The Brendan Voyage Read Online Free PDF

spent a great deal of his time traveling around the northwestern perimeter ofEurope in small vessels. In short, Saint Brendan was a sailor’s saint, so it was hardly surprising that he had come to be known as Brendan the Navigator.
    But it was the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis,
more usually known as the
Navigatio
or
Voyage of Brendan,
that sealed his reputation. This was the text which my wife and I had both read as students and remembered as something remarkable. It had been written in Latin, and it described how Saint Brendan, living in the west of Ireland, had been visited by another Irish priest who described to him a beautiful land far in the West over the ocean where the word of God ruled supreme. The priest advised Brendan to see this place for himself, and so Brendan built a boat specially for the voyage, making a framework of wood on which he stretched oxhides for the hull. Then he loaded ample stores, spare oxhides and fat to dress the hides, and set sail with seventeen monks to find this Promised Land. They had a long, hard journey. They wandered from one island to another and had many adventures until they finally won through to their destination, and managed to explore the fringe of the Promised Land before setting sail once again for Ireland. Some of their adventures were obviously fabulous. For instance, they were said to have landed on the back of a whale, mistaking it for an island. The monks lit a fire to cook themselves a meal, and the heat of the fire woke the whale, so that the monks only just managed to scrambled back into their boat before the whale swam off with the fire still burning on his back like a beacon. Other episodes seemed equally unlikely: the
Navigatio
described how Brendan and his crew came upon a huge pillar of crystal floating in the sea. Later they were chased by a sea monster breathing fire from his nostrils. At one island they were pelted with hot rocks; at another they discovered Irish monks living under the rule of silence in a monastery. So it went. The
Navigatio,
some scholars said, was a splendid collection of seafaring yarns, a farrago of wild fantasy, one tale more colorful than the last.
    But several eminent authorities disagreed. They pointed out that, seen in another light, the episodes in Brendan’s voyage bore a striking resemblance to geographical facts. The floating pillar of crystal could have been an iceberg which the travelers had met at sea. Perhaps the sea monster was a pugnacious whale or a walrus. The burning rocks hurled at them might have been molten slag thrown up by an eruption in Iceland or in the Azores, which are both seats of volcanic activity. Asfor the monks of the silent community, it has long been known that groups of Irish holy men formed religious colonies on outlying islands around Britain. But there was one great stumbling block: how could Saint Brendan and his monks have made such a huge journey, which lasted, the text said, for seven years, in a boat made of perishable ox skins? Everyone knew that leather disintegrates in sea water, and one would no more contemplate going to sea for several months in a leather boat than standing in the sea in a pair of good leather shoes. The results would be catastrophic.
    I pulled out modern atlases and sea charts, and tried to match up these theories with the practical realities of the North Atlantic. The way Saint Brendan’s itinerary fitted the various Atlantic islands was certainly startling. A single similarity like, say, the volcanos of Iceland as the basis for the story of the hot rock could have been explained as a coincidence. But it would have required a whole string of coincidences to explain the complete run of other similarities—from the Islands of Sheep, which Brendan visited early on in his journey and which sounded very like the Faroe Islands, right through to the thick white cloud he encountered just off the Promised Land and might have been the notorious fog zone off the Grand Banks of