The Brendan Voyage (42 page)

Conversely,
Brendan
amply supported those theorists who claim that early boats were capable of making new discoveries by being blown off course by heavy weather. In July 1976, while trying to sail from the Faroes to Iceland, we experienced a spell of such persistent and strong east winds that we would have been blown clear across to Greenland, if we had not made special efforts to heave-to and keep our original landfall in Iceland where we needed to resupply.

As for the geography of the
Navigatio,
the Brendan Voyage succeeded in linking together the different locations which have been suggested as the places mentioned in the medieval text: the Faroes as the Island of Sheep; Mykines or perhaps Vagar, also in Faroes, as the Paradise of Birds; southern Iceland as the region of the Fiery Mountain and the slag-throwing Island of Smiths; and the identifications of iceberg and curious whales with the “Column of Crystal” and the Great Fish Jasconius. More original, perhaps, is the fact that
Brendan
showed how these landfalls could be made in a logical progression around the North Atlantic using the wind patterns of the summer sailing season, and that in every case local folklore, as well as current archaeological research, is firmly based on the tradition of the Irish visits. Again, the significant factor is the overall agreement between the modern Voyage and the original tale. A single identification between one of Saint Brendan’s landfalls and a present-day location would be overly subjective, but an entire progression of such identifications seems to be more than mere coincidence.

At the same time the Brendan Voyage did not expect nor try to explain
every locality mentioned in the
Navigatio.
Some of the places are too vaguely defined by the text to be identified; others lay off our route. Indeed, if the
Navigatio
is an amalgam of several voyages carried out by other monks besides Saint Brendan, as seems likely, there is no reason that some of these places should not lie in other directions. The general trend of the
Navigatio,
however, is north and west, and as
Brendan
demonstrated, this is also the route to take a skin boat to America.

Another question which
Brendan
has left in her wake concerns the Norsemen themselves. There are three references in the sagas to an Irish connection, however faint, with the New World. Erik’s Saga has a report from two American “Skraelings,” or natives, that they knew of men near their tribe who wore white clothes and marched in procession bearing poles before them to which cloths were fixed, and yelling loudly. At the time, the Norsemen thought the reports referred to Irishmen. Then secondly, the Icelandic
Landnamabok
talks about a country “which some call Ireland the Great. It lies west in the sea near Vinland the Good.” A Norseman who was driven there by bad weather, it says, was unable to escape and was baptized by the inhabitants. Finally there is a report from an Icelandic trader named Gudleifr Gunnlaugsson, who was gale-driven across the sea from the west coast of Ireland, and made land on an unknown shore where he thought he recognized the natives using Irish words in their language. As usual the details are casual and, by themselves, light-weight. Taken together they gain a little more substance, and after the successful Atlantic crossing of
Brendan
it may be worth considering the whole attitude of the Norsemen toward North America. It is interesting how the saga writers readily accepted the idea of Ireland the Great in the far West. After all, when the Norsemen arrived first in the Hebrides, in the Faroes, and in Iceland they found that Irish seamen had been there before them, and that Irishmen had settled these islands. And if the Norsemen resembled any other explorer-navigators in history, they would have gone to great lengths to obtain local seafaring knowledge and to employ pilots who had sailed the unknown waters before them. Thus even the choice of the land scouts the Norse employed is interesting. Erik’s Saga says that when Thorfinn Karlsefni reached the western land he set on shore two Scoti (i.e., Irish) who were very fleet of foot and could explore the new land effectively. Under the circumstances
one wonders if the Norsemen did not also carry Irishmen on their exploring ships for pilots as well as scouts.

But this must remain speculation, even for the most imaginative detective hoping to solve the riddle of the
Navigatio.
A more tantalizing clue is being examined on the coast of Newfoundland. There, overlooking the entrance to Saint Lunaire Bay, archaeologists were investigating some lines incised on a boulder and trying to decipher their meaning even while
Brendan
was sailing across the Atlantic. The lines on the rock appear to be man-made and to have been cut with a fine pointed tool, possibly of metal. Some of the lines are obscured beneath an encrustation of lichens which covers most of the rock surface. But one criss-cross pattern seems to have been rubbed clean for inspection at some time in the past, and what looks like a fresh lichen growth has begun to grow again on top of it. By chance this fresh lichen includes a variety that grows at a measurable rate, and it has been calculated that even this growth is at least 150 to 200 years old, which is longer than the present habitation of the area. The lichens covering the other lines may be far older, and some observers have been quick to claim that the criss-cross lines are ogham, the early Irish form of writing, particular on stone, favored by the Christian monks. Scholars of ogham are doubtful, and certainly the inscriptions are very cryptic, if not completely undecipherable. Work on them is continuing, including an attempt to date the more heavily encrusted markings and to ascertain if the lines really were incised with metal. But there are other candidates for their authorship: Saint Lunaire lies not far from the presumed Norse settlement at L’Anse au Meadow and the marks could have been cut by a straggler from that camp; and there is the wreck of a cannon-bearing vessel in the waters of Saint Lunaire entrance, right under the lookout where the mysterious rock is set in the hillside. Perhaps a survivor swam ashore and cut the marks with a knife. Whatever the answer, there is plenty of room for speculation and further investigation, particularly now that
Brendan
has shown that one group of suspects could certainly have reached the scene of the “crime” at the time alleged. Clearly the file on North American’s discovery by Europeans is far from closed.

