Tim Severin, a British adventurer who for 40 years meticulously replicated the journeys of real and mythical explorers like St. Brendan, the Navigator, Sinbad, the Sailor and Marco Polo, died on December 18 at his home in West Cork, Ireland. He was 80 years old.
Her daughter, Ida Ashworth, said the cause was cancer.
In May 1976, Mr. Severin left Ireland on his most audacious journey: following in the wake of St. Brendan, a 6th century monk, who, with a group of other monks, would have made a spectacular journey from Ireland across the Atlantic to the “Promised Land” in a boat wrapped in leather.
Saint Brendan was a sailor who spread the Gospel on his travels through Ireland, Scotland and Wales. If the story of his trip to the Americas had been true, he would have beaten Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus for centuries.
After studying an account of the trip – in a medieval Latin text written many years later entitled “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” or “The Voyage of Saint Brendan, the Abbot” – Mr. Severin brought together a team of designers and artisans, who helped him build a ship. The 36-foot boat and two masts of oak and ash were covered with a quarter inch thick oxhide.
The small crew of the boat, called Brendan, left Brandon Creek, on the Dingle Peninsula, on the west coast of Ireland. They sailed north to the Hebrides and west to the Faroe Islands on a course to Iceland. Whales visited, day after day, sticking close to the boat; Mr. Severin thought they could have mistaken the boat for another whale.
Their arrival in Reykjavik in August 1976 allowed them to examine Brendan’s condition. After shaving the barnacles, they found that the leather had resisted. But because of the ice that would make navigation impossible, the crew stored Brendan and returned home to await better conditions.
When the crew embarked on Brendan again in the summer of 1977, they made their way to Greenland, where they would have to cross the Strait of Denmark, a dangerous channel.
“We knew this was going to be the real test of the boat,” said Severin in a 2012 lecture at Gresham College in London. “It was inevitable that in the Strait of Denmark we would have a terrible time. But we made a commitment that there was no turning back. “
Brendan survived the strait, but the ice prevented him from landing in Greenland, so Brendan sailed around him. But they soon found themselves enveloped in fog – no one responded to the boat’s emergency radio signal – and then slowed down by pieces of melted ice in the Labrador Sea.
Finally, on June 26, 1977, Brendan reached the coast of Newfoundland.
The purpose of the trip, he said, “was to show that the Irish monks’ technology was capable of reaching North America.” He added that he was not sure that St. Brendan and his crew had sailed for North America, only that it could have been done.
Severin, who financed his adventures with advances from books and other sources, wrote “The Brendan Voyage”, published in 1978, about the trip.
A review of the book in The Guardian called the trip “the most remarkable sea voyage since Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove that a ferry could cross the Pacific.”
Mr. Severin was born Giles Timothy Watkins on September 25, 1940, in Jorhat, Assam, in northwest India, where his father, Maurice Watkins, ran a tea plantation, and his mother, Inge (Severin) Watkins, owned From home.
Tim’s travel thirst was triggered by his early years in India – where, he said in a 2015 interview on his publisher’s website, “the whole family environment was living and traveling in distant, often exotic places”. And he grew up at the Tonbridge boarding school in Kent, England, where he read adventure books that sparked his imagination.
He adopted the surname Severin in honor of the maternal grandmother who cared for him in England while his parents were in India.
He graduated from Oxford in history and geography. In 1961, while still studying there, he and two other students traced 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 completed the journey in Calcutta.
The trip resulted in his first book – “Rastreando Marco Polo” (1964) – and an adventure career. To explore the tales of the fictional sailor Sinbad the Sailor, Severin sailed from Muscat, Oman, to China in a replica of an Arab sailboat. To follow the legend of Jason and the Argonauts and Ulysses, he traveled in a replica of a Bronze Age galley.
His other adventures included riding with Mongol nomads to explore Genghis Khan’s heritage; reconstructing British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace’s journey through the Spice Islands in a prahu, a type of sailing boat; and exploring 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 wrote: “Severin operates at the intersection of imagination, action and myth, a place as mature as any other to find a wonderful white whale.”
He wrote more than 20 books – accounts of his travels and historical novels that were based on his expeditions.
“Writing about my own travels requires me to be clearer, more accurate, more defined to report what happened,” he said in an interview on his publisher’s website when his novel “The Pope’s Assassin” was released in 2016. ” In contrast, writing historical fiction is a looser and more evocative process that invokes imagination and allows the plot to take its own course. “
On his last great voyage, he sought out the true origins of Daniel Defoe’s fictional castaway, Robinson Crusoe, on the 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 left his wife, Dee (Pieters) Severin, and two grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Dorothy Sherman, ended in divorce.
Mr. Severin’s first wife – a specialist in medieval Spanish literature – played a role in his decision to recreate the expedition of St. Brendan. While reading “The Voyage of Saint Brendan”, she told Mr. Severin that the story had much more practical details than most medieval texts.
“He talks about the geography of the places Brendan visits”, he remembers her telling in “The Brandon Voyage”. “It carefully describes the progress of the trip, the time and the distances and so on. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend, but a short story that is embroidering a first-hand experience. “
Mr. Severin soon created his own legendary tale.