Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

By helmsmanship, or luck, or both, they are able to steer the craft into the lee of a small island called Cauda, lying off Crete. The storm is still violent and it is impossible to anchor; billows, white-crested as if toothed, continue to crash against the craft, but in the part-shelter of the isle they are at least able to perform urgencies that had been impossible in the full squall. The crew lower the sail that had threatened to undo them; it might even have blown them to the wrecking sandbars off Libya, had they not got it down. Then they undergird the ship: running a double length of rope from stern to bow and torquing it tight, to stop the hull bending with the force of the pounding. While the sailors are at these tasks, the soldiers and passengers are ordered to haul in the ship’s boat, which, after the practice of the time, had been drifting on a line behind them, threatening to capsize. It takes all their strength to get it on board, with the ship wrenching and the wind blasting. Their eyes sting from the salt spray and driving downpour, and it is hard even to grasp the rope, their hands are so slick with water.

The damnati shriek that they should be freed from their chains, or they will certainly die if the ship goes down. But the centurion tells them every man on board will drown if the ship sinks, and those in chains will be blessed to perish fastest. They should be grateful to be fastened and caged, when the wash that sweeps across the decks threatens to tear better men overboard.

Timothy vomits in the constant rolling churn. He retches until his stomach is empty; then he dry-retches the lining, then he vomits again with all the water swallowed in the retching.

Paul tries to lift his spirits with a psalm:

‘Some went out on the sea in ships;

they were merchants on the mighty waters.

They saw the works of the Lord ,

His wonderful deeds in the deep .

For He spoke and stirred up a tempest

that lifted high the waves .

They mounted up to the heavens and went

down to the depths;

in their peril their courage melted away .

They reeled and staggered like drunkards;

they were at their wits’ end .

Then they cried out to the Lord in their

trouble ,

and He brought them out of their distress .

He stilled the storm to a whisper;

the waves of the sea were hushed .

They were glad when it grew calm ,

and He guided them to their desired haven .’

But the storm is not stilled with a whisper and the waves are not hushed and it does not grow calm, and the only guidance to be found is the wind Euraquilo.

The crew swing the ship so that its prow points into the gale. Then they rig a small foresail, only big enough to hold the bow position, in hope not to be sunk by wave-crashes from the side. And they throw out sea-anchors to steady and slow. But they can do nothing more than this and the ship courses with the storm, dragged ever further from safety.

The breakers are blasted skyward and the rain comes drenching as a sea and the heavens are half as often at the side as above, so that no one even knows which way is up or where water ends and air begins. One wave hasn’t passed before the next hits and they join and tear apart again. The deck is treacherous and terrifying, lit only when lightning flashes, but to go below is to sit in rocking, slopping liquid in darkness and misery and to know that water lies on every side and even overhead.

On the next day the tempest has not diminished and the ship is tossed so fearfully that it’s decided they must jettison the cargo, to lessen the force of the waves on the broadside. Valuable sacks of Nile grain are heaved from the hold in human chain over slippery, pitching boards and fed to Poseidon’s white horses. But if that salt god is pleased by the gift, he doesn’t show it and the storm continues to rage.

The third day, to further lighten, for fear the planks will be torn apart, they hurl into the billows all the ship’s goods and tackle, everything any less than vital. And the wounds caused by falls and splintered wood are first washed clean and then washed raw. And the passengers follow the crew in lashing themselves to those parts of the ship they deem least likely to be swept away.

The gale still doesn’t abate. And after many more nights’ drifting before it, fear itself is just a distant memory, replaced in most with the certainty of despair. For more than a week the sailors see neither sun nor stars nor any land, so that they cannot do better than guess where they are. Some fear they will be crushed on reefs or rocks and others that they will disintegrate in the open water. And old salts, who had thought they had known and conquered every hazard of the sea, cry tears masked by the rain and the sprays and sob supplications hidden in the howls of the gale.

They can’t make cooking fires on deck to bake the remnants of grain, and all the hardened biscuits and salted fish are long gone, so they eat raw, mortared corn, damp with blustered sea water. Most hunger and all are cold. The soldiers and seamen have woollen cloaks waterproofed with oil and Paul and his pseudo-slaves have thick travelling clothes, but all of these are drenched and heavy. The damnati shiver in their shackles, clustered tight together like a colony of seabirds. Not a nail or pot or inch of skin on board has known dryness in a week. Chains and ropes have snapped; the taut foresail barely holds. And the ship sometimes leans so hard that a man at the side could stretch a hand into the deep, but all are strapped at the centre away from waters that yawn like jaws.

More days they suffer in hopelessness, still blasted towards they know not what fate by the storm; perhaps even until they drop off the edge of the world. Each time they think they feel the tempest lighten, it proves to be a dream.

Paul reminds them of how they should have followed his advice: never to have left the anchorage at Fair Havens. But they resist the urge to send him over, like a Jonah, for long enough to hear him also say that an angel came to him in the night and promised they would all be saved. Some of the mariners pluck small comfort from this because — though no man saw this angel — it is clear from Paul’s countenance that he earnestly believes what he says, and there is no other comfort to be found.

They will not even know a grave or pyre when the ship goes down, only the ocean and the stripping fishes. Some have travelled half the world to be here and some who are slaves had no choice in that. And men who have never prayed in their lives pray now. To Poseidon, Thalassa and Oceanus; to Triton and Palaemon; to Castor and Pollux; to the sea nymph Thetis and the white goddess Leukothea; and some even wager a prayer to that resurrected God of Paul’s to see if He might bring them back from this oblivion.

It is near midnight on the fourteenth day adrift in the tempest when the first sailor senses that land is near. And others, too, believe it to be so, either smelling soil, as some old tars can, or picking out the resound of breakers upon a shore even amid the still-blowing storm.

Though water washes across the deck, so deep it is sometimes hard to be sure they are not sunk, the mariners take a depth-sounding over the side and find it twenty fathoms and then a little later fifteen fathoms. But because it is double dark from cloud and night they can’t risk drifting in to smash upon cliffs or rocks so they throw out four anchors from the stern, which by miracle catch in clay, to hold the ship fast. The vessel slews about, like a bull at the end of a charge, and with the groans of planks in the last of integrity, the prow faces a shore the voyagers cannot see.