Ireland

  “Sir! Sir! I’m coming with you.”

  The Storyteller hesitated, then strode faster, out of sight of the village now. With Ronan still backpedaling, entreating, Deirdre Mullen began to run, beckoning harder. The boy began to weep.

  “Sir? Please let me. I’m never any trouble!”

  Deirdre Mullen caught up. The Storyteller realized they had a pursuer and turned his head.

  “Hallo,” he said to her. “They’ve come for you,” he said to Ronan and stopped.

  “I don’t care. You could come back to my house now. Or the school, Miss Burke’d love to see you. I know she would, she asked me all about you. And then I could go with you.”

  Deirdre Mullen stepped carefully around man and boy. She was (and to this day still is) level and calm. Ronan flapped his arms up and down, a sign of distress. When he did it at home, Kate and sometimes his father put arms around him quickly and held him. Neither the Storyteller or Deirdre Mullen moved. They waited for Ronan to subside. She wore a broad green ribbon in her frizzy hair.

  After some moments, she eased the coat levelly onto the boy’s arms and stooped to button it. The Storyteller moved in on her success.

  “If I tell you one last story, will you go back then?”

  “No! Not a last story!”

  “All right. One more story?”

  “Now? Here? Where?”

  “There’s a gate.” He pointed to the tree-shaded limestone pillars of an old entrance. Light rain began to fall. “We can shelter.”

  Ronan hesitated. Deirdre Mullen finished buttoning his coat and led him by the hand to the sheltered gate. The Storyteller followed.

  “When I tell you this, will you go back?” said the Storyteller, when they had settled on the wall.

  “He will,” said Deirdre Mullen. “Won’t you?”

  Ronan nodded. He had too many tears on his breath to speak clearly.

  Fifty years ago, every country road in Ireland saw a simple and pleasing morning sight. Most farms kept cows, milked morning and evening. One or two pails, still warm and creamy, went to the kitchen for the family’s use. The rest, in shiny aluminum cans shaped like tall, fat cones, were taken to the local creamery on horse-drawn carts; consequently, a monthly check, a farmer’s salary, underpinned the rural economy. From eight o’clock every morning, Ronan awoke to the sound of carts trundling by and looked out of his window at the gleaming creamery churns.

  Along the road now, coming toward the village, he saw the first of the returning farmers. Dan Collins, his face a mottle of freckles, called Ronan (and all small boys) “Captain.” He stopped when the Storyteller asked him for a light.

  “You’re the man they’re all talking about?” he said.

  The Storyteller smiled. “We’re telling one more story.”

  “I’ll listen so. If nobody raises a parliamentary objection,” said Dan Collins. “Slow, Beauty,” and the horse duly lowered her head to graze on the roadside. Another cart appeared and another, and soon seven more farmers had reined in their horses on the damp November lane.

  The Storyteller lit his pipe with Dan Collins’s matches. Blue smoke roamed the gray morning. He eased the old black cravat from his chicken’s-neck throat.

  “This tale has special meanings for you,” he told Ronan. “Your first name, as I’m sure you know—it means ‘little seal,’ and your last name, O’Mara, means ‘coming from the sea.’ So listen carefully, because this is a story about a great sea voyage—and a little seal from the sea should know about such things.”

  WE MUST REMEMBER ALL OUR LIVES TO raise our heads and be aware of the horizon. A boy may achieve great things in his life by casting his gaze abroad; that’s how he will find the wonders that the world can offer. And anyone who looks out to sea on our western coast may see ancient visions, sights from the long-ago. This story confirms that point.

  It’s a known fact that the Irish got to America long before Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci or any of those characters. How else can you explain that the North American Indians who greeted Columbus offered him a drink of “usquebah”? Listen to the word: “usquebah.” Doesn’t it sound like the Irish term we pronounce as “ish-keh ba-hah”? Which means “the water of life”—and your ear will tell you that the word whiskey comes from uisce, the word for “water.”

