That evening George finally gave up the unequal contest of trying to compete with Arthur’s flailing knees and elbows inside the confines of the main shelter, and he moved his berth forward to a spot under the bow canvas. We slept with the tent flaps open because the weather was so still, and it was a surprise to find a rind of ice covering Brendan in the morning. We were now some 1,600 miles along our route from Iceland, and across the icefield lay Labrador, only 200 miles away. Moreover our encounter with Mirfak and Svanur had put Brendan back on the map for the outside world. The Canadian Coast Guard radio stations now arranged a special listening watch for us; and on the afternoon of June 15 a small plane flew over the boat for five minutes and took pictures. By radio the plane warned that large areas of pack ice lay to the south and west of Brendan. But there was little to be done. Brendan was still becalmed.
At quarter past three the next morning, however, I was awakened by the sound of water sliding past the leather hull. That’s odd, I thought to myself, Brendan is not heeling to the wind. Nor can I hear the sound of waves. On my last watch the weather had been very settled, and there had been a flat calm and no sign of wind.
Then I heard Trondur and George speaking softly, and some sort of commotion, punctuated by light thuds and the flapping of a sail, and several splashes. What on earth were they doing? Was George helping Trondur restow some of the stores? But that was ridiculous; it was dark, and George was off-watch, and should be asleep. Finally, I could contain my curiosity no longer, and called, “What’s going on? Do you need any help?”
No answer. Then abruptly, the thuds and splashes stopped. I heard the others moving back down the boat.
“What’s up?” I asked again.
“Oh, Trondur just lost a pilot whale he had harpooned,” came back George’s casual reply. I pulled on a sweater, and listened to their story.
Trondur had been on watch by himself when a large school of pilot whales surfaced around Brendan, splashing and puffing. Although it was dark, this was the opportunity Trondur the Hunter had been waiting for. Without bothering to wake up anyone, he clambered forward to his cabin, unshipped his harpoon, and scrambled up onto the very bows of the boat where he could get a clear throw. George was awakened by the sound of Trondur clambering across the thin tarpaulins just over his head. George got up, and emerged just as Trondur saw his chance—a pilot whale of the right size swimming near the boat.
Chunk! From a kneeling position on the bow Trondur tossed his harpoon three or four yards to starboard, and made a clean hit. It was a classic shot.
Immediately the harpooned animal dived. There was a tremendous flurry among its closely packed companion whales. The water churned as the animals thrashed in panic. The shaft of the harpoon snapped under the press of bodies, and then all the whales were gone, leaving the stricken animal to its fate.
Fascinated, George watched as Trondur began to play the whale like a fisherman with a salmon on the end of a line. At first the thirty-foot harpoon line was pulled out taut to its fullest extent. Trondur had tied the free end of the line to the foremast as a strong point, and the harpooned whale began towing Brendan briskly along. If the whale had been any larger, this could have been dangerous, but Trondur knew what he was doing. He had selected a whale of the right size, about fifteen feet long, small enough to handle from Brendan. As the whale grew tired, Trondur began to haul in on the line. The animal darted back and forth underneath the bows, trying to rid itself of the clinging harpoon. Flashes of foam and phosphorescence rolled up off its body and fins as it fought to escape. Inexorably Trondur continued to haul in. As the line shortened, the pilot whale began to weave up and down; its tail scooped dollops of water aboard Brendan as it fought to resist. Trondur’s strategy was to pull the animal high enough to the surface so that it could get less grip on the water. At the crucial moment, however, when the whale was right alongside the boat, the harpoon head pulled free. A second later, the animal was gone.
“Harpoon too far back in whale,” said Trondur, sadly shaking his head. “More forward and it would have been good.”
I wondered to myself what on earth we would have done with a fifteen-foot pilot whale on Brendan. We didn’t have that much extra space. But Trondur the Hunter had done remarkably well to harpoon the animal in the dark. “Never mind,” I said, “you picked a good whale. It was towing us in the right direction at a good two to three knots.”
Our adventures and misadventures all seemed to be happening in the dark, or at best, in the last hour of daylight. On June 18 the barometer began to fall rapidly. So did the temperature. Then the wind backed into the northwest and blew strongly, bringing driving rain. In short, it was a thoroughly villainous evening, and it was lucky, in view of what was to follow, that Trondur and Arthur unlashed and stowed the bonnet from the mainsail before they ended their watch at dusk. George and I took over on a foul, black night, rigged an awning over the cooker, lit the kerosene lamp, and huddled over it for warmth, taking an hour each at the helm. Our only consolation was that Brendan was thrusting briskly through the murk, sailing at a good pace. At 3:00 A.M. it was my turn to seek the shelter of the cabin, and I crawled in thankfully. I had just pulled off my wet sea-boot socks when suddenly there was a high-pitched crackling sound, rather like stiff calico tearing. “What on earth was that?” I exclaimed, poking my head out of the cabin. George was already standing up, flashing a torch on the sails. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything looks okay. The sails seem all right.” “Perhaps a bird was flung into the sail by the high wind, and was thrashing to get out,” I suggested. “No,” said George, “I thought the sound came from the hull—still, there’s nothing we can do about it in the dark,” and he settled back down on the thwart.
