The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin Page A

Saint Brendan’s day were smaller than now. I need small-sized hides about a quarter of an inch thick to be authentic, maybe as many as fifty of them.”
    “You are in luck. We’ve got some hides just like that in the tanning pits now. Of course you’ll have to have the best. You’re trusting your life to them.”
    Much later I discovered just how unstintingly the Croggon brothers worked on my behalf. They and their men personally sorted through oxhide after oxhide, hauling them out, wet and dripping, from the tanning pits. They examined each hide minutely for flaws, for barbed-wire scratches, for the holes left by warble flies, for cuts made by a careless skinning knife. It must have taken days of back-breaking work, and without ever a word to me. In the end, the Croggons provided fifty-seven of the finest oak-bark-tanned oxhides I could have wanted. When a professional saddlemaker saw them stacked together, he gavea low whistle of appreciation. “I’ve never seen leather like it,” he said. “I’ve been told about it, but never expected to see so much of it in one place. We seldom see it in our workshops.”
    “That’s because it’s all been earmarked for a leather boat,” I teased him.
    From the Croggons’ tannery the hides went up to Harold Birkin to be greased. Tests at the research laboratories had revealed that wool grease was in fact the best dressing for the leather, and through a friend in the wool business I had been given the name of a wool mill in Yorkshire that might help. I telephoned one of the directors. “I wonder if you could supply me with some wool grease.”
    “Yes, of course. How much do you want?”
    “About three-quarters of a ton, please.”
    There was a stunned silence.
    The only trouble with the combination of wool grease and leather was the appalling smell. My wife complained that the leather smelled like blocked drains, and this smell now competed with the odor of rancid fat. Even the workers in Harold Birkin’s tannery—and tanneries are notoriously pungent places—complained about the stench of the grease. They claimed that they could smell the stuff half a mile away from the factory gates.
    Under Harold’s close attention, each evil-smelling oxhide was folded down the backbone and suspended in a tub of hot wool grease. Then it was withdrawn from the tub, allowed to drain, and put flat on the ground. Now molten wool grease was literally poured onto it, another hide placed on top, and the process of pouring hot grease repeated for all fifty-seven oxhides until there was a huge, sticky, multilayer sandwich of leather gently absorbing the vital wool grease.
    The project was now moving ahead rapidly, but I still lacked a vital expert. I needed someone who could produce a proper design study of my medieval curragh, complete with a set of technical drawings from which to build the boat. It would have to be someone who was a historian as well as a fully qualified naval architect, and one afternoon I sat down in the library of the Royal Geographic Society and wrote to all of the maritime museums I could think of, asking if they could recommend such a man. The replies were polite, but nobody could help. However, one museum told me that I should ask the secretary of the Royal Institute of Navigation, who personally knew most of the experts in thisfield. I looked up the address of the institute. It was in the same building as the Royal Geographic Society. All the time I had been writing my requests, I was sitting directly under the man who could help me! I went upstairs, and was promptly given one name: Colin Mudie.
    The name seemed distantly familiar, and then I remembered. Colin Mudie had sailed with Patrick Ellam across the Atlantic in the tiny yacht
Sopranino
in the 1950s. He also had designed an extraordinary balloon to cover the same route, using a gondola that doubled as a boat when, after a record time aloft, the ballooning ended in a storm. Colin Mudie had a reputation as one