  One morning a long time ago, on the rocky shores of Kerry, where the relentless Atlantic waves beat green and wild on the beaches of the southwest, a very respected monk by the name of Brendan stood and looked out at the horizon. A long time he gazed, the salt seas flecking his beard and his eyes narrowing against the gleam of the sun on the waters.

  Some weeks earlier, a nine-year-old boy had asked him whether great palaces rose from the sea. Then, a few days before that, when he was visiting another monastery at Clonfert in county Galway, a very old monk, named Barrind, told Brendan that if he sailed westward he would come to “a Promised Land which God will award to his chosen souls when Time ends.”

  Brendan had sailed the seas frequently, but always to other parts of Ireland or Scotland or Europe, and in his travels he had come to believe many things about God. He believed, for example, that God keeps his most beloved creatures in the deep of the ocean. And—to answer the little boy’s question—he also believed that golden palaces lay out there, beyond the line where the sky meets the sea. On days when the light on the waves shone brilliant as blue gems, on nights when the world had a quiet so deep you could hear the lobsters breathe, he had watched how the sky lit the sea and looked at the serrated gleams of the silver fish in their shoals.

  A woman once asked him what it was like to understand the spirit of the sea, and this is what Brendan said:

  “When I rise out of my bed and take in the first air of the day at my door, I can smell the sea. And when I smell the sea, I also see it—in my eyes and in the eyes of my mind. When I feel the waves lift my boat, I feel in my bones the pulse of the tide. And I know that my heart and soul shall not be at peace with each other until I am once again afloat like a prayer on the swell of the waves.”

  Brendan, as you know, is called “Brendan the Navigator.” The word navigator comes from the Latin word navis, meaning “ship,” and Brendan carved out for Ireland and the Irish the greatest path in our history—the path to America. Every morning of the year, all along the shoreline of the Atlantic seaboard, men have stood and gazed west across the sea as Brendan did all those centuries ago. They do it still, in the counties of Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, and Donegal. What were they looking for, those coastal ancestors of ours? What do they look for now?

  It has been called many things—the lost city of the sea, the golden country in the ocean, the Land of Youth. Some people have referred to it as Hy-Brasil and believed that the gilded towers rising out of the waves were in Brazil. But the explanation of Hy-Brasil has a greater simplicity; in the ancient languages of Europe, brasil means “fortunate” or “abundantly rich.”

  When I was at school, I learned a poem which began, “On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell/A shadowy land has appeared, as they tell/Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest/And they called it Hy-Brasil, the Isle of the Blest.” In the poem, a man decides to set out in his boat and find these gorgeous palaces, these cloud-capped towers, and he sails and he sails and he sails. But he never draws nearer—the gilded city stays far ahead of him, and the last line of the poem is, “And he died on the ocean away far away.”

  My story describes how Brendan the Navigator, braced by the love of his God, set out to find Hy-Brasil or the Promised Land of Saints—and found it. I believe that Atlantis or Hy-Brasil or whatever you like to call it has always been the coast of America. And they do say that if you sail into New York up the Hudson River in the early morning, the sun gilds the skyscrapers until they look as though they’re made of gold.

  The year was five-forty-six Anno Domini, that is to say, five hundred and forty-six years after the birth of Christ. Patrick had been dead almost a hundr
ed years, and Brendan, born on the sixteenth of May four-ninety-three, had pursued devoutly the teachings of Christianity, which Patrick had brought to Ireland.

  Brendan was a strong man, over six feet tall, with deep brown eyes; he made all others chuckle when they heard him laugh. As a young man he had embraced Patrick’s teachings with joy. He examined his own life in the light of this new God whom he had learned to love, and he understood that the search for God must be seen as never-ending.

  So he became a holy man and established monasteries where the word of God, as taught by Patrick, could be kept vigorous and spread anew. To do this, he called upon his own particular skills as a superb boatman. Using his control of his boat and his knowledge of the ocean, he sailed up the west coast of Ireland and established monasteries that lasted for many centuries.

