“What have you got there?” asked the Irish customs officer as he slid back the van door with a rumble, poked in his head, and withdrew it again very sharply, wrinkling his nose at the eye-watering smell.
“Oxhides,” I replied. “They’re for a boat I’m building and hope to sail to America.”
“Oh, they are for re-export then. Thank heavens for that. We won’t want that sort of smell around too long.” He laughed as he banged the door shut. I was on my way to the boatyard in County Cork where the boat would be built, and an important new stage in the Brendan project was about to begin.
Not so long ago I had been worrying whether I could find a boatyard to do the job. After all, it’s not often that a modern boatyard is asked to construct a medieval boat. But as it turned out, I need not have fretted. Only in Ireland was it possible to stroll into the local boatyard, spread out a drawing, and casually ask, “I wonder if you could help build this for me? It’s a sixth-century design, and I’ll be covering the hull with oxhides myself, but I want an expert to build the wooden frame.” The boatyard manager’s eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. He took two slow puffs on his pipe, and then he murmured, “That shouldn’t be any trouble. I’ll check with our head shipwright if he’s got space.”
This was no run-of-the-mill boatyard. The Crosshaven Boatyard was where the Irish lifeboats were sent for overhaul; where Sir Francis Chichester built his record-breaking Gypsy Moth V; and where I heard it stated that they preferred never to build two boats to the same design because this was “too dull.” Crosshaven was a boatyard in the old style: no fiberglass, scarcely any steel, but masses of timber and a cheerful confidence in their ability to build anything that was meant to float. Above all, it was a boatyard that didn’t mind my bringing smelly oxhides onto the premises, to be followed shortly afterward by a medley of saddlers, leather-workers, students, amateur helpers, and a mascot dog.
Pat Lake was the head shipwright. With his spectacles and rubicund face he looked more like a country doctor than a boatbuilder. He was what County Cork called a “flier.” When he got started into a job, it simply flew along. To my delight Pat himself elected to build the frame for the boat, working in the evenings in his spare time and helped by a pair of picked assistants. “Pat,” I told him, “what I would like you to do is to build me the wooden frame according to Colin Mudie’s drawings. Can you do it in such a way that the frame is held together temporarily? Once you have shaped the main structure, I will then replace your fastenings with authentic medieval fastenings of the type Saint Brendan would have used to hold the wooden frame together.”
“What were those fastenings made of?” he asked.
“Strips of leather thong were most probably used to lash the frame together. In those days metal was too valuable to be used where other materials would do the same job. Besides, I think if we lash the frame together like a wicker basket, this ought to make the hull more flexible.”
“What sort of timber do you want me to use?”
“Oak for the double gunwales, and ash for the frames and the longitudinal stringers. We know from the analysis of hearth ash that these types of wood were growing in Ireland in Saint Brendan’s day.”
“Oak sounds fine to me,” commented Pat. “We’ve got some oak here in the yard that has been seasoned for eight or ten years and is as hard as iron. But I wouldn’t be happy about using ash. It’s not a timber that goes well in a boat. If ash keeps getting wet in sea water and then drying out, it begins to rot. Before long you’d be able to poke your finger through it.”
“I’m sure that ash is the right timber,” I repeated. “No other wood available in medieval Ireland was supple enough to follow the sharp curves of the hull frames.”
“Right then. But it’s going to be difficult to find ash in the long straight lengths we’ll be wanting.”
Here was an unexpected snag. I found that very little ash is now used in the timber industry. And when ash trees are felled, they are cut up into short lengths to make it easier to haul the logs from the forest. But for my boat I had to have trunks of ash thirty feet long and straight in the grain. These were rarities in the timber trade. It looked very much as if I was going to have to begin yet another hunt for my medieval materials, and I feared that I had no time for such a quest.
But I had forgotten Brendan Luck. I was given the name of a consultant expert in the timber trade, and I went to see him at his office. By now I was thoroughly accustomed to opening such meetings with a long introductory explanation about my project for a leather boat. So I took a deep breath and began. “This may sound strange to you, but I want to build a medieval boat made of…”
The timber expert held up his hand to stop me. “Some years ago a man called Heyerdahl came in to us for advice about balsa wood,” he said. “I believe we found some for him. Just tell me what timber you want, and we’ll see if we can help.”
