IMAGINE A MOMENT in the Northern Ocean one morning fourteen
centuries ago, in a time when the Earth had not yet been ravaged
by humankind:
The surface of the
water rises and falls in a lazy swell under a featureless gray
sky. There is no sound of wind. The sun appears as a dim halo of
light obscured behind ribbons of stratus cloud. Seabirds wheel and
dive over a series of concentric rings in the water where a pair
of whales has just sounded. Near the rings, shrouded in a veil of
mist, moves a tiny ship, forty feet long and ten feet wide,
fashioned out of animal skins and wood.
From a short distance away the ship
looks like the discarded shoe of some
gigantic walker of the Earth, covered as it is with rectangular
slabs of blackened ox hide and sewn together with heavy thongs of
horsehair, flax, and tallow. Brown flaxen sails are lashed to
yardarms atop the two wooden masts, each sail painted with red
ochre in the form of a Celtic cross. At the masthead above the
larger of the sails, a long silken pennant hangs limp in the
stagnant air.
A company of fifteen men lives in
this ship. Several stand together this
morning in the uncovered center section of the vessel, two facing
forward on either side of the steering oar, four others facing aft
and pulling together on a pair of long wooden sweeps. The
remainder of the company rests in the ship's dank bowels where
they endure the semi-darkness and the high animal odor of a place
where too
many men have lived and eaten and slept in uncomfortable proximity for too long. The voyage these men have made is nearly six weeks old, although most of them have forgotten this fact by now. The continual parade of nights and days of wandering across ice-strewn seas has caused the measure of time to grow indistinct. Hours have passed into days and days have passed into weeks until there is no longer any certain means of counting the time. The men have sailed their ship to the accompaniment of rain and sleet and summer gales until it seems they will never see the land again... until this moment... this long awaited, terrifying moment.
Suddenly somewhere beyond the curtain of fog come the sounds of an
unknown coast—the faint chatter of seals, the cry of gulls, the
grinding of surf
against a granite shore—sounds that stop the breath of every man
aboard the ship. The dangers these sailors have faced for so long,
dangers of storm and cold, hunger and fatigue, seem in this moment
almost benign as they are replaced by the even more uncertain
dangers of the land.
The leader of the company moves aft
to take over the steering oar. He
exhorts his shipmates to gather their resolve and to arm their
spirits with hope. He utters a prayer of thanksgiving to the
Christian God whom he is certain has brought them to this
landfall, and he points the leather ship in the direction of the
sound, urging his oarsmen onward.
The loom of a rockbound headland
materializes slowly out of the mist as the helmsman maneuvers the
leather ship into the mouth of a large bay. In another few minutes
the air clears completely, revealing "a wide land, rich in fruit
and flowers and autumnal trees." The helmsman propels the vessel
deep into the bayuntil it is engulfed by the sweeping shoreline.
Here he makes one final pull on the steering oar, driving the prow
of the ship onto a beach of golden sand. He climbs to the gunwale,
steps out onto the shore, and falls to his knees in prayer.
When he rises to his feet again, he
surveys the shoreline and the lush
forests beyond with a slow sweep of his eyes. Surely, he thinks,
this is the land that has filled his imagination for so long—the
land that Barrind described to him, the place Saint Mernoc visited
so many times. Surely this is the green and fruitful glade that
holy men and poets have for generations called the Promised Land,
the "Blessed Isle of the Saints."
In this manner, on an anonymous
summer morning in the sixth century of the Christian era, the
Irish sailor-saint, Brendan of Kerry, is said to have achieved the
object of his quest: landfall on the lush and elusive island
referred to ever since as Saint Brendan's Isle. The tale of this
voyage is recounted in the pages of a Latin text, written down
several hundred years later and known throughout medieval Europe
as the Navigatio Sancti Brendani. The story was widely popular
during medieval times, attested to by the fact that more than a
hundred hand-copied manuscripts still survive.
The tale continues in the words of the Latin text:
[Brendan and] the monks disembarked… [and] when they had gone
in a circle around land, it was still light. They ate fruit
and drank water, and in forty days’ exploring did not come to the
end of the land.
The text concludes with reports of
further exploration, with the discovery of a “great river” that
divides the land, and with an encounter with a holy man who speaks
to Brendan in his own language. This man cautions Brendan to
return without delay to his home in western Ireland and foretells
of the sailor’s approaching death.
