Tim Severin

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1983.

Speaker 10:12

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

My guest this week is the explorer and author Tim Severin.

Presenter0:35

Tim, is music important to you?

Tim Severin0:38

I have to confess it's not, really. I'm much more interested, in fact, in lyrics than the music itself. I don't know whether you include that, but um I I enjoy words, and so I tend to listen to words rather than to music.

Presenter0:50

You've never learned to play an instrument.

Tim Severin0:52

No, absolutely not. In fact, um I think I've been discouraged from doing so. Do you play discs? In a car I will play cassettes to while away the time and I I have favorite cassettes.

Presenter1:03

On your various expeditions have you taken cassettes or discs?

Tim Severin1:07

No, I haven't, but all my crew members always do. And I like to think that I'm too busy to have time to listen to these.

Presenter1:15

Now what sort of music do you think would stand up best in complete isolation? Would you dare to take

Presenter1:21

Nostalgic music.

Tim Severin1:22

Yes, in fact I certainly would. That that is the way probably that I would um approach the problem. I'd take bits of music that would remind me of people or places or circumstances.

Presenter1:34

What's the first one on your list?

Tim Severin1:36

It's the Beethoven Archduke trio, and that's really, I suppose, to remind me of the backup that I've always had in my projects. And in this case, it's my assistant, Sarah Waters, who has really always run the central office, who's the person that copes with panic-stricken sponsors, worried families of crew members and so forth, and who feels all these questions. In fact, everything seems to go across her desk while I am miles away on the ocean in different parts of the world. So I suppose if I'm locked away in the middle of the ocean, it would be very nice to think that somebody was coping back there.

Presenter3:15

The opening of Beethoven's Archduke Trio.

Presenter3:18

Daniel Baremboim, Pinkus Zuckermann, and Jacqueline Dupre.

Presenter3:23

De Mu born in

Tim Severin3:24

Mm-hmm.

Tim Severin3:25

Yes, the family were tea planters. In fact, on my mother's side she was born on a tea plantation, her father and her grandfather, and I suppose uh previous generation to that as well. So it's tea planting in Asam for a very long way back on that side.

Presenter3:41

And you were sent back to this country to be educated.

Tim Severin3:44

Yes, absolutely standard procedure. When I was six off I was shipped with my brother, and we were sent back to a boarding school, prep school, on the Sussex coast.

Presenter3:57

You were up at Oxford, was you? Yeah. Uh

Tim Severin3:58

Do

Presenter3:58

Read.

Tim Severin3:59

Geography. That was um uh quite an easy decision because I had travelled already so much and since the conversation at home always referred to foreign lands afar, it was terribly easy to do geography. You know, I knew what a monsoon was and what all the countries were that lay between um Assam and the Sussex coast.

Presenter4:19

Now, while you were still an undergraduate, you led an expedition to trace Marco Polo's route as far as the borders of China. That was a very enterprising thing to do. How did you raise the money for it? How did you organize it?

Tim Severin4:32

Well, there was surprisingly little money was needed. In fact, there were three of us, and our total funds came to two hundred pounds, with which we proposed to set off on two motorcycles and two sidecars, and follow Marco Polo's route by the simple process of using his book as a as a guidebook. Marco Polo says turn left here, cross a desert for three days and come to such and such a city. We proposed to do the same on our motorbikes. And it worked out very well. And you got there and back within the vacation? No. We didn't get into China. We got as far as the Chinese border, by which stage we had just one motorcycle left, and the three of us sat with extreme discomfort. I'd already broken my leg at that stage, and so it was um

Speaker 35:13

Say it was

Tim Severin5:14

Motorcycles are far more dangerous, we discovered, than Campbell's, which would have been the original form of transport.

Speaker 35:17

In the original forward transport.

Tim Severin5:19

and we motorcycled across India down to Calcutta.

Tim Severin5:23

managed to get a free passage back. We had no money left, and I returned several weeks late to an Oxford term to a very indulgent warden, that is, the master of my college, which was Keble College and he was tremendously understanding, as indeed were the Department of Geography. who felt that uh perhaps I'd been doing something which was vaguely geographical.

Presenter5:46

You continued your geographic studies at three American universities, California, Minnesota and Harvard.

