§ 2 Captivity and Escape
CAPTURE OF PATRICK
Of all that befell Patrick during his captivity in Ireland we know little, yet the little knowledge we possess is more immediate and authentic than our acquaintance with any other episode of his life, because it comes from his own pen. But at the outset we encounter a puzzling contradiction between Patrick’s own words and the tradition which was afterwards current in Ireland as to the place of his bondage.29
When the boats of his captors reached their haven, Patrick was led—so we should conclude from his own story—across the island into the kingdom of Connaught, to serve a master in the very furthest parts of the “ultimate land.” His master dwelled near the wood of Fochlad, “nigh to the western sea,” in north-western Connaught, to this day a wild and desolate land, though the forest has long since been cleared away. A part of this bleak country belonged to Amolngaid, who afterwards became king of Connaught, and it is still called by his name, Tirawley, “the land of Amolngaid.” But the wood of Fochlad was probably of larger extent than the district of Tirawley; it may have stretched over Mayo to the western promontory of Murrisk. Here, we should perhaps suppose, close to Crochan Aigli, the mount which has been immemorially associated with Patrick’s name,30 the British slave served his master for six years.
But our other records transport us to a distant part of Ireland, far away from the forest of Fochlad, to Pictish soil near the eastern coast of Ulster. Here in the lands east of Lough Neagh, the old race, driven eastward from central Ulster, still held out. The name Ulaid, which originally designated the whole of northern Ireland—even as now in its Danish form of Ulster—had come to be specially applied to the eastern corner, whither the true Ulidians had been driven. It seemed now to be the true Ulaid. Within the borders of Ulidia, in this restricted sense, there was a marked division. In the extreme north were the Scots, and in the south were the Picts. The small land of the Scots was known as Dal-riada, and the larger land of the Picts as Dal-aradia.31 It is supposed that both peoples, those known as Scots and those known as Picts, represented the older races, which possessed Ireland before the coming of the Goidelic invaders, whose language ultimately prevailed throughout the whole island.
PLACE OF CAPTIVITY
Here, it was believed and recorded, Patrick served a master whose name was Miliucc. His lands and his homestead were in northern Dalaradia, and Patrick herded his droves of pigs on Mount Miss. The name of this mountain still abides unchanged, though by coalescing with sliabh, the Gaelic word for “mountain,” it is slightly disguised in the form Slemish. Not really lofty, and not visible at a distance of many miles, yet, when you come within its range, Mount Miss dominates the whole scene and produces the impression of a massive mountain. Its curious, striking shape, like an inverted bowl, round and wide-brimmed, exercises a sort of charm on the eye, and haunts one who is walking in the valley of the Braid, somewhat as the triangular form of Pentelicus, clear-cut like the pediment of a temple, follows one about in the plain of Athens.
It was in this valley of the Braid and on the slopes of Miss that, according to the common tradition and general belief, Patrick for six years did the bidding of his lord.32 But it is certain, from his own words, that he served near the forest of Fochlad. An attempt may be made to reconcile the contradiction by assuming that he changed masters, and that, having dwelled at first in the west, he was sold to another master in Dalaradia;33 but his own description of his bondage seems hardly compatible with such a conjecture. The simplest solution seems to be a frank rejection of the story which connected his captivity with Mount Miss in the land of the Picts.
While he ate the bitter bread of bondage in a foreign land, a profound spiritual change came over him. He had never given much thought to his religion, but now that he was a thrall amid strangers, “the Lord,” he says, “opened the sense of my unbelief.” The ardour of religious emotion, “the love and fear of God,” so fully consumed his soul that in a single day or night he would offer a hundred prayers; and he describes himself, in woodland or on mountain-side, rising from his bed before dawn and going forth to pray in hail, or rain, or snow.
His contemplation was above the earth,
And fixed on spiritual object.
Thus the years of his bondage were also the years of his “conversion,” and he looked back upon this stage in his spiritual development as the most important and critical in his life.
THE ESCAPE
But he was homesick, and he was too young to abandon hope of deliverance and escape from the wild outland into which fate had cast him. He longed and hoped, and we may be sure that he prayed, to win his way back within the borders of the Roman Empire. His waking hopes came back to him at night as responsive voices in his dreams. He heard a voice that said to him in his sleep, “Thou doest well to fast; thou shalt soon return to thy native land.” And another night it said, “Behold, thy ship is ready.” Patrick took these dream-voices for divine intimations, and they heartened him to make an attempt to escape. Escape was not easy, and was beset with many perils. For the port where he might hope to find a foreign vessel was about a hundred and eighty miles from his master’s house. Patrick, in describing his escape, does not name the port, but we may conjecture that it was Inver-dea, at the mouth of the stream, which is now called the Vartry, and reaches the sea near the town of Wicklow. The resolution of attempting this long flight, with the danger of falling into the hands of some other master, if not of being overtaken by his own, is ascribed by Patrick to the promptings of a higher will than his. He escaped all dangers and reached the port, where he knew no man. But at all events he had chosen the season of his flight well. The ship of his dreams was there, and was soon to sail. It was a ship of traders; their cargo was aboard, and part of the cargo consisted of dogs, probably Irish wolf-hounds. Patrick spoke to some of the crew, and made a proposal of service. He was willing to work his passage to the port to which the vessel was bound. The proposal seems to have been at first entertained, but afterwards the shipmaster objected, and said sharply, “Nay, in no wise shalt thou come with us.” The disappointment, as safety seemed within grasp, must have been bitter, and Patrick turned away from the mariners to seek the lodging where he had found shelter. As he went he prayed, and before he finished his prayer he heard one of the crew shouting behind him, “Come quickly, for they are calling you.” The shipmaster had been persuaded to forego his objections, and Patrick set sail from the shores of Ireland with this rough company.
