Leathering oars What do an Irish monk from the sixth century and a pair of recycled rigger boots have in common? David Parker explains
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s shopping experiences go, here’s one which I’m actually going to miss. For a start it didn’t involve parking or the use of a car at all. Big name stores or high street chains were nowhere to be seen and neither were there hordes of people or noxious music making you desperate to escape. No, this shopping experience involved a gentle walk through the woods to a quiet road where there once lived Warsash Nautical Bookshop. Sadly the owner retired last year so the shop closed and I have fond memories of it. I miss the hours of browsing books new and old and the piles of second-hand delights you could ferret through. You could find real bargains for a pound and I would normally come away with an arm full of books I didn’t intend to buy. Most would have cost under a fiver, an occasional rare edition treat would be £15. The world was a better place for that timeless old book shop which stocked everything from charts to merchant mariners’ reference texts to piles of old boating magazines. Needless to say I amassed quite a collection of secondhand books, many of them buried deep in various piles which turned out to be great reads. Many of them were ridiculously cheap because few people wanted them apparently, but the other admirable thing about the shop was that they would never throw a book away. One of my finds was The Brendan Voyage, a hard-backed edition packed with pictures published in 1978. I could remember being intrigued by the story at the time – the
book recounts an epic Atlantic crossing in a leather boat. This fascinating adventure was undertaken in 1976/77 and was inspired by a medieval text known as the Navigatio, which describes the legendary voyage of the Irish monk, St Brendan. St Brendan lived in the sixth century and Latin texts tell how he sailed with a crew of seventeen monks to America. His voyage is supposed to have lasted seven years and he undertook it after hearing from another Irish priest about a “beautiful land far in the West”. If this claim is true he would have reached the new world a thousand years before Columbus and four hundred years before the Vikings. Sceptics dismissed the Latin texts, but explorer Tim Severin undertook the Brendan Voyage in a specially built replica leather craft to find out if he could have done it. To try and sail directly from Ireland to North America would have been contrary to the prevailing southwesterly and westerly winds, an impossible task for a small supple medieval leather boat, with a basic square rig and no
David’s inspiration – Tim Severin’s The Brendan Voyage. Above: an illustration from the Navigatio
keel. The route therefore was to go north of these winds from Ireland. This would take them to the Hebrides, then up to the Faroes, on to Iceland and then south of Greenland to the coast of Labrador, Newfoundland, Canada. This was known as the Stepping Stone Route and although notoriously stormy was the only option for what was essentially an open boat which could not sail upwind. According to the author the craft had “a motion more like a liferaft than a conventional vessel”. It is a fascinating account of an impressive ocean crossing in an unlikely craft. They had to survive storms in some of the toughest waters in the world in addition to nearly being run down very close to the start. I am happy to say the book is still in print and there are lots of images of the boat online. Brendan was 36ft overall with beam of 8ft, had sails made of flax on twin masts, with 140sqft on the main and 60sqft on the foresail. The craft was recreated as authentically as possible with much research, but there was very little detailed practical information to work from. She was designed by the renowned naval architect Colin Mudie and built at the Crosshaven Boat Yard in County Cork, Ireland, the same yard in fact
where Sir Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth V was built. What I also found particularly interesting about this project was the dedication which went into the build of the vessel itself and the use of leather. No boat like her had been afloat for probably the past thousand years but the closest cousin would be the Irish Curraghs. Originally these too would have been leather but in more recent times were made of a skin of tight canvas stretched over a lath frame and tarred on boat sides to make it waterproof. On Brendan the hull skin was formed of 49 ox hides, ¼in thick and stitched together to form a patchwork quilt stretched over a wooden frame. This skin would be prone to “flexing and shifting like the skin over a man’s rib cage”, and leather being high in protein would also be prone to corrode quickly in salt water. After many tests in modern laboratories the ancient text of the Navigatio proved very accurate in regard to the best way to select and prepare suitable materials. Oak bark was used for the tanning process, a rare specialty in modern times and undertaken by the Bill Croggon tannery in Grampound, Cornwall. Each carefully selected hide took a year in preparation. Boiled-up
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