Tim Severin5:53

Yes, I was extraordinarily fortunate. I got something called a Harkness Fellowship, which um was very, very

Speaker 15:59

Bad.

Tim Severin6:00

Nice. It gave me a couple of years in America to go to almost any university I chose to go to.

Tim Severin6:05

And those are the three I went to. In the interval, I might add, I actually went down the Mississippi River, starting at the source in a little canoe. The first problem was to actually get through the first culvert drain.

Tim Severin6:17

It emerges from a little tiny lake called Itasca and disappears literally under a road. And so we plunged down into this hole in the canoe two and um lay flat in the canoe because you obviously couldn't sit up. You were just going down like a gun barrel and hoped that nothing blocked the other end. And we

Presenter6:25

I'm in canoe.

Tim Severin6:35

We popped out.

Tim Severin6:36

About a week later, actually, we sank the canoe spectacularly in some rapids, and I resuscitated a little launch and continued down to New Orleans by that means.

Presenter6:47

Well it produced a book,

Tim Severin6:49

Yes, The Explorers of the Mississippi. That was more of a history book than a travel book.

Presenter6:53

with your own experiences included.

Tim Severin6:55

Yes, well the idea was to look into the geographical background of the early explorations of the Mississippi.

Speaker 37:01

Uh

Presenter7:01

Mm-hmm.

Tim Severin7:01

Try and experience some of the conditions that the early explorers experienced, and then write about it.

Presenter7:08

What's your second record, Tim?

Tim Severin7:10

My second record will be um Ella Fitzgerald singing You're the Top, and that I think really.

Tim Severin7:17

Refers to what I mentioned about enjoying lyrics. I think the lyrics of this are absolutely splendid.

Speaker 37:23

You're a supply, you're a turkey dinner, you're the type of the derby winner I'm a toy balloon that's faded soon to pop

Speaker 37:43

But if baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.

Presenter7:50

Ella Fitzgerald, you're the top.

Presenter7:53

Now, you started an expedition based on a medieval manuscript, in fact a pre-medieval manuscript.

Tim Severin8:01

Yes, that to me, I suppose, in my career was the great breakthrough, and curiously enough, it went back to that original Marco Polo trip.

Tim Severin8:10

I

Tim Severin8:12

Had written a book on that, and I had enjoyed it so much, and then I thought, well, it is time now to leave the libraries and go out in the field, do some practical work. And we had a small house in the west of Ireland. It was a sort of a little cottage country place. And the figure that somehow attracted me totally was the figure of St. Brendan the Navigator. And the text was the Navigatio, The Voyage of Brendan.

Tim Severin8:40

It was fascinating because it was one of these things which in the nineteenth century.

Tim Severin8:45

Scholars had said this is the account of a real voyage by Irish monks in the fifth or sixth century across the Atlantic to the New World.

Tim Severin8:56

They were the first to have reached America from Europe and written about it.

Presenter8:59

So he wanted to find out if this manuscript was a fake or a legend or reality.

Tim Severin9:05

Yes, to put it to the test, to do, as always, the essential research in the libraries, and then to build a replica of the sort of vessel that Saint Brendan would have sailed, and sail it along the theoretical route, to find out, firstly, whether it was possible for a boat to survive. And there was a great deal of contention about that. The the boats weren't considered to be sufficiently seaworthy to last more than three or four days at sea.

Presenter9:30

How did you know what kind of craft he had sailed in?

Tim Severin9:32

The directions are remarkably precise. In the Navigatio in the Latin text, it described exactly what sort of leather the hull is made of, and that was the amazing thing. The skin of this boat was the skin of oxen.

Tim Severin9:47

tanned in a particular way with oak bark.

Tim Severin9:51

And this was the medieval way of making um leather.

Presenter9:54

What is the size of the boat? What was the length of it?

Tim Severin9:56

She was thirty six feet long and she had a beam of eight feet. How many ox hides to cover it? Forty nine. A wooden frame, of course. The frame was a sort of a basket work, really, lattice work. Lashed together with strips of leather.

Presenter10:10

Was there a keel?

Tim Severin10:10

Or though.

