Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/115

Rh only canoes dug out of the solid timber. When Cortes was building the brigantines with which he attacked the city of Mexico from the lake, he had to manufacture the tar he required from such suitable trees as he could find. Quetzatcoatl may have used serpents' skins for a similar purpose, and such use would imply that the vessel in which he sailed away was not a mere canoe, but a built-up boat. If he was really St. Brendan, nothing is more likely than that he should seek for a substitute for tar or pitch in skins of some sort. Coming from the west coast of Ireland, he would be familiar with the native curracles, coracles, or hide-covered boats then in common use (and not yet wholly discarded) for coasting purposes, and sometimes for voyages to the coasts of Britain and the continent of Europe. Some of these were of large size, and capable of carrying a small mast, the body being a stout framework of ash ribs, covered with hides of oxen, sometimes of threefold thickness. It may have been a vessel of this kind which Quetzatcoatl constructed for his return voyage, or it may be that he employed the serpents' skins for the protection of the seams of his built-up boat in lieu of tar or pitch. In any case the tradition makes him out a navigator and boat-builder of some experience, and if he were really St. Brendan he would have had a knowledge of the Irish mode of constructing and navigating sea-going crafts, and would probably have employed serpents' skins, the best Mexican substitute for ox-hide, in either of the ways suggested.

In the Mexican tradition there is no certain reference to Quetzatcoatl having with him companions of his own country, though in the story of St. Brendan the Irish saint is given such companions both in his going out and coming back. But the Mexican tradition nowhere negatives, either by implication or directly, that Quetzatcoatl had companions of his own race, and it seems in the highest degree improbable that he could have crossed the Atlantic both ways alone and unassisted by comrades. It may, therefore, be supposed that the fact of Quetzatcoatl having attendants of the same religion and nationality as himself was a detail omitted from an account which chiefly concerned itself with the great figure of Quetzatcoatl himself.

It would be presumptuous to claim that the identity of Quetzatcoatl with St. Brendan has been completely established in this essay, but it may reasonably be submitted that there is no violent inconsistency involved in the theory herein advanced, and an examination of the evidence upon which it is based discloses many remarkable coincidences in favor of the opinion that the Mexican Messiah may have been the Irish saint. Beyond this it would not be safe to go, and it is not probable that future discoveries will enable the identity of Quetzatcoatl to be more clearly traced.—Gentleman's Magazine.