St. Brendan the Navigator

Who they were

Brendan of Clonfert was a real and substantial figure of Ireland's monastic golden age: founder of monasteries across the west of Ireland, Clonfert chief among them, and a traveller by curragh along the Scottish islands in the ordinary daring way of Irish monks.

And then there is the book. The Voyage of Saint Brendan, the medieval bestseller that sent him west across the Atlantic for seven years with a crew of monks: the island that turned out to be the whale Jasconius, on whose back they celebrated Easter; the crystal column in the sea; the paradise of birds. It was copied in hundreds of manuscripts and read across every language of Europe. It is a glorious legend, and it comes with an honest footnote that keeps readers up at night. The voyage's geography of sheep islands, bird islands, smoking mountains, and crystal towers maps plausibly onto the Faroes, Iceland, and icebergs, and in the 1970s the explorer Tim Severin built a leather curragh to the old specifications and sailed it from Ireland to Newfoundland, proving the trip was possible. Whether Brendan made it, God knows.

Why people turn to St. Brendan the Navigator

Boaters, sailors, and mariners, with St. Nicholas and St. Andrew. And everyone setting out into the genuinely unknown, the move or the venture or the diagnosis journey, under the patron whose boat was made of leather and prayer.

How to ask their intercession

At the dock, before the season's first launch. And for the setting out: one decade before any leap where the far shore is unproven.