Tim Severin10:12

No. The entire draught of the boat, fully laden, was fourteen inches. What did happen? Right down as low in the water as that? Well, she sat sort of on the surface like a banana. She was a curious bent shaped, like the Irish currahs of the County Kerry to this day, which are the descendants of the the boats originally used out there.

Tim Severin10:33

And it was said that leather boats and they weren't only used by the Irish, they'd been used by other peoples in other parts of the world, cannot go to sea because every three or four days you've got to beach a leather boat, let the leather dry out. And of course all the leather specialists said, No, it can't be done. You can't set off across the ocean, your boat will fall to bits. What was the special treatment? It's a combination of the fact that it was tanned in oak bark, which produces a very, very stable sort of leather, plus the fact that it was smeared with grease. Now the Irish may have used butter. I used, in fact, wool grease, that's raw lanolin which you wash out from sheep's fleece when it's first shorn.

Presenter11:10

Uh

Tim Severin11:13

And, in fact, that leather never deteriorated at all.

Presenter11:17

It was, of course, a sailing craft. Did you have oars as well?

Tim Severin11:21

Yes, there were four of us on board, and we had four oars. And what was the route, straight across? No, it was a much more difficult route. It was one which went up the west coast of Ireland to the Western Islands of Scotland, then to the Faroes, and then to Iceland.

Tim Severin11:39

past Greenland and to the coast, in fact, of Newfoundland.

Presenter11:43

Before we start talking about it anymore, let's have your third record.

Tim Severin11:47

The third record, in fact, is uh an extract from a piece of music, uh an orchestral suite, which was written about the Brendan Voyage after I published the book of that project.

Tim Severin12:00

a composer in Ireland, read the book, so enjoyed it that he wrote this piece. It's called The Brendan Voyage. My favourite extract from it is the the second bit, which is, I think, called Water Under the Keel. It's a sort of an Irish jig, and the the Uhland pipes being played.

Presenter13:15

Water Under the Keel from The Brendan Voyage composed by Sean Davie and conducted by Noel Keelahan.

Presenter13:22

So off you went in the wake of St. Brendan. How long did you estimate the voyage would last?

Tim Severin13:29

I was hoping to do it in a single season, that is to say, a very brief sailing season up there. And in fact, we got as far as Iceland in two months. And at that stage, my good friends in the Icelandic Coast Guard said, Look, you've done jolly well to get here, but the storms are coming in, and unless you get some decent weather, it's very foolhardy to go out again and go on. So we left the boat up there, and it took us fifty days on the second season. So it was a total really of almost four months to make that voyage.

Presenter14:02

Now how'd you set about getting a crew? You needed three chaps to undertake this very chancy project.

Tim Severin14:08

Such people in in life just seem to arrive. They they must clearly be at a period, or by nature, somewhat foot loose at that time

Tim Severin14:17

My crew comprised a very, very nice Anglo-Irishman.

Tim Severin14:22

with the seno of Maloney and uh George

Tim Severin14:26

I can't remember how I think he just heard about me. He'd just come back from the Middle East of all places, where I'd been nice and warm, and he he helped me build the ship.

Tim Severin14:33

or the boat, rather.

Tim Severin14:34

And there was an Irishman who one day just potted into the boat yard, and he just just came in and we were there we were, stitching away the leather. Because you had to first build your vessel.

Tim Severin14:46

And he joined up and then

Tim Severin14:48

The other crew member was a Faroese Islander by the name of Trondor Patterson, who was also an artist.

Presenter14:55

There was a cabin on the craft every one could get under shelter.

Tim Severin14:59

Yes, in a manner of speaking. The cabin was really more of a little tent, and in that tent, which I suppose well, it was I know it was six feet long by about four feet wide, and if

Presenter15:11

For four people.

Tim Severin15:12

Yes. We soon found actually that the two people were much better off sleeping under the thwarts up in the bows of the boat with a sort of a tarpaulin structure over them, because inside the the main little tent we had to keep books and charts and all the rest of it.

Presenter15:26

Did you hope to live mainly off the sea for for food?