Brendan’s
design was based on three sources—ethnographic, literary, and archaeological. The ethnographic data were the most fruitful and included the design and construction details of the Irish curraghs of the Dingle pattern as described by James Hornell in “Curraghs of Ireland,”
Mariner’s Mirror,
January 1938. Hornell’s data was compared with the present-day Dingle curraghs, which range up to 21′4″ in length for the “four-hand” size, and augmented with information from John Goodwin, curragh-builder of Castlegregory, County Kerry. The literary evidence for the historic use of leather boats in western Europe is widely scattered throughout many early texts, and the majority of references have been collected together by G. J. Marcus in his “Factors in Early Celtic Navigation,”
Etudes Celtiques,
Volume 6, 1952. Leather boats, for instance, are mentioned by Caesar, Pliny, and Solinus. But the most relevant details for
Brendan
were found in Adomnan’s
Life of Columba
and, of course, the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
itself. Early Christian artifacts in the Irish National Museum, Dublin, show how wood, leather, and metal were worked in Ireland, and this information decided the actual construction techniques of
Brendan.
With particular reference to leather-working techniques, John J. Waterer’s study, “Irish Book Satchels or Budgets” in
Medieval Archeology
,
Volume 12, 1968, was invaluable. Pictures of early boats are rare, but fortunately an outline of an open Irish boat can be seen carved on the vertical shaft of an Irish stone cross, still in situ near Bantry, County Cork. This carving has been dated to the eighth century A.D., and is described by Paul Johnson in
Antiquity,
Volume 38.

In designing the boat, Colin Mudie was concerned with keeping the hull weight as low as possible to allow for a heavy load of stores and the intended use of the craft on long open-water passages, beaching, and propulsion by sail and by oar with a crew of only four or five. Also for stability, the sections were made rather firmer than those of some current smaller curraghs. His design was for a boat 36’ overall and with a beam of 8’. The estimated weight was 2,400 pounds for bare hull, plus 1,284 pounds for sails and rowing equipment. With stores, water, crew, and sea-water uptake into the leather,
Brendan’s
final cruising displacement was close to five tons. Her sail area was 140 square feet on the mainsail and 60 square feet on the foresail. Both sails were made in flax by Arthur Taylor and Son of Maldon, and could be extended by the addition of a bonnet, 3 feet deep on the main and 2 feet deep on the fore, at the foot of the sails. The addition of side panels was found to be effective only in a wind from dead astern. Steering was by a large-bladed paddle on the starboard quarter, though twin steering paddles and a steering sweep were tested in sea trials and found to be ineffective or unnecessary. Oars of different lengths were also tested, and the most suitable length was found to be 12 feet. Oars worked on thole pins and “bulls”—triangular pieces of wood pegged to the oarshaft—and the oar blades were of the traditional curragh pattern, being extremely slim.

Perhaps the most fascinating and rewarding phase of the Voyage preparations was the research into the performance of the medieval materials. The aim was to try to determine if the medieval materials had any chance of standing up to a trans-Atlantic voyage. Some of the tests were very simple—for example, samples of leather were hung on frames in sea water to see if they would decompose or pick up barnacles. Other tests were conducted in the laboratory, thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of the British Leather Manufacturers’ Research Association at Milton Park led by Dr. Robert Sykes, and the associated work by the tannery of W. & J. Richardson of Derby, and by Harold Birkin’s team at the tannery of Joseph Clayton and Son in Chesterfield. There was plenty of room for error, because although leather is a remarkable and rewarding material to work with, it must be handled absolutely correctly or it will be ruined. In preparing the leather for
Brendan
’s hull, the tanners and scientists had to be concerned with such matters as surface crack, the tightness of the grain in the leather, the lower surface tension of salt water, and a host of other considerations, including the dimensional stability of damp leather. To general satisfaction, the lesson was learned that the medieval materials, if prepared correctly, were exceptionally suited to the task of crossing the Atlantic.

Schematic diagram of
Brendan

1.
Hull leather.
The
Navigatio
states that Saint Brendan’s monks covered the wooden frame of their boat with “oxhides tanned with the bark of oak” and carried similar oxhides on board as spares, and to make two smaller skin boats presumably as tenders to the larger vessel. Dr. Sykes’ researchers tested samples of oak-bark leather supplied by Josiah Croggon and Sons of Grampound, Cornwall, and compared their performance to other types of leather tannages under similar conditions. The properties that were sought were resistance to water; dimensional stability, particularly after immersion in salt water; and tensile strength. The following table, supplied by the B.L.M.R.A., indicates the remarkable stability of the dressed oak-bark leather throughout various testing procedures: