Click on an image for a complete description and ordering instructions.
Glacier Bay, August, 2011
The Celts are renowned for sailing out from home shore. And westward toward the land beyond land, the domain of all the saints. As I stood aboard the Holland America ship Zuirdam and heard the sharp cracking of the ice and small icebergs crashing into the sea, I thought of Saint Brendan of Ireland. On his sixth century epic journey he recounted encountering "ice castles" in the sea. Well, here they were again! The glacier behind me, dark blue at its base, has white spires of ice towering up like the spires of castles.
The Celt, Saint Brendan the Navigator, wrote his medieval epic Navagatio Sancti Brendani which seems to indicate that Brendan accompanied by other monks reached North America in the sixth century. Before he sailed in the fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus visited Galway in Ireland where he probably studied these texts!