Tim Severin15:31

Not really. We hoped to live much as the monks would have done, taking the same sort of foods that they ate, the dried fruit, the nuts, the the oats, the dried meat, the smoked meat. We did catch fish. In fact, w once we got past Ferris and had Trondo Patterson on board, we caught and ate a lot of seagulls. Um which I hope wouldn't do anything to your introductory seagull on your signature.

Presenter15:55

Tune right.

Presenter15:57

So the Western Isles, the fairies how did the craft stand up to it?

Tim Severin16:01

Very well indeed. It was quite amazing. She flexed a bit, you know. It was like being inside a sort of a living e animal. If you can imagine with the the curved ribs, it was slightly like being inside the whale. You felt a little bit like Jonah.

Presenter16:13

You ran into

Tim Severin16:14

The pack ice at one point. Yes, that was not in the script, so to speak. That was a complete surprise. We got driven very far north, close to Greenland, and found the pack ice by day. That was no problem, because actually the pack ice is quite a friendly element. You get good weather near the edge of the pack. And we sailed merrily along the edge of the pack ice. And in the night the wind changed and of course it changed the whole position of the pack ice and we woke. One of the most frightening sights, um absolutely vivid in my memory, is the bump in the middle of the night when you meant to be out in the middle of the ocean and you hit something.

Tim Severin16:52

and bump again, and there was a sound like I thought there was a quite a gale blowing gun. I thought it was a seagull had been blown into the sails.

Tim Severin17:01

and uh rushed out, sort of scrambled out of this tent and turned on our torch. And it literally all we had were hand torches, and shone into this blackness and it was raining uh sleeting actually.

Tim Severin17:14

and the beam of the torch reflecting off ice floes all around you. It was quite a stunning moment in navigation.

Presenter17:24

How long will you hold up in the ice?

Tim Severin17:26

The dawn came up, and we really did see that there was no choice. We had to sail our way through this. The wind had opened up the pack, so that in fact there were ice floats, but they were all bashing together and rolling and grinding and awful sort of gurgling noises going on. And it took us all that day, and then

Tim Severin17:48

I mean literally we're fending off by hand these days.

Presenter17:50

Maybe

Tim Severin17:52

Yes, that actually was one of the advantages of having such a little boat, and such boat with no uh draught to her, because every time two ice floes came together we were sort of squeezed between and popped up like a melon seed between your fingers, which was you know, if you had a keel that wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 118:04

Choose.

Tim Severin18:08

And we

Tim Severin18:10

Got punctured, and it was, it was literally a puncture. We hit a piece of very old ice, and it was very bad luck, and we got a hole in there.

Tim Severin18:17

In the craft

Tim Severin18:19

in I suppose probably in the early part of the following evening, and we had a really rather bleak night because we simply had to pump and pump and pump and keep the boat afloat.

Tim Severin18:31

until we could locate the

Tim Severin18:34

A hole in the hull next day.

Presenter18:36

You couldn't get the boat out of the water on to the ice, demanded.

Tim Severin18:39

No, the ice wasn't stable enough. It was rollicking all over the place. And.

Presenter18:40

What

Tim Severin18:44

I've mentioned the appalling moment of seeing the ice all around, but the tremendous moment of discovering that the puncture

Tim Severin18:52

in the leather was within arm's reach of somebody leaning over the side of the boat. And if he put his hands and did his stitching under water, we could sew on a patch. And in fact it was George who did the outside work on this. He rubbed um wool grease on his hands and uh we well, we did a a running repair. It was a puncture in the ocean.

Presenter19:11

Yeah.

Presenter19:16

Quite an achievement. So you got across and you're convinced that the Brendan story is true?

Tim Severin19:22

I think we showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that more than coincidence must explain why the Saint Brendan story describes this route so well.

Presenter19:33

Let's have your fourth record.

Tim Severin19:35

And the fourth record would be the song Wouldn't It Be Lovely from uh My Fair Lady, and that's my uh ten-year-old daughter's favourite and therefore has become one of my favourites. She's spent a lot of time quite recently in the back of the car, right behind my head, playing it on a small cassette player as I was driving a long distance. And I don't think I'll ever forget it. I actually I continued to enjoy it.

Speaker 320:01

One's head resting on my knee, Warm and tender as he can be.

Speaker 320:09

Who takes good care of me, I would dear.

