Free The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin

practical tests with them by tying together wood laths and hanging them in the tide water of the estuary. I quickly found that it was vital to soak the thongs in sea water beforehand, stretch them, and then tie the lashings while the leather was still wet. Otherwise the thongs did not grip. Unfortunately, tying knots in slippery wet thongs was like joining two snakes. The thongs simply slid apart. One hilarious Sunday morning I was testing a new type of knot in the garage, and had tied the thong to a ring bolt in the floor. I was heaving away with all my might, when suddenly the thong slipped, and I went hurtling backward out of the garage door onto the pavement. There I tripped and fell flat on my back waving a wet thong in the air, right in the path of the village congregation on its way back from church. “That’s what education does for you,” someone muttered.
    In the end I found a knot that seemed to hold effectively, though it required much interlacing and twisting, and in a curious way it looked very like the braided patterns found in Irish manuscript illustrations; and to help with the long job of lashing the frame together, George came out from England to join me.
    George had always been my first choice for crew. Twenty-six years old, he had served in the army and later gone to the Middle East to train soldiers for an oil-rich sheik. With the money saved from this venture, he had decided to take a couple of years looking around the world and pleasing himself. He answered an advertisement in a yachting magazine looking for someone to help sail a small yacht in the Mediterranean, and in this way he had come cruising with my wifeand me aboard our
Prester John.
Six foot tall and rangy, George was a consummate sailor. He could get more out of a boat by tirelessly resetting sails and adjusting the helm than anyone I had ever sailed with. Above all he was reliable. When George said he would get something done, it was done. One weekend he had promised to help transport some of the oxhides to Harold. On the Friday evening he loaded them; and on the Sunday he delivered them. On the Saturday in between he had got married!
    Now, leaving his wife Judith to keep her job as a schoolteacher in London, George came out to Ireland to join me, and together we started the laborious task of lashing the boat frame. Day after day we crouched inside the upturned frame of the vessel. Each wire nail had to be pulled out and discarded. In its place a leather thong was wrapped around the wood and tightened, knotted, and then the free end led on to the next thong, and so on and so on. It was backbreakingly slow work, poking fingers through the gaps in the frame, groping for a slippery strip of leather, and heaving the knots tight until our muscles ached. Some days we were joined by friends from the village, and their help made the work move a bit faster. By the time we finished, we had hand-lashed 1,600 joints in the latticework frame, and used nearly two miles of leather thong to do so. But it was worth it. The wooden skeleton of the boat was now gripped in a fine net of leather. This net was so strong that a dozen men could jump up and down on the upturned hull, and not a lath groaned or moved out of place. Finally, to protect thong and timber, we boiled up buckets of wool grease and painted it over the hull in a spattering mess. It looked and smelled abominable but, as George pointed out, the wool grease had one benefit: though we had been hauling and clawing at the work for almost a month, not one of us had raised a single blister on our hands. The lanolin in the wool grease was a first-class handcream.
    On the afternoon we finished, we went down to the local pub to celebrate, and were promptly pursued by the landlord’s dog, who smelled the wool grease on our clothes. So that evening we ceremoniously burned our workclothes as the first, though not the last, sacrifice to medieval working conditions.
    Now came the most crucial step in the