Chapter 1
Did St. Brendan
Discover America?
S
t. Brendan was running a monastery in Ireland when a
visiting abbot told him of his voyage across the ocean to
the “Promised Land of the Saints.” Brendan decided to
see it for himself.
So, sometime in the middle of the sixth century, Brendan and seventeen
other monks set sail in a small boat they framed with wood,
then covered with ox hides, much like the curraghs still sometimes seen
in Ireland. Their adventures were many and marvelous.
They came, for example, to one island filled with giant white sheep,
and another covered by hymn-singing birds. They found a huge pillar of
crystal floating in the ocean, surrounded by pieces of marble, and a
whole island on fire, from which they were pelted by hot rocks. Brendan
told his fellow monks they’d reached the edge of hell.
Another island appeared rocky and black, and the monks went
ashore to cook a meal. As soon as the cauldron began to boil, the island
started to move, and the monks scrambled back into their boat. Turns
out, Brendan figured, the island was actually the ocean’s largest fish.
More pleasantly, there was a spacious and woody island, and one
with luxurious colors and fruit unlike anything the monks had seen before.
And finally, after seven years, there was the Promised Land of the
Saints, where a young man told the monks the land would be given to
their successors. Brendan then returned to Ireland.
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This is Brendan’s story, as told in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis,
a Latin manuscript by an anonymous author. Scholars date the
Navigatio back to sometime after A.D. 800, at least a hundred years after
Brendan’s death. The story was tremendously popular throughout the
late Middle Ages—understandably, given its mix of maritime romance
and Christian theology.
Also understandably, most modern scholars viewed the Navigatio as
a work of literature, not history. Brendan seemed to have more in common
with King Arthur, or perhaps with Odysseus, than with an actual
historical figure. Many placed the work in a genre of early Irish literature
known as imrama; these were generally filled with fantastic sea
stories.
But there was a key difference. Unlike imrama, the Navigatio contained
navigational directions and detailed descriptions of the places the
monks visited. By plotting their course on a map and comparing the descriptions
to actual islands, historians sought to reconstruct Brendan’s
journey. Some concluded that the Promised Land of the Saints was in
North America.
If so, Brendan reached America about a thousand years before
Columbus.
ୋ ୋ ୋ
Among those who tracked Brendan’s voyage were Geoffrey Ashe in the
1960s and Paul Chapman in the 1970s. Ashe was a medieval historian,
Chapman a World War II navigator familiar with the North Atlantic
from ferrying planes across the ocean.
Some of the islands were fairly easy to identify, and most historians
agreed which of these was which. The sheep and the birds were most
likely in the Faroes, an archipelago in the North Atlantic between Scotland
and Iceland. True, the sheep there aren’t giant and the birds don’t
sing hymns, but there are plenty of both. Faeroes, in fact, is Danish for
sheep, and the island of Vagar is known for its kittiwakes and arctic
terns.
The crystal pillar could have been an iceberg, a likely sight as the
monks headed north. What appeared to be marble could have been
patches of ice that had broken off from the berg. The hot rocks? Molten
slag from an erupting volcano near Iceland, according to some speculation,
or farther south near the Azores, according to others. Both are areas
of volcanic activity.
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The moving island is surely a tall tale. But whales are common
north of the Faroes, and there were undoubtedly more of them around
in the seventh century. So, for Brendan enthusiasts, the story could be
seen as confirmation that the monks were in that area.
Now it gets trickier. Brendan and company drifted for twenty days,
then were swept west for another forty before reaching the large,
wooded island. Chapman concluded this must have been the heavily
forested Barbados. Heading north from there, the fruit he soon found
may have been grapefruit, which was native to the Caribbean and unknown
in Europe. Ashe was less certain of all this, saying only the “effect
of the whole passage is West Indian.”
The Land of the Promised Saints is even more amorphous. There
were another forty days at sea—a number whose recurrence makes one
suspect its significance is more biblical than nautical. Equally problematic,
Brendan was at this point, according to the Navigatio, sailing east,
presumably away from America.
