Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. ‘My first ever major find from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow sea bed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.’
‘You mean like the Nile?’
Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘What we’re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.’ He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. ‘Now listen to this.’ He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read: ‘“But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.”’
Costas whistled. ‘The Gospels!’
‘The Acts of St Paul, Chapter 27.’ Jack’s eyes were ablaze. ‘And guess what? Directly offshore from where we are now, the bottom slopes off to deep water, but diagonally to the south there’s a sandy plateau extending about three hundred metres out, about forty metres deep.’
‘That’s a hundred and twenty feet, twenty fathoms,’ Costas murmured.
‘On our last day of diving twenty years ago we did a recce over it, just to see if we’d missed anything,’ Jack said. ‘The very last thing I saw was two lead anchor shanks, unmistakably early Roman types used to weigh down wooden anchors. By the time of our north African amphora wreck, anchors were made of iron, so we knew these must have been lost by an earlier ship that had tried to hold off this coast.’
‘Go on.’
‘It gets better.’
‘I thought it would.’
Jack read again: ‘ “And casting off the anchors, they left them in the sea, at the same time loosing the bands of the rudders; and hoisting up the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach. But lighting on a place where two seas met, they ran the vessel aground; and the foreship struck and remained unmoveable, but the stern began to break up by the violence of the waves.” ’
‘Good God,’ Costas said. ‘The drug chest, the sounding lead. Stored in the forward compartment. What about the stern?’
‘Wait for it.’ Jack grinned, and pulled out a folder from the bag. ‘Fast-forward two millennia. August 1953, to be exact. Captain Cousteau and Calypso.’
‘I was wondering when they were going to come in to it.’
‘It was the clue that brought us here in the first place,’ Jack said. ‘They dived all along this coast. Here’s what the chief diver wrote about this headland. “I saw broken amphoras, concreted into a fold in the cliff, then an iron anchor, concreted to the bottom and apparently in corroded state, with amphora sherds on top.” That’s exactly what we found here, the Roman amphora wreck. But there’s more. On their second dive, they saw “des amphores grecques, en bas profound”.’
‘Greek amphoras, in deep water,’ Costas murmured. ‘Any idea where?’
‘Straight out from the cleft in the rock behind us,’ Jack said. ‘We reckoned they hit seventy, maybe eighty metres depth.’
‘Sounds like Cousteau’s boys,’ Costas said. ‘Let me guess. Compressed air, twin hose regulators, no pressure gauge, no buoyancy system.’
‘Back when diving was diving,’ Jack said wistfully. ‘Before mixed gas took all the fun out of it.’
‘The danger’s still there, just the threshold’s deeper.’
‘Twenty years ago I volunteered to do a bounce dive to find those amphoras, but the team doctor vetoed it. We only had compressed air and were strictly following the US Navy tables, with a depth limit of fifty metres. We had no helicopter, no support ship, and the nearest recompression chamber was a couple of hours away in the US naval base up the coast.’
Costas gestured pointedly at the two mixed-gas rebreathers on the floor of the boat, and then at the white speck of a ship visible on the horizon, steaming towards them. ‘State-of-the-art deep-diving equipment, and full recompression facilities on board Seaquest II. Modern technology. I rest my case.’ He waved at the battered old diary Jack was holding. ‘Anyway, Greek amphoras. Isn’t that before our period?’
‘That’s what we assumed at the time. But something was niggling me, something I couldn’t be sure of until I saw those amphoras with my own eyes.’ Jack picked up a clipboard from the crate and passed it over to Costas. ‘That’s the amphora typology devised by Heinrich Dressel, a German scholar who studied finds from Rome and Pompeii in the nineteenth century. Check out the drawings on the upper left, numbers two to four.’
‘The amphoras with the high pointed handles?’
‘You’ve got it. Now, in Cousteau’s day, divers identified any amphora with those handles as Greek, because that was the shape of wine amphoras known to have been made in classical Greece. But since then we’ve learned that amphoras of that shape were also made in the areas of the west Mediterranean colonized by the Greeks, then later under the Romans when they conquered those areas. We’re talking southern Italy, Sicily, north-east Spain, all major wine-producing regions first developed by the Greeks.’ He passed over a large black and white photograph showing high-handled amphoras leaning against a wall, and Costas peered at it thoughtfully.
‘A wine storeroom? A tavern? Pompeii?
Jack nodded enthusiastically. ‘Not Pompeii, but Herculaneum, the other town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. A roadside bar, preserved exactly as it was on 24 August AD 79.’
Costas was quiet for a moment, then squinted at Jack. ‘Remind me. What was the date of St Paul’s shipwreck?’
‘Best guess is spring AD 58, maybe a year or two later.’
‘Put me in the picture.’
‘A few years after the death of the emperor Claudius, in the reign of Nero. About ten years before the Romans conquer Judaea and steal the Jewish menorah.’
‘Ah. I’m with you.’ Costas gave Jack a tired smile, then narrowed his eyes again. ‘Nero. Gross debauchery, throwing Christians to the lions, all that?’
Jack nodded. ‘That’s one take on the history of the period. But it was also the most prosperous time in ancient history, the height of the Roman Empire. Wine from the rich vineyards of Campania around Vesuvius was being exported in those Greek-style amphoras all round the known world. They’ve even been found in the furthest Roman outposts in southern India, traded for spices and medicines like the opium in that chest. And they’re found in Britain. They’re exactly what you’d expect to find on a large Alexandrian grain ship of this period. According to the New Testament account in the Acts of the Apostles, there were more than two hundred and seventy people on board that ship with St Paul, and diluted wine would have been their staple drink.’
‘Last question,’ Costas said. ‘The big one. From what I remember, St Paul’s shipwreck was supposed to have been in Malta. How come Sicily?’
‘That’s why it never clicked twenty years ago. Then I did a bit of lateral thinking. Geographically, I mean.’
‘You mean you had a way-out hunch.’
Jack grinned. ‘It’s like this. All we have to go on is the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles. There’s no other account of St Paul’s shipwreck, no way of verifying the story. Right?’
‘It’s all about faith.’
‘In a way, that’s the nub of it. The Gospels, the New Testament, were a collection of documents chosen by the early Church to represent the ministry of Jesus, or perhaps their view of the ministry of Jesus. Some of the Gospels were written soon after Jesus’ life, by eyewitnesses and contemporaries, others were written later. None of