  On the morning in which this tale begins, Brendan acknowledged to himself that he had been restless for some time. The monasteries he had founded prospered under the abbots he had appointed; they didn’t need his attention, and so he longed for a new quest. When the young boy asked him about the horizon and what lay beyond, and then when the old monk Barrind told him about the Promised Land in the ocean, Brendan took all this as a sign from God that he must set out to find the place. To guarantee the success of his mission, he fasted forty days and forty nights, and when his fasting ended he began his new work.

  In the monastery at Ardfert, he gathered the fourteen monks who formed his usual crew. He had three helmsmen, each of whom would work sixteen hours a day: one steering, one the lookout, the third sleeping. Eight other men would handle the great leather mainsail, which in heavy weather became as unmanageable as an elephant. A doctor and two cooks completed the crew. All of them loved and respected their great skipper, Brendan.

  Of course, he had taught each of them the skills they needed for sea voyages. The helmsman could also cook, and the doctor could repair a sail or patch the leather keel of the boat if it was torn by a reef or a shark.

  Brendan met the men in the monastery chapel. All those buildings were made of wood in those days. They sought to form monasteries quickly, to bring together their monkish communities as fast as possible. Abbeys made of stone would not be built in Ireland for some centuries yet. As the fourteen monks knelt in prayer beside Brendan, each felt the rush of excitement he always brought to their lives when he summoned them. They had sailed with him up the broad, slow-flowing rivers of Ireland, through the fogs around the coast of England, and into the placid estuaries of Brittany.

  In rain or under hailstones the size of plums, scorched by yellow suns or tossed by winds that blew from the throat of the world, in freezing storms where the ice hurled itself at them in particles as big as golf balls, they rowed, they steered, they sailed, eager to be in the company of this wonderful man who made everyone feel so good and so capable.

  Now, when their prayers had ended and Brendan had implored God’s blessing and a serene voyage, they crowded around him, full of excitement: “Where are we going this time?”

  Brendan told them of the two conversations—with the young boy, and with the old monk. The sailor monks smiled and laughed; one or two clapped their hands. Then, almost as one voice, they told Brendan, each and every one of them, that they too had often stood on the shore, gazed out to the light of the west, and asked themselves—and God—what lay beyond.

  These men loved Brendan. They loved his kindness, they loved his immense capability aboard a boat, and they loved his love of the sea. When they sailed with him, they each tried to be awake for the moment, every dawn, when Brendan dipped his hands in the ocean, brought the salt water to his lips, tasted it gently with his tongue, smiled, and said to them, “How fortunate we are—how fortunate!”

  He never failed them in this little ritual; he performed it every dawn, and then he blessed them with the water.

  Now he told them what he knew of Hy-Brasil—that on certain days of the year, due north and west of where they now stood (in other words, directly due west from the center of Ireland), great towers rose slowly from the sea. Witnesses had reported that on clear days they had actually seen the shelves and ledges of these towers as they rose out of the ocean, and the billows of the waves as they fell back from them.

  At first, said all who had seen them, the buildings seemed dark, in shadow. But as the sun swung around on its slow course across the heavens, its golden rays soon lit the towers, and they seemed more wonderful and more expertly constructed than anything ever seen. And the spray from the billows caught the light and looked like diamonds in the sky.

  Brendan told his crewmen that he himself had never seen this city of the sea. Nor had any of them; one helmsman, however, a slim and quick-footed man with muscles of iron, told them all that his grandfather, who came from farther up the coast, from south Galway, had seen it. They pressed him for details, with Brendan the most eager. The helmsman said that his grandfather reported great clouds of wonderful birds flying in circles above these towers. And in front of them, spouting whales sent hundreds of fountains into the air.

  Most notable of all, said the helmsman, was his grandfather’s feeling—and this too was held in common with all who reported sightings.

