Tim Severin. The Brendan Voyage. London: Endeavour Media, 2013. E-book.

First, to get it out directly, Tim Severin, the author of The Brendan Voyage, must have lived one of the most adventurous lives on earth. I might actually envy him. In addition to sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a leather curragh or coracle, his book titles suggest that he has attempted other historical voyages in historically authentic vessels. Not only am I too old to try to imitate him, but I would have to learn how to sail.

Second, what attracted me to this book in the first place was simply that this was an effort like Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki and Ra voyages to prove that it was possible for someone to sail from one distant location to another. I had read somewhere, possibly in Marshall and Manuel’s The Light and the Glory, that Columbus had read about Bendan’s legendary voyage to a new land across the Atlantic Ocean and based his voyages partly on that.

So in 1976, the author got together a crew of five after spending the better part of two years researching how the Gaelic leather boats were made. He followed as best he could the descriptions from medieval sources of how it was done and found experts in a number of different fields: lumber, leather, and flax being primary.

The project was impressive. One of the most remarkable things was that building a leather boat using the medieval technology actually made the craft more seaworthy than using more modern techniques of carpentry and leather dressing.

There are over a hundred manuscripts extant of the voyage of Brendan, and the author noted that the basic story is really pretty specific and changes little though there are variations in the manuscripts. Was this based on fact? It helped that Mrs. Severin was a medieval scholar. He managed to get enough financial backing to give this a try.

The story is fascinating. He admits that he was lucky in some ways to find the experts that he did. In one case he was looking for someone who could duplicate the medieval way of treating leather thongs for sewing oxhides together. One expert told him that no one could do it any more except maybe a Mr. John O’Connell who was no longer in the business. He found him. He also found the last man in Ireland who made curraghs for a living, though rarely had he made one as big as the one Severin had made, which he christened Brendan.

I was in the Coast Guard and the rescue and patrol boats we used were generally around forty feet long and about twelve feet wide. Of course, they were diesel powered, not sail. These were typical for relatively sheltered areas, though they were pretty seaworthy in a pinch. They normally had a crew of three, which was enough for most of our work.

The Brendan was thirty-six feet long and eight feet wide with a crew of five. There was not a whole lot of living space. They followed the route to North America that St. Brendan apparently took. It was kind of island-hopping: Ireland to the Hebrides to the Faeroes, to Iceland, to Greenland, to Newfoundland.

The Brendan did not stop at Greenland since it was mostly uninhabited. That was not the case in the sixth century when Brendan the Navigator sailed. The climate was warmer then, so there were at the very least some Irish monks there. Later Eric the Red would settle there. Once the “Little Ice Age” of about 1300 to 1850 began, things would change.

Indeed, it seems clear that while Brendan did encounter some icebergs on his trip, he did not have the trials that Severin and his men had trying to navigate through ice fields.

There is so much more. Not only do we read about this challenging voyage and the various places the voyagers sailed to, but we see the sea birds, fish, and marine mammals close up. Some of the tales of sea monsters from the Brendan stories were very similar to some of their experiences with whales. Although they did have some very dangerous moments in rough weather and ice, one of the most intense moments involves an encounter with a Killer Whale.

Rounding up an experienced and varied crew was not unlike the first half hour or so of The Magnificent Seven. Each had talent and experience which the vessel needed. Without each one, the voyage might not have succeeded. There is expertise in the construction and in the execution. It would have been so in the sixth century, and it is still the same to sail anything in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Like The Odyssey, the story begins in the middle of the action, and then gradually we learn how the Brendan got into the gale described and how the crew got out again and actually made it to Newfoundland. If they did it, it seems pretty clear Brendan and others could have done it as well back in the day. And, clearly, Columbus may have learned something from Brendan, too, especially on his return route to Europe.

Severin has another book out called The Ulysses Voyage. We can imagine what that attempts to do. I am curious to see if he identifies the various stops in The Odyssey with those of Mauricio Obregón in his Ulysses Airborne. I use that in my classes when I teach Homer. I think some day we shall see.