Crack … crack … crack. There it came again, something weird was happening, a strange snapping noise, this time much louder. George was right. The noise was coming from the hull. George was back on his feet, peering into the darkness, trying to see a few yards in the pitch black. Hastily I began to put on my outer clothes again, knowing by instinct that we had a crisis on our hands.
“It’s ice!” George suddenly shouted. “We’re running into ice! I can see lumps of it all around.” Crack … crack … crack, we heard the sound again and realized without looking what it was. Brendan was hitting lumps of ice at speed, and they were swirling and bumping along her flanks so hard that they rattled and crackled along the oxhide skin.
“Drop the sails,” I yelled. “If we collide with heavy ice at this speed, we’ll knock her to pieces. Our only chance is to stop and wait for daylight.”
George moved into action. By the time I had struggled into my oilskins, he had lowered the mainsail and scampered forward over the icy tarpaulins, and already had the headsail halfway down. I went forward to help him secure the sodden canvas. It was perishingly cold. In an instant our bare fingers were numb as we secured the lashings on the sails. Neither George nor I said a word as we worked frantically. We could glimpse indistinct shapes in the water, and felt under our feet that Brendan’s hull juddered softly against unseen obstacles. We hurried back to the helm and took out the two most powerful hand torches. They were the only spotlights we had. We switched them on, one each side of Brendan, and shone them over the water. Their beams penetrated only fifty yards through the spray and sleet which hissed down in white streaks through the shafts of light. But fifty yards was far enough to reveal a sight which brought the adrenalin racing. All around us floated chunks and lumps and jagged monsters of ice. This was not the same ice we had seen a few days ago. In place of the well-defined ice edge, there was now a nightmare jumble of ice floes of every size and description, with channels of clear water opening and closing between them as the floes moved with the wind. But this ice should not be here, I told myself. I knew the ice chart by heart. That same day I had painstakingly marked in the ice boundaries according to the latest information radioed by the ice information service. Brendan should be at least sixty miles clear of the nearest ice. Yet here it was; and with a morbid feeling of satisfaction I knew exactly what had happened. The same northwest gale which had been spinning Brendan so happily on her way had swept over the main ice sheet and burst it open. The compact ice raft we had seen two days ago was now sprayed like shrapnel right into Brendan’s path. Later I learned that the entire pack-ice front had advanced across a broad front so that the Straits of Belle Isle, well to the south of Brendan, were nearly closed to merchant shipping.
Our torch beams showed us that Brendan had blundered into a type of sea ice known as Very Open Pack, and that most of the ice was rotten. Very Open Pack would have presented no problems to a large ship, which would have been able to shoulder forward, driven by powerful engines. But it was a totally different matter for Brendan. How much of a battering would her leather hull withstand, I wondered, and what would happen if a couple of ice floes bumped together, and Brendan was caught in the middle? Would she burst open like an overripe banana? And just how much sailing water was there among the ice floes which lay ahead? The devil of our situation was that there was no way to plan a strategy. We might only be in a small zone of ice, a temporary obstacle which we would soon clear. Common sense said that it was far more likely that we were in a major area of ice and that sooner or later we would find massive rafts of consolidated ice still frozen together. We had already seen the grinding action of the giant ice floes on a relatively calm day. I shuddered to think of what would happen to Brendan if she was blown into that sort of obstacle in the dark. She would be fed in like mincemeat. For about an hour George and I tried to keep the boat out of trouble. Without her sails, Brendan was still moving through the pack ice at one or two knots, driven by the pressure of the wind on the masts and hull. But sail-less, Brendan was at her worst—slow to maneuver and only able to turn through a very small arc. If too much helm was applied, she merely drifted sideways, out of control.
Everywhere the torch beams probed, white lumps of ice winked back out of the dark. Painfully, we wallowed past them, heaving on the tiller, and silently hoping that Brendan would respond in time. Smaller floes bumped and muttered on her leather skin; and out of the darkness we heard the continuous swishing sound of the waves breaking on ice beyond our vision.
George hoisted himself on the steering frame to get a clearer view. “There’s a big floe dead ahead,” he warned. “Try to get round to port.” I pulled over the tiller as far as it would go. But it was not enough. I could see that we were not going to make it. “Get the foresail up,” I shouted. “We’ve got to have more steerage way.” George clipped on his lifeline and crawled forward along the gunwale. Reaching the foremast, he heaved on the halliard to raise the sail. It jammed. A loose thong had caught in the collar that slid up and down the mast. “Trondur!” shouted George. “Quick, pass me up a knife.” Trondur’s berth was right beside the foremast, and he began to emerge like a bear from hibernation. But it was too late. With a shudder from the top of her mast to the skid under her, Brendan ran her bow into the great lump of sea ice. It was like hitting a lump of concrete. The shock of the impact made me stagger. “That will test medieval leather—and our stitching,” I thought. Thump! We struck again. Thump! Once more the swell casually tossed Brendan onto the ice. Then ungracefully and slowly, Brendan began to pivot on her bow, wheeling away from the ice floe like a car crash filmed in slow motion. Thump! The boat shivered again. We had a feeling of total helplessness. There was nothing we could do to assist Brendan. Only the wind would blow her clear. Thump! This time the shock was not so fierce. Brendan was shifting. Scrape. She was clear. “Is she taking water?” George called back anxiously. I glanced down at the floorboards. “No, not as far as I can see back here,” I replied. “Try to clear the jammed headsail. I’ll get Boots up as well. This is getting dodgy.”
