The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin Read Free Book Online

“A canoe will go through any weather,” Johnsummed up. “Just so long as her crew know how to handle her, and there’s a man aboard who still has the strength to keep on rowing.”
    I asked John if he would build a curragh for me, and show me how it was done. With him I spent a hot afternoon tarring and stretching the canvas hide into position, and in the end I had a small two-man curragh of my own, built to the traditional pattern right down to the place to step the obsolete mast. When I collected the boat from him, I asked John, “Do you think a big canoe could get all the way to America?” He looked at me with his old man’s grin.
    “Well, now. The boat will do, just as long as the crew’s good enough.”
    I decided to call my little curragh
Finnbarr,
in honor of Saint Finnbarr, the patron saint of Munster, said to have been the priest who showed Saint Brendan the way to the Promised Land. I hoped the little curragh would do the same for me, and to my wife’s chagrin, I stole the linings from the dining-room curtains to make a sail for
Finnbarr,
and spent all of Christmas Day stitching it by hand. Then I sailed up and down the little estuary outside our house to see how the boat behaved. It was bitterly uncomfortable, but the effort was worth it. By the end of the Christmas holidays I knew that although
Finnbarr
wobbled alarmingly and refused to sail upwind, she and her ancestors had been designed to carry a mast and sails.
    It was about this time that I became aware of a curious phenomenon which I could only call Brendan Luck. This was the strange way in which I began to have stroke after stroke of good fortune in my preparations for the voyage. The entire Brendan project seemed lucky. My encounter with John Goodwin was one example of Brendan Luck; the unusual circumstances of the original idea was another; and a third was when I discovered that a definitive study of Irish curraghs had been written by the man who virtually started the study of traditional craft: James Hornell, the naval historian. At one stroke I was presented with a complete record of curragh history, tracing the boats back to Saint Brendan’s day and beyond into the writings of Julius Caesar and other classical authors who had recorded the skin-covered vessels of the natives of Britain. Caesar’s army engineers had even copied the boats, building skin-covered landing craft for amphibious river crossings. But perhaps the most bizarre stroke of good fortune occurred when I was trying to work out how Saint Brendan might have rigged his ocean curragh.
    It seemed to me that such a long, slim boat must have carried two masts, but in all my research I had never seen a picture of an early medieval boat equipped with more than one. They all had a single mast, even the Viking ships. Then one day I was in the cellar stacks of the London library. I was not working on the Brendan project at all, but on quite another subject, and by chance I happened to walk through a section of the library that was little used. As I passed the stacks, a book caught my eye. It was misshelved, having been put in back to front. Casually I pulled it out to turn it the right way around, and my eye fell upon the title. It was in German, long and scholarly, and roughly translated as
A Record of Ship Illustrations from the Earliest Times to the Middle Ages.
My curiosity was aroused, and I flipped the book open. From the page where it fell open, one illustration jumped up at me. I caught my breath. It was a drawing of a two-masted ship! And it was undoubtedly medieval. Hastily I turned to the index to see where the original illustration was to be found. To my astonishment I read that the picture was copied from a privately owned medieval bestiary, an illustrated collection of animal descriptions. What was incredible was that the twin-masted boat came from the letter B under the Latin word
Balena
for whale. The picture was of Saint Brendan’s ship stranded on the whale’s back!