Through his contacts I found myself in County Longford in the very heart of Ireland, at a timber yard run by a family called Glennon. Had it not been for the flat Irish countryside and the strong Irish accents, I could have imagined myself with the leather-making Croggons in Cornwall. The two situations were strikingly similar. In each case there was a small family business specializing in a traditional material. In Ireland it was Paddy Glennon who ran the business, supported by Glennon brothers, Glennon children, and Glennon cousins. And once again it was a family that gave to the Brendan project a huge enthusiasm that no money could ever have bought. The Glennons took me on a tour of their timber yard, providing a running commentary much like that of an art connoisseur showing a visitor around his picture gallery. Here was the trunk of an oak tree that had been hand-picked to make a keel for a new wooden trawler. It was a massive giant that had flourished for about four hundred years. “Aren’t you sorry to cut down such splendid trees?” I inquired. “Oh, no. You see this black mark here near the root? That’s rot. The tree has entered its old age. It was sick, and in time it would have rotted right through and been destroyed.”
“Do you think you could possibly find me some really large fine ash trees to provide the timber for my boat?”
“Just as it happens,” said Paddy, “we are felling timber on one of the great estates near here, and there’s some beautiful ash to be cleared. It should be just what you want.”
So I found the ash I needed, and once again the experts guided me into the fascinating subject of fine timber. “Heart of oak, bark of ash” was one of Paddy Glennon’s mottoes. He advised me to use the heart-wood from the oak tree for the gunwales, but it was the fine white wood from the outer trunk of the ash tree that was the strongest. Best of all the ash, Paddy advised, was the wood from a mountain ash “which had to scrabble for its living” and grew light and strong. And when it came to selecting a suitable ash tree for the mast and oars, Paddy himself took me on a squelching tour across the countryside, hunting from tree to tree until we found just the one he sought—tall and straight, about eighty years old, an ash tree in its prime. “We’ll fell this one,” he said, “and I’ll see to it personally that the mast timber is taken from the north-facing side of the tree where the white wood is best. You’ll find no ash that is stronger for your purpose.”
Quite by chance, I mentioned to him Pat Lake’s worries about using ash in a boat. “Wait a minute,” said Paddy Glennon, “I think there’s someone at the timber yard who might be able to help you. In the old days the mill was powered by water from a pond, and the tools the men used were always getting soaked and then dry; perhaps they had some way of preserving the wood.” We returned to the mill and Paddy made some inquiries. “It seems that the old fellows used to soak their wooden tools in oil or grease, and this kept them in good condition. How does that sound to you?” It sounded just right and another piece of the jigsaw puzzle clicked into place. The Navigatio had said that grease was used for preserving the leather. Logically the same grease would have been available to protect the timber frame if it had been built of ash. Indeed, the grease from the leather would unavoidably rub off onto the wood as the boat flexed in the sea. The logic was inescapable: here were two materials, leather and ash, which were normally vulnerable to sea water. But the same treatment with the same basic material—grease—rendered them suitable for a medieval boat.
The first of my visits to the Glennons’ timber yard ended with a conversation that was to stay in my mind. When we had toured the yard, Paddy Glennon invited me to meet his wife and have supper with him in their home. During the meal he asked all about the Brendan project, and cross-examined me about the reasons behind it. And when I was about to leave the table, he suddenly said, “There’s something else I want to tell you. I’ll find the timber for your boat, and I’ll see that it’s cut exactly right, even if I have to run the saws myself. What is more, you are not to expect to receive a bill from Glennons. I want to make you a present of the timber.”
I was overwhelmed. This was a most generous gift indeed. I started to thank him, but he went on:
“You ought to know why I’m doing this,” he said. “It’s because I feel I’m repaying a debt. My family has made a good living out of Irish-grown timber. We’ve always dealt with native-grown hardwoods when most other firms were importing their timber, and we’ve done well. If you’re going to build an Irish boat out of Irish timber, I want it to be made of Glennons’ timber. It’ll help to pay back some of what the native timber has given to us. But …” and here he grinned, “there’s always a ‘but.’ If your early Christian boat gets across the Atlantic, I want you to bring back just a small piece of our timber so that we can keep it in the office.”
Paddy Glennon was as good as his word. A week later a lorry delivered a load of superb ash to the Crosshaven Boatyard, and later another shipment arrived of the long straight ash baulks, cut on the north-facing side of the great tree, that we shaped into the masts and oars on which our lives would depend.
With this material Pat Lake and his shipwrights set to work. They used exactly the same methods that John Goodwin followed when he built his canvas “canoes” up in the Dingle. The two gunwales were made from flint-hard oak joined with wooden pins. Then the two gunwales were placed one above another in a sandwich, and shaped to the characteristic banana curve of the Dingle curragh. Next, the double gunwales were turned upside down so the boat could be built bottom upward. Only an Irish boat, I thought to myself, would be built in reverse, beginning with the gunwale and finishing with the keel.
Yet there was good sense to it. One by one the light, curved frames of bone-white ash were carefully put into position until they looked like a line of hoops that carry nets over strawberry beds. By pulling and pushing on these hoops, Pat Lake got exactly the right profile he wanted. Then he began to attach the stringers, the long slim strips of ash running fore and aft which completed the latticework of the boat frame. He lightly tapped in a single wire nail at each intersection of frame and stringer, until the entire basketwork was the correct shape of Colin Mudie’s drawings.
