Tim Severin

Tim Severin was born in Assam (now India) in 1940, raised in England, and studied at Oxford before embarking on a career that was sui generis among travel writers. He was a historical voyage recreator — he built replica ancient vessels and sailed them along the routes of legendary journeys to prove that the journeys were physically possible.

The Brendan Voyage (1978) was the first and most celebrated: he built a traditional Irish curragh — a hide boat, exactly as St Brendan would have used in the 6th century AD — and sailed it from Ireland across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland. The voyage took two years (1976–77), crossing ice fields and encountering whales, and proved that such a crossing was possible with the materials and techniques available to early medieval Irish monks.

He followed this with the Sindbad Voyage (1982), sailing an Arab dhow from Oman to China to prove the routes of the Sindbad stories; the Jason Voyage (1985), following the route of Jason and the Argonauts from Greece to the Black Sea; the Ulysses Voyage (1987), tracing Homer's Odyssey; and the China Voyage (1994), in which he crossed the Pacific on a bamboo raft.

Each book is simultaneously a maritime adventure and a historical argument. Severin was a rigorous researcher and his seamanship was real — the voyages were genuinely dangerous and several nearly ended in disaster.