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.)

ACCORDING TO LEGEND, Saint Brendan sailed from Ireland to Newfoundland 1,400 years ago, but the expedition described above took place in the late 20th century, led by a heretical explorer named Tim Severin.

"There's no question that the Brendan voyage was my most dangerous journey," says Severin, speaking so softly my tape recorder barely picks up his voice. "The margins were very slim. It set the threshold for fear. Once you've been really, really scared and then you come through and everything's fine at the end, it's very difficult to get as frightened again."

"No one's tried another Brendan Voyage," says Severin of his most famous expedition. "and my advice is, don't."

Severin and I are having lunch at the Casino House, in the quiet hills of County Cork, Ireland, Severin's home for more than 30 years. A slight 63-year-old man with blue-green eyes, a lean, handsome face, and a thin neck wrapped in a paisley cravat, Severin looks more like a distinguished British intellectual than one of the finest modern adventurers. In truth, he is both: recipient of the prestigious Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society as well as the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, author of 15 books, winner of numerous literary awards, and the only man to have built and sailed five different seagoing vessels of ancient design.

In an age when stunts of extraordinary physical skill are regularly performed with little apparent purpose beyond 15 minutes of fame—hucking 100-foot waterfalls, snowboarding Everest—and the risks transparently outweigh lasting value, Tim Severin is an adventurer cut from a different cloth.

"No one's tried another Brendan voyage, and my advice is, don't," Severin says, laughing. "It's like a doctor who injects himself with some sort of unknown drug. The hypothesis has been tested. Further risk is unwarranted." Severin's 1976–77 Brendan expedition became his benchmark for exhaustive research and methodical preparation. Studying the eighth-century Latin text Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, which describes a precise if phantasmagoric voyage to the New World by Saint Brendan, a sixth-century Irish monk and missionary, Severin began to believe that such a journey may have actually taken place.

The only way to prove it was to do it, so he did. He spent two years building a replica of the early Irish skin boat, then, using the Navigatio as a travel guide, sailed the craft 4,500 miles from Ireland to Newfoundland via the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. Though he nearly died trying, Severin proved that seafaring Irish monks could have discovered North America in the sixth century, well ahead of the Vikings and almost a millennium before Columbus.

In 1978, Severin's account of the journey, The Brendan Voyage: An Epic Crossing of the Atlantic by Leather Boat, became a global bestseller, was translated into 27 languages, and established Severin as Thor Heyerdahl's rightful successor.

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