St. Brendan was a real person, born ca. 484 and died ca. 577. He founded several monasteries, most notably one at Clonfert in western Ireland. He most likely travelled to Scotland, Wales, and France and there exist a Life and a Navigatio relating the details. However, there also exists a plethoric amount of material, much of which is pure myth and fantasy. This is probably because he lived in the sixth century, but legends about him did not begin to appear until the ninth or tenth century; and the tales became ever more fantastic and outlandish, especially in the literary genre peculiar to the Irish, the immram. (Some ten years ago, Robert H. Fuson, reviewing a piece of Brendaniana in these pages, wrote: “So great is the bifurcation of claims . . . that one feels he is being conned” [HAHR (Aug. 1964), p. 404]). Most of the legends concern the discovery of an island or islands. The Martin Behaim globe of 1492 places near the equator in the middle of the Atlantic an isle that bears Brendan’s name, and credits him as its discoverer in the year 565. Others have credited him with the discovery of the Faeroes, the Hebrides, the Canaries, the Azores, Madeira, and Iceland—all of which he may possibly have visited. In the realm of probability, however, the only land near enough to have been visited in an open Irish curragh is totally barren Rockall Island, a piece of granite 70 feet high and 90 feet wide, jutting out of the Atlantic 150 miles northwest of Donegal.
Nothing that has come before compares with the claim advanced in the book under review; namely, that “Brendan and the Irish monks functioned as the advance ‘scouts’ who found a way to get there [to America] and return and thereby made Columbus’ trip possible” (p. 181). The bulk of Chapman’s volume consists of an annotated and personalized explication of selected segments of the Navigatio, which a local Latin teacher translated for him—a task, incidentally, that had been done before. The first chapter begins with five one-sentence paragraphs, whose brevity, simplicity, and iconoclasm set the stage for a thesis that is supposed to stagger the reader.
Chapman’s qualifications for advancing his thesis are not overly impressive. He is described as a history student-navigator: the educational credentials consisting of an undergraduate degree; the navigational, a result of World War II Air Force training. His methodology for utilizing source material is amazing: “Students of human nature know that which can be read ‘between the lines’ is sometimes of more significance than that which is ‘on the line’” (p. 178). How convenient! His citation to authorities is of a selective nature. He quotes Morison’s opinion in Admiral of the Ocean Sea that “it was merely his [Columbus’] good fortune that the same wind carried his fleet all the way to America,” but neglects Morison’s previous statement in the very same paragraph that Columbus “must have observed on his [prior] African voyage that a westward course from the Canaries would enjoy a fair wind.. . .” Therein lies Columbus’s so-called “secret.” He did not need Brendan as a precursor; everyone knew that a direct westerly course from the Iberian peninsula was impossible; the Admiral was empirical— and lucky. Justin Winsor, who wrote of Brendan’s isle in his 1891 book on Columbus, probably would have consigned this author, as he did an older champion, the monk Philoponus, to the ranks of the “credulous fictionmongers who hang about the skirts of the historic field.”
