ST. BRENDAN, AMERICA’S FIRST DISCOVERER. HOW A LEARNED AND ADVENTUROUS IRISHMAN AND SIXTY MONKS OUTSTRIPPED COLUMBUS BY NEARLY TEN CENTURIES IN HIS QUEST OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE—A GRAPHIC AND CONVINCING TREATISE.
BY THOMAS S. LONERGAN, NEW YORK CITY.
During all historic time, the Irish have been noted for their love of adventure and travel, and had commercial intercourse with the leading ports of Europe and Asia for centuries before and after St. Patrick’s time, which is proof that they had sailing vessels of no mean order. The conversion of the Irish people to Christianity, in the fifth century, is unique in the annals of Christendom, because it was accomplished by one man and without the shedding of a single drop of human blood—but the discovery of America by Irish monks in the middle of the sixth century is still a mooted question, notwithstanding the historical researches of Irish, French, German and American scholars, which prove that St. Brendan was the first discoverer of this western hemisphere. His expedition was essentially a religious undertaking, as well as the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy.
St. Brendan was born in the year 484, at a place now called Tralee, in the County of Kerry, Ireland. He was the son of Finnlogha, of the race of Ciar, son of Fergus. He was educated by his relative, the Bishop of Erc, who was head of a local monastery at Kerry. When a child, young Brendan was placed in charge of St. Ita, at Killeedy, in the County of Limerick, where he remained for five years, after which he returned to Bishop Erc’s monastery, and began his ecclesiastical studies with marked ability. He was sent from there to St. Jarlath’s College of Tuan for the purpose of studying the laws and rules of the saints of Ireland, with the injunction to return to Bishop Erc for holy orders, and in due course of time he was ordained.
THOMAS S. LONERGAN, ESQ.,
Of New York City.
Member of the Society, Litterateur and Lecturer.
St. Brendan belonged to what is known as the second order of Irish Saints. Shortly after his ordination, a passionate desire took possession of him to go forth on expeditions for the discovery of strange lands and the salvation of souls. At his ordination the words of St. Luke produced a profound impression on his mind, which subsequently formed his determination to forsake his native country and to embark on a voyage to a mysterious land, far from human ken and beyond a mighty ocean.
It is certain that Irishmen, in ancient days, found their way to the Hebrides, the Shetland and Faroe Islands, and even to Iceland. St. Brendan is said to have visited the Western and Northern Islands, and Brittany in France between 530 and 540. When he returned home the passion to discover the Land of Promise, as foretold in St. Patrick’s prophecy, was stronger than ever. He went to St. Ita, his old nurse, for counsel, and she advised him to build a ship of wood, and she told him that he would find the distant land beyond the great ocean. He immediately set out for Galway in Connacht, and gathered several of his faithful monks about him, and they there and then began to build a large wooden ship. We are told that they built a peculiar mast in the middle of the ship, and secured all the other rigging for such a craft. They put aboard various kinds of herbs, seeds and provisions. They sailed from Galway along the Irish Coast to the Bay of Kerry.
In 545, according to the Irish annals and the Latin manuscripts, St. Brendan and sixty Irish monks, sailed from the Bay of Kerry, which still bears his name, and after an adventurous voyage of forty days, they reached the shores of what is now Virginia or Carolina, and are said to have remained in this western hemisphere for seven years, exploring and preaching the Gospel of Christ to the natives, especially along the shores of the Ohio River. Most probably they trod the soil of New England. The reports of what they saw and endured are simply marvellous. They found a fertile land, thickly wooded and full of birds and flowers, strange animals and strange human beings.
There is every reason to believe that before the close of that eventful century the story of St. Brendan’s voyages and discovery was well known in every part of Europe. There are still extant thirteen Latin manuscripts in the National Library of Paris which have come down from the tenth century, and contain elaborate accounts of St. Brendan’s discovery of America. The Bodlien Library of Oxford and the Nuremburg Library of Germany contain several of the Brendan MSS. There are also versions of the discovery in Gaelic, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
In the year 1892, the late General Daniel Butterfield, the noted American soldier and scholar, photographed one of the original Latin manuscripts of Brendan in the Bibleothèque Nationale of Paris, which he translated on his arrival in this country, and he subsequently prepared a learned lecture on the subject, which he delivered before the New York Gaelic Society. The translation, has been vouched for by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore as being almost literal.
