The Brendan Voyage Read Free Page A

perhaps the salt in sea water may have a pickling effect. I really don’t know….”
    “And what happens in the end?”
    “Just the same as if you left a piece of steak out in the air on a saucer. In time it will turn into a nasty, evil-smelling blob of jelly. Just like a rotting piece of oxhide.”
    The hull’s turning to jelly was now the least of my problems. The gale was showing signs of getting worse; the waves were increasing in size. They were smashing into us more violently; and if the leather hull was not strong enough, the first result would be when the thread holding the oxhides together simply ripped through the weakened hides like tearing the perforations on a cardboard packet. Then the oxhides would peel away like petals, and the wooden frame underneath would spring open like a flower in a brief moment of disintegration. Privately, I doubted it would ever come to that. Much more likely was the possibility of a capsize. Our boat had no keel beneath her to hold her steady. If one of the tumbling wave crests caught her wrong-footed, she would be sent spinning upside down, and her crew tipped into the water, where there was no hope of rescue.
    Why on earth, then, were my crew and I sailing such an improbable vessel in the face of a rising gale? The answer lay in the name of our strange craft: she was called
Brendan
in honor of the great Irish missionary, Saint Brendan, who had lived in the sixth century. Tradition said that Saint Brendan had made a voyage to America, and this astonishing claim was not just a wild fairy tale, but a recurrent theme based on authentic and well-researched Latin texts dating back at least to A.D. 800. These texts told how Saint Brendan and a party of monks had sailed to a land far across the ocean in a boat made of oxhides. Of course, if the claim was true, then Saint Brendan would have reached America almost a thousand years before Columbus and four hundred years before the Vikings. Such a notion, declared the skeptics, was harebrained. To suggest that anyone could have crossed the Atlantic in a boat made of animal skin was unthinkable, impossible, a mere fantasy, and the idea of a leather boat proved it. But the Latin texts were absolutely positive about the boat being made of leather, and they even explained how Saint Brendan and his party of monks had built this vessel. The obvious way of checking the truth of this remarkable story was to build a boat in similar fashion and then see if it would sail the Atlantic. So there we were, my crew and I, out in the ocean to test whether Saint Brendan and the Irish monks could have made an ocean voyage in a boat of leather.
    The gale could not have caught us at a worse time. Our adventure had only just begun.
Brendan
was still untested; and only thirty miles tostarboard lay Saint Brendan’s own country—the jagged Atlantic coast of Ireland. Thirty miles was much too close for comfort. To a navigator this was a coast to be treated with the utmost respect. The southwest winds beat upon it all year round. Sailing ship upon sailing ship had been lost upon it, their hulls so fouled with weeds after an Atlantic crossing that, like
Brendan,
they could not tack out to sea against the wind and were driven helplessly ashore. This same coast had destroyed at least twenty galleons in the Spanish Armada, and, compared to a Spanish galleon, our
Brendan
was a seafaring nightmare. We could not sail upwind, and if the gale swung into the west, we would be driven as helplessly as a leaf down onto the iron-bound cliffs and half-submerged reefs which now broke the steady onslaught of the great Atlantic rollers hissing past us after their immense journey from the far side of the Atlantic. In such a gale and seaway even a modern yacht would have been hard pressed to hold up against the weather. For us in a medieval boat there was no choice but to turn tail and run helter-skelter before the gale, driven along by a single square sail slung as low as we dared,