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| His Majesty's Bark Endeavour (photo courtesy of the Australian National Maritime Museum) |
Now when it was determined that we should sail for Italy, they delivered Paul to a centurion named Julius. Embarking on a ship that was to sail for places on the coast of Asia, we put to sea. Acts 27
Few things are as absorbing as a shipwreck, particularly when the participants have survived to tell the tale. Luke's account of the shipwreck of St Paul reflects the same concern for accuracy that he shows in his gospel and has been praised by modern scholars. For the shipwreck of the Endeavour, we have the written records of her Captain and the naturalist Joseph Banks.
His Majesty's Bark Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef 20 kilometres off the coast of Far North Queensland shortly before midnight on 11th June 1770. For nearly 24 hours she was stuck fast and her preservation during this time was entirely due to the calm tropical seas which surrounded her. Many ships, similarly caught, were broken up by the waves.
Having lightened his vessel, Captain Cook failed, nevertheless, to shift her at the first high tide. Although not a man given to gushes of emotion, his situation must have seemed dire. He stood to lose more than just his ship, his reputation and whatever crew were unable to fit into the three small boats onboard: two years of voyaging, observing, exploring and navigating, and for Joseph Banks, two years of collecting and recording new plants and animals. Twelve hours after the first high tide, with the second loping in towards his stricken bark, Cook was at last able to haul her off the reef using the two-tonne bower anchors, the capstan and the windlass, the brute strength of his crew together with a complicated system of ropes and pulleys designed to give them a mechanical advantage, and an interesting physical rule which says that when the length of rope used is the depth of the water multiplied by seven, the ropes bear the strain and the anchors remain on the sea floor.
St Paul’s ship was not so lucky.
Paul, Luke and their 274 companions had been at sea for two weeks in a storm typical of the Mediterranean in autumn.
Acts 27
16 As we passed to the lee of a small island called Cauda, we were hardly able to make the lifeboat secure, 17 so the men hoisted it aboard. Then they passed ropes under the ship itself to hold it together. Because they were afraid they would run aground on the sandbars of Syrtis, they lowered the sea anchor and let the ship be driven along. 18 We took such a violent battering from the storm that the next day they began to throw the cargo overboard. 19 On the third day, they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands.
Despite these precuations, the ship foundered. Luke writes: ‘having fallen into a place between two seas, they ran the ship aground and the bow, having stuck and remained immovable, the stern was destroyed by the force of the waves.’ Acts 27,41.
My 1966 Greek lexicon tells me that ‘the sandbars of Syrtis’ were ‘the sandbanks on the coast of Africa, of which there were two, the Syrtis Major and Minor’. We can assume that the sailors feared running aground on the major one, that is south of today’s Benghazi, because it was closest to where they had been on the sheltered side of Cauda, an island south of Crete, and about four fifths along it, heading west.
If you are in a sailing vessel in gale force winds, you must furl the sails before their force on the mast becomes too great. Otherwise, you risk cracking the mast and disabling your ship. Furl means to reduce the sail area. Roman ships only had a main sail and sometimes a smaller foresail, so furl is really a modern term often used when speaking about the tall ships and tea clippers which had a huge sail area. (The Endeavour had nearly one thousand square metres.) We know that Paul’s sailors saved their mast because in verse 40, the sailors hoisted the foresail — ἀρτέμωνα (artemona) — a small sail that didn’t carry enough force to crack a mast.
But there is a problem with the translation of the Greek τὸ σκεῦος (to skeuos), here translated as sea anchor. Strong's Greek, to which I usually refer, says that this singular form seems to be 'used specifically and collectively of the sails and ropes'. But the Greek word in question is neuter in verse 17 and feminine in verse 19, and this seems to have confused the translators. The neuter form is used often in the scriptures to mean different but related objects while the feminine form occurs only once.
The translators addressed this issue by suggesting a variety of words for the neuter version but, on the whole, using the same one for the feminine. 
