The Voyage Series

By Tim Severin

A collection of classical seafaring journeys undertaken and recorded by renowned adventurer Tim Severin.

The Brendan Voyage – It has been described as the greatest epic voyage in Irish history.

Tim Severin and his companions built a boat using only techniques and materials available in the sixth-century A.D, when St Brendan was supposed to have sailed to America.

The vessel comprised forty-nine ox hides stitched together in a patchwork and stretched over a wooden frame. This leather skin was only a quarter of an inch thick. Yet Severin and his crew sailed from Brandon Creek in Dingle to Newfoundland, surviving storms and a puncture from pack ice.

The Sinbad Voyage – In 1980, four years after his Brendan Voyage, Tim Severin set out to test another legend. 

With a crew which included eight Omani seamen, and a ship made from Malabar timbers held together with coconut rope and painted with fish oil and sugar, he aimed to recreate the Seven Voyages of Sindbad, from Oman to China, and to find out whatever truth there may have been in the mythical tales of the “Arabian Nights”.

The Jason Voyage – Tim Severin, having sailed in a leather boat from Ireland to America to test the legend of St Brendan, and having linked the seven journeys of Sindbad the Sailor into a single mammoth trip from Arabia to China, set out to investigate the story of Jason. 

He had a twenty-oar galley built in the Aegean to the exact specifications of a Bronze Age boat and, with his crew of new Argonauts, made the same perilous 1500-mile journey. The oarsmen were aided by Greek, Turkish and Soviet volunteers as they passed through each country’s territorial waters, encountering extraordinary hardships on the way.

But they did prove that, in spite of the dangers and discomfort, Jason could have made the journey in an oared galley, which many experts had considered impossible.