Speaker 320:16

Be lovely.

Speaker 320:19

Many

Speaker 320:21

Lovely.

Presenter20:29

Wouldn't it be lovely from the soundtrack of the film version of My Fair Lady?

Presenter20:34

Tim, after Marco Polo and St. Brendan you decided to investigate Sinbad the Sailor. Is there any historical evidence that Sinbad the Sailor existed?

Tim Severin20:44

Yes, I think from the literary evidence really is wh where one begins. It's very, very rare that you get a figure of romance like that which doesn't have an original kernel of truth somewhere. Can we put a date on him?

Tim Severin21:01

Well, his dating actually probably comes from the f earliest voyages to the east, which are seventh and eighth centuries, when the Arabs had this explosion of voyaging out of the Gulf and far to the East Right, around the edge of the known world. In fact, they were exploring new trade routes, new trading places. And the interesting thing about the Sindbad stories is that the storyteller and it was probably just one man who wove together those stories.

Tim Severin21:30

Pinched a lot of his material from the existing Arab geographies of the time. Now, what we do know.

Tim Severin21:37

is that the Arab geographies were written by scholars who gleaned their material very often by going down to the ports and talking to returning sailors, who would say, We've just come back from such and such a land, and describe it. So it got into the geographies and was then lifted

Tim Severin21:54

By the unknown compiler of the Sinbad Stories.

Presenter21:59

Could you conjecture fairly accurately what sort of craft he had?

Tim Severin22:03

Yes, there we do know that the

Tim Severin22:07

Classic cargo ship of the Arabs. What we call a dhow, and I might add that is not a word used by the Arabs.

Tim Severin22:14

They had a ship they called the Boom, which is a double-ended, it's sort of um a very simple-looking craft, but extremely elegant craft.

Tim Severin22:23

which is in use to this day. No has engines in, but was the classic vessel built in the Gulf and along the coast of Arabia, used as a cargo ship, and travelled these immense distances under these huge triangular sails. What sort of size?

Tim Severin22:41

Difficult to calculate, but a good average size, one would imagine, would be about seventy to eighty five feet on the deck. That's quite a big ship.

Presenter22:50

Yes, a much bigger job than than getting an oxide currer built. I mean, this is going to take a lot of financing.

Tim Severin22:56

Yeah.

Presenter22:57

Yeah.

Tim Severin22:57

Oh, it was a very ambitious project. It was the Arabian Nights Come True, because I put the problem on one side about finance, went out to do research on the type of vessel, and the way I do research, the ethnographic side, is to go out to the area

Tim Severin23:16

Like I did with the west of Ireland, with the Carruks out there. In this case, the coast of Arabia, and particularly the Sultanate of Oman.

Tim Severin23:25

where there were still very, very old fashioned boats, beaching boats, little ones, on view, actually in use. And while I was there, the Government of the country got to know about my project.

Tim Severin23:37

and approached me, and in fact they sent me a telegram after I'd come away from Oman, asked me to go back.

Tim Severin23:43

and I was informed on my return uh that uh His Majesty the Sultan, the ruler of Oman, had approved my project, and His Ministry of National Heritage would sponsor it. And I didn't quite understand what was meant. I thought maybe, you know, I was dreaming, or that uh there was a language problem, because this was told to me in English, and the man who told me was a member of the royal family, the Minister of National Heritage.

Tim Severin24:09

And it was it was one of these these enchanted moments because he could see I was getting puzzled.

Tim Severin24:14

And he opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out a sheet of blank crested note paper, and he slid it across to me and said, mister Severin, write down the sort of agreement that you would like me to sign.

Tim Severin24:27

It was a classic blank check.

Presenter24:29

Marvelous.

Presenter24:30

Well let's break at this point for another record.

Tim Severin24:32

Oh, and that record would be the overture to uh Don Giovanni.

Tim Severin24:38

And that is again, as I mentioned, about reminding me of people. This is for my ex-wife, who helped me very much with the Brendan project, and it's one of her favorites.

Presenter25:52

Part of the Overture to Don Giovanni, Mozart's Don Giovanni, the orchestra of the National Theatre Prague, conducted by Carl Bohr.

