This article is more than about the book-review of The Brendan Voyage. It recaps the story/myth of the Irish monk who sailed to America 1000 years before Columbus. It reviews and critiques Tim Severin’s book called the Brendan Voyage. It judges the faults of the Brendan Voyage, the misgivings of the voyage’s leader, and it acknowledges benefits to doing such things, even if they could be done better. And it ends with a connecting piece on the Age prior to the Era of Exploration, where adventurers and sailors mostly never came back, and new lands were only new to the sailors – not the inhabitants.
First, to recap the infamous and maybe real voyage of the Irish Monk: The myth is based off of one story, which is titled: Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. The first written version of this story is suspected to be from 800AD, which is 300 years after the supposed voyage. Like most stories from this era, the verbal pass down was much stronger than the written pass down. Over time, the myth grew and changed and fell into the hands of many historians, many who wrote the account off as mostly fictional. The written story is about the voyage of 12 Irish Monks, led by Saint Brendan of Clonfert. In 500 AD, everywhere on the globe, sailing was a primary means of travel. On coastal states, sailing was an expertise acquired by most at an early age. The Irish Monks of this time period, were known as significantly talents sailors, as they inhabited and built monasteries around some of the most dramatic coastal backdrops one can imagine. For Saint Brendan, he had heard of a Promise Land to the West, and went on order from god, to establish a stronghold in this region, to be settled later by Europeans (this is nice). Brendan set sail in a boat built of what the Irish built boats out of in those days – local materials. Oak and Ash frame, covered in Sheep’s leather. He island hopped North, then west, stopping in Iceland, Greenland, and Finally Canada, making it to the Americas in 500AD, and back home shortly thereafter. The story goes into detail about his adventure, with dragons, raining fire, floating crystals, and setting up camp on a whale’s back. All of which are standard for this time period, and, of course, the Bible itself.
Tim Severin was a Harvard graduate looking for something to put his history degree to use over. Him and his wife, who has a PhD in medieval studies stumbled into the idea of sailing a remake of Brendan’s boat across the Atlantic. With a solid plan, in the early 1970s, and a well thought-out and researched strategy, they sold the rights to their adventure and story to a book publisher, and set out on the quest to build a duplicate of Brendan’s ship and sail it the Canada. The book under review, The Brendan Voyage, is about this endeavor. Hate to spoil it, but the ship makes it. While the author admits that this does not prove that the Saint Brendan was the “first to discover America,” he suggests that his success will at least put the idea on the table for future studies, historians and dreamers.
I like to point out the similarities of Tim Severin with many of the other articles and characters I’ve focused on: Like Dana, he was a Harvard graduate who has misrepresented the blue-collar sailor. Like Shackleton, he created a personal interest which could have jeopardized the lives of his crew. And like all of the mariners whose stories survived, he did something really fucking cool and dangerous.
Like Dana, Severin graduated from Harvard. With a white-collar history of sailing small recreational craft, with all sorts of fancy education and money, he simply misses the point of what Saint Brendan did. 12 Irish Monks on a 25’ leather boat, setting sail across an unknown body of water – Holy Shit!!!! Severin’s account of Saint Brendan talks about the Saint Brendan voyage as if it was a common practice for this type of character to exist, for this type of behavior to be typical, for risk so extreme to be the norm. I’m sorry Severin, but any bearded 20 year old man who’s set sail black-out drunk on the Pacific aboard a dilapidated child’s-home-made-Huck-raft knows that the unknown ocean is a fucking beast to be emphasized. The little thrills of rolling around with a $100,000 ship built by experts with a bunch of radios and EPIRBS and strategies and plans is not equal to what Brendan may have done. Your pampered life has blinded you as it blinded Dana. You should have mentioned the abuse the monks gave each other. The location of the shitter. The smell of vomit. The dangers of rats. The sexual desires at sea. The idea of sailing into the unknown. The unknown. Sailing into the unknown. You can’t duplicate that shit.
Like Shackleton, Severin sold the rights to his story before the story existed. He even mentions this in his text. In an adventure at sea, this is a bad idea. It creates an interest for the benefactor (Severin) that the remaining crew does not have. Without that interest, sailing into dangerous predicaments can be managed fairly. With that interest, there becomes a magnetic pull for the leader to manipulate, to coerce, and to push when he shouldn’t. While Severin seems to do a noble job at keeping his crew out of harms way, we can never be so sure he did such a thing – he did write his own story.
And finally, even if we remove the author’s hand, and just picture the idea of a leather ship sailing from Ireland to Canada, there remains an epic adventure! Nicely done sir. Nicely done.
So, from reading this text, which summarized Saint Brendan’s voyage, I take a few things to connect to our mission to promote 21st century maritime culture. 1) There are more stories lost than we know of, and the ones we do know of, that have been lost, are ours to think about, and we should. Setting sail, into the unknown, and not returning, was more common before and during the age of exploration than at any other given time (other than maybe during the great World Wars (someone should do the math on this)). It’s important to remember, that the rule of numbers predicts the success of some and the demise of others – which means we should not judge the demise or the successful too significantly. 2) The push to find new land arose for many reasons. But the mistake of finding new land was more significant. Brendan was running from the abuse the rest of Europe was giving to the Irish church. His form of Catholicism granted him permission to be high and mighty, and to settle lands where people “needed to be saved.” We must remember that the world was inhabited, before recorded and remembered stories exist. A discovery of one tribe can be seen as an invasion or a visitation by another. 3) If the people of the North Atlantic interacted with Europeans as early as 500-1000AD, we would see shared blood lines in that region. This research has been done, and the answer is that there is no shared blood from that early in history. Do we have North American artifacts and influence in the Baltics, Ireland and Scotland, Iceland, Greenland earlier than what we know of? Am I missing something? How would such an artifact travel in a time of great starvation, brutality, and Catholic rule? It would be nice for the Vatican to be turned upside down and shaken – it ruled the age of exploration – maybe it knew more than we think it did/does. This third point I am making is that, even if pre-Columbus Americans interacted with Europe, European monarchies and the church had every reason to hide it, and finagle a way to benefit from it. It wouldn’t surprise me if a Religious expedition to the Americas happened before Columbus, which was then concealed by the church itself.