Scarcely had I spoken than a truly awesome sight loomed up out of the dark just downwind of us—the white and serrated edge of a massive floe, perhaps the dying shard of an iceberg, twice the size of Brendan, and glinting with malice. This apparition was rolling and wallowing like some enormous log. Its powerful, squat shape had one great bluff end which was pointing like a battering ram straight at Brendan, and it was rocking backward and forward with ponderous certainty to deliver a blow of perhaps a hundred tons or so at the fragile leather.
George took one look at this monster and leapt up the foremast to try to clear the jammed sail and give us steerage way. It was a slim hope. “Hang on tight!” I bellowed at him as the swell gathered up Brendan and pushed her at the great ice lump which heaved up ponderously to greet her. Crack! Thump! The whole boat shook as if she had struck a reef, which indeed she had, but a reef of ice. The impact flung George backward from the mast. “Christ, he’s going to fall between Brendan and the ice floe, he’ll be crushed,” I thought, horrified. But George still had the jammed halliard in his hand, and clutched at it desperately. The rope brought him up short, and for a heart-stopping moment he dangled backward over the gap like a puppet on a string. Now the wind was pinning Brendan against the great block of ice so that she was nuzzling up to it in a deadly embrace. The next impact was different. This time the ice floe rocked away from Brendan as the swell passed beneath us. Brendan swung over a broad spur of a wave-cut ledge projecting from the floe. The spur rose under us, caught Brendan with a grating sound, and began to lift and tip the boat. “We’re going to be flipped over like a fried egg,” I thought, as Brendan heeled and heeled. Then, with another grating sound of leather on ice, Brendan slid sideways off the ice spur and dropped back into the water.
Crash. The next collision was broadside, halfway down the boat’s length. The leeboard took the impact with the sound of tortured wood.
This can’t go on much longer, I wondered. Either Brendan will be blown clear of the floe, or she will be smashed to smithereens. As I watched, Brendan jostled forward another six feet on the next wave, and there was a chance to gauge the rhythm of destruction. It was obvious that the next blow would strike the steering paddle and snap its shaft. That would be the final problem: to be adrift in the pack ice with our steering gear smashed. Now the great floe was level with me where I stood at the tiller bar. The face of the floe stood taller than I did and in the light cast by my torch, the ice gleamed and glowed deep within itself with an unearthly mixture of frost white, crystal, and emerald. From the water-line a fierce blue-white reflected up through the sea from the underwater ice ledge. And all the time, like some devouring beast, the floe never ceased its constant roar and grumble as the ocean swell boomed within its submarine hollows and beat against its sides.
Here comes the last blow, I thought, the final shock in Brendan’s ordeal. I felt a wave lift the leather hull, saw the bleak edge of glistening ice swing heavily toward me and—feeling slightly foolish—could think of nothing else to do but lean out with one arm, brace against the steering frame, and putting my hand on the ice floe I pushed with all my strength. To my astonishment, Brendan responded. The stern wagged away and forward from the ice wall, and instead of a full-blooded sideswipe, we received a glancing ice blow that sent a shiver down the hull, but left the steering paddle intact. One wave later, the great floe was rolling and grumbling in our wake. It had been a very close call.
Trondur and Arthur were soon up and dressed in sweaters and oilskins ready to help. I should have called them earlier, but their off-watch rest had seemed too precious. Now their assistance was needed, because I planned to try to get Brendan through the ice by increasing speed, which in turn meant that we might be blundering into the main consolidated pack ice and wreck the boat. But it was a risk we had to take. It was better than gyrating into loose floes and being broken up. “Boots! Trondur! Go forward by the foremast and stand by. We’ll raise and lower the foresail as we need it, and trim the sail to port or starboard, depending on the position of the bigger ice floes. We’re going to run through this ice. George, could you act as look-out, and sing out the bearings on the larger floes?”
George climbed up on to the shelter roof, wrapped an arm round the mainmast for support, and from his vantage point spotted the approaching dangers.
“Big one dead ahead! Two floes on the port bow, and another on the starboard side! I think there’s a gap between them.”
