Stories from the Sea: Legends, adventures and tragedies of Ireland's coast

Stories

from the

Sea

Legends, adventures and tragedies

of Ireland’s coast

Jo Kerrigan & Richard Mills

This book is dedicated to all those who, over

thousands of years, have sailed to and from Ireland.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter I: The Sea Carried Them

Chapter II: Raiders, Traders, Pirates

Chapter III: Making a Living From the Sea

Chapter IV: Build That Boat Well: Lives Depend On It

Chapter V: Storms and Shipwrecks

Chapter VI: No Moon Tonight: The Smuggling Game

Chapter VII: Travelling Far From Home

Chapter VIII: Ireland Calling

About the Authors

Other books by Jo Kerrigan and Richard Mills

Copyright

The Cailleach or Hag of Beara, an echo of our ancient past.

Introduction

As a small island nation, ours is a culture inextricably bound up with the seas that surround us. From earliest times, travellers in fragile craft from far-off lands have crossed the oceans to our shores, seeking a place to settle or to trade the goods they carried. Later, others came with plunder in mind, seizing the rich bounty that this fertile soil produces so effortlessly.

Over millennia, our people have earned their livings from the waters that lap our shores. They have built small boats and huge ships, the better to traverse those surrounding waters. They have learned to read the skies and sense the changing of the wind. In stormy weather, many a vessel has come to grief on the hungry rocks that are always waiting for new victims, while in secret inlets on calm, moonless nights, bales and barrels have been swiftly unloaded and spirited away to safe hiding places.

A vital source of nourishment, a natural means of travel, a source of food and income; friendly and smiling or threatening and deadly, the sea has influenced Ireland and its people since the beginning. It has brought goods, ideas, invaders, influences, and taken away emigrants, pilgrims, evangelising monks, adventurers. All have played their part in our history.

Here, then, are just some of the salt-drenched stories that have come from Ireland’s endless involvement with its sur­rounding waters. Age-old legends of fantastic voyages and strange demonic invaders; thrilling tales of storms, shipwrecks and smuggling; stirring accounts of little coastal traders and huge transatlantic liners; exciting ideas from those who pushed the boundaries of communication. Read them, feel the tug of the sea breeze in your hair, get the scent of the brine, and feel you are there.

Chapter I

The Sea Carried Them

THE LEGENDARY FIRST SETTLERS TO IRELAND

People have been drawn to Ireland, with her gentle cli­mate and fertile soil, for millennia; ever since the withdrawal of the Ice Age, in fact. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, or Book of Invasions, is a collection of poems and prose chronicling the multiple waves of settlers who sought this green island on the westernmost edge of what was then the known world. The collection was first committed to writing by Christian scribes around the eleventh century, but the text is firmly based in oral tradition going back into prehistory, handed down from father to son, generation to generation, storyteller to storyteller. ‘This is how it happened and how we came to be what we are today, these are the people who came to Ireland long long ago …’ the shanachie would softly chant to a spellbound audience.

Naturally enough, every single one of these early settlers used the sea as their high road to Ireland. Some may not even have intended to come here: they might have been swept before a storm or missed their planned destination in fog; they may not have had an idea of where on the great ocean they actually were. In ancient times, you quite often ended up where Aeolus, god of the winds, felt like send­ing you – if your cargo or mission was to somewhere very different, well, that was your problem and you had to make the best of it.

Whether the waves of settlers chronicled in the Lebor Gabála came by accident or intention, they travelled here across the ocean. Most came with the prevailing trade winds from the southeast, from Asia, Greece, Sicily, Spain; but some at least came from the colder Northlands, and one group indeed (if the legends are to be believed) from a threatening and grim Undersea world.

Of course, there is a great deal of embroidery and expansion in these old legends, but at the heart of every such tale is a germ of truth, a shred of folk memory going back generations, an enshrining of actual facts and happenings, around which the story has been developed. However fanciful they may appear, they are still telling us something about the far distant past, and should be valued as such. Here, then, are some of the legendary stories of those who came by sea.

Cessair

According to the Book of Invasions, the very first traveller to reach Ireland was Cessair, who came from far in the south­east, escaping from the Great Flood. Christian scribes copying down the tale according to their standards identify her firmly as Noah’s granddaughter, but that was probably what one might call monkish licence, slotting her into an acceptable Biblical context. Whatever her origins, she was definitely a woman, not the usual armed warrior of legend, and she landed on the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry:

This is the reason for her coming, fleeing from the Flood: for Noe said unto them: Rise, said he [and go] to the western edge of the world; perchance the Flood may not reach it. The crew of three ships arrived at Dun na mRarc in the territory of Corco Daibne.