Now it was up to me. While Pat was making up the frame, I had been busily experimenting with the leather thongs to lash the frame together. Doctor Sykes at the Leather Research Laboratories had advised that the best leather for this job was made by “tawing,” a process using alum, known since Roman days. Carl Postles at the Derby tannery had sent over two big bales of these thongs, and I began a few practical tests with them by tying together wood laths and hanging them in the tide water of the estuary. I quickly found that it was vital to soak the thongs in sea water beforehand, stretch them, and then tie the lashings while the leather was still wet. Otherwise the thongs did not grip. Unfortunately, tying knots in slippery wet thongs was like joining two snakes. The thongs simply slid apart. One hilarious Sunday morning I was testing a new type of knot in the garage, and had tied the thong to a ring bolt in the floor. I was heaving away with all my might, when suddenly the thong slipped, and I went hurtling backward out of the garage door onto the pavement. There I tripped and fell flat on my back waving a wet thong in the air, right in the path of the village congregation on its way back from church. “That’s what education does for you,” someone muttered.
In the end I found a knot that seemed to hold effectively, though it required much interlacing and twisting, and in a curious way it looked very like the braided patterns found in Irish manuscript illustrations; and to help with the long job of lashing the frame together, George came out from England to join me.
George had always been my first choice for crew. Twenty-six years old, he had served in the army and later gone to the Middle East to train soldiers for an oil-rich sheik. With the money saved from this venture, he had decided to take a couple of years looking around the world and pleasing himself. He answered an advertisement in a yachting magazine looking for someone to help sail a small yacht in the Mediterranean, and in this way he had come cruising with my wife and me aboard our Prester John. Six foot tall and rangy, George was a consummate sailor. He could get more out of a boat by tirelessly resetting sails and adjusting the helm than anyone I had ever sailed with. Above all he was reliable. When George said he would get something done, it was done. One weekend he had promised to help transport some of the oxhides to Harold. On the Friday evening he loaded them; and on the Sunday he delivered them. On the Saturday in between he had got married!
Now, leaving his wife Judith to keep her job as a schoolteacher in London, George came out to Ireland to join me, and together we started the laborious task of lashing the boat frame. Day after day we crouched inside the upturned frame of the vessel. Each wire nail had to be pulled out and discarded. In its place a leather thong was wrapped around the wood and tightened, knotted, and then the free end led on to the next thong, and so on and so on. It was backbreakingly slow work, poking fingers through the gaps in the frame, groping for a slippery strip of leather, and heaving the knots tight until our muscles ached. Some days we were joined by friends from the village, and their help made the work move a bit faster. By the time we finished, we had hand-lashed 1,600 joints in the latticework frame, and used nearly two miles of leather thong to do so. But it was worth it. The wooden skeleton of the boat was now gripped in a fine net of leather. This net was so strong that a dozen men could jump up and down on the upturned hull, and not a lath groaned or moved out of place. Finally, to protect thong and timber, we boiled up buckets of wool grease and painted it over the hull in a spattering mess. It looked and smelled abominable but, as George pointed out, the wool grease had one benefit: though we had been hauling and clawing at the work for almost a month, not one of us had raised a single blister on our hands. The lanolin in the wool grease was a first-class handcream.
On the afternoon we finished, we went down to the local pub to celebrate, and were promptly pursued by the landlord’s dog, who smelled the wool grease on our clothes. So that evening we ceremoniously burned our workclothes as the first, though not the last, sacrifice to medieval working conditions.
Now came the most crucial step in the whole reconstruction. How were we to cover the wooden hull with oxhides? What should we use for thread? How did we join the hides together? What method of stitching was best? How far apart should we make each stitch hole? There was a host of questions, and if we made one error, the consequences would be disastrous. For example, if we stitched too closely, the leather might rip between stitches. On the other hand, if we stitched too widely, the leather would buckle between them and water would pour in through the joints.
The Irish National Museum in Dublin had a superb collection of early Christian artifacts, and I spent hours examining the skills of the craftsmen from Saint Brendan’s day. What exquisite skills they had displayed! These were men who had worked metal and wood and leather so cunningly that their craftsmanship stood comparison with the very best modern examples, and their decorative metalwork and jewelry was still unsurpassed. Naturally, I was more interested in their everyday objects. These items, too, were sometimes so well made that I realized we would not be limiting our own techniques to conform with medieval practices, but rather we would be hard put to it to rise to their level of skill. In metalwork, for example, the early Christian craftsmen had cast fish-hooks in bronze as robust and sharp and well-designed as anything we could obtain today. They had hammered rivets so delicately and accurately that it was virtually impossible to duplicate the effect. And as for their leather work, the museum displayed a rare example of early leather—an early Christian book satchel made to carry a Bible. To stitch this satchel, the medieval craftsman, who may well have been a monk himself, had worked with his hand inside the satchel, running his needle down the length of the leather so that the stitches actually stayed within the thickness of the skin and were totally invisible. No less an authority than John Waterer had declared that few modern leather-workers would have cared to try to duplicate this meticulous craftsmanship.
