Tim Severin

• 1. Introduction

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  Tim Severin spent his life asking a single stubborn question: what if the old stories were true? Born Giles Timothy Watkins on the 25th of September 1940 in Jorhat, Assam, where his father managed a tea plantation, he would go on to build a leather boat with hand-stitched ox hides, sail a ninth-century Arab dhow across the Indian Ocean, and row a replica Bronze Age galley into the Black Sea. He won the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and his account of one voyage alone was translated into sixteen languages. He died on the 18th of December 2020, aged 80, at his home in Timoleague, West Cork, Ireland. What drove a man from a tea plantation in Assam to the mid-Pacific on a rotting bamboo raft? The answer begins at Oxford University, where a young undergraduate was already planning his first expedition.

• 2. From Oxford to the World

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  Severin adopted the surname he became famous under to honour his maternal grandmother, the woman who cared for him during his youth. His given name was Watkins, and he came to England for schooling at age 7, attending Tonbridge School before reading geography and history at Keble College, Oxford. That academic background was not merely decorative. While still a student, he wrote his thesis on the first European travellers in Central Asia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and he would later draw on that research for an expedition to the Gobi Desert.

  His first major expedition came while he was still an undergraduate. Severin, Stanley Johnson, and Michael de Larrabeiti used Marco Polo's own account, The Description of the World, as a road map and retraced Polo's thirteenth-century journey across Asia by motorcycle. They rode from Oxford through Switzerland to Venice, then on through Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan. The journey included sandstorms, floods, motorcycle accidents, and time in jail. Severin and his guides even rode camels through the Deh Bakri pass in search of the Persian "apples of Paradise" Polo had described. Visa problems at the Chinese border stopped them short of completing the route, and they returned to England by sea from Bombay. The book, Tracking Marco Polo, eventually appeared in 1964.

• 3. The Leather Boat

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  Medieval Latin texts dating to at least 800 AD told of the monk Brendan, who lived from around 489 to 583, making a seven-year crossing of the Atlantic to a new land. Most scholars treated this as legend. Severin believed it preserved a genuine memory of an actual voyage, and he set out to test that belief in the most direct way possible: by building the boat.

  In 1976, using traditional tools, craftsmen constructed the Brendan to Severin's specifications. The 36-foot, two-masted vessel was built of Irish ash and oak, with the timbers hand-lashed using nearly two miles of leather thong. Forty-nine traditionally tanned ox hides were wrapped around the frame and sealed with wool grease. On the 17th of May 1976, Severin and his crew, George Maloney, Arthur Magan, and Tróndur Patursson, sailed from the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.

  Over more than thirteen months, the Brendan covered 4,500 miles, stopping at the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, where the crew wintered and did not depart again until the 11th of May. They reached Peckford Island, Newfoundland, on the 26th of June 1977, before the Canadian Coast Guard towed them to Musgrave Harbour. Severin told reporters that the voyage had proved a leather boat could cross the North Atlantic by a route few modern sailors would attempt. He also found real-world correspondences for the "Island of Sheep", the "Paradise of Birds", the "Crystal Towers", and the "mountains that hurled rocks at voyagers" in the medieval text. The book that followed became an international best-seller in sixteen languages. The Brendan itself is now on display at the Craggaunowen open-air museum in County Clare.

• 4. Sindbad and the Sultan

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  Severin spent three years researching the tales of Sindbad from One Thousand and One Nights and studying early Arab and Persian drawings of medieval ships before the project took physical shape. The key decision was to build the vessel not just accurately but authentically. He brought the project to Sur, Oman in 1980, where Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said sponsored the construction.

  Omani shipwrights, working under Severin's guidance, built the Sohar, an 87-foot replica of a ninth-century lateen-rigged dhow with cotton sails. Instead of nails, the planks were sewn together with nearly 400 miles of hand-rolled coconut-husk rope. Construction took seven months. The Sohar left Oman on the 21st of November 1980.

  Severin and a crew of 25 navigated by the stars. From Sur they crossed the Arabian Sea, sailed south down India's Malabar Coast to Lakshadweep and Calicut, then continued to Sri Lanka. Crossing the Indian Ocean from Galle, the crew was becalmed in the doldrums for nearly a month and suffered broken spars. They were nearly run down by freighters. The Sohar reached Sabang on the 17th of April, then passed through the Malacca Straits to Malacca and Singapore, arriving on the 1st of June, before completing the nearly 6,000-mile voyage when they docked in Guangzhou, China on the 6th of July. The account of the journey earned Severin the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage.