The Flood or Deluge isn’t really our concern here, but it is fascinating to ponder on what it might actually have been, what its causes were, how large an area was affected. In our own time, we have seen disastrous tsunamis caused by vol­canic eruptions and earthquakes, and it could well be that a similar natural disaster is echoed, however vaguely, in the Biblical stories of Noah and his Ark.

Modern research inclines toward the theory that the Flood was caused by the original barrier between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea (then a freshwater lake) breaking, loosing vast amounts of water from the former to the latter. This may have been caused by a tsunami or by rising temperatures after the Ice Age. Certainly, recent deep-water explorations of the Black Sea coast have revealed an original shoreline and ancient shipwrecks, hundreds of metres below present-day sea level. (Mount Ararat, where the Ark finds its final rest­ing place in the story, is in eastern Turkey, which would add strength to this idea.)

After the first deadly rush, the waters would have continued to rise steadily, and survivors would have had to either move further and further up into the hills or take to boats and seek new lands.

Cessair, according to legend, was able to organise a fleet of ships and a strong band of female followers for this migra­tion, so she was clearly somebody of importance. In fact, she is likely to have been a seer or high priestess, perhaps from Egypt, and certainly somebody possessing both strength and power, which would explain why the monks were so quick to ascribe to her a Biblical parentage. Most emphatically, it would not do to have strange women from distinctly unac­ceptable religious backgrounds taking the principal role in the start of Ireland’s history.

Cessair’s journey from the east was not an easy one, encountering fierce storms and high winds that sank two of their craft and drowned many of the travellers, both the women and their armed male escort. (That male escort is another indication of the leader’s social importance.) It is one of the first records of stormy weather and shipwreck, themes that are to recur again and again in stories from the sea down through the centuries.

Wild waves threatened those trying to reach Ireland.

Cessair herself survived, along with fifty women and just three men. Making sensible plans for their future in Ireland, she divided her female followers into three groups, each under the protection of one of the men, and she herself married Fintan, the bravest and strongest of these.

However, after some time, these fortunate (or unfortunate, depending how you look at it) men eventually died, and the practical Cessair realised that she had only one man, her hus­band Fintan, to ensure the future of the settlement. Giving a very human twist to the legend, he realised that he could not possibly satisfy fifty women. He lost heart and fled into the wilderness. The abandoned Cessair died of a broken heart, and her abandoned followers too eventually died out.

Fintan, somewhere out there in the wild, was the only one left of those first arrivals. He must have learned some of his wife’s magical skills, as he managed to survive down through the ages by being reborn as many different creatures: a salmon, an eagle, a boar, a hawk and more. He lived for 5,000 years, so that he could recount to later settlers the history of Ireland as he had seen it since the beginning.

One variation of the legend says that the Great Flood even­tually reached Ireland and only Fintan survived, by changing himself into a salmon in a submerged cave known afterwards as Fintan’s Grave. This cave is said to be hidden on the moun­tain called Tul Tuinde, or Hill of the Wave, near Lough Derg on the Shannon.

Fintan survived by changing himself into a salmon, and then an eagle.

Parthalon

After Cessair, it is said, Ireland lay empty until the coming of Parthalon, who came all the way from Greece, via Sicily, in a sea journey that took two and a half months. He and his people are said by some to have landed near Kenmare in Kerry.

Now Ireland was waste [thereafter], for a space of three hundred years, till Parthalon came to it. He is the first who took Ireland after the Flood, on a Tuesday, on the fourteenth of the moon, in Inber Scene: [for three times was Ireland taken in Inber Scene].

Henry Morris, in a detailed lecture given to the Royal Society of Antiquaries in 1937, maintains that Parthalon landed not in Kerry but at the mouth of the Erne in Donegal, where the town of Ballyshannon stands today.

Parthalon settled on an island in the River Erne.

Parthalon settled on an island here with his wife Delgnat and his followers, making their living by fishing in the rich waters of the river. One day, so the legend relates, he went off to fish, leaving Delgnat in the care of one of his servants. Clearly this servant must have been attractive, since the lord of the island came home to find them having rather too fond a time together. Furious, he turned on his wife’s pet dog, which came leaping to greet him, and killed it with a blow. This would in fact have been a major offence in ancient Ireland, under Brehon law, and would have been perceived as such by listeners to the tale.