As he called the position of each floe, he aimed the beam of his torch at it to identify the hazard for me at the helm. In turn I called out instructions to Boots and Trondur to raise and trim, or lower, the headsail to catch the wind and pick a route through the ice. “Up foresail …down!” We slipped past a white shape of ice, ghostly in the dark. “Up foresail … sheet to starboard,” and I hauled over the tiller bar so that Brendan slid past the next floe. It was a crazy scene, an icy toboggan run in the dark, with a minimum of control, no way of stopping, no knowing what lay fifty yards ahead. From where I stood, I could see the shape of George’s body clinging to the mast, the gale plastering his oilskin to his back; then the line of the midships tarpaulin running forward to where Arthur and Trondur stood, one by each gunwale. They had opened a gap in the tarpaulin, and the upper halves of their bodies poked out like the crew in an open airplane of First World War vintage. Only the hoods of their oilskin jackets now made them look more like monks in cowls, and the impression was heightened by the red-ringed cross on the foresail, which raised and lowered and bellied out with a thundering clap above their heads. Beyond them, still farther, was the blackness of the night out of which loomed the eerie white shapes of the ice floes, occasionally illuminated by George’s torch beam through which still flicked the streaks of rain and spray.
After three hours of this surrealist scene, the gloom began to lift. George switched off his torch, and found he could detect the white flashes of the ice floes without help. Dawn lightened the horizon, and we started to identify ice patterns beyond our immediate orbit. We were surrounded by pack ice. Off to one side was floating a huge, picture-postcard iceberg, a sleek monster of ice sloping spectacularly to the ocean with virgin white flanks. But the berg was no danger, for it was at least a mile away. Our real troubles lay ahead and around us in the contorted shapes of the floes which had ambushed us in the night. Now we could identify them by type. There were “bergy bits” broken from the dead icebergs, ice pans of assorted sizes, and “growlers,” the unstable chunks of hard ice which twisted and turned in the water and threatened to do the most damage to Brendan’s quarter-inch-thick leather hull. Now with enough light we could see to avoid these obstacles. Surely the way ahead must be clear, I thought to myself. Brendan had shown her worth yet again. Her leather skin and hand-lashed frame had survived a battering. No more could be expected of her. “Is there any water in her yet?” George asked again.
“No,” I replied. “She came through like a warrior.”
But my hopes were soon dashed. Ahead we began to discover mile upon mile of ice, floe after floe, oscillating and edging southward under the combined effects of gale and the current. Brendan could neither hold her position nor retreat. Her only course was forward and sideways, hoping to move faster than the pack ice until we eventually outran it and emerged somewhere from its leading edge.
All that day we labored on, trying to work our way diagonally across the pack ice and find its limits. It was a nerve-wracking business, trying to pick our way from one gap to the next. Planning ahead was impossible, because the ice floes changed their position, and our horizon was very limited. From time to time fog banks gathered over the ice and visibility was often less than a mile. Our only advantage was that the water was very calm within the pack ice. As we penetrated deeper, the wave action died away even though half a gale was still blowing. The great carpet of ice muffled the waves like an enormous floating breakwater, leaving only a powerful swell which rocked and spun the floes. Sometimes we came across patches of open water, dotted with only a few lumps of rotting ice. Here we sailed without hindrance for a few minutes. Sometimes ice barriers and ice ridges rose ahead of Brendan where the floes stretched right across her path, forming an impenetrable wall which had to be avoided at all costs. Once or twice there loomed out of the mists the magnificent shape of the great icebergs, one hundred feet high and more; and as we drew closer to them we could discern ominous cracks riven through the ice blocks where the bergs would split and calve. Such bergs had to be avoided because downwind of each one lay its attendant cluster of broken ice. Even more awkward were the patches of consolidated pack ice, the larger relics of the old ice sheet. This consolidated ice floated in broad jumbled rafts, heaped and contorted where one floe had piled upon another, and then frozen into one mass, like a breaker’s yard where every block weighed a score of tons or more.
Brendan’s ability to maneuver past these dangers was so limited that virtually every floe had to be skirted on its leeward side. This meant sailing directly at the floe, putting over the helm at the last moment, and skidding around the lee of the ice where the scud and foam sucked and spread as the floe rocked in an endless see-saw motion to the swell. Our advance was a cross between bumper cars at a fairground and a country square dance, except that our dancing partners were leviathans of ice as they dipped, circled, and curtsied. Again and again we slithered past floes, listening to the bump and crunch as ice brushed the leather hull, the sharper tremor and rattle as we ran over scraps of small ice, the shudder as ice fragments the size of table tops and weighing a couple of hundred pounds ricocheted off the blade of the steering paddle.
“Well, you wanted to see ice on this trip, George,” I said. “You can’t say you’ve been disappointed.”
“It’s fantastic,” he replied ruefully, “I’m glad I’ve seen it. But I don’t think I ever want it again.”
The strain on the crew was terrific. When daylight came, we tried to revert to our normal watch-keeping system and get some rest. But it was impossible to relax with the clatter of the ice reverberating through the little thin hull so close to one’s head. And time after time every man had to be called into action—raising and lowering the sail to vary our speed, hauling and readjusting the sheets to alter the slant of our course; and, when the worst befell, leaning out to poke and prod with boat hooks to fend off the boat, or, once or twice, even sitting out on the gunwale, putting feet on the floe, and kicking off with all one’s might. Once again I was reminded of the early voyages—this time of a famous picture of Elizabethan sailors fending off the heavy ice from their ship with just the same simple technique. But I had to confess to myself that I had not expected to find Brendan in quite the same predicament.