A master saddler also came across from England with his best apprentice to advise George and me on possible leather-working techniques for the boat. We numbered every oxhide and heaped them under piles of weights to flatten out the wrinkles as much as possible. We trimmed the hides with sharp knives, and hung them on the wooden boat frame, turning them this way and that to try to make them fit the compound curves of the hull. We warmed oxhides to try to mold them; we soaked them in water; and we beat them with great hammers to try to shape them. We tried every technique I had seen in the museum, and we tested the traditional methods of the master saddlemaker, methods with splendid-sounding names like back-stitching, two-hand stitching, blind stitching, and the furriers’ stitch.
Occasionally the results were disastrous. For example, when we tried lacing the hides together with finely cut leather thong, the lacing popped apart like rotten string. “If only we could get fine thong made from horsehide; it’s so much stronger,” bemoaned the master saddler. Another hide we tried dipping in water that was too warm, and the leather turned brittle and lifeless. It cracked and split like a neglected shoe, and George and I looked at one another, wondering what would happen if we made a similar mistake but failed to spot it before we put to sea in the Atlantic. At last we worked out a technique that seemed simple and effective. We overlapped the oxhides by a margin of one to two inches, and then stitched a strong double line of thread along the joint. It took care and patience, but the workmanship was at least within our capabilities, and the joints showed a crude strength. Just before he left to go back to the firm who had kindly loaned him to us, the master saddler looked at the long, gleaming, naked frame of the boat, then at the stack of hides lying waiting, and then at George and me. “That’s probably the biggest single leather-working job of the century,” he said. “If you get it done, you’ll be able to teach others something about stitching.”
The task was truly daunting. I was under no illusion that without constant advice and supervision, George and I and any amateur helpers were likely to make a shambles of the work. It was immensely frustrating. Here we were with the materials and the enthusiasm, but we lacked the expert to guide us through the job. But where could I possibly find him? The men trained in heavy leather work were a vanishing breed. Fifty years ago most villages in Ireland had a man who repaired bridles and made harnesses; most country towns might have had a saddler. But these craftsmen had all but vanished, gone into limbo with the farm animals. Only a handful remained; there were probably less than a hundred trained saddlers still at work in the entire British Isles. Such men were eagerly sought after. They made saddles for the export market and were kept permanently busy. Even if I could find one with free time, I could not see how I could possibly afford to pay him.
From the very beginning of the project, I had been visiting saddlemakers in London and Birmingham. I had driven the length and breadth of Ireland to every saddlery firm on my list. Everywhere I had asked if they could spare a man or tell me where I might find one. Everywhere I was told politely but firmly that it was impossible. Every good saddler, and there were desperately few, was needed at the saddler’s bench. My only compensation was that I earned a first-hand impression of fine leather work. I met the deft craftsmen who still handled tools that had not changed for centuries: the awls and punches, the pincers and scribers, the half-moon knives, crimpers, and edge-shavers. The saddlers’ benches smelled richly of leather and beeswax polish; and the saddlers sat in their leather aprons, bent over their work endlessly stitching away with their huge strong hands and powerful shoulder muscles, developed by years of pulling taut the double-handed thread with a snap that still made good hand-sewn leather far stronger than any machine stitch. I learned why English saddles were considered to be the finest in the world; why Australian racing stables would wait four years for a light saddle from a top maker; and how the Shah of Iran had placed a legendary order for six sets of harness for his state coach at his coronation, every piece of harness to be made in blue leather. I learned too that the premier firm of English saddlemakers had closed down when its owner died, and its team of saddlers and harness-makers—perhaps a dozen men—had scattered to other firms, while the Royal Warrant as Saddlers to the Queen had passed to a rival firm. Sad-dlemaking was such a tightly knit world that the top men could recognize their own handiwork across the width of a room and tell you the names of most of the other craftsmen in the same line.
I never failed to ask a saddler if he could recommend a colleague to me, but the bench workers themselves could not help, except once. At the saddlemakers who now held the Royal Warrant, one of the saddlers told me of an Irish harnessmaker who had vanished from the world of leather-working. His name was John O’Connell, and my informant told me that no one knew where he had gone. John O’Connell had worked on harness for the royal stables, and he had been one of the quickest, surest harnessmakers in the trade. “Always laughing was John O’Connell,” the saddler told me, “and if you find him you can’t miss him. He’s about the same around the middle as he is tall. Built like a barrel. And a great one for the girls. He married a girl from Ireland, and I believe he decided to go back home, and I’ve never heard from him again. Find John O’Connell,” he added, “and you’ll have found one of the best harnessmakers in Ireland.”
