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.)

BORN IN ASSAM, India, in 1940, Severin credits his upbringing for igniting his exploratory instincts. His father was an English tea planter born in South Africa; his mother, half British, half Danish, was born in India. At the age of six, Severin was shipped off, like so many children of expats, to boarding school in England.

"Look, this was ordinary," says Severin. "It made us extremely independent and self-sufficient at a very early age. We could cope perfectly well, thank you very much. No need to be led by the hand.

"I spent my holidays in England with my grandmother, who had spent her entire life in India. Everything in the household, all the photographs on the walls, all the reference books, all the literature, came from India. I grew up with this whole mythology around me."

Severin was educated at Oxford, where he received a graduate degree in medieval Asian exploration. Researching his thesis, he and two companions retraced the route of Marco Polo, from Venice to Afghanistan, by motorcycle, a journey that resulted in his first book, Tracking Marco Polo (1964). It also foreshadowed his lifelong obsession with epic voyages, and the lengths to which he'd go to achieve historical accuracy.

Building Sinbad's ship, a 90-foot motorless vessel with 2,900 square feet of sail, required 140 tons of hardwood Severin hand-selected in the forests of India, 50,000 coconut husks that were spun into 400 miles of coconut rope to bind the hull planks and ribs together, and 20 traditional shipwrights working nonstop for 165 days. In November 1980, Severin launched the Sohar—named after the ancient Arabian port and purported home of Sinbad—sailing from Muscat, Oman, bound for China.

During the seven-and-a-half-month voyage, Severin and his sailors endured many of the struggles early Arab seamen—the prototypes for Sinbad's character—must have faced. They shared quarters with all kinds of creatures: fruit flies that burrowed into their nostrils, a plague of cockroaches that skittered over their faces, mice in the food lockers, rats in the bilge.

Then there were the mind-warping doldrums. On the 900-mile crossing of the Indian Ocean, from Sri Lanka to Sumatra, the ship began sailing backwards in a headwind. Soon the Sohar was stranded at sea.

"We were facing the long, slow, gnawing doubts of boredom, frustration, and the ultimate possibility of thirst," wrote Severin in The Sindbad Voyage. "We had truly moved back into the days of sail on ocean passages. Our time scale was longer, slower, and ultimately dependent on nature."

For the next 35 days, the Sohar zigzagged aimlessly in the middle of the sea. As food and water began to dwindle, the 27-man crew became resourceful. They fished constantly, but instead of eating their catch, they used it as bait to hook sharks for food. Once they managed to bring in 17 sharks in just ten minutes. During storms, they rigged canvas tarps under the mainsail, funneled the rainwater into buckets, and then passed them hand to hand to the ship's cistern.

"Patience is very easy to display," Severin explains when I ask him about his cool stoicism, a rare quality in this age of instant gratification. "If you believe what you're doing is something truly worthwhile, you stay with it. Frustration arises when you think what you're doing is empty and useless. If the project is worth doing in the first place, it's worth being patient about."

And what makes a project worthy? For him, Severin says, there are two inflexible criteria:

"First, it must be original—something that no one has ever done before. Second, it must stand a reasonable chance of advancing knowledge."

Just days after escaping the doldrums, an abrupt, violent shift in wind slammed the mainsail against the mast and broke the foot-thick, 81-foot main spar in two. "Sohar had been crippled as effectively as a butcher snapping the leg bone of a chicken by twisting it against the socket," Severin wrote. They were 450 miles from Sumatra. Improvisation in times of calamity is one of the defining characteristics of great adventurers, and Severin immediately put a plan into action. Within seven hours, the crew had salvaged the long section of the broken main spar, smoothed off the fractured end, and rigged it with a spare mizzen sail, and Sohar was once again "moving briskly through the water."

Intriguingly, although Severin has managed to display equanimity in the face of countless dangers over four decades of exploration, none of his books address the issue of courage.

"I don't see my journeys as tests of courage," he explains, "but more as tests of knowledge. When I select a project, I examine the evidence. I search for the kernel of truth within the legend. Could a ship of that kind have made such a journey? I gather information, do my homework, dig. If, after a year of research, the project still seems worthy, I build a boat as true to the original craft as possible, then we go out and do it. You get into heavy weather and there are some fraught moments, but I've done the calculations and think the risks are acceptable. There's no courage involved."

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