Tim Severin (1940 – 2020) was born in 1940 and educated at Tonbridge School and Oxford University. He sailed a leather boat across the Atlantic in the wake of Saint Brendan, captained an Arab sailing ship from Muscat to China, steered the replica of a Bronze Age galley to seek the landfalls of Jason and Ulysses, investigated the route of the First Crusade, travelled on  horseback with the nomads of Mongolia to explore the heritage of Genghis Khan, sailed the Pacific on a bamboo raft to test the theory that ancient Chinese mariners could have travelled to the Americas, and retraced the journeys of Alfred Russel Wallace, Victorian pioneer naturalist, through the Spice Islands of Indonesia. He wrote about all these adventures in award winning books.