Presenter26:01

So, Tim, a blank check to build a boom. Where was this built for you? In Oman?

Tim Severin26:07

In Oman, on the beach, classic way of building a ship. You walk along the beach and say, I shall build here, and you mark out a suitable spot, lay the keel and away you go.

Tim Severin26:16

The timber came from the Malabar coast of India because for time out of mind the countries of the drier, timberless parts of the Middle East have drawn on India for their timber and that is precisely what I did. I went across there with an Omani shipwright from the beach that I was going to build the ship and we wandered around the forest looking at trees and selected the trees.

Tim Severin26:42

and felled them. Elephants took them down to the coast. Nothing had changed. I mean there was no chainsaw to chop down the trees. You got axemen who slugged away with axes and you brought down these magnificent trees and they eventually were turned by hand with hammer and chisel into this truly elegant ship.

Presenter27:02

Now you had to get a crew of about twenty, an Arab crew.

Tim Severin27:06

It was a mixed crew. The basic sailing crew were Omani seamen. They were sailors. They all came from fishing families, lived along the coast, and they knew how to handle these very cumbersome

Tim Severin27:21

Triangular sails.

Tim Severin27:22

And they require an awful lot of handling. There's in fact a split second time you can get quite badly hurt. The rest of the crew were Europeans, although there was one American. He helped me during the some of the building stages. He was a model maker because

Tim Severin27:37

I thought to myself, I need somebody to do a bit of supervising.

Tim Severin27:42

Who on earth has built a mediaeval ship? And I thought about that problem and I thought, well, of course a professional, very keen model maker would have built something in miniature.

Tim Severin27:50

So I found this model maker.

Tim Severin27:52

I invited him to meet me and I said, Look, I'm going to suggest to you that instead of making a little tiny model, why don't you build the real thing?

Tim Severin28:00

And his eyes sparkled then. So he came out,

Tim Severin28:04

And then the rest of the crew were all in some way technicians. There was a photographer to take Still's pictures, a film cameraman and sound recordist, a doctor, and three marine biologists, because they towed plankton nets and made collections all along the way.

Tim Severin28:23

And the biggest disaster of all, the cook.

Tim Severin28:27

Oh dear. It is said that to have a a truly contented crew you don't need a good captain. You need a doctor and a good cook, and the emphasis is on the the good cook.

Speaker 328:38

Hmm.

Tim Severin28:39

And the chap I had or I set out with was a catastrophe. He had a one note menu, which was one particularly ghastly insipid curry. He was a Balooch from the Balochistan coast, which is what is now Pakistan.

Tim Severin28:58

And he made our lives misery for the first leg of the voyage until I was able to beach him very, very firmly in India and replace him.

Tim Severin29:09

The idea was to sail the Spice Route, the route which the Arabs pioneered, and that went from the Arabian Gulf in this case Muscat was the harbour we set out from, from the capital of Oman,

Tim Severin29:21

across the Arabian Sea to India, then down the Indian coast to Sri Lanka, which the Arabs call Serendib.

Tim Severin29:28

across the Indian Ocean to Sumatra, down the Malacca Strait, around the tip there, past uh Singap what is now Singapore,

Tim Severin29:37

Up through the South China Sea.

Tim Severin29:39

to the Pearl River to Canton.

Tim Severin29:42

Where the Arabs traded.

Tim Severin29:44

And that is getting you know, it's between a fifth and a quarter of the way round the world.

Presenter29:47

What a very long haul.

Presenter29:49

Another record of nap.

Tim Severin29:51

Well, my next record, I think, would be one by Edith Piaf, who I still think is one of the most uh lively of all singers, and it's her most famous one.

Speaker 330:02

Oh yeah, Doria

Speaker 130:04

Yeah.

Speaker 330:08

No runaway.

Speaker 330:18

Nila Ma to Sa Bebianega.

Speaker 330:25

Riyado, Ria No.

Presenter30:29

No.

Presenter30:33

Added Piaf, I regret nothing.

Presenter30:36

So off you went, Tim, in what the press christened the slow boat China.

Presenter30:41

There was a certain unpleasantness aboard a plague of insect.

