Water of Life

Every time I take the boat down Stranraer Sound, I think of Saint Brendan. A Celtic monk, Brendan set sail toward the setting sun with fourteen of his confreres in a whimsical endeavor to find the Island of the Promise of the Saints. Spoilsports (i.e., my academic colleagues) tell you his charming tale is an allegory for the development of the soul, like Pilgrim’s Progress. If so, then what, one wonders, is symbolized by the whale called Iasconius, whose back the monks mistake for an island where they can light a bonfire and cook up fish stew? Silly sooth, I would say.

Saint Brendan was sailing away from Ireland into what we call the Atlantic, whereas Stranraer is the dour wee burgh on the bottom left-hand corner of Scotland, from which you get the car ferry across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland. The town is emphatically unromantic, though the corrugated countryside behind it, the land of Sir Walter Scott’s “Old Mortality,” is appealingly wet and green, and the inlet down which you sail after leaving the harbor is lined with long, low hills that feel they might well be the last of land before you pass, like Turner’s Fighting Témeraire, over the edge of the world.

In Saint Brendan’s time there were, of course, other, more deadly sailors trekking westward. The Vikings got to Minnesota a bit later (1961, according to the team history), but they were certainly in Newfoundland a thousand years ago, where they lived in a seaside settlement now called L’Anse aux Meadows. If you fly Icelandair back from Europe, not only will you find that Iceland (at the right time of year) is green and Greenland is covered with snow, but you will see the rippling gray whaleroad in between them that they rowed over, laid out like a gelatin print.

Less adventurous Vikings got no further than the hills of the Scotch-English border, where they started families with names like Nicholson and became noted for sheep stealing and cattle theft. They still sing ballads in the border country about the most vicious of these “reivers”: “My name is wee Jock Elliot and wha’ daur meddle wi’ me’” (in English, “who dares meddle with me”; and in straight Latin, “nemo me impune lacessit”).

When James VI of Scots became James I of England in 1603, he started to dream up schemes to make his kingdoms a touch more prosperous—Jamestown in Virginia was one of the less lucrative enterprises he chartered. Introducing a market economy to Northern Ireland was one that paid better (though, of course, at the expense of the Gaelic population). Among those transplanted from southern Scotland across the narrow sea to northern Ireland were quite a number of the vigorous folk who had made life on the Scotch-English border so exciting in earlier days, when men were men and sheep were afraid.

Some of the settlers moved on further during the next few generations, especially to the more southerly of the Thirteen Colonies of North America. But plenty stayed. Like their Scottish ancestors, the Protestant settlers in Ulster had a talent for distillation. No surprise, then, that they soon got into the whiskey business (whiskey with an ”e” because it’s Irish). The first license to distill in the northern tip of Ireland, in the area around Bushmills in County Antrim, was granted in 1608. The present Bushmills business, which claims to be the oldest distillery in the world, is first mentioned in 1783. Nowadays it produces several different whiskies: a standard blend of malt and grain (Bushmills Original, with a white label); various single malts; and a superior blend called Black Bush.

Black Bush is the one I like best, and can be had for less than $30 locally. It is mostly malt whiskey with a certain amount of grain whiskey to lighten the taste (not that it is as light as Cutty Sark and other blends of Scotch popular in the United States). It also has real bite—though, like Irish whiskey in general, it is innocent of the reek of peat that makes connoisseurs of Laphroaig, the Islay malt from the Scotch side of the water, gasp for air. Having been thrice distilled (unusual, though not unique), Bushmills is clean and clear. There are no frills, no superfluous sweetness. It must be something like this they drink in the Island of the Promise of the Saints.