The Brendan Voyage (35 page)

“It’s fantastic,” he replied ruefully, “I’m glad I’ve seen it. But I don’t think I ever want it again.”

The strain on the crew was terrific. When daylight came, we tried to revert to our normal watch-keeping system and get some rest. But it was impossible to relax with the clatter of the ice reverberating through the little thin hull so close to one’s head. And time after time
every man had to be called into action—raising and lowering the sail to vary our speed, hauling and readjusting the sheets to alter the slant of our course; and, when the worst befell, leaning out to poke and prod with boat hooks to fend off the boat, or, once or twice, even sitting out on the gunwale, putting feet on the floe, and kicking off with all one’s might. Once again I was reminded of the early voyages—this time of a famous picture of Elizabethan sailors fending off the heavy ice from their ship with just the same simple technique. But I had to confess to myself that I had not expected to find
Brendan
in quite the same predicament.

All that day, June 18, we were kept so busy in the pack ice that there was no time for proper meals. At noon Trondur cooked up a hot mush which we spooned down between emergencies, and there was just enough time for two cups of coffee later in the day. But breakfast was a failure—I found my pannikin of cold cereal at tea time. It was still sitting untouched, in a safe place under the thwart.

It had to be admitted that the ice had a certain lure and majesty. The ice was rotting and disintegrating into thousands upon thousands of weird shapes and sizes, odd corners and pillars, which floated low in the water and speckled the surface as far as the eye could see. The colors were entrancing—opaque whites, deep greens of undersea ledges, transparent flecks the size of cabin trunks, vivid blue glacier ice, dirty ice coated with ancient dust and grime. Once George reached out and broke off a morsel of blue ice from a passing floe, and popped it in his mouth. “Delicious,” he quipped. “Please pass the whiskey.”

But each color signaled its own danger. The least worrying was the transparent dead ice in the last stage of melting. This ice was riddled with myriads of tiny air pockets so that the outer layer crushed on impact with
Brendan
’s hull and cushioned the shock. Its only disadvantage was that this type of ice floated so low in the water that it was hard to spot in time to avoid. Most of the big heavy growlers were equally difficult to see because they revealed only a small portion of their bulk above the surface, usually a sleek, round lump of opaque white dipping innocently below the swells. But under the water the growlers could be massive—great blocks of menace that heaved and churned in the current. They could deal a tremendous blow to a small boat. The snow-white surface floes, though thinner and lighter, were awkward because they tended to form up in strips and block our path. Our only
chance was to bear down on the line, hoping to pick out a gap at the last second, and slither through. It required judgement, skill, and a lot of pure luck that a gap would open at the right moment. Usually
Brendan
bumped and weaved her way through safely, but occasionally she would run her bows right onto the floe. Then for a moment or two, we would ride on top of the ice, waiting for the wind to catch
Brendan
’s stern and lever her back into the water, pirouetting away in her strange ice dance. “It’s easy to follow our path through the ice,” Arthur remarked, “just follow the line of wool grease marks on the edges of the floes in our wake.”

The two colors we treated most warily were the deep green of the underwater ledges, which threatened to gouge upward into
Brendan
’s hull as she glided over them, and the stark diamond-white and blue of the floes made of very old ice. The latter had been born many years earlier as snowfalls in interior Greenland and Baffin Land, compacted, and squeezed out as glaciers and finally spawned into the ocean as icebergs. This ice had scarcely begun to melt at all. Its floes were sharp and hard and utterly uncompromising.

Bump, slither, swing sideways, charge at the gap, don’t think about the quarter inch of leather between yourself and the icy sea, ignore the rows of stitching offered up to the constant rubbing of ice along
Bren
dan’s flanks; fend off with the boat hook. Helm up, helm down, search for the space between ice floes ahead; calculate, calculate. Wind, leeway, current, ice movement. For hour after the hour the ordeal continued, until by dusk, with the wind still blowing half a gale, the ice seemed to be thinning out. And this time we really did seem to be nearing the edge of the pack.

Then Brendan Luck finally ran out.