Tim Severin30:46

All sorts of hitchhikers came along. Now the cockroaches were all right. I mean you expect cockroaches to live and thrive and multiply aboard a mediaeval ship.

Tim Severin30:54

There's one rather unhappy resemblance between the colour and shape of a cockroach at night on the deck and a date, which is what we are eating.

Presenter31:09

That's a horrible story. Go on.

Tim Severin31:11

Well the other thing that at night was very strange and weird was the fact that somehow we got on board a family of crickets, and they thrived and multiplied. And this wasn't too bad, but it's the weirdest thing to be out in the middle of the ocean and to hear crickets buzzing away in the middle of the night.

Tim Severin31:30

One can accept that, but the poor fellow who couldn't accept it was the sound recordist for the film, because he was going around saying, Nobody's going to believe I really recorded this on board. This isn't the creak of the ropes, it's all these uh crickets. And so he spent a lot of time hunting crickets, so that on his watch at night you could hear sort of shuffling sounds and a loud thump and a cry as he struck out at a cricket. In fact, he became really our sort of insect specialist, because by the time the voyage ended, we had an enormous number of cockroaches. And when you are on, say, the port tack and the ship is leaning over to the starboard, all the cockroaches who don't like getting their feet wet stay over on the port side. You wear a ship and she leans over, the tilt is in the other direction, and the cockroaches migrate from the port side up the side of the ship, across a cross beam, and march down on the other side, you see, which is quite satisfactory because you're not particularly keen that the cockroaches have any better time than you're having. And Terry, the sound recordist, used to lie. Their main pathway was on a beam just over his bunk, and he would lie there with a sea boot and try and smash cockroaches as they migrated.

Presenter32:43

Uh

Presenter32:44

You also had problems with a nasty smell.

Tim Severin32:48

Yes, that was quite worrying, because from the very first day we launched the ship and we put in the ballast, which was sixteen tons of sand, this ghastly smell started. Uh it was the classic smell of schoolboy stink bombs.

Tim Severin33:01

And we changed the ballast on a very hot Omani day, shifting sixteen tons, chucking overboard, putting another sixteen tons.

Tim Severin33:08

But it did no good. So I called in the specialists and I was told that this was

Tim Severin33:14

Combination of the words sulphur and hydrogen in some way, and they cheerfully told me that, um.

Tim Severin33:19

in less than one part per million, it was all right, but above that it was likely to be fatal. And this smell stayed with us all the way. If it had been a modern ship, one would have simply cleaned the bilges. But you couldn't do this because the whole ship was held together, not with nails, but with cocoanut rope.

Tim Severin33:38

Traditional Arab way of building a ship. She was. No nails or screwers. Not one.

Presenter33:40

She was out.

Tim Severin33:43

The whole thing was sewn together. This is a sixty ton ship.

Tim Severin33:49

Sown together, sailing six thousand miles

Tim Severin33:53

and held together with parcel string, essentially.

Tim Severin33:56

And to protect this string, to stop it degrading, we soaked it in coconut oil, which is what has always traditionally been done. And I suspect the bacteria that produced the hydrogen that produced this awful gas lived on that oil. But if I cleaned the oil to get rid of the bacteria, my ship would fall to bits. So we just had to live with it.

Tim Severin34:18

My American Tom had that lovely phrase he said, it would make a maggot gag.

Presenter34:23

Yeah.

Presenter34:25

So how long did you live with the smell? How long did the voyage take?

Tim Severin34:28

Seven and a half months with stopovers in the most lovely places like Sri Lanka and so forth, where we we did our research or our links with the stories for Sinban. Were you becalmed at all? Yes, for the best part of a month. Were you? Well, it was a combination of being becalmed and butting against headwinds and an adverse current in uh the sector between Sri Lanka and Sumatra.

Presenter34:46

Wait.

Tim Severin34:56

It was the absolute classic. It was the doldrums, and we were drinking our water, eating up the food, obviously everything pretty severely rationed.

Tim Severin35:08

And it was a very interesting psychological strain because

Tim Severin35:12

They sit there, day after day after day, getting nowhere.

Tim Severin35:16

Knowing that your nearest land when we got really stuck was about six hundred miles away?

