Tim Severin, a British adventurer who explores the journeys of real and mythical explorers such as St. Brendan the Navigator, Sinbad the Sailor and Marco Polo, who have been repeating themselves for 40 years, passed away on December 18 at his home in West Cork, Ireland. He was 80.
His daughter, Ida Ashworth, said the cause is cancer.
In May 1976, Severin left Ireland on his most daring voyage: in the wake of St. Brendan, a sixth-century monk, who, along with a group of other monks, embarked on a spectacular voyage from Ireland across the Atlantic to the “Promised Land” in a leather-wrapped boat.
Saint Brendan was a sailor who spread the Gospel during his travels through Ireland, Scotland and Wales. If the story of his trip to America were true, he would have beaten Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus for centuries.
After studying a report of the voyage – in a medieval Latin text written many years later entitled “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” or “The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot”, Mr. Severin put together a team of designers and craftsmen who helped him build a vessel. The two-meter boat of 36-foot oak and ash was covered with a quarter-inch-thick ox.
The small crew of the boat, named Brendan, departed from Brandon Creek, on the Dingle Peninsula, off the west coast of Ireland. They sail north to the Hebrides Islands and west to the Faroe Islands on a course to Iceland. Whales visit, day after day, and stick to the boat; Mr. Severin thought they might have mistaken the boat for another whale.
Upon their arrival in Reykjavik in August 1976, they were able to investigate the condition of the Brendan. After scraping off razors, they found that the ladder was holding. But because of packs that would make it impossible to sail, the crew saved the Brendan and returned home to wait for better conditions.
When the crew boarded the Brendan again in the summer of 1977, they went to Greenland, where they had to cross the Strait of Denmark, a dangerous canal.
“We knew this would be the real test of the boat,” he said. Severin said during a lecture in 2012 at Gresham College in London. “It was inevitable that we would have terrible weather in Denmark Street. But we have committed ourselves to the fact that there are no more times. ”
The Brendan survived the strait, but ice precluded landing in Greenland, and the Brendan sailed around it. But they quickly immersed themselves in fog – no one responds to the boat’s emergency radio beacon – then slowed down by patches of melting ice in the Labrador Sea.
Finally, on June 26, 1977, the Brendan arrived on the Newfoundland coast.
The purpose of the trip, he said, “was to show that the technology of the Irish monks is capable of reaching North America.” He added that he could not be sure that St. Brendan and his crew sailed to North America, but only that it could be done.
Mr. Severin, who financed his adventures with book advances and other resources, wrote ‘The Brendan Voyage’, published in 1978, about the journey.
A review of the book in The Guardian calls the voyage the ‘most remarkable voyage since Thor Heyerdahl’s evidence that a balsa raft could cross the Pacific Ocean. ‘
Mr. Severin was born Giles Timothy Watkins on September 25, 1940 in Jorhat, Assam, in northwestern India, where his father, Maurice Watkins, ran a tea plantation, and his mother, Inge (Severin) Watkins, a housewife.
Tim’s delusion was fueled by his early years in India, where, according to a 2015 interview on his publishing website, he said: ‘the whole family environment was a place to live and travel to remote, often exotic places.’ And it grew at boarding school in Tonbridge, Kent, England, where he read adventure books that sparked his imagination.
He adopted the name of Severin to honor the maternal grandmother who cared for him in England while his parents were in India.
He earned degrees at Oxford in history and geography. In 1961, while still studying there, he and two other students tracked down Marco Polo’s caravan route on motorcycles: they started in Venice, then traveled to the Chinese border in northwestern Afghanistan, along the Grand Trunk Road in India and the travel in Calcutta completed.
The journey led to his first book – “Tracking Marco Polo” (1964) – and a career of adventure. To explore the stories of the fictional sailor Sinbad the sailor, Severin sailed from Muscat to Oman to China in a replica of an Arab sailing ship. Following the legend of Jason and the Argonauts and that of Ulysses, he traveled in a replica of a Bronze Age gallery.
His other adventures included riding with Mongolian nomads to explore the heritage of Genghis Khan; the path of the British physicist Alfred Russel Wallace through the Spice Islands in a prahu, a kind of sailboat; and to investigate whether a white whale like Moby Dick ever existed.
In his review of “In Search of Moby Dick” (2000) in The New York Times, W. Jeffrey Bolster writes, “Severin works on the intersection of imagination, action and myth, as ripe as finding a wonderful white. whale. ”
He has written more than 20 books – versions of his travels and historical novels that his expeditions used.
‘To write about my own travels, I need to be sharper, more precise and more defined to retell what happened,’ he said in an interview on his publisher’s website when his novel ‘The Pope’s Assassin’ 2016 appears. ‘In contrast, the writing of historical fiction is a looser, more enticing process that evokes the imagination and lets the storyline go its own way. ‘
In his last great voyage, he sought the true origins of Daniel Defoe’s fictional stray Robinson Crusoe on islands where shipwrecks occurred and in Central and South America. His book, “In Search of Robinson Crusoe”, was published in 2003.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Severin is survived by his wife, Dee (Pieters) Severin, and two grandsons. His first marriage, to Dorothy Sherman, ended in divorce.
Severin’s first wife – a specialist in medieval Spanish literature – played a role in his decision to make the St. To recreate Brendan Expedition. While she ‘The Voyage of St. Brendan ‘read, she told Severin that the story has considerably more practical details than most medieval texts.
“It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits,” he recalled telling him in “The Brandon Voyage.” “It accurately describes the progress of the journey, the time and distances, and so on. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a story that embroiders a first-hand experience. ”
Mr. Severin soon created his own legendary story.