Ashe concluded the Land of the Promised Saints was a “literaryreligious
figment,” one that fulfilled the promise of the opening chapter
but not the demands of historical reality. Chapman agreed that the Navigatio
did not prove Brendan reached the mainland. He figured Brendan
probably stopped at the West Indies, just as Columbus did.
The Navigatio alone, then, could not make the case for the Irish in
America. Nor could other medieval Irish texts. Brendan had a minor
role in a ninth-century Life of St. Machutus, another saint; there was also
a tenth-century Life of St. Brendan. Both texts were useful in confirming
Brendan was a real person, renowned for many sea voyages, but neither
offered anywhere near the detail of the Navigatio.
There were, however, three medieval texts that did place the Irish
in North America. Surprisingly, these came not from Ireland but from
Iceland.
ୋ ୋ ୋ
For most of American history, historians treated the Icelandic sagas much
as the Irish imrama. They were ancient stories, not quite as ancient as
the Irish ones perhaps, but equally inadmissible as historical evidence.
All that changed when a Norwegian archaeologist, Helge Ingstad, uncovered
a Norse spindle whorl amid the remains of a village in northern
Newfoundland. Here was proof that the Norse had reached—indeed
had settled in—America hundreds of years before Columbus.
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The Icelandic sagas, of course, told the stories of Eric the Red and
Leif Ericsson and other Norsemen, not of Brendan or the Irish. Yet the
Irish did appear in three of the sagas, and each time they were in the
New World.
In the Saga of Eric the Red, the Norse reached America, captured
some natives, and taught them their language. The natives then told the
Norse of a land whose people wore white clothes and marched with
poles that had cloths attached to them. To the Norse who heard this
story, according to the saga, this sounded a lot like a procession of Irish
monks. A second saga mentioned a land west of the Norse settlement in
America, “which some call Ireland the Great.” And a third had a lost
Norseman wash up on American shores, where natives spoke a language
that he thought sounded like that of the Irish.
In one sense, these stories made a lot of sense. The Norse knew well
that the Irish monks were accomplished seamen. The Irish had beaten
them to the Faroes and Iceland and Greenland, so why not America?
6 ୍ More Unsolved Mysteries of American History ୍
On his way to the “promised land,” according to the Navigatio Brendani, Saint Brendan
celebrated mass on the back of whale. This illustration comes from an early edition of the
Navigatio. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
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Indeed, it was the Norse who pushed the Irish monks out of Iceland,
perhaps prompting them to head west. This was sometime in the ninth
century, too late for Brendan to be the first Irishman to reach America,
but still well before Leif Ericsson, let alone Columbus.
There were a number of problems with this theory, however. First,
the sagas were vague about the location of “Ireland the Great.” If the
ninth-century Irish monks headed west from Iceland, they would have
come to Greenland before America, and they might very well have
founded a colony there. Second, there’s no archaeological evidence that
the Irish made it to America; no one has found an Irish equivalent of
Ingstad’s Norse spindle whorl.
And third, Leif Ericsson and the Norse didn’t reach America before
the end of the tenth century, more than a hundred years after the Irish
monks left Iceland. So either these monks had reached Old Testamentlike
ages, or they had met some Native American women and abandoned
their vows of chastity.
ୋ ୋ ୋ
Most modern historians, therefore, would deny Brendan’s claim. Even
some of those who believed the Irish reached the West Indies weren’t
sure it was Brendan.
“Over a period of two or three hundred years, many Irish monks
besides Brendan made actual voyages,” wrote Ashe. “And as so often in
legend-making, the most famous figure came to be credited with deeds
not authentically his.”
Ashe concluded the Navigatio was not so much the record of a specific
voyage as an amalgam of knowledge the Irish accumulated, not
only from their own travels but from studying traditions and legends
from Plato’s Atlantis to the Celtic “otherworld.”
