LEATHER ATLANTIC CROSSING

Press, 29 July 1978, Page 17

LEATHER ATLANTIC CROSSING

The Brendan Voyage. By Tim Severin. Hutchinson. 292 pp. $15.95. (Reviewed by Graham Billing)

■'The boat was like a whale and I was laying inside its ribs like Jonah and feeling the boat change her shape to meet the enormous pressures of the sea.” Indeed it was the most whalelike boat to go voyaging for 1400 years or more — ‘‘Brendan,” a replica of the kind of leather boat Irish monks may have used in early medieval times on North Atlantic journeys of discovery. In "Brendan,” setting out from the west coast of Ireland m May, 1916, Tim Severin hoped to prove that the discovery of America by Irish monks in the sixth century would have been possible. He had spent three years in research and building until he had a 36-foot open boat made of 40 ox hides, tanned in oak bark, and stretched over a basket-like framework of ashwood. In June last year “Brendan,” with a crew of four, finally reached Newfoundland after following the ‘‘stepping stone” route round the North Atlantic from Ireland through the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland, and

the coasts of Greenland and Labrador.

Certainly the boat could make it. She survived full storms halfway between Iceland and Greenland and was holed by Labrador pack ice. It was not just whimsy to suppose she might. In a medieval “best selling” book, the “Navigatio” of St Brendan, the monk is said to have spent seven years voyaging in such a boat to find the Promised Land of Saints which lay in the far west.

An historian of exploration and a seasoned adventurer, Severin decided that the fancifully described places visited in the Saint’s story could be none other than the northern island, icebergs and whales of the Atlantic. No final proof of an American visit has yet been found by archeologists, but circumstantial and geographical evidence indicates Irish voyaging at least as far as Iceland. St Brendan’s Paradise of Birds, Island of Sheep, Island of Smiths, Crystal Column and Thick White Cloud, became real places as “Brendan,” driven across or down the icy winds by her two small square sails, slithering the seas on her wooi-

greased ox skins, continued her extraordinary voyage. Such journeys have become fashionable since Heyerdahl took to the Pacific on his balsa raft in 1949 and it takes a good deal to make yet another seem unusual. After all, some Australians set out from Darwin to Singapore last year in a boat made of beer cans. But “Brendan,” with her sails bearing the red croses of the old Celts, has ' caught the European and American imagination with the help of a gigantic publicity campaign. It is a pity that Severin, like many explorers, is unable to write compeilingly about the human story of his journey. One longs for the narriative skill of a Gavin Maxwell in the telling of such an extraordinary tale.

The colour photography is splendid as subscribers to the “National Geographic” magazine will already know, but the account is so very British so stiff in the upper lip. What do we learn? Columbus was not the first. The Vikings were in North America around the year 1000. The Irish —maybe round 600 A.D.