  “Every sighting brought my grandfather a wonderful, gentle peace. For over a week or so afterward, he felt calm and good. He slept deeply at night, he awoke untroubled and placid. And every day he came down again to the shore to see would the towers reappear.”

  Brendan loved this report so much that he asked the helmsman to repeat it. Once again they all listened, as enthralled the second time as they had been the first. Then Brendan pronounced that he suspected God of having put in his mind the idea of looking for this place. Something so wonderful, he believed, must have been created by God for a specific reason. They needed to find that reason, and when they had found it, they would have also found some more of God, something new.

  So they left the monastery of Ardfert and set out on their great voyage. All the monks gathered to watch them depart, rowing away in a flimsy boat.

  Their first port of call was the Aran Islands, to visit Brendan’s old friend Enda, whose advice everyone valued. At the end of the third day, Enda had confirmed to Brendan that a trip to the west across the ocean would surely honor God. Brendan and his boat left for their next stop, an island up the coast of Mayo. There, he and his crew began to build a new boat, a big version of the curragh, the fishing boat they still use on the west coast of Ireland today. This new boat would be the greatest of them all, made by sewing together the hides of forty cows, and each had to be perfect when taken from the cow—no holes made by warble fly, no damage to skin caused by ulcers. All of them set to work, including Brendan; he had a rule that he never asked anyone to perform a job he wouldn’t do himself.

  But the most immediate task wasn’t boat-building. Brendan took a helmsman, the tallest of the fourteen crewmen, to a point high on the clifftop, above where the island’s boats lay on the sand. He told the man to spend every day before their departure gazing out to the west, in the hope of sighting the rising towers. Straight away, the helmsman began his vigil from dawn to dusk.

  Now the crew began to build the great boat. They knew exactly what to do, but nevertheless they understood that it would take many months, even though all the materials they needed for the building were ready to hand in the surrounding countryside. First, they chose the skins they wanted, forty cowhides supplied by the nearby farmers, and they stitched them together with thread made of flax. Linen comes from flax, and the core of the flax plant is a very strong fiber.

  Next they searched for a tree to make the mast, and they found a tall ash from the northernmost side of a forest, where the living is hardest. They cut down this tree, skinned it clean, and weathered it in brine; and every day they checked it for any sign of rot or decay. When the mast passed their examination, they unrolled the sail they had made and spread it out upon the broad white sand. All the men knelt in a row on the leather and moved
forward in a line, peering minutely at the fabric one last time. This was a most important inspection; if the sail had suffered a small perforation, a high wind could turn that little gash into a great rent and thus imperil the voyage.

  No holes were found, not even the size of a pin, yet Brendan decided to proceed with another test. Section by section, four of them held the sail up, slacking each portion into a kind of belly. Then Brendan poured water into this billow and dropped to his knees, peering underneath to see whether water leaked or—equally dangerous—seeped through the leather. This scrutiny took many cumbersome hours, but in the end the sail seemed utterly watertight, and everybody praised and thanked God.

  Just for safety, they did one more thing. Monasteries raised sheep so that they could get the wool for the monks’ robes. When you shear a sheep, the fleece has grease in the wool. That grease makes wonderful waterproofing and elasticity. The monks had tubs of such grease for the specific purpose of making their hide boats waterproof. The crew smeared the boat with this grease, and by the time they were finished they must have smelled so rancid that the dogs barked at them.

  Brendan allowed a week for stocking the boat with supplies. They also carried sufficient materials to make two more boats. At the end of that week, he had his last consultation with his watchman on the clifftop.

  He, in answer to Brendan’s questions, reported, “I have seen the white gannets making themselves into spears as they dive beneath the waters to come up with fish in their beaks. I have seen the small puffins by my feet, unafraid and inquisitive. I have seen the guillemots trying to save their eggs from tumbling down the cliff side. I have seen the shearwaters fly like small, dark angels. And I have seen the clouds wipe the face of the sun. But I have seen no gilded towers nor whale fountains, no great flocks of birds in the sky.”