‘Then they passed ropes under the ship itself to hold it together. Because they were afraid they would run aground on the sandbars of Syrtis, they lowered the sea anchor and let the ship be driven along..'
That doesn't make any sense to me, and I don't like the punctuation either. Ancient Greek had no punctuation. It looked like a find-a-word. So let's change the nouns and the punctuation.
Then they passed ropes under the ship itself to hold it together, because they were afraid they would run aground on the sandbars of Syrtis. They lowered the sails and ropes and let the ship be driven along.
I like this version. After all, if you're going to run onto a sandbank, you want to strengthen your ship by undergirding it, but you don't lower a sea anchor fearing that you might ran onto a sandbank. The sail is the engine. If Paul's ship had lowered instead the sails and the ropes that raised it, it could no longer tack and had no alternative but to be driven.
In this disabled state, Paul, Luke and their doomed ship spent fourteen days at sea, by which time they could have been anywhere.
But Luke tells us exactly where, in Greek: the island of Melita.
There are two main contenders for this sacred spot, Malta and Mljet which is off the coast of Dubrovnik. I have read excellent arguments in support of both, based on identical winds and currents in the Mediterranean. Five hundred years ago, Malta and Dubrovnik were powerful, rich and very keen to have their own famous saint shipwrecked on their islands.
A clue to the location of Melita comes in verse 27 Luke informs us that 'on the fourteenth night while we were being driven about in the [sea of] Adria, the sailors suspected that they were nearing land'. The Adriatic Sea is significant because the Bibles in my church explain that in the ancient world it extended south to Malta. While this may be true, other sources suggest it may not have been strictly true for another couple of centuries.
Pliny the Elder, a contemporary of St Paul who is easy to remember because he died in the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, wrote in his Natural History,
The towns inland from Tarentum are Uria surnamed Apulia, Messapia, and Aletium; on the coast, Senum, and Callipolis, now known as Anxa, 75 miles from Tarentum. Thence, at a distance of 32 miles, is the Promontory called Acra Iapygia, at which point Italy projects the greatest distance into the sea. At a distance of 19 miles from this point is the town of Basta, and then Hydruntum, the spot at which the Ionian is separated from the Adriatic sea, and from which the distance across to Greece is the shortest. The town of the Apolloniates lies opposite to it, and the breadth of the arm of the sea which runs between is not more than fifty miles (1).
Hydruntum is today's Otranto, the most easterly point of Italy.
In the same fashion as the Endeavour, Paul's sailors took depth soundings. In verse 38, 'they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea', so we can assume that the ship was still too low in the water. Unfortunately, she could not be raised high enough to pass over the sand, reef or rocks at ‘the place between two seas’. The hull was caught and the ship broken up by the waves. It’s a shame she didn’t have a flatter bottom like the Endeavour and could have better navigated shallow waters.
Lastly, consider this: Luke wrote that island was called Melita, but did Melita mean ‘Place of Refuge’ in Phoenician or ‘Honey’ in Greek? If Luke meant Place of Refuge, then well done all you folks who voted for Malta because Malta had a big Phoenician presence. However, if Luke meant Honey, could it have been Mljet in the Adriatic along with Split, from the Greek, Kotor, from the Greek, and of course Istria, where my mother came from, also from the Greek Ister, meaning the Danube River?
The real choice owes as much to power and politics
than to winds, currents and ancient geography. To the powerful Knights of St
John who made Malta their home in 1530, Paul was shipwrecked on Malta. In its
position midway between Europe and Africa, the Maltese archipelago is hugely
important, as anyone who has read the Kappillan of Malta by Nicholas Monsarrat will
know. Its history stretches back 8000 years. It was part of the
British Empire and put up a brave stand against Axis bombing during World War
2. To a westerner, for Paul to be shipwrecked on Malta makes complete sense.
A little too much sense? I am wavering. Once we get to
heaven we’ll probably find that Paul and Luke were marooned that stormy autumn on
some obscure little island no one’s ever heard of.
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