In a few more paragraphs the story
ends. Brendan sails home and dies soon afterwards among his
friends and disciples, but not before he is able to describe to
them—and eventually to the world—all the wonders he has witnessed.
Ever since the writing down of the
Navigatio more than a thousand years ago, the question has
remained: Was Brendan’s journey to the mysterious island a real
voyage? And is the place that he is said to have discovered a real
place? Archeologists and explorers, geographers and historians
have argued about this question for generations. Cartographers
during the first few centuries of the Age of European Discovery
drew imaginary locations for Brendan’s Isle in every corner of the
North Atlantic Ocean. On some of the maps it was located where the
Azores are now known to be. On others it appeared near Bermuda,
Iceland, or Newfoundland. But on most of the early maps, it was
simply drawn as a mysterious terra incognita, a land shrouded in
fog somewhere out in the trackless waste of the northern ocean,
surrounded by strange sea creatures and monsters of the deep.
In our own times there has been
renewed interest in confirming (or debunking) the historical
veracity of the voyages of Saint Brendan. In the late 1970s an
intrepid young historian, Tim Severin, actually built a replica of
Brendan’s leather curragh and sailed it from County Kerry in
western Ireland to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland in an
attempt to prove the feasibility of such an undertaking. The story
of his two-year odyssey was chronicled in a book, The Brendan
Voyage, and later also appeared as a featured photo-essay in
National Geographic. Yet even as Severin’s modern voyage proved
without a doubt that such a journey could be accomplished, it
still stopped short of proving that a particular Irish cleric had
made an actual historical voyage to a real place somewhere in the
wilds of the western Atlantic.
In spite of all attempts to the
contrary, it seems that the saga of Brendan and his fourteen
“jolly saintes” belongs to the realm of legend—and here, in all
probability, it will remain. Perhaps this is as it should be.
Perhaps in the end it doesn’t really matter whether there was an
actual historical person named Brendan of Kerry who sailed an
actual leather ship to the shores of the new world. The most
important thing about this intrepid Irish explorer may simply be
that we have his story. And his story, whether fact or legend, may
be all we need.
The saga of Brendan’s seven-year
odyssey is unique in two important ways. Not only does it survive
as the earliest written account of European contact with the
unknown lands beyond the western ocean, but it also stands alone
in the literature of European discovery as a testimony to a
special kind of journey—a journey of the imagination and the
spirit. Brendan and his crew set out in search of the Blessed Isle
without economic motives or self-aggrandizing schemes. Their
purpose was not to lay claim to new territories, subjugate native
populations, or seek for gold or riches. They weren’t looking for
a northwest passage to the Orient. They weren’t planning to trap
for furs or establish a summer fishing station. They had, in fact,
no other purpose for making their voyage than to witness for
themselves the grand and terrible beauty of a wilderness they had
heard extolled in legend but had otherwise only vaguely dreamed.
“The themes [of the Navigatio],” writes American nature writer Barry Lopez, “are of compassion, wonder, and respect” as opposed to the more familiar themes of bloodshed, plunder, greed, and conquest that typify so much of the history of early European contact with the American continent. Nowhere else in the long chronicle of European discovery is there a tale of another voyage quite like this one.
The Icelandic Sagas of the tenth and
eleventh centuries describe several attempts by early Norse
explorers to wrest fertile lands from their aboriginal inhabitants
and to establish permanent trading colonies of their own on the
shores of the New World. Four centuries later, the record of the
Columbus voyages echoes many of the same themes and establishes
the rule for all who would follow—Cortez and Balboa, Verazanno and
Cabot, Frobisher and Cartier—as they set out to plunder the
American continent or to discover lucrative trade routes to the
wealthy markets of the Far East. Hundreds (eventually thousands)
followed in the footsteps of these early explorers, virtually all
of them seeking land or power or economic gain.
The Navigatio of Saint Brendan, in
contrast, is the tale of a voyage with a simpler objective. As
Lopez again observes, it is the story of a group of “impeccable,
generous, innocent, attentive men [who] were, one must think, the
perfect travelers.” Their journey was a pilgrimage of sorts, yet
they did not sail as proselytizers or missionaries. Instead, they
pursued their quest as celebrators of the Earth and as chroniclers
of its awesome majesty. It was enough for these travelers to bring
home memories of what they had seen and afterwards to tell the
story or their voyage to all who would listen.
