ABSTRACT
So what bearing may climatic tendencies have had on what was soon revealed as the propensity of the bolder Irish monks to rove the seas in search of converts if not of Paradise itself ? From the mid-sixth century to the late tenth, it was comparatively warm over Greenland, save for cool intermissions from 660 to 710 and 820 to 870.42 One is tempted to presume that a relatively salubrious climate would have helped St Brendan and his brethren sail their open boats not just to Iceland but, in all likelihood, on to Greenland (though not the American mainland).43 However, the relationship between temperature and run of wind is not a matter for simple abstraction. A tentative comparison of gale frequency as between the warmish years 1930-5 and the coolish 1945-9 shows little difference overall, either in the Denmark Strait or around Cape Farewell.44 Obversely, an earlier statistical analysis suggested that summer anticyclones are more evident in the Greenland-Iceland sector when pack ice is persisting well south.45 The argument is, in any case, turned on its head as regards St Brendan’s transatlantic epic if, as is quite possible, this took place in the Krakatoan cool years between 536 and 540. He may have followed migrant birds to the Faeroes and Iceland in the early summer, then picked up anticyclonic easterlies to carry him towards Greenland. Apparently he sailed, on a later trip, into the calmer seas of the trade wind belt at least as far as Madeira.46 He was lucky as well as deserving to die back home, c. 577.