Tim Severin35:21

No shipping, absolutely empty, and you will eventually run out of water and there's nothing you can do, you have to wait for the wind.

Presenter35:31

Well, you got to China, ignored Hong Kong, went up the Pearl River to Canton. The Chinese were expecting you.

Tim Severin35:38

Very much so. This was Is really a historic first for us because the

Tim Severin35:44

The Chinese government of the People's Republic had never sort of become involved in such a project, a mediaeval ship sailing up their river, but they were very keen on establishing friendly relations with the Arab world.

Tim Severin35:56

And they laid on a reception which was absolutely mind boggling. They flew in ministers from Peking, there were dancing dragons on the quayside, Chinese bands, school children with pom poms, the Chinese navy formed up and escorted us up river.

Tim Severin36:12

And uh there we were, this mediaeval Arabship and of course by then a a bearded, incredibly piratical and tough looking crew.

Presenter36:22

And of course all this is in another book. What's this one called?

Tim Severin36:25

The name of the book is The Sindbad Voyage, the whole project was The Sindbad Voyage, and it's a sort of companion volume to The Brendan Voyage.

Presenter36:34

Another record.

Tim Severin36:36

I think I'd like to go to another Edith Piaf record, and one which is Lom Alla Motu, which is curious because it was recorded, I mean, more than twenty years ago, and it's still the sort of the um prototype punk rock motorcyclist record.

Speaker 336:53

Trimada compatible here filed myself, and whenever I'm afraid of the s

Presenter37:23

Edit Pierre Fegen l'oma Lamoto.

Presenter37:26

Now, tell me you're alone on a desert island. What sort of craft do you think you'd be able to improvise in which to escape?

Tim Severin37:33

Well, that obviously depends upon what raw materials I've got there, but depending also on the weather condition and the rest of it, I suppose

Tim Severin37:39

I would probably go for a very light twin hulled surface craft. Uh depending which way the prevailing winds and which direction I wanted to go.

Presenter37:49

Yes, I've done it. I mean, it's.

Tim Severin37:50

I mean, it's part of my job.

Presenter37:51

You make holes in coconuts and that sort of stuff.

Tim Severin37:54

That's right. The Arabs have a very simple uh system which we used on on board Sohar on the Sindbad voyage. That that wouldn't be any problem at all, actually. I I must be, I suppose, one of the few people actually sort of trained for that.

Presenter38:06

Your last record.

Tim Severin38:08

It's um the uh Mullivkin tyre, which is a of course the the wings for McCartney.

Presenter38:15

Yes. Why'd you choose that?

Tim Severin38:17

Oh, it's it's uh very evocative. I live in County Cork in the west of Ireland, where some of the members of Wings also have or had homes, and of course the Mile of Kintar, it's that uh west part of Scotland which we sailed past in Brendan, and it's just a lovely tune.

Speaker 338:42

Mull of Kenton, oh Mistrolling in from the sea. My desire is always to be all of Kenton.

Presenter39:03

Mull of Kintyre, Paul McCartney, and Wings.

Presenter39:07

Tim, if you would take only one disc of the eight you've chosen, which would you choose?

Tim Severin39:12

Oh, probably Gena Gretaria. I think that would be a good choice.

Presenter39:15

And one luxury to take with you, something of no practical use.

Tim Severin39:20

Would I be allowed a herb garden?

Tim Severin39:23

Is that permutation?

Presenter39:23

Herb God know yes.

Tim Severin39:25

Well, having had that ghastly experience with my cook aboard Soha,

Presenter39:25

Yeah.

Tim Severin39:28

And having lived under these conditions, I would have thought that perhaps f you know, improving some of that fish that one would hope to catch, or the cocoanuts, would would be legitimate with herbs from that garden.

Presenter39:39

That's a luxury. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island.

Tim Severin39:44

I would probably choose Pax Britannica by James Morris, now Jan Morris.

Tim Severin39:51

Which I think probably I would read and it would teach me more about how to write really, really well.

Presenter39:56

X Britannica.

Presenter39:58

And thank you, Tim Severind, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Tim Severin40:02

Thank you very much, Ryan. I've enjoyed it very much indeed.

Presenter40:05

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 140:31

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.