|
Did Irishmen Discover America?
By John Tiffany
Fabulous stories have been told of a sixth-century Irish monk, St. Brendan the Navigator. According to these legends, he discovered America centuries before the Vikings, let alone Christopher Columbus. These legends have generally been dismissed as tall tales. However, there is reason to believe that not only is the Brendan saga fairly accurate, but the real facts about Irish voyaging to America are even more amazing than the tales of St. Brendan.
St. Brendan (or Brandan), one of the most famous of Irish saints, was also an abbot. He was born probably about A.D. 489 near the lakes of Killarney in County Kerry, in the area around Tralee. He founded many important Irish monasteries throughout the country. For five years he was in the charge of the famous virginal St. Ita (also spelt Ite or Oda), of whom many stories are told. In perhaps A.D. 559, Brendan founded the monastery of Clonfert. But that was only a part of his works. He was quite a traveler, always moving about by sea; and even the court historians will go so far as to admit that he went to Scotland and perhaps Wales.
According to various medieval legends, Brendan, by then in his 70s, and a band of monks embarked on a seven-year voyage through the Atlantic in search of the “Promised Land,” where, it seems, another Irish monk, known as St. Finbarr, had been before. (Unfortunately, not much is known about this particular St. Finbarr; there are five Irish saints of this name.) The legends, which were known in most of the European languages in the middle ages, recount Brendan’s amazing adventures. The saint is said to have eventually discovered a mysterious land (possibly the American mainland), through which flowed a great river. Many people, especially the “court historians,” have tended to dismiss the Brendan legends as merely fantastic myths—the product of overheated medieval imaginations.
The saint is said to have visited a country far across the Atlantic Ocean, which Irish popular tradition identifies as Ameri ca, and certain passages in the story suggest that St. Brendan may even have reached Bermuda and the Bahamas.
Here is a summary of the Brendan legend, with modern interpretation identifying the places visited and some of the phenomena the monks observed:
1. St. Brendan and his companions, head ing northward from Ireland, come to a rocky isle with no obvious landing place. After sailing around, it they discover a single cove, where they go ashore (St. Kildas).
2. They sail onward to an island in northern seas where there are many sheep and a monastic community (the Faeroes).
3. They wander back and forth in an archipelago, staying ashore for long periods (the Shetlands).
4. They sail north to another island, a place of fire and smoke, where it looks as if a great number of smiths are at work on glowing metal. As they watch, the mass blazes and becomes molten (to Iceland, wit nessing an eruption of the volcano He cla).
5. After returning to a point previously visited and obtaining advice, they sail west for 40 days.
6. They are surrounded by darkness, which is said to be the prelude to arrival in the land they are seeking (fog on the Newfoundland banks).
7. They come to a huge crystal pillar in the sea. (They sight an iceberg drifting south with the Green land current.)
8. They reach an inhospitable coast where there are creatures with tusks and speckled bellies. (They put in briefly at New foundland and encounter walruses.)
9. They sail into a semitropical lagoon. (They make for a warmer zone and eventually enter the Bahamas.)
10. They put in at an island and are attacked by small, dark savages (possibly Carib Indians).
11. They sail over transparent waters where they can see a long way down. (Ex ploring the Caribbean fringes, they notice the famous transparent sea, beloved by modern scuba divers.)
12. They disembark in the Promised Land, which is sunshiny and warm and abounds in fruit. After 40 days of exploration they reach a river. The land seems to stretch indefinitely beyond, and they give up the attempt to find its limit (Florida or the Gulf Coast).
St. Brendan died in 577 or 583 at Enach Duin, Ireland.
In 1976, Tim Severin, a British navigational scholar and adventurer, embarked from Brandon Creek on the Dingle peninsula of County Kerry, in a curragh (coracle) he constructed using the details described by Brendan. His goal was to determine if the legendary voyage of Brendan and his fellow monks was physically possible. They tanned ox hides in a special process, using oak bark, stretched them across a wooden frame of ash (from the tougher, north-facing sides of the trees), sewed them with leather thread and smeared the hides with wool fat, which would impart water resistance. All was in strict accordance with the medieval practices, as nearly as those could be reconstructed by surviving craftsmen. After a remarkable 50-day journey, the reenactors’ two-masted ship, christened the Brendan, made landfall at Peck ford Island, Newfoundland, some 150 miles northwest of St. John’s.
It would not be surprising if Irishmen discovered America prior to the Colum bus voyage and even before Leif Eriksson, since they are known to have gotten to the Faeroe Islands and other North Atlantic lands before the Vikings. Indeed, the Vi king sagas tell of white men called Pa par, their word for Christian men, living in Ice land before the Northmen settled on that island. While there is no archeological evidence as yet to prove the presence in Ice land of ancient Irish hermits, The Book of Icelanders is considered a very reliable historical source.
A later wave of Irish immigration to America seems to have taken place around A.D. 770, when polytheistic Vikings began to settle in Iceland, pushing the Christian Irish out of that place. They fled the violence-prone pagans and went to Cape Breton Island. This colony was called “Ir land ed Mikla”—“Greater Ireland”—or “Huitramannaland” (literally “white man land”)—also called later “Albania” (“the white country”). (Scotland was also called Albania in former times, a corruption of Alba, its Gaelic name. The modern republic of Albania, on the other hand, is so called because a medieval Roman visitor compared its scenery to that of the Alban Hills.)
Their language and religious rites still survived in 1020, but eventually the Mic mac Indian tribe [see page 20] assimilated the remnant of the colony.
St. Finbarr may have had access to even earlier Irish records of transatlantic travel: There is ample evidence that America was well known to pre-Christian Kelts, going back to about 800 B.C. (TBR Oct. 1997, Nov. 1997). In this connection, the old Irish name for a land in the west is “Hy Brasil,” which means “Island of Iron.” (The word for iron is “brzl” in Ugaritic; the cognate word in Akkadian is “parzillu.”) Whether or not the so-called Island of Brasil visited by pre-Columbian European voyagers was in the country now known as Brazil is unknown, but it is worthy of note that Brazil’s chief resource is iron and that 25 percent of the world’s known iron ore reserves are in the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais.
Coracles are a traditional Keltic water craft used even to this day by the Welsh people as well as by some in Ireland. It is interesting to note that the Mandan Indians, thought by some scholars to be partly descended from pre-Columbian Welsh voyagers to America, were observed by pioneers to be using primitive, round “bull boats” of wicker covered with hides, very similar to Welsh and Irish coracles. v
bibliography:
Boutet, Michel-Gerald, The Celtic Connection, Stonehenge Viewpoint, Santa Barbara, California, 1996.
Cyr, Donald L., Megalithic Adventures, Stone henge Viewpoint, Santa Barbara, California, 1992.
Cyr, Donald L., ed., The Diffusion Issue, Stone henge Viewpoint, Santa Barbara, California, 1991.
Goodwin, William B., The Ruins of Great Ireland in New England, Meador Publishing Co., Boston, 1946.
Gordon, Cyrus, Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, Crown Publish ers, New York, 1971.
Severin, Tim, The Brendan Voyage, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1978.
Thompson, Gunnar, American Discovery, Argonauts Misty Isles Press, Seattle, 1994.
web sites:
www.castletown.com/brendan
www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/brendan
|
|