Of course I mentioned John O’Connell’s name at all the Irish saddlery firms I visited. But they had never heard of him. Then one day after we had begun boat-building at Crosshaven, I went to Cork to interview a retired saddlemaker. Unfortunately he had long since lost his skills, but I stayed to chat with him about the saddlery business and, as we talked, he happened to mention the famous blue harness sets made for the Shah’s coronation. At once I came alert.
“Did you work on that job?” I asked him.
“Yes, it was worth thousands and thousands of pounds, and I remember we had to make it in a special way. The organizers of the Shah’s coronation ceremony didn’t know until the last moment whether they would use a six-horse team or a four-horse team to draw the imperial coach, so we had to make the harness set to fit either six horses or to be divided down into a four-horse team and harness for two more horses drawing a separate coach.”
“Did you by any chance know of someone by the name of John O’Connell?”
There was a pause, while he thought back. “Yes, I knew John. He was very good.”
“I’m told that he came back to Ireland after he got married. You don’t know by any chance where I might be able to get in touch with him?”
Then, incredibly, came my answer.
“I heard some time ago from John O’Connell. I was looking for someone to help me in the business, and I wrote to him but he wasn’t interested.”
I was agog with excitement, but calmed myself with the thought that John O’Connell might be living at the other end of Ireland. “Do you remember his address?”
“Let me think.” Another agonizing pause. “It was in Summerstown, a place in Summerstown. In Summerstown Road itself, I believe.”
“Where’s Summerstown?” I asked. He looked at me in surprise.
“It’s here on the edge of Cork City.”
Scarcely believing the luck, I stayed a few minutes longer and then hurried out to my car and drove straight to Summerstown estate. Summerstown Road was easy to find, and I banged on the door of the first house in the street, trusting to the fact that in Ireland everyone is liable to know everyone living in the same street.
“Excuse me. Can you please tell me if there’s someone called O’Connell living near here?” I inquired.
“There are three O’Connells in this street,” she said. “Which one are you wanting?”
“The man I’m looking for is short and very strong, and he’s got big hands and thick strong forearms.” I was describing the classic physique of a harnessmaker.
Without a second’s hesitation the woman replied, “That’s John O’Connell. He’s at number seventeen.”
I dashed across the road, and rang the bell of number 17. The door was opened by a small keg of a man. He had the weatherbeaten complexion of an outdoor worker, and also massive hands and shoulders. He looked at me inquiringly.
“You’re John O’Connell …the harnessmaker?” I asked.
He looked stunned. “That’s right. How did you find me?”
John O’Connell, one of the most skilled harnessmakers in the craft, had come back to Ireland, failed to find harness work in Cork, and had taken a job as a construction worker. He lived not fifteen miles from the boatyard where we were working, and he had kept his skills in trim, occasionally mending leather shoes for friends, or school satchels for local children. I asked him if he had still kept his leather-working tools.
“My wife complains that I never throw anything away,” he said with a chuckle. “Just wait a minute while I go upstairs and fetch them down.”
He came back with a battered leather Gladstone bag and pulled open the top, and I found myself looking at as varied a collection of harnessmaker’s tools as I had ever seen in my life.
“I inherited most of them from my father,” John O’Connell explained. “He was a horse-collar maker. Of course you don’t find that trade now. I was apprenticed to him, and served my full term before I went to England.”
So John O’Connell was found and agreed to join us at Crosshaven Boatyard. At first he visited us in the evenings after he had finished his regular job on the building site. But later I was able to make arrangements so that he could join us full time, and our good fortune was difficult to believe. John was experienced in making horse collars, the branch of traditional leather work closest to our heavy leather work for the boat. Step by step, he began to train George and me and all the volunteers I recruited. He taught us to roll flax thread, turning a single strand into a thick fourteen-strand cord. We were started at the deep end. Clad in leather aprons we looped and twisted the flax, rubbing it with lumps of black wax mixed with wool grease and beeswax, and rolling it on our thighs like cigarmakers. At first we got into terrible tangles, finishing up with cats’ cradles of flax that had to be thrown into the dustbin. John O’Connell merely grinned at us over the inevitable cigarette stuck in his mouth, and started each man over again. Gradually we picked up the knack of spinning the thread and how to break it against the twist with a casual flick of the wrist, but we never equaled John himself. His hands moved in a blur, and he never even needed to watch the threads spinning and twisting as if by magic they rolled as neatly and regularly as from a machine. To the finish John could roll two cords for every single one that George or I turned out.
