Malachy McCourt
Actions, like water ripples, have continuous motion with varieties of consequences both good and ill. I’m sure if we knew the exact results of our doings there’d be more thinking and less doing.
There was a bold seafarer named Niall of the Nine Hostages who roamed far and further in search of booty and bodies (live ones, that is) to sell to the folks of Ireland who needed cowherds, shepherds, and goatherds. On one of his forays abroad, probably to France, he came upon a healthy enough young fellow of fifteen years of age. He swept the lad into his craft and took him to Ireland, where he sold him to a man called Milchu who put him to work looking after the sheep in the Glens of Antrim. Patrick was the lad’s name and, lonely and miserable as the job was, he became attached to the Irish that he met on the hills and to their land. One day he persuaded another roving Hibernian to help him escape and give him passage to France, where he studied for the priesthood and later returned to convert the pagan Irish to Roman thinking, thus destroying a wonderful and rich culture. After hundreds of years of communalistic living and resisting invaders (tribes like the Firbolgs, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and the Milesians), the Irish succumbed to the sorcery of organized religion and gave up their wild roving to work the land for their new ecclesiastic masters.
The only traveling abroad recorded after that was done by monks and other tonsured types. A hardy crowd of ascetics were these lads, well versed in the Greek classics, fluent in Latin, they knew the world was round and they navigated by sun, stars, and, that most dangerous of all sextants, the conviction in the rectitude of their beliefs and the error of all others.
As Tim Severin writes so beautifully in the story of the Brendan voyage, the ancient pre-Patrick Irish had a vision and a fairly concrete knowledge of a Promised Land far off to the west. Some of them may have popped over there over the centuries and perhaps more of them would have if it were not for the Irish propensity toward procrastination, to wit, “When God made time he made plenty of it.”
They would come to the Promised Land in the hundreds of thousands later, horrified by an Ireland crazed with thirst, mad with hunger, and staggering with disease. They traveled on what were known as “coffin ships,” where many of them are resting to this day beneath the merciful waters of the Atlantic. Tis said if there were a white cross on the waters for every Irish refugee who died fleeing the Great Hunger the Atlantic Ocean would look like a vast cemetery.
But Brendan the Navigator, with faith, a flickering flame, and, tis said, a rudder that was a gift from St. Bridget, sailed those almighty seas. Hundreds of years later, Tim Severin and his fearless four replicated the journey, wherein one quarter inch of oxhide was all that was twixt them and perdition. The detailed account Severin renders in this book draws the reader into the feeling of being there, hearing the creaking of the masts on quiet nights, and the roaring of the storm on many others. The five men on the craft were never alone; they were exhausted, sunburned, windburned, and without privacy. The power of wind and water over their flimsy curragh is only mitigated by the energy of their faith, intelligence, and teamwork. At times the exhaustion is so overwhelming that the reader can barely sustain the holding and reading of the book so great is the empathy.
To some people there is a foolhardiness to these expeditions, but the men and women, who scale the mountains, who fly the machines into the air, and go down to the sea in ships, glorify the human spirit and give praise to a God of their choosing. They add to the store of human knowledge and leave us proud.
Having faced the perils of rubber rafting on the six-inch whitewater on the Delaware River and heroically guided a rowboat on Central Park’s lake in New York City, I can hardly write with authority on crossing the Atlantic, the ocean that vanquished the unsinkable Titanic, in an oxhide boat. To read of human beings at one with God, arcing the centuries, reverently utilizing that which nature provides leaves one agape at the magnificent simplicity of this wondrous and wonderful odyssey. I read The Brendan Voyage and am left with the absolute conviction and inspiration that all things are possible. What man has done, man can do and I, too, can sail the ship of my visions. Get aboard the Brendan, fasten your lifelines for the waves are deep, the waves are high, but there’s the Promised Land.
Welcome!
MALACHY MCCOURT is the author of the memoir, A Monk Swimming.