Corragh Riding: Schooner Days MCLXX (1170)

by C. H. J. Snider

Irish Interlude—6

Kilronan, Inishmore, 1954

BEST boatride I have ever had was when the Ward brothers, of Toronto Island—Frank, Ed and Fred—took me out in 1909, to bail for them, when they picked the crew off the bowsprit of the schooner St. Louis, stranded on the Western sandbar. They used a 20 ft. fishboat, for the lifeboat had been burned the night before. They got everybody off, seven people, in three trips, though we shipped a lot of water doing it. Sometimes it was up to my knees.

High light was the cook of the St. Louis, with all her best clothes on, perched on the bowsprit cap, clinging to the standing jib stay, and refusing to jump until she had jammed another hatpin through her best hat. She wasn't going to lose that in the gale, even if the vessel broke up under her.

'NOTHER GOOD RIDE

Next best was today's 9-mile trip from Kilronan, in the Aran Islands, to Inishmaan and back, in an island corragh, pulled by Pat Gill and his John and young Tom Folan.

Going over it was plain sailing, for we had a fair wind and slack Water. Coming back was heavy going, for it blew hard and both tide and current were against us. Hour after hour those boys pulled steadily on the heavy oars, cross-handed so as to get the better leverage, never missing a stroke nor catching a crab, never grunting even.

They were heavily clad in the island "boneen" or blanket cloth, under woolen jerkins and jerseys, topped with thick frieze jackets and trousers, but they were soaked through.

"Seawater never hurt anny wan," the islanders say, "but its getting wat in the rain that gives ye pneumonia."

All the water that came aboard was salt spray, tossed up by the angry wind. The corragh's homely roman-nose poked clear over each charging wave like a hunter taking a hedge.

She never pounded. Her motion was easy. Not a drop came in through side or bottom.

In the sternsheets, sitting on the very skin of the boat to keep the weight low, I was dry all over. The toilers at the oars took all the spray.

The oars were pine two-by-fours, straight from end to end, tapered to form flat blades, held to the tholepins by triangular cleats of wood. They could not be feathered, and they could not be lost The handles were shaved round so as to be grasped easily.

HOW THEY ARE MADE

The corragh herself had been built over moulds, full-length battens, carefully tapered, running from end to end.

On these, like barrel-hoops, were bent flat ribs, close together. This wooden "cage" was covered with tarred canvas. That was all there was to keep the water out.

Brendon, saint and navigator— One man or two?—is said by credible Irish legend to have discovered a gleaming marble mountain afloat in the ocean and the mystical island of Hy Brasil, in the sixth century of the Christian era. He may have sighted an iceberg and crossed the Atlantic seven or eight centuries before Columbus did. He is said to have voyaged in a coracle, or in a corragh covered with bull's hides, or in a boat of stone.

Like the reinforced concrete ships of the last war? We can hardly believe that, even in this Tir-nan-Og, where dreams come true. But some version of the coracle or corragh was probably St. Brendan's ship.

THE ORIGIN

LET'S get it straight. Corraghs are different from coracles, and both are different from the Curragh of Kildare. The latter is a grassy plain, a camp, and has something to do with horses. The corragh is a long narrow boat. Many spell it "curragh", but corragh is the way the Irish pronounce it.

The coracle is also a boat, but a different kind of boat, shorter, wider, rounder. It is woven of willow withes and covered with fabric (formerly cowhide) and is portable as a big pan, which it greatly resembles.

Coracles are in use yet, for creek fishing. Just big enough to float the angler, about 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, shallow and egg shaped, they can be paddled from pool to pool and carried across shoals and bars and taken home on a bicycle. The Welsh use them on the Wye.

From the 'l' in it, the coracle is probably the Latinized diminutive (coraculum?) of whatever the original Keltic word was for corragh, 2,000 years ago. So both are varying developments of the same idea—a basket-like framework, waterproofed by covering with beasts' skins or cloth.

Maybe the crannog dwellers in the loughs of Ireland evolved them. The discovery of such ancient lake dwellings in Ireland this year has moved human history back a millennium or two without being particular about dates.

But the crannog people, who lived in lakes somewhat like beavers, also had dugout canoes, made from oak trunks, a thousand years before St. Patrick came to Ireland. There is a very fine example of one in Limerick, taken from a peat bog, I and perhaps 2,000 years old. The bottom and the turn of the bilges is all that is left. The oak had been hollowed out by burning, and made smooth inside by patient scraping and chiseling with stone chisels.