All that day, June 18, we were kept so busy in the pack ice that there was no time for proper meals. At noon Trondur cooked up a hot mush which we spooned down between emergencies, and there was just enough time for two cups of coffee later in the day. But breakfast was a failure—I found my pannikin of cold cereal at tea time. It was still sitting untouched, in a safe place under the thwart.
It had to be admitted that the ice had a certain lure and majesty. The ice was rotting and disintegrating into thousands upon thousands of weird shapes and sizes, odd corners and pillars, which floated low in the water and speckled the surface as far as the eye could see. The colors were entrancing—opaque whites, deep greens of undersea ledges, transparent flecks the size of cabin trunks, vivid blue glacier ice, dirty ice coated with ancient dust and grime. Once George reached out and broke off a morsel of blue ice from a passing floe, and popped it in his mouth. “Delicious,” he quipped. “Please pass the whiskey.”
But each color signaled its own danger. The least worrying was the transparent dead ice in the last stage of melting. This ice was riddled with myriads of tiny air pockets so that the outer layer crushed on impact with Brendan’s hull and cushioned the shock. Its only disadvantage was that this type of ice floated so low in the water that it was hard to spot in time to avoid. Most of the big heavy growlers were equally difficult to see because they revealed only a small portion of their bulk above the surface, usually a sleek, round lump of opaque white dipping innocently below the swells. But under the water the growlers could be massive—great blocks of menace that heaved and churned in the current. They could deal a tremendous blow to a small boat. The snow-white surface floes, though thinner and lighter, were awkward because they tended to form up in strips and block our path. Our only chance was to bear down on the line, hoping to pick out a gap at the last second, and slither through. It required judgement, skill, and a lot of pure luck that a gap would open at the right moment. Usually Brendan bumped and weaved her way through safely, but occasionally she would run her bows right onto the floe. Then for a moment or two, we would ride on top of the ice, waiting for the wind to catch Brendan’s stern and lever her back into the water, pirouetting away in her strange ice dance. “It’s easy to follow our path through the ice,” Arthur remarked, “just follow the line of wool grease marks on the edges of the floes in our wake.”
The two colors we treated most warily were the deep green of the underwater ledges, which threatened to gouge upward into Brendan’s hull as she glided over them, and the stark diamond-white and blue of the floes made of very old ice. The latter had been born many years earlier as snowfalls in interior Greenland and Baffin Land, compacted, and squeezed out as glaciers and finally spawned into the ocean as icebergs. This ice had scarcely begun to melt at all. Its floes were sharp and hard and utterly uncompromising.
Bump, slither, swing sideways, charge at the gap, don’t think about the quarter inch of leather between yourself and the icy sea, ignore the rows of stitching offered up to the constant rubbing of ice along Brendan’s flanks; fend off with the boat hook. Helm up, helm down, search for the space between ice floes ahead; calculate, calculate. Wind, leeway, current, ice movement. For hour after the hour the ordeal continued, until by dusk, with the wind still blowing half a gale, the ice seemed to be thinning out. And this time we really did seem to be nearing the edge of the pack.
Then Brendan Luck finally ran out.
We were in sight of relatively open water and passing through a necklace of ice floes when two large floes swung together, closing a gap Brendan had already entered. The boat gave a peculiar shudder as the floes pinched her, a vaguely uncomfortable sensation which was soon forgotten in the problem of extricating her from the jaws of the vise. Luckily the two floes eased apart enough for Brendan to over-ride one ice spur, and slip free. Five minutes later, I heard water lapping next to the cooker and glanced down. Sea water was swirling over the floorboards. She was leaking. Brendan had been holed.
There was no time to attend directly to the leak. The first priority was still to get clear of the pack ice while there was enough daylight to see a path. Otherwise we would find ourselves in the same predicament as the previous evening, blundering into ice floes in the darkness. “One man on the bilge pump, one at the helm; one forward controlling the headsails; and the fourth at rest,” I ordered, and for two more hours we worked Brendan clear of the pack until there was enough open water to run a fairly easy course between the ice floes, and set the mainsail, double reefed. The helmsman still needed to be vigilant, but the man at the headsail could at last be spared; and after twenty-four hours of sustained effort, we could revert to our normal two-man watch-keeping system. The risk, it seemed to me, was as much a question of human exhaustion as of the frailty of our damaged boat.
“We can’t tackle the leak tonight,” I said. “There’s not enough light to trace it, and then to try to make a repair. Besides, we are all too tired. But it’s vital to learn more about the leak. I want each watch to work the bilge pump at regular intervals and record the number of strokes needed to empty the bilge and the time it takes to do so. Then at least we will know if the leak is getting worse and gaining on us. If we’ve torn the stitching somewhere, then more stitches may open as the thread works itself loose, and the rate of leakage will go up.”
Trondur tapped the leather at the gunwale. “I think stitching is broken by ice,” he said calmly.
“It’s very possible,” I replied, “but we can’t be sure. We’ve simply got to find out all we can.”