We were in sight of relatively open water and passing through a necklace of ice floes when two large floes swung together, closing a gap
Brendan
had already entered. The boat gave a peculiar shudder as the floes pinched her, a vaguely uncomfortable sensation which was soon forgotten in the problem of extricating her from the jaws of the vise. Luckily the two floes eased apart enough for
Brendan
to over-ride one ice spur, and slip free. Five minutes later, I heard water lapping next to the cooker and glanced down. Sea water was swirling over the floorboards. She was leaking.
Brendan
had been holed.

There was no time to attend directly to the leak. The first priority was still to get clear of the pack ice while there was enough daylight to see a path. Otherwise we would find ourselves in the same predicament as the previous evening, blundering into ice floes in the darkness. “One man on the bilge pump, one at the helm; one forward controlling the headsails; and the fourth at rest,” I ordered, and for two more hours we worked
Brendan
clear of the pack until there was enough open water to run a fairly easy course between the ice floes, and set the mainsail, double reefed. The helmsman still needed to be vigilant, but the man at the headsail could at last be spared; and after twenty-four hours of sustained effort, we could revert to our normal two-man watch-keeping system. The risk, it seemed to me, was as much a question of human exhaustion as of the frailty of our damaged boat.

“We can’t tackle the leak tonight,” I said. “There’s not enough light to trace it, and then to try to make a repair. Besides, we are all too tired. But it’s vital to learn more about the leak. I want each watch to work the bilge pump at regular intervals and record the number of strokes needed to empty the bilge and the time it takes to do so. Then at least we will know if the leak is getting worse and gaining on us. If we’ve torn the stitching somewhere, then more stitches may open as the thread works itself loose, and the rate of leakage will go up.”

Trondur tapped the leather at the gunwale. “I think stitching is broken by ice,” he said calmly.

“It’s very possible,” I replied, “but we can’t be sure. We’ve simply got to find out all we can.”

“Ah well,” said Arthur cheerily, “that’s what the right arm is for—pumping. It’s our watch, Trondur, I’d better get to work.” And he crawled forward to get to the bilge pump. It was none too soon. Even as we had been talking, the water level on the floor by the cooker had risen noticeably. The water slopped back and forth around our boots, and would soon be lapping into the lee side of the shelter.

Pump, pump, pump. It took thirty-five minutes of non-stop pumping to empty the bilge.
Brendan
’s bilge, though shallow, was broad and relatively flat in profile and so held a great deal of water. Just fifteen minutes after being pumped out, the water level was as bad as ever, and threatening to get worse. Pump, pump, pump. “How many strokes to empty her?” I asked. “Two thousand,” Arthur grunted as he collapsed,
exhausted. I did a rapid sum. Two thousand strokes every hour was within our physical limit, but only temporarily. One man could steer, while his partner pumped and kept
Brendan
afloat. But this system would work only while our strength lasted, or, more likely, we ran into bad weather, and waves began once again to break into the boat. Then we would no longer have the capacity to keep emptying
Brendan
fast enough. It was a tricky situation: In slanting out of the pack ice and clawing to seaward, I had brought
Brendan
out a full two hundred miles from land, and even then the nearest land was the thinly inhabited coast of Labrador, from which little help could be expected. We were running before half a gale, and now the damping effect of the pack ice was gone, the waves were beginning once again to break and tumble around us. Nor were we entirely free of ice danger. Here and there we could see in the darkness the occasional white shape of a large growler, stubbornly refusing to melt. “We’ve got six hours before daylight,” I said. “There’s nothing for it but to husband our strength until dawn and then tackle the leak. It’s best if one man in each watch keeps pumping continuously, turn and turn about. If we can keep the bilge empty,
Brendan
will ride lighter and take fewer waves on board.”

That night was the most physically tiring of the entire voyage. It was difficult to rest or sleep properly. On watch one stood for half an hour on the helm, then went forward to take over the pump, scarcely having time to nod to one’s partner as he struggled wearily back, to go to the helm. There, peering through the murk, one tried to decide whether the white flashes ahead were the manes of breaking waves or the telltale sign of a growler lying in
Brendan
’s path.