The manuscript begins with a sketch of St. Brendan’s career and of the confession made to him by Father Barindus, which was instrumental in firing the imagination of the great abbot to make a voyage in search of the Land of Promise, which was America. St. Brendan laid his full statement of the confession before the seven wisest counsellors of his community, which concluded in the following words, as translated:
“My Beloved Fellow Warriors: I now ask of you counsel and help, inasmuch as my thoughts and my heart are bent on one desire, if it be the will of God. That land whereof Father Barindus has spoken, is the land of promise of the saints. I have yet set my heart upon. What say you? What counsel do you give me? Their answer was, ‘Abbot, your will is ours; have we not left our parents, have we not forsaken our inheritance, have we not delivered ourselves up unto you? Therefore with you we are ready to go unto life or death.’”
They considered the story or confession a revelation to enable them to reach the land, of which Patrick’s prophecy had foretold. When once upon the highlands of Munster, and looking out upon the Atlantic Ocean, St. Patrick said that a man of renown should arise in those lands and go out upon the sea and find the promised land. That prophecy has been a household word with the people in the Kerry region for more than fourteen centuries, and was well known for several years before St. Brendan was born. The traditions of the Brendanian voyages, like Banquo’s ghost, will never down, because they are embodied in the literature of many European nations.
The following passage appears in Otway’s Sketches, published in Dublin in 1845.
“Brendan, having prosecuted his inquiries with all diligence, returned to his native Kerry, and from a bay sheltered by a lofty mountain, that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land and directing his course towards the Southwest, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we call the ‘tropic’ after a long and rough voyage, came to summer seas where he was carried without sail or oar for many a long day. This, it is presumed, was the great Gulf Stream and which brought his vessel to shore, somewhere about the Virginia Capes, or where the American coast tends eastward and forms the New England States. There landing, he and his companions marched far into the interior and came to a large river, flowing East and West, which was evidently the Ohio River. After some years’ exploration, the holy adventurer was about to cross the river when he was accosted by a person of noble presence (but whether a real or imaginary man does not appear), who told him that he had gone far enough in that direction and that further discoveries were reserved for other men who would in due time come and Christianize all that pleasant land. The above, when tested by common sense, clearly shows that Brendan landed on a continent and went a good way into the interior.”
It is now supposed that St. Brendan and his companions soon returned to Ireland. Some writers state that he made a second voyage to this country, but there is no proof for that statement.
In the sagas of Scandinavia, America is called Irland Mikla, or “Great Ireland.” The Scandinavian records contain an account of three voyages made to America after the time of St. Brendan and before the arrival of Columbus. Voraginius, the Provincial of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in the thirteenth century, devotes much space in his “Golden Legend” to St. Brendan’s Land. Wynkyn de Worde, the first English printer, wrote a life of St. Brendan, which was published in 1483, just nine years before Columbus sailed from Palos. Several Italians, who wrote in the fifteenth century, had much to say about St. Brendan’s discovery, and it is to be presumed that the mind of Columbus was well stored with the traditions of America’s first discoverer, which had come down through the Middle Ages.
Here are a few sentences spoken by St. Brendan on the banks of what is now supposed to be the Ohio River:
“Behold the land which you have longed for so long a time.
“The reason you saw it not sooner was that God desired to show you the secrets of the ocean.
“Return, therefore, to the land of thy nativity, carrying with you of the fruits and gems of all that your ship will carry, for the days of your journey are near to a close, and you shall sleep with your fathers. But after the lapse of many years this land shall be made known to your descendants, when Christianity shall overcome Pagan persecution. Now, this river which you see divides the land, as it now appears to you rich in fruits, so shall it always appear without any shadow of night, for its light is Christ.”
If the foregoing is not positive proof, it is at least pretty good circumstantial evidence of St. Brendan’s discovery of this western hemisphere.
Nearly all writers on Columbus bear witness to the traditional value of the voyage of St. Brendan in guiding and inspiring Lief Erickson in the tenth century, and Columbus in the fifteenth, to the discovery of the New World.