“Ah well,” said Arthur cheerily, “that’s what the right arm is for—pumping. It’s our watch, Trondur, I’d better get to work.” And he crawled forward to get to the bilge pump. It was none too soon. Even as we had been talking, the water level on the floor by the cooker had risen noticeably. The water slopped back and forth around our boots, and would soon be lapping into the lee side of the shelter.
Pump, pump, pump. It took thirty-five minutes of non-stop pumping to empty the bilge. Brendan’s bilge, though shallow, was broad and relatively flat in profile and so held a great deal of water. Just fifteen minutes after being pumped out, the water level was as bad as ever, and threatening to get worse. Pump, pump, pump. “How many strokes to empty her?” I asked. “Two thousand,” Arthur grunted as he collapsed, exhausted. I did a rapid sum. Two thousand strokes every hour was within our physical limit, but only temporarily. One man could steer, while his partner pumped and kept Brendan afloat. But this system would work only while our strength lasted, or, more likely, we ran into bad weather, and waves began once again to break into the boat. Then we would no longer have the capacity to keep emptying Brendan fast enough. It was a tricky situation: In slanting out of the pack ice and clawing to seaward, I had brought Brendan out a full two hundred miles from land, and even then the nearest land was the thinly inhabited coast of Labrador, from which little help could be expected. We were running before half a gale, and now the damping effect of the pack ice was gone, the waves were beginning once again to break and tumble around us. Nor were we entirely free of ice danger. Here and there we could see in the darkness the occasional white shape of a large growler, stubbornly refusing to melt. “We’ve got six hours before daylight,” I said. “There’s nothing for it but to husband our strength until dawn and then tackle the leak. It’s best if one man in each watch keeps pumping continuously, turn and turn about. If we can keep the bilge empty, Brendan will ride lighter and take fewer waves on board.”
That night was the most physically tiring of the entire voyage. It was difficult to rest or sleep properly. On watch one stood for half an hour on the helm, then went forward to take over the pump, scarcely having time to nod to one’s partner as he struggled wearily back, to go to the helm. There, peering through the murk, one tried to decide whether the white flashes ahead were the manes of breaking waves or the telltale sign of a growler lying in Brendan’s path.
As soon as the first watch ended, I called the Canadian Coast Guard radio station at St. Anthony in Newfoundland. “This is the sailing vessel Brendan,” I reported. “We have been in open pack ice for the last twenty-four hours but now seem to be clearing the ice. We have suffered hull damage and the vessel is leaking. In the next twelve hours we will attempt to trace and repair the leak, but it is important to note our estimated position, which is 53°10’N., 51°20’W. I repeat, this position is only an estimate, as we have lost our log line sheered off by the ice, and due to poor visibility have had no sight of the sun for two days. We are not in immediate danger. But could you please investigate the possibility of air-dropping to us a small motor pump, with fuel, in case we cannot contain the leak. I will call again at 14.15 hours GMT to report progress. If no contact is made at 14.15 hours or 16.15 hours, we may have activated an emergency locator transmitter on 121.5 and 243 megacycles. Over.”
“Roger, Roger,” replied the calm voice of the radio operator at St. Anthony, and he confirmed the details I had given. Then he advised me that he would inform the Rescue Coordination Center at Halifax, and listen out for Brendan on the next schedule. Later I learned that the Canadian Coast Guard responded unstintingly to our request for standby help. An aircraft was readied at Halifax, and the Operations Room at St. John’s calculated that a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker could reach us from Goose Bay in twenty-one hours. “But to be honest,” said an officer who was on duty that night in the Operations Room, “we didn’t know how our ship would be able to locate you in time. And after the loss of the Carson, which sank in the same ice not many days before, when we heard that a leather boat was in trouble in the ice, we rated your chances of getting out as nil. How could a leather boat survive when a steel icebreaker went down?”
Nevertheless, at the time of our ordeal, it was very comforting to know that someone, somewhere, was informed of our plight and, if worst came to worst, we could call for help. Partially relieved by this thought, I sat hunched in my sleeping bag and tried to concentrate my mind. Brendan was leaking at the rate of two thousand pump strokes an hour. This represented a sizeable leak, and obviously we had to track it down without delay at first light. But how on earth would we find the leak? It could be almost anywhere in Brendan’s hull below the water already filling up the boat. We would have to shift all our gear, section by section, along the vessel; lift up floorboards, remove the fresh-water storage tubes from the bilges—and where would we store the drinking water temporarily?—and then try to trace the leak by following any current or bubbles in the bilge. All this would have to be done in a rough sea.