Next, John turned to the stitching of the leather. He started us on the plain back-stitch, and showed us how it was made. He taught us to thread the needles properly. He demonstrated how to pierce half-an-inch thickness of leather straight and true with a quick stab of the deadly saddlemaker’s awl and, before the hole closed up, to run through the blunt needle, its tip touching the point of the awl as it was withdrawn. Hand and eye had to match the movement exactly. A second’s delay and the advantage was lost as the leather closed around the hole. At the start we almost abandoned hope at ever being able to copy his methods. In four days of work we averaged a paltry six inches of stitching per day, and we knew that we had at least two miles to go. We broke needles by the score, split and tore the threads, snapped awl blades, and pricked our fingers till they bled profusely. Our hands were soon a mass of cuts, and we kept a large box of sticking plaster by the workbench. Even John’s hands were bleeding, but for quite a different reason. After ten years away from the saddler’s bench, his hands, despite carrying bricks, had grown soft for harness work. When John pulled the thread tight into each stitch, he did so with a massive jerk that brought into play the enormous muscles in arm and shoulder, and the thread wrapped around his fists sliced into the soft flesh like a knife. But John merely laughed. “It’ll soon mend,” he grunted as drops of blood spattered out. “Inside a week my hands will be back in trim, and then we’ll really get going.”
“Won’t the cuts get infected?” I asked him.
“No, not at all. A waxed thread never leaves a dirty cut. In the old days if we cut ourselves with a knife on the bench, we always treated the cut with a dab of black wax. Nobody ever had any trouble.”
We began with the easier work, piecing together the oxhides that covered the central segment of the hull, joining each hide as if stitching together a quilt. Neighbors and friends came from my village to help us, and we learned that it was knack rather than brute strength that mattered in driving a good stitch. Some people had a true feeling for the work, others hadn’t. Our best recruit was a mere slip of a girl with less muscular strength than anyone else, but she left a neat, firm line of stitches that joined the hides as if they had been welded together.
Once we had mastered the back-stitch, John O’Connell took us on to the faster but more complicated two-hand stitch. Two needles were used to carry two separate threads down the line of awl holes, working from both sides of the leather. Normally a harnessmaker would have done the two-hand stitch by himself, holding the leather clamped between his knees. But our oxhides were too big, averaging four feet by three and a half feet, and so it was impossible for one man to reach both sides simultaneously. We had to have the stitchers working in pairs, poking the needles back and forth to one another through the leather. One stitcher stood on the outside and opened a hole with a stab of the awl. His partner, curled up inside the upturned boat, poked the needle out to the pinprick of light. Back came a second needle; then the partners gathered up the slack of the two threads in their fists; a grunt, and both tugged the stitch home simultaneously. The technique took patience, dexterity, and a sense of rhythm if it was to be done right. And if it was done wrong, John O’Connell was merciless. “Rip it, rip it!” he would say, and out would come his razor-sharp saddler’s knife and one slash would sever an entire day’s painstaking labor.
Gradually the work crept forward … two oxhides in place, four … six, and then suddenly we were working on the second tier of hides. John was satisfied with the quality of the work, but I was growing worried that we were falling behind schedule. If the boat was to be launched on time, I had to find more stitchers. I had already scoured the village and the neighborhood, and recruited every available housewife and friend. Then I had a brainwave. There was a technical college in London that gave a course in saddlery. Perhaps I could get a class of students to come over to help. I had never met the saddlery instructor, but I knew he had once been foreman at the Royal Warrant saddlers. I wrote him a letter and then telephoned him.
“Hello. This is Tim Severin. I wrote to you about a medieval leather boat I’m building. Do you think there’s any chance that some of your students would like to come over to help? It would be good experience for them, and I’ll pay their fares to come to Ireland.”
The instructor sounded doubtful. “I’ve talked to my students, and they’re very keen. But what would they learn? I don’t want them picking up any shoddy techniques, and somebody will have to keep an eye on them.”
“I’ve got John O’Connell looking after the work at the boatyard,” I pleaded.
“What! John O’Connell the harnessmaker?” He sounded impressed. “Well then, you’ve got the best man. I’ll give the students permission to join you for a week.”
So nine students came across to Ireland, tumbling one morning from a battered van at the Crosshaven Boatyard to the amazement of the shipwrights. The students brought with them their transistor radios, sleeping bags, and a strange assortment of old clothes ranging from moleskin overcoats to long woollen scarves and striped sports shirts. They chattered and joked … and they worked superbly. At its peak the boat had no less than nine students, eight volunteers, George’s sister Ellen, George, myself, and John working on it; and if you peered underneath, there was our mascot: George’s dog, Biscuit, who sat all day under the upturned hull, licking the faces of the “inside” stitchers and begging lunchtime sandwiches. In the evenings we drove back, completely worn out, to the village, where kindly neighbors had cooked up vast pots of stew and left them on my doorstep.