As soon as the first watch ended, I called the Canadian Coast Guard radio station at St. Anthony in Newfoundland. “This is the sailing vessel
Brendan,”
I reported. “We have been in open pack ice for the last twenty-four hours but now seem to be clearing the ice. We have suffered hull damage and the vessel is leaking. In the next twelve hours we will attempt to trace and repair the leak, but it is important to note our estimated position, which is 53°10’N., 51°20’W. I repeat, this position is only an estimate, as we have lost our log line sheered off by the ice, and due to poor visibility have had no sight of the sun for two days. We are not in immediate danger. But could you please investigate the possibility of air-dropping to us a small motor pump, with fuel, in case we cannot contain the leak. I will call again at 14.15 hours GMT to report
progress. If no contact is made at 14.15 hours or 16.15 hours, we may have activated an emergency locator transmitter on 121.5 and 243 megacycles. Over.”

“Roger, Roger,” replied the calm voice of the radio operator at St. Anthony, and he confirmed the details I had given. Then he advised me that he would inform the Rescue Coordination Center at Halifax, and listen out for
Brendan
on the next schedule. Later I learned that the Canadian Coast Guard responded unstintingly to our request for standby help. An aircraft was readied at Halifax, and the Operations Room at St. John’s calculated that a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker could reach us from Goose Bay in twenty-one hours. “But to be honest,” said an officer who was on duty that night in the Operations Room, “we didn’t know how our ship would be able to locate you in time. And after the loss of the
Carson,
which sank in the same ice not many days before, when we heard that a leather boat was in trouble in the ice, we rated your chances of getting out as nil. How could a leather boat survive when a steel icebreaker went down?”

Nevertheless, at the time of our ordeal, it was very comforting to know that someone, somewhere, was informed of our plight and, if worst came to worst, we could call for help. Partially relieved by this thought, I sat hunched in my sleeping bag and tried to concentrate my mind.
Brendan
was leaking at the rate of two thousand pump strokes an hour. This represented a sizeable leak, and obviously we had to track it down without delay at first light. But how on earth would we find the leak? It could be almost anywhere in
Brendan
’s hull below the water already filling up the boat. We would have to shift all our gear, section by section, along the vessel; lift up floorboards, remove the fresh-water storage tubes from the bilges—and where would we store the drinking water temporarily?—and then try to trace the leak by following any current or bubbles in the bilge. All this would have to be done in a rough sea.

And if we were lucky enough to trace the leak, what then? Suppose we had cracked the skid keel under the boat when
Brendan
rode upon an ice floe, or pulled its fastenings through the leather hull? At sea we could neither refasten nor mend the skid. And what if we had gashed the leather skin or ripped the flax stitching? Then, I feared, we would be in an even worse way. I could not imagine how we would ever stitch on a patch under water, it would be impossible to reach far below the
hull, and equally impossible to work on the inside because there was not enough space between the wooden frames and stringers to put in a row of stitches. The more I thought about our straits, the gloomier I felt. It seemed so futile if
Brendan
were to sink so close to the end of her mission. She had already proved to her crew that an early medieval Irish skin boat could sail across the Atlantic. But how could people be expected to believe that fact if
Brendan
sank two hundred miles off Canada? It would be no good to say that there was less pack ice off Canada and Greenland in early Christian times, and that the Irish monks would probably not have faced the same problems. To prove the point about the early Irish voyages,
Brendan
had to sail to the New World.

To clear my mind, I took up a pen and made a summary of our position:

1. Brendan
   is leaking fast. We can keep her afloat for two days, or less, in bad weather; indefinitely in fair weather but at great physical cost.
   

2. First priority is find the leak—skid fastening? Burst stitches? Hull gash?
   

3. If we cannot trace and mend a leak, the Coast Guard may get a motor pump to us. Do they have a suitable pump? Can their plane find us? This will depend on visibility and sea state.
   

4. No pump—we
   MAYDAY
   and abandon ship.