Irish Exploration of the Atlantic

Irish religious activity was responsible for some of the earliest European exploration of the Atlantic.

Irish monks journedy in the Atlantic to convert pagans to Christianity and to find new, isolated lands suitable for hermit life.

Before the 400s, Ireland had been almost entirely pagan. It was a land of scattered homesteads and small individual communities under the rule of local noblemen. Most of the population lived by fishing, or near-subsistence farming, or by raiding the property of wealthier neighbors.

Early in the 400s, one such raiding party returned from the west coast of Britain with a 16-year-old boy called Patrick, who had been captured as a slave. Patrick was later to become Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

After six years in captivity, Patrick escaped and fled to France, where he became a monk. In 432, he returned to Ireland and spent the rest of his life on missionary tours throughout the country. In some places, he converted the pagan inhabitants to Christianity. In others, he organized the tiny pockets of Christianity that already existed, and brought Ireland in closer touch with Rome and the church of western Europe.

In Patrick's time there were no cities or large towns, and the country was divided into many small principalities. This feature of Ireland in the 400's aided the establishment of monasteries throughout the country. The noblemen converted by Patrick, or by other wandering priests, set up local monasteries, each independent of the others.

When a monastery throve, it followed the example set by Patrick and sent out missionary groups in its turn.

Some of the missionaries traveled long distances within Ireland itself, while others made much longer journeys far beyond the Irish shores.

Among their first converts were other people of Celtic origin.

Irish missionaries established communities in southwest England, in Cornwall, where the Romans had introduced Christianity centuries earlier.

They also established themselves in Wales, where the people had also known Christianity.

The Irish established Christian foundations in France and Germany, and as far away as northern Italy. Many of these monasteries kept records from which we derive much of our knowledge of the earliest Irish travelers overseas.

In 563, Saint Columba, a monk from the north of Ireland, established a monastery on Iona, a tiny island off the west coast of what is now Scotland. From Iona, monks began the conversion of the Picts on the mainland. Iona rapidly became the early center of the church in Scotland, and served to keep the Irishmen who came to settle the country in touch with their homeland.

From the 500's onward, Irish monks and hermits began to turn their attention away from the known world. Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by experienced sailors and supporting lay communities, they traveled and settled in little-known lands.

Saint Brendan (484-577) was an Irish abbot born at the Bay of Tralee, in the southwestern part of Ireland. Brendan became a monk. Determined to live the life of a hermit, he is reported to have sailed out into the Atlantic in search of solitude.

He is said to have visited the Sheep Islands, which may have been what are known as the Faroe Islands, and the Paradise of Birds, which may have been the Shetlands or Outer Hebrides.

It is also believed that he reached what he thought were the "Isles of the Blessed" described by ancient classical writers.

In about 825, an Irish monk named Dicuil, who studied and taught in Europe, wrote about an Irish colony in the Faeroes.

According to Dicuil, in about 770, Irish monks reached an island called Thyle or Thule, which may have been Iceland. Dicuil reported that the monks in Thyle observed that during midsummer, it never grew dark.

Other sources indicate that by Dicuil's time, Irish monks were regularly traveling to and from Iceland.