The Brendan Voyage Read online

  “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 fi
nished, 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, an
d 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?”