Delgnat, however, gave as good as she got, asking Parthalon what else he expected if he were to leave her alone all day with temptation laid out in front of her. It’s an observant touch, and notable that it is dutifully recorded in the old text, even though written down by Christian scribes. Women in those times had minds of their own, unlike the obedient and sub­servient wives of later literature. The event was ever afterwards claimed to be the first instance of jealousy in Ireland (and also, incidentally, the first of adultery).

Parthalon, and his descendants after him, lived many years in Ireland (300, according to the Lebor Gabála), and cleared much of the heavy woodland that covered that part of the northwest in which they settled, in order to graze cattle and plant crops. He is in fact credited with being the first to intro­duce cattle, to till the land, to churn butter and to brew ale. Clearly a man of practical sense and skill was Parthalon.

Once again, these are indications that the legend is based on real events of the far distant past. If it wasn’t precisely Parthalon and his followers, somebody certainly came, stayed and cleared woodland. Those are the basic facts that are remembered over the generations.

In the end though, according to the Lebor Gabála, the entire Parthalon tribe died in a single week of a dreadful sick­ness. This was in all probability the ‘yellow plague’, which is recorded in old sources as recurring regularly. That could have been bubonic plague, better known in medieval times as the Black Death, or perhaps smallpox. One might think, given the descriptive ‘yellow’, that it was a form of jaundice, but that couldn’t really be described as a virulent and fatal disease. Bubonic plague, on the other hand, is spread by fleas, carried by rats, and there would have been plenty of both around in ancient times.

Whatever the identity of the swift-moving pandemic, it is held to have wiped out the Parthalonians within the space of seven days. For a long time, it was held that this happened on the site of modern-day Tallaght (Tamleacht, the Plain of the Plague), just southwest of Dublin, but more recently there have been disputes about the location. Tamleacht is a name found all over Ireland, in places where many have died at one time of an epidemic, and several of these are nearer to where Parthalon is said to have lived on the west coast.

After that, Ireland remained empty and silent for thirty years, say the legends. Perhaps there was no-one left after the plague to go adventuring on the sea; perhaps the fear of the infection kept new invaders away.

It was thirty lean years that she

was empty in the face of war-champions,

after the death of her host throughout a week

Nemed

But then came Nemed and his followers, from the land of Scythia, far away on the very borders of Europe and Asia. The Scythians were a group of ancient tribes, mainly nomads, who came originally from Siberia and spread gradually outwards as far as the Black Sea. The name Nemed means ‘holy’ or ‘privileged’ in ancient Irish, and this new invader may well have been a druid – or, given that they came originally from Siberia, a shaman.

He and his tribe set sail from the Caspian Sea in forty-four ships, but only one survived to reach the Irish shore, after storms and catastrophes. One such disaster came about when the voyagers saw a golden tower floating in the sea and tried to conquer it. As a result, many of the boats were wrecked. An allegory or a real-life iceberg? One wouldn’t expect an iceberg along the complex route they must have taken from the Caspian Sea. Up into the Volga River and then down the Don into the Sea of Azov and on to the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus (if there was a way through, otherwise a bit of overland portaging would have been necessary) and into the Aegean. Then along the Mediterranean, around Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), up past what is now France and across to Ireland. Nevertheless, it is an interesting echo of those iceberg encounters which occur in the ancient imramma or travel tales (see later sections of this chapter).

Nemed landed at Great Island in Cork Harbour.

The Nemedians landed at Great Island in Cork Harbour, on Ireland’s south coast. In old Irish, Great Island was known as Oileán Ard Neimheadh.

Puzzlingly, though, we are told that Nemed’s wife died twelve days after their arrival, and was buried at Ard Macha or Armagh, which lies almost 400km to the north. Geograph­ically, that isn’t really possible. But then, it was common for storytellers to ascribe a particular location to an important event when it seemed politic so to do. That is, if you are being housed and feasted in a noble hall or indeed a monastery or abbey in the north of the country, you would naturally empha­sise the importance of local places in your tale.

A more practical solution to this puzzle of location lies in the woman’s name. Since she was called Macha, it is likely that the hill or cairn where her body was entombed would have been christened Ard Macha, wherever it was located. Irish place names, in both their original and their present-day forms, are a challenging study all on their own.

After only nine years, Nemed and 3,000 of his followers also died of that endemic plague. He himself is said to have been buried on Great Island, where he first landed. The few who survived the infection were, naturally enough, somewhat less than enamoured with Ireland,