Timothy Severin was a British explorer, historian, and writer.
14 Facts About Tim Severin
2.
Tim Severin was awarded both the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.
3.
Tim Severin received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage.
4.
Tim Severin was born Giles Timothy Watkins in 1940 to Maurice and Inge Watkins in Jorhat, Assam, India, where his father managed a tea plantation.
5.
Tim Severin adopted the name Severin to honour his maternal grandmother, who cared for him in his youth.
6.
Tim Severin is survived by his daughter from his first marriage, Ida Ashworth, and two grandsons.
7.
From conquistadors to nineteenth-century gentlemen explorers, Tim Severin follows the routes and tells the stories of the adventurers who have travelled along the US river the Mississippi for hundreds of years, and does so while navigating the length of the river by canoe and launch.
8.
Tim Severin began his research into ancient Greek ships and the details of the text in 1981.
9.
In 1984, with twenty volunteer oarsmen, Tim Severin rowed and sailed from northern Greece through the Dardanelles, crossed the Marmara Sea, and passed through the Straits of Bosphorus to the Black Sea, reaching the Phasis delta in then-Soviet Georgia: a voyage of 1,500 miles.
10.
Once again making use of the Argo from The Jason Voyage, in 1985 Tim Severin followed the route of Ulysses' voyage home in The Odyssey, from Troy to Ithaca in the Ionian islands.
11.
Along the way, Tim Severin made tentative or conclusive identifications of The land of the Lotus-eaters, King Nestor's palace, the Halls of Hades, the Roving Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, and the sirens.
12.
Tim Severin was unable to follow exactly the route of Duke Godfrey due to the civil war in the Lebanon, instead routing through Syria and Jordan to reach Jerusalem.
13.
Tim Severin set out to prove that such a voyage could have been made.
14.
Tim Severin's quest takes him to the remotest parts of the South Pacific: the Philippine island of Pamilacan, whose people hunt whale sharks with their hands and grappling hooks and the Indonesian island of Lamalera, whose people hunt sperm whales with harpoons from open boats.