To what country or race the crew belonged we are not told; we learn only that they were heathen. They wished to enter into some solemn compact of abiding friendship with Patrick, but he refused to be adopted by them. “I would not,” he says, using a quaint phrase,34 “suck their breasts because of the fear of God. Nevertheless I hoped of them that they might come to the faith of Christ, for they were heathen, and therefore I held on with them.”
They sailed for three days before they made land. The name of the coast which they reached is hidden from us, and there is something very strange about the whole story. The voyage was clearly uneventful. They were not driven by storm or stress of weather out of their course to some undesired shore. There is nothing in the tale, as Patrick tells it himself, to suggest that the ship did not reach the port to which it was bound. Yet when they landed, their way lay through a desert, and they journeyed through the desert for eight and twenty days in all. Their food ran short, and at last starvation threatened them; many of their dogs were exhausted and left to die on the wayside. Then the shipmaster said to Patrick, “Now, O Christian, thou sayest thy God is great and almighty. Why then dost thou not pray for us? For we are in danger of starvation, and there is no likelihood of our seeing any man.” And Patrick, in the spirit of the missionary, replied, “Nothing is impossible to the Lord, my God. Turn to him truly, that he may send you food in your path this day till ye are filled, for he has plenty in all places.” Presently a drove of pigs appeared on the road, and the starving wayfarers killed many, and rested there two nights, and were refreshed. They were as ready as Patrick himself to believe that the appearance of the swine was a miraculous answer to his prayer, and he won high esteem in their eyes.
As Patrick slept here, his body satisfied, after long privation, by a plenteous meal, he had a dream, which he remembered vividly as long as he lived. He dreamed that a great stone fell upon him, and that he could not move his limbs. Then he called upon Elias,35 and the beams of the rising sun awoke him, and the feeling of heaviness fell away. Patrick regarded this nightmare as a temptation of Satan, and imagined that Christ had come to his aid. The incident has a ridiculous side, but it shows the intense religious excitement of Patrick at this period, ready to see in the most trivial occurrence a direct interposition from heaven; and we must remember how in those days dreams were universally invested with a certain mystery and dread.
For nine days more Patrick and his companions travelled through deserted places, but were not in want of food or shelter; on the tenth they came to the habitations of men. Patrick had no thoughts of remaining with them longer than he needed. He had heard in a dream a divine voice answering his thoughts and saying, “Thou shalt remain with them two months.” This dream naturally guided him in choosing the time of his escape. At the end of two months he succeeded in releasing himself from his masters.
JOURNEY IN GAUL
In his description of this strange adventure he leaves us to divine the geography as best we may, for he relates it as if it had happened in some nameless land beyond the borders of the known world. But the circumstances enable us to determine that the ship made for the coast of Gaul. It can be shown that its destination was not Britain, and Gaul is the only other land which could have been reached in three days or thereabouts. The aim of the traders with their Irish dogs must have been to reach southern Europe, and the place of disembarkation would naturally have been Nantes or Bordeaux. The story of the long faring through a wilderness might be taken to illustrate the condition of western and south-western Gaul at this period.36 For much about the time at which Patrick’s adventures happened, Gallic poets were writing heartbreaking descriptions of the desolation which had been brought upon this country by the great invasion of Vandals and Sueves and other barbarous peoples. The Vandals and Sueves had indeed already left it to pass into Spain, but they had left it waste. Strong castles, walled cities, sings one poet, could not escape; the hands of the barbarians reached even lonely lodges in dismal wilds and the very caves in the hills. “If the whole ocean,” cries another, “had poured its waters into the fields of Gaul, its vasty waves would have spared more than the invaders.”
But even in the exceptional conditions of the time, it is surprising that a party, starting from a port on the west coast and travelling to the Mediterranean, should have walked for four weeks without seeing a human abode and in dire peril of starvation. We must suppose that they avoided, deliberately and carefully, beaten roads, and perhaps made considerable halts, in order to avoid encounters with roaming bands of the Teutonic barbarians.
Though Patrick did not mention the scene of his journey in the narrative which he left behind him, he used to tell his disciples how he had “the fear of God as a guide in his journey through Gaul and Italy.” This confirms the conclusion, to which the other evidence points, that Gaul was the destination of the crew, and also intimates that he travelled with his companions through Gaul to Italy. It was in Italy, then, we must suppose, that he succeeded in escaping from them.
The book in which he described this episode was written by Patrick, as we shall see hereafter, when he was an old man. He rigidly omitted all details which did not bear upon his special purpose in writing it. The whole tale of his captivity and escape, undefined or vaguely defined by landmarks or seamarks, as if the places of the adventures had no name or lay beyond the range of all human charts, is designed to display exclusively the spiritual significance of those experiences. That the land of his captivity was Ireland, this was indeed significant; but otherwise names of men and places were of no concern and might be allowed to drop away. Patrick, in reviewing this critical period of his life, reproduces the select incidents as they impressed him at the moment, contributing, as he believed, to his own spiritual development, or illustrating the wonderful ways in which Heaven had dealt with him.