“Good Lord, where did that lot come from?” asked a student as Ellen Molony staggered in with a four-gallon tub of Irish stew.
“Leprechauns!” was the instant reply.
The students set the timetable right, and on the day they were due to go back to college, their spokesman took me to one side.
“We are enjoying ourselves so much,” he said, “that we would like to stay on two extra days. Would you mind?”
“Of course not,” I answered. “I would be delighted. But the agreement with your college was that you would only be here for a week.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said gaily. “We’ll just arrange to miss the ferry boat, and the next boat doesn’t sail for two days.”
So the students blithely missed the boat, and by the time they roared off cheerily in their dented van, we had only to make and fit the bow and stern sections of the leather. We anticipated extra wear and tear in these areas, and so we doubled the thickness of the leather, and on the bow where it might run on a rock or onto sharp flotsam, we made it four layers thick, more than an inch of solid leather. Only John O’Connell had the strength for this work. From his Gladstone bag he produced a pair of great heavy half-moon needles and an antiquated collarmaker’s palm that was almost a museum piece. As I watched him drive the needles through the leather with his prodigious strength, I thanked our luck that we had found such a man.
Finally, the leathering was done. We had used forty-nine hides to cover the frame. Several hides had been damaged in our first attempt to sew them, but we still had an ample supply of extra material if the boat needed repairs during the forthcoming trials or the voyage itself. George and I crawled for the last time under the upturned boat. With rope cut from oxhide, we pulled down the hanging edge of the skin and fastened it upward to the lower gunwale. Pat Lake the shipwright and Murph, his second-in-command, climbed onto the upturned hull to fit on a shallow skid of oak to protect the leather when we should run the boat up on to a beach; and our medieval boat was manhandled the right way up. From the finest Glennon ash we fashioned masts and oars to the same pattern as the Dingle curraghs, and at last she was ready.
To bless our new boat there was no better person than Eammon Casey, Bishop of Kerry and the spiritual descendant of Saint Brendan himself. On January 24 the Bishop arrived in full regalia at the beach where the boat lay ready. The weather was cuttingly cold, with a sharp wind that sent the flags on the boat’s rigging snapping and crackling. On the peak of the mainmast flew the flag of Ireland, and on the foremast our own pennant, the twin-tailed Brendan banner of a ringed Irish cross in red, “the cross of glory” on a white background. I had chosen the ringed cross, not only for its Irish association, but also because this cross was found in one form or another at many of the monastic sites which the medieval seafaring monks had visited, leaving the Celtic cross scratched on native rocks or as a magnificent freestanding monument.
A bottle of Irish whiskey had seemed more appropriate than French champagne for the first ocean-going leather boat to be launched in Ireland for perhaps forty generations, but there was a last-minute hitch. How did one break a stout glass bottle against a leather hull? The bottle would just bounce off. Crosshaven’s shipwrights came to the rescue. They hung an anchor on the bow and fixed the whiskey bottle into a wooden arm that would swing down on the target. Just to make sure, one of the shipwrights hid inside the bow throughout the service, ready to tug on a cord that made the bottle descend at full speed. A sizeable crowd had gathered to witness the ceremony. Movie cameras were focused; and the inevitable Doubting Thomas bustled among the spectators, offering to take bets. “Five to one she doesn’t float; five to one she sinks within the hour,” he offered. “You’re on for fifty pounds,” called one of my friends, but by the time he got out his money, the little bookmaker had discreetly vanished. Bishop Casey was magnificent. Isolated from the gale inside his purple and lace, he spoke the traditional prayers over the new boat. He blessed her mission, her crew, and the watching audience, and he read a poem in Irish he had specially composed for the occasion:
Bless this boat, O True Christ,
Convey her free and safe across the sea.
You are like a blessing of Brendan’s time,
Bless this boat now.
Guide our journey in it to sheltered land,
To go to the land of promise is your right,
You are like a guide of Brendan’s time,
Guide our boat now.
Then came the moment. My daughter Ida stepped forward with the scissors, and in a small clear voice she announced, “I name this boat Brendan” and cut the ribbon. The whiskey bottle, propelled by its hidden shipwright, whipped down with a tremendous crash. Shards of glass showered everyone within range, and the cloud of atomized Irish whiskey swept over the crowd. “That’s the real stuff!” shouted a hoarse voice, and Brendan began to slide down toward the water. With scarcely a ripple, she floated lightly off her cradle; her crew of shipwrights heaved at their oars; and Brendan pulled away, floating high with her bunting rippling and the crowd applauding. The boat of leather was afloat.
