Tim Severin's "The Jason Voyage"

A historian friend introduced Tim Severin to me a few years ago when I told him a favorite book (at the time) was Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. Heyerdahl (1914 - 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer. Probably his most famous work was his book Kon Tiki, which was a raft made following ancient craft-building traditions with vines for binding balsa logs and bamboo canisters for storing water. Thor and a five others sailed their raft from the Peruvian coast to the island reefs of Raroia in the Tuamotus 4,300 miles distant. No one died, the 1947 adventure was a success and his subsequent book of his endeavor -- from building the raft to the difficulties of sailing without contact to the rest of the world to being cast on an island and feared as spirits of the original Kon Tiki -- was publicly well received. He proved the hypothesis that ancient peoples could have followed sea routes to navigate the globe, particularly to relocate to the Polynesian Islands. He made subsequent voyages and in 2011, a few years after his death, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives were added to UNESCO's "Memory of the World" Register.

Tim Severin (1940 - present) made similar grand voyages of adventure. He is a historian, a navigator, and fortunately a writer, as he combines these three pleasures with grand adventure writing after research-based adventure seeking. As a navigator, he reads ancient texts and ponders on sea routes taken, e.g. Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002), the Sinbad Voyage (1980-1981), In Search of Moby Dick (1999). He also did motorcycle and camel explorations when retracing the route of Marco Polo. He has been quite diverse in his explorations; his routes have been almost uniformly based on ancient ones documented in literature, e.g. The Jason Voyage (1986), or the non-fiction historical texts.

The Jason Voyage

The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1986)

Since Wikipedia already wrote a brief summary of the voyage, there's no need to reinvent the wheel and summarize the book myself:

The epic poem Argonautica, first written down by Apollonius of Rhodes in Alexandria in the late 3rd century BC, became the basis for Severin's next expedition. He began his research into ancient Greek ships and the details of the text in 1981. Master shipwright Vasilis Delimitros of Spetses hand built a 54-foot (16.5 m) replica of a Bronze Age galley based on a detailed scale model of the Argo. In 1984, with twenty volunteer oarsmen, 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—a voyage of 1,500 miles (2,400 km). Along the way they identified many of the landmarks visited by Jason and his Argonauts, and found a likely explanation for the legend of the Golden Fleece. Severin recounted the expedition in The Jason Voyage (1985).

Though historians have questioned the veracity that anyone like Jason could have existed, or at least existed but doubted whether the golden fleece existed, they have also questioned the navigability of the Argonauts' route from Athens to Georgia. With his commissioning of a boat as identical to the original Argos as possible, and with an equal number of men (minus the mythologically great Heracles, Castor and Polux, etc) Severin proved that a sea-route could done. En route to Georgia following the original argonaut route he made stops on islets and recorded tides; he experienced brutal storms like Jason had experienced in literature, and Severin identified the appearance of rocks, hills, and island formations that matched those on the route of the original Argonauts. 

While in Greece, no self-respecting girl would want the evil name of Medea, but in Georgia it is a very popular name. Medea had been a princess, daring, brave; she had chosen her own destiny, and the name of Medea is not twisted with subterfuge like it is further to the west. In Georgia it is a name of pride. Quick-witted princess Medea, to help Jason, had told Jason the solution to circumventing the sacred bulls. Then she had charmed the guardian snake that protected the golden fleece, and together with their golden possession the lovers had fled. Medea was a temptress but a beauty, the bulls are still part of temple worship, snakes are apparent in archaeological diggings and were cult objects. Evidence in the present-day points to the symbols of the past.

The voyage that Tim Severin embarked on was to demonstrate that the route could be taken, but he also was able to prove that the old literature isn't just dusty words but geographical, topographical and archaeological evidence supporting the veracity of the "tale". One of his final sentences in The Jason Voyage is "What had seemed as a far-fetched yarn when we began the Jason Voyage had found its solution in Georgia, 1500 miles away from its starting point in Iolcos" Greece. 

No more spoilers. The book is a travelogue entwining the historical and the present, a great journey!