 The crew found that the two spoke Irish and took them on board, whereupon they expressed amazement, never before having seen a large wooden ship.The consistency in accounts from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period makes it likely that the construction and design of the currach underwent no fundamental change in the interval.A 17th-century account in Latin by Philip O'Sullivan Beare of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland includes a description of two currachs built in haste to cross the River Shannon.