It was much too stormy and cold to risk Brendan at sea, so one of Paddy Glennon’s giant timber lorries trundled her up to the shallow lakes of the River Shannon for trials. We stepped the masts, hung the steering paddle over the starboard quarter, and pushed off to see what happened under sail. It was an idyllic morning. A gentle breeze filled Brendan’s two square sails; the hull canted slightly in response, and the long slim boat glided over the peaty brown Shannon water. We were deep in the countryside, with not a house in sight. The broad river curved past deep green meadows. Swans took off before our bows, paddling with their feet and undulating their long necks to gain speed and height as they left behind the powerful rushing sound of their wings. Clouds of ducks rose from the winter-brown reeds on each side of the river, and a cart horse that had been grazing in the water-meadow came galloping down to stop and stare in amazement at the strange, silent gliding craft before it suddenly wheeled and galloped away with soft sucking splashes in the mud, halting again at a safe distance and turning to watch the boat once more. The whole scene—the square white sails moving silently over the brown reeds—had an unreal air.
We glided into Lough Corry, scarcely more than an embayment in the river’s course. A puff of wind struck us, and suddenly everything became alive. The boat heeled more steeply; the water began to surge against the steering oar; a rope jerked adrift from its cleat; suddenly there was chaos. Each sail needed four ropes to control it, and each rope developed a life of its own. When one rope escaped, the others began to wriggle and slat. The heavy crossyard swung over; the sail slapped against the mast; and without warning we found ourselves grabbing at unidentified ropes and hauling in hopefully, trying to discover which rope would quell the riot. But the wind had got stronger, a good solid puff, and Brendan shot forward. The crew clung on, ropes burning their hands. Brendan whizzed forward and the far bank of the little lake loomed up. I leaned hard on the steering oar, and Brendan began to turn. But it was too late. With a splintering of dry stalks, we went hurtling spectacularly into the reed beds and found ourselves condemned to half an hour of prodding oars into the peat bottom to punt Brendan free.
A dozen times a day we crashed into the reeds, which served as handy buffers, and gradually we got to know the boat. Brendan, we discovered, had her limitations. With only four oarsmen on board she was too unwieldly to row against the wind, because her bows were blown downwind and we hadn’t the strength to get her back on course. More ominous was the fact that when left to her own devices, Brendan lay broadside to the wind at a dangerously exposed angle. We dropped marker buoys in the lough, and by sailing between them learned that Brendan refused to go against the wind like an ordinary yacht. She pointed her bows bravely enough to the wind, but lacking a keel she slid sideways across the water like a tea tray. On the other hand she was far more stable than we had anticipated, and running with the wind astern she went famously. She twisted and turned at a touch of the great steering paddle so that I was reminded of surf boats.
This was how Brendan would be at sea, a one-way exhilarating ride with the wind on the stern. A pair of ash shovel handles extended the breadth of our main crossyard so we could carry more sail; and after a day on which it snowed, we rigged the two tent structures that would give us shelter on the voyage. We practiced hauling Brendan up onto the bank, and we covered her with a thick layer of wool grease like a long-distance swimmer. And always we watched the leather hull for signs of leaks. We knew that 30,000 stitches pierced the hull, most of them made by amateur leather-workers. Any of them could leak with dire results. At first the water did trickle in, perhaps ten gallons a day, but then the trickles gradually slowed to half the rate and we found it scarcely necessary to bail Brendan unless it had rained.
When we were sufficiently confident, we took Brendan back down to the coast and tried sailing her in the estuary where I had first tested Finnbarr. Sometimes we were dispirited; sometimes we were greatly heartened. Once again we found it was impossible to row against the wind, and spent one dreary and uncomfortable night bottled up in a bay, anchored just out of reach of the surf that creamed and roared past us onto the beach. On another day we tried capsizing the Brendan, and found that she floated like an upturned whale, virtually impossible to turn the right way up. So we placed inside her some blocks of buoyancy so that we could spin the boat the right way up. In this state, when totally swamped, we learned that five of us using buckets could bail her dry inside ten minutes.
In Saint Brendan’s Navigatio it had been written that the monks “got iron tools and constructed a light boat ribbed with wood and with a wooden frame, as is usual in those parts. They covered it with oxhides tanned with the bark of oak and smeared all the joints of the hides on the outside with fat. Into the boat they carried hides for making two other boats, supplies for forty days, fat for preparing hides to cover the boat, and other things needed for human life. They also placed a mast in the middle of the boat and requirements for steering a boat. Then Saint Brendan ordered his brothers in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to enter the boat.”
In the twentieth century it had taken nearly three years of work and research to reach the same point. Now, like the original monks, it was time to put to sea to look for our way to the Promised Land.