Samuel Eliot Morison, the premiere chronicler of the European
voyages across the ocean, would grant neither Brendan nor any Irishman
an American landing, even in the West Indies.
“We are not straining the evidence to conclude that Brendan sailed
for several trips . . . on the circuit Hebrides-Shetlands-Faroes-Iceland,
possibly as far as the Azores,” Morison wrote in 1971. “But, discovery of
America—no!
“The imagination of certain modern . . . writers, no whit less than
that of the early storytellers, has brought Brendan to Newfoundland,
the West Indies, Mexico, and even the Ohio River!” Morison continued.
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“They do not even boggle at peppering the Antilles with Irish monasteries
which have disappeared, or ascribing to Brendan’s curragh the
speed and endurance of a clipper ship.”
Tim Severin, a British explorer and writer, believed Morison was
wrong, at least about the capabilities of the boat. To prove it, Severin
stitched together forty-nine ox hides, stretched them over a wooden
frame, put together a crew, and in May 1976, set sail from the west
coast of Ireland. The ship—christened Brendan—reached the Faroes in
June and Iceland in July. There Brendan rested until May 1977, when
Severin and his crew headed west. Less than two months later, they
reached Newfoundland.
Granted, Severin equipped the boat with some modern equipment,
including a radio. But the medieval equipment, such as extra hides with
which the crew patched leaks in the middle of the North Atlantic, came
in just as handy and proved a lot more durable than, for example, the
plastic food bags that were quickly inundated by seawater.
The trip did not, of course, prove that the Irish monks had reached
America; merely that it was technologically possible.
“A leather boat that some had feared would disintegrate in the first
gale off the Irish coast had successfully crossed the Atlantic. Brendan had
demonstrated that the voyage could be done,” Severin wrote. “But in
the final analysis the only conclusive proof that it had been done would
be if an authentic relic from an early Irish visit is found one day on
North American soil.”
ୋ ୋ ୋ
Assume for the moment that Brendan reached America. Or, as Ashe
did, that the Irish monks at least knew about America. The question
then arises: What did Columbus know about Brendan and the Irish?
Since the Navigatio was so widely known, Columbus may very well
have read it, or at least heard about it. A pre-1492 globe includes “the
Isle of St. Brendan,” in what could be construed as the West Indies.
Chapman believed Columbus followed Brendan’s route, and intentionally
hid that fact so that he could claim the New World for Spain.
That seems a stretch, especially since most of Columbus’s biographers—including
his own son Ferdinand and, more recently, Morison—
maintained that the admiral was searching for a new route to Asia, not
a New World. Indeed, even after Columbus reached America, he continued
to describe it as an island, or perhaps a peninsula, off the Asian
mainland.
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Still, even the most skeptical historians, such as Morison, don’t deny
that Brendan may have been an inspiration—and therefore in some
sense a forerunner—to later explorers, including Columbus.
“No, here is not a discovery of a New World,” Morison wrote of
the Navigatio, but then added that it was “a captivating tale which led
men of later centuries to sail into the unknown, hoping to find Brendan’s
islands, confident that God would watch over them.”
୍ To investigate further:
Selmer, Carl, editor. Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. Dublin: Four Courts,
1989. A reconstruction based on 18 of the 120 known Latin versions.
Ashe, Geoffrey. Land to the West. New York: Viking, 1962. Ashe focuses on
what the Irish monks knew, as opposed to what Brendan did.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Morison’s elegant prose is informed
by his extensive knowledge not just of history, but also of the sea.
Chapman, Paul H. The Man Who Led Columbus to America. Atlanta, Georgia: Judson
Press, 1973. The title has two meanings: Brendan came first, and Columbus
used the Navigatio as a guide.
Severin, Tim. The Brendan Voyage. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Regardless
of its historic import, this is a dramatic and well-told sea story in the tradition
of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. Originally published in 1978.
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