I first learned about the voyages of
Saint Brendan more than two decades ago, during a time when I was
building a sailboat in my back yard. With my wife Kay and our
friend John Griffiths, I worked full time on that boat for almost
a year. In the evenings I would read a few pages of Severin’s The
Brendan Voyage—that is, when I could stay awake long enough to
read anything at all. Then, when daylight came again, I would head
back down to the boat for another ten or twelve or fourteen hours
of work.
For much of that year the sailboat
had no name, although I was too busy at the time to worry about
such secondary details. The name would come, I knew, in its own
good time. Meanwhile there were more important things to worry
about: things such as designing plywood templates for bunks and
settees, ordering the next three thousand board feet of Philippine
mahogany, cutting out seven hundred cypress plugs on the drill
press, gluing up thirty-five cupboard doors, building the icebox
and the navigator’s table and the companionway stairs.
I knew what I was hoping to do with
this boat once she was finished and launched. I wanted to sail her
to the lonely coasts around the rim of the North Atlantic basin. I
wanted to explore some of the natural places and see some of the
wonders that old Saint Brendan himself may have witnessed during
his seven years of wandering about the northern ocean.
It therefore came as no surprise when
the boat’s name suddenly occurred to me—not as an idea but as an
incontrovertible fact, as something that had always been. It came
while I was working one morning fitting a piece of cabinetry in
the main saloon. I was staring at the plank in my hand,
concentrating on the asymmetrical sweep of its grain, preparing to
mark with a pencil and compass the line that it would take as it
fit against the irregular inner surface of the hull. One moment
there was nothing in my mind but the task before me. The next
moment there was a name: Brendan’s Isle.
I felt as if I’d just emerged from
some kind of temporary amnesia. Surely, I thought, I’d seen this
name before. Maybe it had been written on the bill of lading from
the shipping company that had delivered the empty hull and deck
from the shipyard in Taiwan. Maybe it had been stamped onto the
pine crates containing the spars and standing rigging that had
come from New Zeeland. Or maybe it had always been there, printed
on the boat’s transom in some kind of invisible brail, and I had
only just now learned how to decipher the shape of the letters.
Brendan’s Isle: the name had a
romantic ring to it, a suggestion of faraway
lands and olden times. It brought to mind the geography of the
northern Atlantic—an apt connotation in light of the plans that
were already forming in my mind about the places I wanted to sail.
The name also suggested good luck. Saint Brendan, by all reports,
had been an unusually lucky sailor. His chroniclers often used the
phrase “Brendan luck” when describing the knack he seemed to have
for avoiding dangers, weathering storms, surviving crises, finding
safe landfalls.
On the more practical side, the name
Brendan’s Isle was short and
unambiguous. On a radio call it would be quick to say. On a
customs declaration it would be easy to spell. People would be
able to remember it—unlike so many exotic yacht names that are
virtually impossible to read or pronounce.
In short, Brendan’s Isle had all the
necessary attributes a sailor seeks when he wishes to name a
little ship. The phrase was both beautiful and simple. And it
seemed to speak to the particular purpose of the boat I was
building. It was a name for the grand and mysterious places my
shipmates and I would one day be setting out to find, the
questions we would be trying to articulate, perhaps even some of
the answers we would be hoping to find.
By July 1983 the building project was
far enough along that we were able to launch and sail Brendan’s
Isle for a month, from the Chesapeake Bay to the southern coast of
New England and home again, in order to sea test her systems and
shake down her rig. The following winter Kay and I worked (without
John) for another fifteen hundred hours, completing all the final
modifications that the boat would need in order to be ready to
take on the North Atlantic Ocean the following spring.
