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.