Last Winter we finally read one of Tim Severin’s books,The China Voyage:Across The Pacific By Bamboo Raft and posted some reactions,all positive. One of our friends said,at the time,that if we liked that book,Severin’s The Brendan Voyage:Across the Atlantic in a Leather Boat was better still. Well,we finally read it. And we concur. It is an absolutely fantastic read.

The Brendan Voyage is also half sailing yarn and half archeological text. There is,apparently,a medieval Irish text,Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, that tells of a voyage St. Brendan took in the North Atlantic in a leather boat,what we now call a curragh. It is,in fact,conceivable to interpret the text to say that St. Brendan and a crew of Irish monks reached Newfoundland around the sixth century,long before Leif Erikson’s boys and WAAAYYY before that poser Columbus. Scholars,of course,disagree about the extent to which it is factual or fantasy. One of the grounds for skepticism was that a leather boat could never make such a voyage. Severin set out to build a replica,using sixth-century technology,and sail it from Ireland to North America,specifically Newfoundland,Canada. Given the subtitle,I don’t think I am a spoiler to say that the crew proves the hypothesis and completes the voyage,adding evidence to support the Irish being the first Europeans to hit these shores.

Everything about the book is amazing.   » Continue reading Fantastic read:Tim Severin’s “The Brendan Voyage” »