The legend of St. Brendan is treated in the general histories of American discovery. In Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” volume I, page 48, there is a list of some of the different texts of the legend. Payne’s “History of America” gives a brief summary of the legend. He says: “No story was more popular in the end of the fifteenth century. The critic who does not absolutely reject it, as the Bollandists have done, may take his choice of original versions of it in eight different languages: and St. Brandan occupies ten dense pages in William Caxton’s version of the Golden Legend.” An English version of the legend was published by the Percy Society in 1844 under the title, “St. Brandan, a mediæval legend of the sea, in English prose and verse (London, 1844).”
Gaffarel’s “Histoire de la dècouverte de l’Amerique,” volume I, contains a chapter entitled “Les Irlandais en Amerique avant Colomb,” in which he gives an extended account of the story of St. Brendan, with references to authorities.
HON. THOMAS B. FITZPATRICK,
Of Boston, Mass.
Vice-President-General of the Society.
De Roo, in his “History of America Before Columbus,” published in 1900, says: “The story of St. Brendan was one of the most remarkable and widely spread of the middle ages. The number of its ancient copies, carefully preserved to the present day, its various translations and its learned commentaries, published of late, sufficiently testify to the living interest which the ‘Navigatio’ of St. Brendan excited. There is scarcely a MSS. Collection in Europe, of any account, where it cannot be found.” There is a copy of the “Navigatio” in the Vatican Library since the Ninth Century. De Roo gives full credence to the St. Brendan narrative.
Learned writers like Moosmuller of Germany, Gravier of France, Palfry and De Costa of America, not to speak of Irish scholars, have written much on St. Brendan and prehistoric America. Cardinal Moran of Australia has recently written a very able work on St. Brendan. O’Donoghue’s Brendaniana and Webb’s Compendium of Irish Biography make mighty interesting reading.
There are several ancient maps in the European Libraries which mention St. Brendan’s Land or “Great Ireland” and those maps are being closely examined by historical students interested in pre-Columbian discoveries.
Columbus himself, while he was endeavoring to fit out his first expedition, wrote these words: “The land of St. Brendan is the land of the Blessed, towards the West, which no one can reach except by the power of God.”
It is not too much to claim that the Irish chapter in American history began with St. Brendan. It is to be hoped and expected that the future historians of this Western Hemisphere will recognize Brendan, the Irish monk and famous navigator, as America’s first discoverer and give credit to whom credit is due.
There is still extant in the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, an ancient MS. containing the prayer of St. Brendan for the safety of himself and his companions in his trans-Atlantic voyage.
“Judging by the ancient documents,” says the learned Dane, Professor Rafn, “we can have no doubt that Great Ireland was settled long before the year 1000 by a Christian Colony from Ireland.” What Rafn calls Great Ireland, we now call the United States of America. Rafn also claims that a people speaking the Irish language were found in Florida as far back as the eighth century.
The latest book on this subject is by Mrs. Marion Mulhall, the wife of the famous statistician, entitled “Explorers in the New World Before Columbus,” recently published by Longmans, Green & Co. Every student of pre-Columbian discoveries ought to read that splendid work, which deals with a mighty interesting theme in the field of historical research.
In the sixteenth century, traces of Gaelic speech and a knowledge of the poems of Ossian were discovered among the Indians of Florida. Ossian was an Irish poet who flourished two centuries before St. Brendan was born. Both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon considered him the greatest poet that ever lived.
In the light of modern historical research, it is absurd to claim that Columbus was the first discoverer of America. I am fully satisfied that Lief Erickson and his Norsemen from the islands of the Baltic discovered this Continent 500 years before Columbus; and I am as fully convinced that St. Brendan and his Irish Monks landed on the shores of this country about the middle of the sixth century. Owing to the fact that no permanent settlement or lasting results came from these discoveries, therefore they do not take a jot or tittle from the achievement of Christopher Columbus, whose name and fame are bound to live forever in the annals of the human race.
The Oxford University press has just published a number of Irish manuscripts in the English language which have been in the Bodlien Library for centuries. Some of those Gaelic manuscripts also refer to the Brendanian voyages and discoveries.
The early Portuguese explorers believed in the existence of the El Dorado, the undiscovered country of St. Brendan. The strongest proof of this is that when the Crown of Portugal was ceded to the Castilians, the treaty included St. Brendan’s land as a certain future discovery.