• 5. Ancient Greece, Bronze and Oar

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  Apollonius of Rhodes first wrote down the Argonautica in Alexandria in the late third century BC, but the story of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece was far older. Severin began his research into ancient Greek ships and the poem's geographic details in 1981. Master shipwright Vasilis Delimitros of Spetses hand-built the vessel that would carry him: a 54-foot replica of a Bronze Age galley based on a scale model of the Argo.

  In 1984, Severin and twenty volunteer oarsmen rowed and sailed from northern Greece through the Dardanelles, crossed the Marmara Sea, and passed through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, reaching the Phasis delta in what was then Soviet Georgia. The total distance came to 1,500 miles. Along the route they identified landmarks associated with Jason's crew and found what they believed was a plausible explanation for the legend of the Golden Fleece. Severin published the account in The Jason Voyage in 1985.

  The following year, rather than building a new vessel, he returned to the same galley and used it to retrace Ulysses' route home in the Odyssey, sailing from Troy to Ithaca in the Ionian Islands in 1985. That expedition led to tentative or firm identifications of the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, King Nestor's palace, the Halls of Hades, the Roving Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, and the sirens. The account appeared as The Ulysses Voyage in 1987.

• 6. Horses, Khan, and a Bamboo Raft

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  Nine hundred years after the First Crusade, Severin traded maritime expeditions for the saddle. He and Sarah Dormon set out from Belgium to follow the 2,500-mile route of Duke Godfrey of Bouillon to Jerusalem. Their two horses were a riding-school palfrey named Mystery and a Heavy Ardennes named Carty, the latter a descendant of the type of war horse Severin described as "the Main Battle Tank" of the Crusader cavalry. The journey stretched over two years, with the horses and riders resting over the winter of 1987-1988. Civil war in Lebanon forced Severin to reroute through Syria and Jordan rather than following Godfrey's exact path.

  To mark the 800th birthday of Genghis Khan, Severin returned to Central Asia, the territory he had first studied as an Oxford student. He rode with Mongol herdsmen along old imperial courier routes, mingled with camel herders in the Gobi Desert, and ate with Kazakhs in their yurts. The resulting book, part travelogue and part research paper, appeared in 1993 under the title In Search of Genghis Khan.

  That same year, Severin turned to an ancient Chinese legend: Hsu Fu, a navigator sent by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, in 218 BC to search the Eastern Ocean for life-prolonging drugs. On the beach at Sam Son, Vietnam, Severin oversaw the construction of a 60-foot raft built from 220 bamboos and rattan cording, powered by an 800-square-foot junk-rigged sail. After leaving Asia in May 1993, the crew faced monsoons, pirates, and typhoons. After 105 days and 5,500 miles, the rattan began rotting and the raft began coming apart in the mid-Pacific, forcing them to abandon it about 1,000 miles short of their destination. Severin still counted the voyage a success: it had proved, he wrote in The China Voyage, that such a craft from the second century BC could have crossed the Pacific.

• 7. Fiction and Final Years

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  Alongside his non-fiction, Severin wrote historical adventure novels. The Viking Series, first published in 2005, follows a young Viking travelling the world. Two years later came the first book in The Adventures of Hector Lynch, a series set in the late seventeenth century and centered on a seventeen-year-old Corsair. That series eventually ran to five books, with the final volume, Freebooter, appearing in 2017.

  Severin's marriage to Dorothy Sherman, a specialist in medieval Spanish literature, ended in divorce. He later married Dee Pieters. He is survived by his daughter from his first marriage, Ida Ashworth, and two grandsons.

  The honours he accumulated reflected the breadth of his work: the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1986, the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, honorary doctorates from Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, and the Gold Medal of the Maritime Institute of Ireland. His 1999 book In Search of Moby Dick followed him to the Philippine island of Pamilacan and the Indonesian island of Lamalera, where he compared Herman Melville's account against the living whale-hunting cultures that Melville himself had drawn on, finding that much of Melville's material had been borrowed or fabricated.