Brendan

MEANING: There are at least seventeen saints who bear the name but St. Breandan the Navigator is probably the best known. Tradition has it that he was born in County Kerry, set sail in a small boat with a group of monks in the early 6th century, visited an island inhabited by birdmen, rode on the back of a whale and was the first European to set foot on the shores of the Americas, nearly a thousand years before Columbus. In the 1970s Tim Severin recreated St. Breandan’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in a flimsy, hide-covered rowboat known as a “”curragh.”” St. Breandan is venerated in Ireland as the patron saint of seafarers and travellers.