The high religious reputation and singular fame of St. Brendan gave considerable value to his manuscripts, from which sprang up an unique literature, that planted in the brain of Columbus a desire to find the long lost Land of Promise, which he eventually discovered in the year 1492, a year forever memorable in the history of civilization.
Why is it that nearly all the original Brendan manuscripts are in the Latin tongue? Chambers in his “Cyclopedia of English Literature” gives an excellent explanation: “The first unquestionably real author of distinction is St. Columbanus, a native of Ireland, who contributed greatly to the advance of Christianity in Western Europe and died in 615. He wrote religious treatises and Latin poetry. As yet no educated writer composed in his vernacular tongue. It was generally despised by the literary class, and Latin was held to be the only language fit for regular composition.”
Both Columbanus and Columkill or Columba were contemporaries of St. Brendan. Doubtless St. Brendan was an accomplished Latin scholar. Throughout Europe, during the Middle Ages, Brendan’s voyage was a most popular subject in church literature. The Brendanian Manuscripts are still locked up in the various libraries of Europe, and only a few of them have been translated into any of the modern languages. It is to be hoped that some of the great scholars of Germany, as well as those of Ireland, will soon turn their attention to those old manuscripts. The Book of Lismore contains a life of Brendan in the Gaelic language, and the annals of Clonmacnoise devote considerable space to the career and achievements of the famous navigator.
In view of St. Patrick’s prophecy, which was fulfilled by St. Brendan’s voyage, it is a singular fact that the Atlantic Cable was laid by Cyrus W. Field in 1857 within sight of Mount Brendan, which stands out in bold relief on the Irish coast, at an altitude of fully three thousand feet, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
In childhood young Brendan inhaled the ocean breezes, and was familiar with the magnificent scenery of his native Kerry. At the foot of his mountain retreat was Brendan Bay, from which he sailed for this Western continent almost fourteen centuries ago.
The Sailor Saint is known as St. Brendan the Elder, in contradistinction to St. Brendin, the Abbot or Bishop of Birr. Some writers have confounded those two illustrious Irishmen who flourished in the same century.
Many beautiful poems on “The Sailor Saint” are to be found in the modern languages of Continental Europe, and some historical ballads by Denis Florence McCarthy, Thos. Darcy McGee and others in the English language. Here is one stanza from McGee’s well-known ballad:
“Mo-Brendan, Saint of Sailors, list to me,
And give thy benediction to our bark,
For still, they say, thou savest souls at sea,
And lightest signal fires in tempest dark.
Thou sought’st the Promised Land far in the West,
Earthing the Sun, chasing Hesperian on,
But we in our own Ireland have been blest
Nor ever sighed for land beyond the Sun.”
It has been recently pointed out by a writer on the subject that the ancient Irish would have turned the discoveries of St. Brendan to good account, and would have kept up communication with America, if their attention had not been drawn to the severe combat carried on in England between the Britons and the Saxons. Then, at a later period, the Danes invaded Ireland, and for almost 300 years the Irish at home were engaged in continuous warfare against those Pagan marauders, and consequently were in no position to carry out any great peaceful enterprise in distant lands.
In the year 553, St. Brendan founded the famous monastery of Clonfert, in the County Galway, Ireland. In after years that seat of learning had over 3,000 students within its walls, most of whom came from foreign countries. They were educated and entertained without fee or reward, and the same was true of all the other great schools and colleges during the Golden Age of Ireland, which embraced the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. History tells us that Ireland was then “the school of the West, and the quiet habitation of sanctity and learning.”
During that age, “the monasteries at Bangor, Clonfert and elsewhere,” says Montalembert in his “Monks of the West,” “became entire towns, each of which enclosed more than 3,000 students. The Thebiad reappeared in Ireland, and the West had no longer anything to envy in the history of the East. There was besides an intellectual development, which the Eremites of Egypt had not known. The Irish communities joined by the monks from Gaul and Rome, whom the example of St. Patrick had drawn upon his steps, entered into rivalry with the great monastic schools of Gaul. They explained Ovid there; they copied Virgil, they devoted themselves especially to Greek literature; they drew back from no inquiry, no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith.”