Brendan’s sailing plan for the next two years began with a
high-latitude
crossing of the North Atlantic, a route that took her out past the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland, across “iceberg alley,” close past
the southern capes of Greenland and Iceland, and on toward the
coasts of northwestern Europe. Her first landfall, some
twenty-three days and three thousand nautical miles after leaving
the Chesapeake Bay, was in the Faroe Isles, a mountainous
archipelago several hundred miles east of Iceland and almost the
same distance due north of Scotland. The Faroes were a convenient
stopping place for Brendan’s Isle and her crew on this frigid
west-to-east crossing of the North Atlantic, just as they may also
have been for old Saint Brendan as he made his way out into the
wilds of the western ocean while sailing in the opposite
direction. If, as Tim Severin argues, the old sailor-saint
followed the so-called “stepping stone” route across the North
Atlantic, he would almost certainly have visited the Faroes
(preceded by landfalls in the western Hebrides of Scotland, and
followed by visits to Iceland, southern Greenland, and perhaps
also the Atlantic coasts of Labrador or Newfoundland). According
to the Navigatio, Brendan and his shipmates made landfalls early
in their travels in a pair of hauntingly beautiful places
described variously as the “Isle of Sheep” and the “Paradise of
Birds.” Both names strongly suggest the Faroe Isles—as they surely
must have appeared a millennium and a half ago and as they still
appear today.
I had no conscious intention, as my
shipmates and I started off across the Atlantic in the spring of
1984, of following in the footsteps of the old Irish sailor-saint.
The legend of Brendan’s voyage was engaging—the idea of a
mysterious island somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic was
romantic and exciting. These were reason enough, I felt, for the
name that appeared on the transom of our little sailboat. I had no
thought as our first summer’s sailing plans evolved of following
specific routes that Brendan may have followed or of visiting
particular places that he may also have visited.
Yet the morning that Brendan’s Isle
sailed up into Hestur Sound, Faroe Isles,
and anchored near a place called Brandarsvik (“Brendan’s Creek”),
I admit I felt a strange sense of oughtness, as if we had sailed
all these three thousand miles just to be in this setting. There
was an aura about this place, a ghostlike presence that seemed to
bridge the centuries and transform legend into living fact. The
ruins of an ancient Christian chapel hunched on the beach, casting
the shadows of its crumbling stone revetments on the sand. The
dark green hills behind the ruins were dotted with sheep. A
thousand feet overhead a thousand seabirds circled in silence, and
for a moment I felt as if I could see the silhouette of a tiny
leather ship lying at anchor near the mouth of the creek and the
spectral forms of fifteen ragged sailors huddled at the chapel
gates, seeking advice from the holy man within about where next to
point their bows in their quest for the Blessed Isle.
Two and a half decades have passed
since that day in Brandarsvik—two and a half decades during which
I and Brendan’s Isle have voyaged over one hundred thousand sea
miles and have visited, in utterly haphazard fashion, virtually
every one of the “stepping stones” that the old Irish sailor-saint
might arguably have visited during his (equally haphazard)
meanderings about the northern ocean. According to the Navigatio,
Saint Brendan pursued his quest for seven years, ranging about the
Atlantic each summer in a primitive and ungainly vessel whose
speed and course were often dictated by the vagaries of wind and
weather, and whose ultimate destinations were therefore often left
entirely to chance. Each year at the end of their summer’s
voyaging, he and his shipmates would seek safe haven to rest
themselves and to repair and reprovision their little vessel.
Then, the following spring, they would set off once again with a
renewed sense of purpose and an ever stronger hope that somehow,
this time, they might happen upon the object of their quest.
In contrast, our travels aboard a
modern, well-found yacht, efficient in its sail plan and equipped
with all the miracles of modern electronic navigation, have been
much more predictable. Each of the forays I’ve made into the North
Atlantic during the past twenty-five years has been carefully
conceived and painstakingly planned. Each has had a cruising
agenda; each has had a timetable; each has had a set of
predictable destinations. Twice I, with a small crew, have taken
Brendan’s Isle from the eastern seaboard of the United States
across the top of the Atlantic to Scandinavia, both times calling
at the Faroe Isles (and both times visiting the ruins at
Brandarsvik).
On the first of these journeys, after a winter layover in southern Denmark, we crossed the North Sea to spend a month exploring the western coast of Scotland, and another month visiting the bays and sounds of southwestern Ireland. On the second, we paused to visit the Westmann Islands, south of Iceland, then to circumnavigate Iceland in its entirety. And both between and after these journeys, we visited the Atlantic coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador on numerous occasions, one of which included a mid-summer crossing of the Labrador Sea and an exploration of western Greenland all the way to the great ice fields of Disko Bay, three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.
