Throughout the Middle Ages there were contacts—or claims of contact—from a wide range of other peoples. The sixth-century Irish monk Saint Brendan sailed extensively around the British Isles, and perhaps as far away as the Faroe Islands.19 According to his legend, which circulated widely in manuscripts from the tenth century onward, Brendan put to sea in a wood-framed coracle covered with “tanned ox-hide stretched over oak bark” and greased with fat. In this, he and a few companions sailed far and wide, enduring hunger and thirst and dodging fire-spewing sea monsters until after many years
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