And if we were lucky enough to trace the leak, what then? Suppose we had cracked the skid keel under the boat when Brendan rode upon an ice floe, or pulled its fastenings through the leather hull? At sea we could neither refasten nor mend the skid. And what if we had gashed the leather skin or ripped the flax stitching? Then, I feared, we would be in an even worse way. I could not imagine how we would ever stitch on a patch under water, it would be impossible to reach far below the hull, and equally impossible to work on the inside because there was not enough space between the wooden frames and stringers to put in a row of stitches. The more I thought about our straits, the gloomier I felt. It seemed so futile if Brendan were to sink so close to the end of her mission. She had already proved to her crew that an early medieval Irish skin boat could sail across the Atlantic. But how could people be expected to believe that fact if Brendan sank two hundred miles off Canada? It would be no good to say that there was less pack ice off Canada and Greenland in early Christian times, and that the Irish monks would probably not have faced the same problems. To prove the point about the early Irish voyages, Brendan had to sail to the New World.
To clear my mind, I took up a pen and made a summary of our position:
Brendan is leaking fast. We can keep her afloat for two days, or less, in bad weather; indefinitely in fair weather but at great physical cost.
First priority is find the leak—skid fastening? Burst stitches? Hull gash?
If we cannot trace and mend a leak, the Coast Guard may get a motor pump to us. Do they have a suitable pump? Can their plane find us? This will depend on visibility and sea state.
No pump—we MAYDAY and abandon ship.
It was a grim scenario, and the situation did not become any more cheerful during that night. Driving rain reduced visibility to a few yards, and with an increase in wind strength, the helmsman no longer had the option to dodge potential growlers in the water. Brendan could only flee directly downwind, and we trusted to luck that we did not hit isolated pieces of ice, or worse yet an iceberg recently set free from the pack.
All of us were desperately tired. The constant strain of bilge pumping was a stultifying chore, which battered mind and muscle. First there was the awkward slippery climb along the gunwale to go from the steering position to the midship’s lashing in the tarpaulin. There you had to open the lashing with half-frozen fingers, drop into the dark slit, turn around to unclip your lifeline, duck under the tarpaulin, and tug the tarpaulin shut. If you did not, the next breaking wave would cascade into the midship’s section and drop even more water into the bilge. Once under the tarpaulin, you had to strip off your oilskin jacket or wriggle half out of your immersion suit. Otherwise the next half hour’s work would drench your clothes in sweat. Now it was time to squirm down the tunnel under the tarpaulin to reach the handle of the bilge pump. Grasp the handle with the right hand, lie on one’s left side on top of the thwart, and pump four hundred to five hundred strokes. By then the muscles of the right arm and shoulder would be screaming for relief; and so you reversed position laboriously, lay on the other ribs, and pumped for as long as possible with the left arm. Then reverse the procedure, and begin all over again, pumping and pumping, until at last came the welcome sucking sound of the intake pipe, and you could begin the laborious return journey to the helm, put on oilskin top, unfasten and fasten the tarpaulin, clamber back to reach the helm, and arrive just in time to find that the water level had risen to exactly the same place as when you had started the whole operation. Only now it was the turn of your watch companion to empty the bilge.
Rocking the pump handle in the dark tunnel of the tarpaulin had an almost hypnotic quality. The steady rhythm of the pump, the dark wet tunnel, and aching tiredness combined to produce a sense of detachment from one’s surroundings. The feeling was heightened by the incongruously pretty little flashes of phosphorescence which slid aboard with every second or third wave crest, and dripped brilliantly down the inside of the leather skin of the boat in random patterns that confused one’s weary eyes and created illusions of depth and motion. The motion of arm and torso, rocking back and forth relentlessly at the pump handle, was matched visually by a strange phosphorescent glow in the translucent bilge pipes. This strange glow varied in intensity with each wave, sometimes soaring to bright sparks of luminescence, but usually a somber green pulse like a ghostly heartbeat. Under the dark tarpaulin, eyes tricked, shoulders aching, head drooping down onto the thwart with exhaustion, it was desperately tempting to drop off to sleep while still mechanically rocking back and forth. Only to be jerked awake by the rattling crash of yet another wave breaking onto the tarpaulin just above one’s head.
At 6:00 A.M. dawn came, and I looked at the crew. They were haggard with exhaustion, but no one had the slightest thought of giving up. In the night watch I had surreptitiously stolen five minutes to lever up the stern floorboards and check the aft section of the bilge to try to find the mysterious leak. It was a job that really should have been left until morning, but I could not restrain my curiosity. When I told George what I had done, he confessed that he had made exactly the same investigation in his forward berth and already examined the bow section without finding the leak. It seemed there was no holding back Brendan’s crew.
“Well, here’s the battle plan,” I explained. “Each man has a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. Then Trondur and Boots work on both pumps amidships to get the water level as low as possible, and keep it there. This will allow George and me to work down the length of the boat, shifting the cargo area by area, and checking the bilge for leaks. We already know that the leak must be somewhere in the main central section of the hull.”
The others looked very tough and confident, and utterly unperturbed. We had just eight hours, I reminded myself, to find and repair the leak before I should be in touch with the Canadian Coast Guard.
Three of us had coffee and then I went forward to relieve George at the bilge pump.
