The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin Page B

of the most unorthodox designers to be found. Nothing daunted him. Arctic explorers took their sledges to him to have them made into convertible boats; he designed power craft for high-speed racing, kites to fly radio aerials, even a submersible yacht with the mast sticking out of the water. Yet he had also been selected to design a sail training brig for the Sail Cadet Corps, designed production boats built in thousands, and was chairman of the prestigious Small Craft Group of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.
    Yet when I went to Colin Mudie’s home, a very unexpected figure opened the door. I had anticipated a bluff, bearded seadog. Instead I was greeted by a small, fragile-looking man with a darting manner, a huge mane of long hair, and the most piercing blue-grey eyes I have ever seen. For all the world he looked like a hungry and alert owl, blinking as he invited me into his study.
    In two hours I found out exactly why Colin Mudie was so highly regarded. He sat at his desk listening intently to my thesis, and absent-mindedly sketched on a pad. From the point of his pen flowed little ships and shapes, details of oars and masts, water lines and carpentry details. He was a gifted draughtsman, and a man whose thoughts literally turned themselves into pictures. When I finished, he merely looked up at me and said, “There’s nothing impossible either about a leather boat or the voyage you want to make. I can do a design study for you, and then, if you want to go ahead, follow it with drawings for a boatyard to work from. But what neither I nor anyone else can give you is the knowledge of how to handle this boat at sea. That knowledge has been long lost. It is up to you to rediscover it. Always remember you are trying to follow men who went to sea with generations of experience behind them. That may turn out to be the unknown factor in your venture.”
    In eight weeks Colin put together all the data about Irish leather boats I had gleaned in the libraries and in the Dingle. Twice he telephoned me. Once to tell me that he thought he’d found a reason for the characteristic double gunwale of the Dingle curragh, one above the other. It was, he suggested, a throwback to the days when the leather hull skin was pulled over the gunwale like a drum skin. This would require a basic frame of great strength, especially in compression, and the double gunwale is an ideal construction. On the second occasion he confirmed my hunch that the original leather curraghs had carried two masts. His calculations showed that the traditional mast position, which John Goodwin had put into my small curragh, was exactly the right place for a foremast. If so, it was reasonable to suppose that in the old days there had been a central mainmast to balance it. But Colin was also practical. He wanted to hang pieces of oak-bark leather in the sea to learn what happened. So once a fortnight the staff of the Lymington ferry pier was treated to the bizarre spectacle of a renowned naval architect solemnly standing on their jetty and hauling up slabs of very smelly leather on the end of long strings. Some of the station’s staff must have thought it mad, but soon there was also a rumor that Colin was designing a waterproof shoe. No one would have believed the truth: that he was working on a leather boat.
    In the end the drawings were ready, four large sheets covered with lines and figures in Colin’s neat hand. They were the end product of all my labor so far, and with them under my arm and fifty-seven slippery, greasy oxhides pungent with wool grease, I set out for Ireland.
    It was time to start building the boat.

3
B UILDING

    “What have you got there?” asked the Irish customs officer as he slid back the van door with a rumble, poked in his head, and withdrew it again very sharply, wrinkling his nose at the eye-watering smell.
    “Oxhides,” I replied. “They’re for a boat I’m building and hope to sail to America.”
    “Oh, they are for