2023/160: The Jason Voyage — Tim Severin

...here in Georgia, and at a higher level in Moscow, enormous efforts had been made to prepare for our visit - months and months of planning had been made and checked, resources delegated, schedules dovetailed, oarsmen selected and prepared, Tovarisch put on standby, an entire apparatus set in motion. All for a small open boat manned by a handful of volunteers, bobbing along at a snail's pace towards Soviet Georgia. [loc. 3489]

In 1985, Tim Severin attempted to prove the story of Jason and the Argonauts -- at least the part about the sea journey from northern Greece, through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea to Colchis -- by ordering the construction of a reproduction Bronze Age galley, recruiting a team of rowers to row it, and making the 1500-mile journey. This is his account of the voyage, and it's a gripping read.

Severin uses Apollonius' epic poem Argonautica (written in the 3rd century before Christ) as a guide, and points out that it's the earliest story of an epic voyage: the original story seems to predate the Odyssey, and the Argo is the first named ship in history. Severin had a master shipwright build the new Argo to a design produced by a naval architect: his team consisted of volunteers, including rowing champions and the captain of a 150,000-ton supertanker, from Britain, Norway, Greece, Turkey and then-Soviet Georgia. The twenty-oar galley struggled at times -- the currents in the Bosphorus flow strongly out of the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and thence to the Aegean -- but the crew succeeded in making the journey with only sail and oar.

This was a great read, but I could have done with more context for some of Severin's statements about mythology (were the Olympian gods really unknown at the time of Jason's voyage, which Severin believes to have been no more than a generation before the Trojan War?) and some of his identifications of modern landmarks with mythological places seemed tenuous. Sadly, the Kindle version could also do with some proofreading: at one point, the Bosphorus is said to be 2112 miles wide (which is approximately 2109.5 miles in excess of actuality) whilst there are frequent references to other ships loading and receiving Argo, rather than cargo. There are also a couple of points where sentences, paragraphs or whole pages have been shuffled. A map would also have helped, but the original photographs -- and a decent translation of Apollonius -- have been included.

Fulfils the ‘Travel and Global Culture’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.