As I sat by the pump, waiting for George to drink his coffee so that we could begin our search, I wondered where we should commence our hunt—aft, under the shelter? But this meant shifting all our personal gear. By the foremast? But this was where we had put the heavy stores like the anchors and water cans. Then, quite unconnected, a thought occurred to me. Last night, while pumping in the dark, the flashes of phosphorescence over the gunwale had been repeated almost simultaneously inside the boat and in the bilge pump tube. I knew nothing of the physical properties of phosphorescence, but imagined some sort of electrical connection was required. If so, then the phosphorescence had traveled directly from outside the hull to inside the hull, apparently by a direct link—the leak.
With a faint stir of interest I abandoned pumping and traced the line of the bilge pipe to its intake amidships on the port side. At that point I peeled back the tarpaulin and hung head first over the gunwale. There, just on the water line, was the most encouraging sight of the day—a sizeable dent in the leather hull. The dent was about the area and shape of a large grapefruit, an abrupt pockmark in the curve of the leather. With growing excitement I scrambled back inside the hull and began shifting away the food packs which had been stored there. As soon as I had uncovered the hull, I saw the grapefruit-shaped pocket and the cause of our trouble: Under tremendous pressure from outside, the leather had buckled inward into the gap between two wooden ribs, and opened a tear about four inches long. The force of the pressure had been so great that it had literally split the leather. The skin had not been cut or gashed. Despite a tensile strength of two tons per square inch, the leather had simply burst. Now, whenever Brendan wallowed, a great gush of sea water spurted through the tear and into the bilge. Jubilant, I poked my head up over the tarpaulin and called, “Great news! I found the leak. And it’s in a place where we can mend it.” The others glanced up. There was relief on all their faces. “Finish your breakfast,” I went on, “while I check that there are no other leaks.” Then I went round the boat, hanging over the gunwale to see if there was any more damage. In fact, apart from that single puncture the leather was still in excellent condition. Indeed it was scarcely scratched by the ice. The other floes had simply glanced off the curve of the hull or skidded on the wool grease.
Except that one puncture. There, a combination of the curve of the hull, the wider gap between the ribs at that point, and the nipping between the two floes had driven a knob or sharp corner of ice through Brendan’s hull. By the same token, however, we also had room to wield a needle between the ribs and could sew a spare patch of leather over the gash. George and Trondur came forward. “The patch had better go on from the outside,” I told them, “where the water pressure will help squeeze it against the hull. First we’ll make a pattern, then cut the patch, and stitch it in place.”
“We must cut away some wood,” suggested Trondur, examining the ash ribs.
“Yes, whatever’s needed to get at the work properly.”
“I’m going to put on an immersion suit,” George announced. “This is going to be a cold job.”
He was right. George and Trondur in their immersion suits now had three hours of bone-chilling work. First they cut a patch of spare leather to size, then George hung down over the gunwale, his face a few inches above the water, and held the patch into position. Trondur poked an awl through the hull and the patch, followed by a long nine-inch needle and flax thread. George reached for the needle with a pair of pliers, gripped, tugged and pulled, and eventually hauled it through. Then he took over the awl, stabbed from the outside of the hull, groped around until he could poke in the tip of the needle, and Trondur gathered it up from the inside.
It was a miserable chore. The top row of stitching was difficult enough, because it lay just above water level, so that each time the boat rolled on a wave, George was lucky if he went into the water only up to his elbows. With the heaviest waves, his head went right under, and he emerged spluttering and gasping. Each large wave then went on to break against the hull, and drenched Trondur who was crouching in the bilge, stitching on the inside. All this was done in a sea temperature of about zero degrees Centigrade, with occasional ice floes and icebergs in the immediate vicinity, and after nearly two days without proper rest. Inch by inch the stitching progressed, and a pancake of wool grease and fiber was stuffed between the hull and the patch to serve as a seal. Then the last row of stitches went in. This last row was completely under water, and George had to use the handle of a hammer to press in the needle.
Finally it was done. The two men straightened up, shivering with cold. George wiped the last of his protective wool grease from his hands and they had a well-earned tot of whiskey in their coffee. Even Trondur was so exhausted that he went off to curl up in his sleeping bag. Arthur pumped the bilge dry, and scarcely a trickle was coming in through the mend. I inspected the patch. “It’s almost as neat and tidy as if you had put it on in Crosshaven Boatyard and not in the Labrador Sea—John O’Connell would be proud of you,” I congratulated George.
“Well, that’s a job I would not like to have to do again,” he replied with quiet understatement.
That afternoon I reported our success to the Coast Guard radio station at St. Anthony’s. The operator’s voice revealed his delight. “Well done,” he said. “I’ll pass on the information to Rescue Coordination. I believe they want to move a Coast Guard ship into your area as a precaution, anyhow. Good luck with the rest of your voyage.” I switched off the set and reflected that the Canadian Coast Guard were worthy colleagues for our friends in the Icelandic Coast Guard Service. Then for the first and only time in the entire voyage we let Brendan look after herself. We dropped all sail, lashed the helm, and all four of us retreated to our sleeping bags and took a few hours of well-earned rest. My last thoughts before dropping off to sleep was that we had been able to repair Brendan because she was made of leather. If her hull had been made of brittle fiberglass or metal, or perhaps even of wood, she may well have been crushed by the ice and foundered.