Religion and education went hand in hand in ancient Ireland from the birth of St. Brendan in 484 to the Danish invasion, which took place in the closing years of the eighth century. In that period Ireland was the most learned country in all Europe. The fame of her schools had travelled far and wide. The languages of Greece and Rome, as well as her old Gaelic tongue, were studied and mastered, and thousands of pilgrim students came to her shores, among them were Alfrid, King of Northumbria, and Dagobert II., King of France.
Love of learning has been an Irish attribute from time immemorial; no mind, not even the Athenian, had ever a greater thirst for knowledge than the Irish mind. Ossian, who lived in the third century of the Christian Era, is to Gaelic literature what Homer is to Greek literature. Intellectual vigor, spiritual fervor and love for travel have been and still are the predominant characteristics of the Irish. Wherever the Irish monks went they founded monasteries, churches and colleges, and laid the foundation for modern civilization and culture. The truest history of Ireland is to be found in the poetry of her bards and in the writings of her exiled monks. For proof see Zimmer’s “Irish Element in Medieval Culture” and Hyde’s “Literary History of Ireland.”
St. Columkill, a contemporary of St. Brendan, has been called the father of monasticism in the British Isles. He and Columbanus are acknowledged to be the two most learned men of their age. It is a well established fact that St. Brendan visited his countryman, Columkill, at his monastery at Iona on the west coast of Scotland in 564. On that occasion he founded two monasteries in Scotland. He also travelled in Wales and England, where he founded some churches and schools and converted thousands to the Christian faith. He built the Monastery of Ailech in Britain, which is now called St. Malo. That was several years before St. Augustine landed on British soil. So we see that Lecky was justified in stating that “England owes a great deal of her Christianity to Irish monks, who labored among her people before the arrival of Augustine.”
Most of the history which has been written during the past four centuries has been a conspiracy against truth, but in these opening years of the twentieth century history is being rewritten in the light of historical research, and in keeping with the spirit of truth and justice. The late Lord Acton was the pioneer, and his example is being followed by some of the great scholars of Germany and other European countries, which may throw a flood of light on the chronicles and traditions of St. Brendan, as well as on the golden Age of Hibernia.
St. Brendan attended the inauguration of Aedh Caemh (anglicized Hugh Keeffe), the first Christian King of Cashel in Tipperary in 570, when he took the place of the official bard, who was a Pagan. On that occasion he converted the bard to Christianity and gave him the name of Colman, now known as St. Colman of Cloyne, in whose honor St. Colman’s College at Fermoy was named.
According to Ussher, St. Brendan died at Annadown in 577, in the 94th year of his age, and was buried in his own monastery at Clonfert. His day on the calendar is May 16—a day forever sacred to the memory of Hibernia’s greatest navigator. No complete compilation of biographical work fails to mention the name of St. Brendan, who is preëminently the mariner saint of the calendar.
The literary fame of historic Clonfert is known only to the students of history. Most of the precious manuscripts of that great institution of learning were destroyed by the Danes and Anglo-Normans centuries ago, and its walls have long since crumbled into ruins.
“Clonfert,” says the scholarly Butterfield, “should be dear to all Americans, because our first discoverer was Clonfert’s Bishop. The Sea of Clonfert will doubtless remain during future ages as a shrine of pilgrimage to numberless tourists, for it holds in its midst an honored grave, where rests the dust of the patriarchal navigator who first designated this hemisphere as a paradise of loveliness, to give happy homes and altars free to the myriad outcasts of the human family.”
During the past two centuries, countless thousands of Erin’s sons and daughters have found happy homes and civil and religious liberty in “Brendan’s Land,” now and forevermore the land of Washington, which has been for more than a century and a quarter an asylum for the poor and oppressed of every race and every clime.
Owing to the ruthless destruction of vast numbers of ancient Irish archives by the Danes and English, our knowledge of the first discovery of America is not as exact as could be desired, yet there is enough known to justify Americans, regardless of race or creed, in claiming the honor of that discovery for St. Brendan and his sailor monks, almost a thousand years before Columbus landed on the soil of San Salvador.
HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN.
Of Peterborough, N. H.
Historiographer of the Society.