In the beginning, as I’ve said, I had
no conscious intention of following in the footsteps of the old
Irish navigator, retracing his voyages, visiting all the strange
and marvelous places he might have visited. But fifteen years
later, as I began to reflect on the record of my own travels, I
realized that Brendan’s Isle and I had in fact been pursuing an
unspoken pilgrimage of sorts, stringing together a series of
voyages that may have seemed random and disconnected when
considered separately, but that began to form a compelling pattern
when considered as a whole.
Eventually, by the summer of 1998, I
realized there were only a handful of stopping places along the
old “stepping stone” route that Brendan’s Isle had not visited,
and I set about to rectify the oversight. That summer, during our
second circumnavigation of Newfoundland, Kay and I and our
shipmates visited the tiny village of Saint Brendan (as good a
candidate as any for the actual historical site of Brendan’s New
World landfall). Two years later, during our second eastbound
trans-Atlantic crossing, we paused to call at the volcanic
Westmann Islands, south of Iceland, there to witness the eerie,
desert-like nakedness of Surtsey, a recently formed volcanic
pinnacle that may be a modern counterpart to Saint Brendan’s
“Island of Smiths,” the smoke-belching island in the Navigatio
whose inhabitants hurtled hot, molten rocks at the monks as they
sailed past.
Finally, two decades and more after
we had first made landfall at the ruins at Brandarsvik, I began to
feel as if I and all those who had sailed with me were on the cusp
of completing a quest that we had been pursuing, consciously or
not, for many years. We had sailed for one hundred thousand sea
miles around the rim of the northern Atlantic, and now, with our
circumnavigation of Iceland, we had managed to assemble a sequence
of landfalls that might easily have been made by our legendary
predecessor—and thus to have fashioned a modern “Brendan voyage”
of our own.
The essays that follow are intended
as a chronicle of this voyage—or really this series of voyages—and
as a celebration of the natural places that Brendan’s Isle and her
crews and I have visited along the way. They are offered, with all
humility, in the spirit of those perfect travelers, those
“impeccable, generous, innocent, attentive men” who were satisfied
simply to experience for themselves all the wonders of the natural
world and afterwards to tell the story of their voyage.
There will be no overt political agenda here—with one important
caveat. The “pristine wilderness” that Saint Brendan and his
shipmates discovered in their travels and that were later
described in the pages of the Navigatio no longer exists. Much as
we might wish it otherwise, we, as a species, have succeeded
beyond our wildest expectations over the past thousand years in
taming the wild places, subjugating nature, establishing our
imprint upon virtually every square inch of this planet. Some of
this imprinting may be relatively harmless and inconsequential—styrofoam
coffee cups washing up on the beaches of Antarctica, broken
soda-pop bottles disintegrating into sea glass on the ocean floor.
But much of it—the vast preponderance of it—is far more onerous.
As we, the seven billion, have succeeded in taming the wilderness,
we have also begun to alter it, often to the detriment of both the
other species who live there and of ourselves.
Of necessity, the essays that follow
are therefore set within an inevitable if often unspoken context
of expanding human waste-streams, changing atmospheric chemistry,
disappearing species, rising sea surface temperatures, thinning
sea ice, melting glaciers. These things are. They exist as part of
the landscape now—so that to claim to bear witness to the beauty
of the natural places without also recognizing these threats to
their survival is to fabricate a lie. Much as Rachael Carson did
more than fifty years ago, I have also learned that it is no
longer possible to celebrate the intricate natural rhythms of “the
sea around us” without also becoming aware of the human-induced
changes that threaten those rhythms from every side.
The age of innocence is past. We can
no longer roam the Eearth as old Saint Brendan may once have done,
marveling in childlike wonderment at a pristine and unaltered
nature. Instead, if we are honest with ourselves, we now must
travel as my shipmates and I have tried to do aboard Brendan’s
Isle: aware of the changes that are taking place, deeply
appreciative of the beauty that remains, armed with a kind of
urgency that moves one at every moment to encounter the natural
world, to live deliberately within it, to strive to minimize one’s
footprint upon it, and to bear witness to it before it is altered
irretrievably—before it is lost.
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