Is Tim Severin the Greatest Living Explorer?

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Outside Magazine June 2004

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The Hard Way
Captain Retro (Cont.)

EVEN BEFORE TOUCHING in the Brendan, Severin was dreaming of his next project: retracing the route of perhaps the greatest literary seafarer of all time, Sinbad the Sailor. In 1980–81, Severin built a medieval ship and sailed the 6,000-mile great trade route described in The Arabian Nights, from Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula, to Canton, China.

In 1984, he designed a 20-oar galley to exact Bronze Age specifications and, with a 17-person crew, rowed it from Greece to the Soviet republic of Georgia, proving that the Greek myth of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece was based on geographical fact. The next year, Severin used the same boat to tackle the über-myth of Western literature, retracing Ulysses' odyssey from Troy to Ithaca. Following that, he completed two overland expeditions by horse, one tracking the 2,500-mile route of the First Crusade across Europe, the other exploring the Mongolia of Genghis Khan; two more sea passages, the China Voyage and the Spice Islands Voyage; followed by two expeditions searching for the historical roots of Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe.

Severin wrote a book about every expedition he completed. All told, he devoted between two and four years to each project, using the book contracts to fund his unorthodox life of adventure and creating a bankable franchise of historic reenactment. To connoisseurs of British sailing literature, Severin the author is legendary. However, unlike much contemporary travel writing, his work is free of emotional outpourings. He is eloquent at description, fastidious about mythic details, but reticent about his personal life. (He was married for ten years, then divorced, and has a grown daughter named Ida.) Much like the 19th-century English explorers, Severin keeps his own counsel and sticks to facts. No confessional effusion, no dark psychological secrets, no wanking.

Reading his books, you realize that Severin is an anachronism: Rigorously disciplined, he is willing to go back in history and re-create the conditions and crafts of ancient travelers, and then physically experience their difficult journeys himself, risking his life to better understand the complex intertwining of history, myth, and geography.

Severin, in short, is a time traveler.

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