Archive Activities

The Brendan Voyage

2011-05-10 18:23

What: The Brendan Voyage: an illustrated talk by Tim Severin
Where: Princess Grace Irish Library, 9 rue Princesse Marie-de-Lorraine, Monaco-Ville
When: 8pm, Monday 16 May 2011
Tickets €10; Tel: +377 93 50 12 25

While still an Oxford undergraduate in the 1960s, a young man called Tim Severin attempted with two friends to retrace the route of Marco Polo by motorcycle, failing to complete his mission only because of visa problems at the Chinese border. But the bug had bitten, and subsequently Severin recreated a great swathe of other historical journeys in order to determine the factual basis of legendary travellers both literary and real - from Ulysses and Sinbad to Genghis Khan and the inhabitant of the world's most famous desert island, Robinson Crusoe.

But perhaps his best known reconstructed voyage was that of Saint Brendan the Navigator, a sixth-century Irish monk who sailed across the Atlantic in a leather boat in search, literally, of Paradise.  Fourteen centuries later, Severin assembled an extraordinary vessel made from forty-nine ox-hides, stitched and stretched over a wooden frame; and in May 1976, he and his crew set sail from the west coast of Ireland, reaching Iceland in July and setting off again the following summer for a two-month voyage to Newfoundland.

The crew's acts of extraordinary resilience (which in one case involved hanging overboard to repair the leather hull while submerged in the icy ocean) make for a compelling adventure story which has lost none of its immediacy thirty years on. For this special visit to Monaco, Mr Severin will be speaking, appropriately, at the Princess Grace Irish Library, an institution set up as a tribute to the late princess's own Irish ancestry.  Her family, of course, found a new home in America, and one of the intriguing questions posed by Mr Severin's talk is whether Saint Brendan did as well!

The books of Mr Severin's expeditions and adventures have been awarded multiple prizes, including the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Book of the Sea Award, a Christopher Prize and the literary medal of the Académie de la Marine. He is also a Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society.



This is a talk that will appeal to the whole family, including children, who may well have read Tim Severin's actio-packed adventure stories based on the fictional character of a seventeenth-century pirate, Hector Lynch.

Princess Grace Irish Library