I did not name S/V Saint Brendan. The name came with the boat, and after losing S/V Aegir-Ran in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil earlier this year, it seemed like a name I shouldn’t be too quick to change.
Saint Brendan of Clonfert was a sixth-century Irish monk and voyager who became known as “Brendan the Navigator”. Centuries later, his legendary voyage was recorded in the “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” — “The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot”. It tells of Brendan and a small company of monks setting out across the Atlantic in search of the Promised Land of the Saints, encountering strange islands, fantastic creatures and, famously, an island that turns out to be an enormous sea creature.
History and legend are thoroughly entangled. There is no convincing evidence that Brendan reached North America, but in the 1970s explorer Tim Severin asked a more interesting question: “Could he have?” Severin built a leather-covered boat using technology intended to approximate what early Irish sailors could have used. In 1976–77, he sailed it from Ireland across the North Atlantic and reached Newfoundland. He didn’t prove Brendan made the voyage; he demonstrated that such a voyage was possible.
When I acquired S/V Saint Brendan, I could have renamed her. But the coincidence was becoming difficult to ignore. Earlier this year I lost S/V Aegir-Ran off Brazil. One voyage had ended in a way I never expected, and now I was beginning again aboard a boat already carrying the name of a sailor remembered for casting off toward something beyond the known horizon.
At first, I thought I was choosing another boat. Somewhere along the way, I began to wonder whether S/V Saint Brendan had chosen me.
I don’t know where Brendan actually went, and perhaps that isn’t the important part of his story. He stood on a shore, looked toward an uncertain horizon, and went. After Brazil, I understand something about beginning again without knowing exactly where the next voyage will lead.
So S/V Saint Brendan keeps her name. I didn’t choose the name, and increasingly I suspect I didn’t entirely choose the boat either.