Last June I initiated a new series of articles about some of my favorite examples of nautical writing. I return to the topic this month with a review of books about voyages of antiquity, or more specifically, books about the stories of the original voyages of antiquity. Putting aside for a moment the irony that this makes me a third degree derivative writer on these subjects, I’ll jump right in. For the armchair sea voyager who may not have an appetite for the original texts, there are few better authors to follow than Irish historian Tim Severin (1940-2020). Severin has fine tuned an approach also used earlier in the twentieth century by Thor Heyerdahl with his Kon-Tiki adventures. The Severin books retrace the legendary journeys of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Sindbad the Sailor, Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, Robinson Crusoe, Genghis Khan, Tsu Fu, Captain Ahab and the Crusaders. His books about these expeditions are classics of nautical exploration and travel. Similar to Heyerdahl, Severin does extensive research into the original stories and then attempts to recreate the historical (or mythical) boats using traditional building materials and techniques. He then retraces the voyages aided in part by navigation techniques used in the original time period. To grasp just how challenging this approach can be, imagine Severin’s attempt to replicate the 6th century voyage of Saint Brendan across the cold and unforgiving North Atlantic in a boat made almost entirely of leather. For the Sinbad voyage he enlisted help from the Sultan of Oman to build a classic Arab dhow, constructed without the use of nails. He then sailed it 6,000 miles to China. He uses a similar approach in each book, first providing the background of the original voyage, followed by a description of the construction of the replica craft, and finally an account of his sometimes harrowing voyage.
It may not quite date back to antiquity (whenever that ends), but another fascinating story about the recreation of historical voyages is Tony Horwitz’s book Blue Latitudes. In it he follows in the steps of Captain Cook’s three voyages between 1768 and 1780, using the original ship logs and published writing of those on board as a guide. It is a humorous account which provides insights into both the sixteenth century and twentieth century Pacific nations and improbably, explains how the Star Trek franchise was based upon Cook’s voyages.
It has been over 50 years since I read Thor Heyerdahl’s books describing the Pacific voyages of his balsawood Kon-Tiki and the Atlantic crossings of his reed bundled Ra and Ra II. They are understandably a bit hazy in my memory, but they all made lasting impressions. What I find fascinating is that 75 years after the first Kon-Tiki expedition, historians are still debating the merits of the various human migration theories which he was attempting to prove with those voyages.
Published in the March 2022 BSM Beacon