The Tongues of Men or Angels

Twenty-nine Years after the Crucifixion

For two years Paul was detained in the palace at Caesarea — less than guest and more than prisoner — with the governor Felix and his wife Drusilla. But after Felix is recalled, Porcius Festus is made prefect.

Porcius arrives in an increasingly unstable land, nationalist banditry rife in the countryside and Sicarii, crowd-mingling, sickle-daggered assassins, murdering collaborators and the impious in the cities with rising regularity. Compared to Porcius’s other problems, the issue of what to do with Paul is just a minor irritation. But it is an irritation nonetheless.

Felix used to enjoy talking with Paul, but upon hearing the apostle preach for the first time, Porcius Festus declares, ‘You are raving mad, Paul. Learning has sent you insane.’

Aware of this altered stance in governance, the Jerusalem authorities renew their petition that Paul stand trial for blasphemy before them. But Paul once again claims Roman exemption.

If Porcius Festus dismisses the charges outright he may face uproar, but if he condemns a citizen, simply to placate the ire of provincials, his political prospects could be lastingly marred. So Porcius comes to a prudent and plain solution: Paul has appealed to Roman justice so let him face justice at Rome.

For the journey, Paul is transferred to the custody of a centurion called Julius of the Frumentarii, a group of detached legionaries who secure supply lines, courier messages and perhaps spy. Julius has a ruddy, broad farmer’s face, which belies a mind dark and supple as a mole viper. For the assigned task, Julius commands a unit of auxiliaries from the Augustan cohort and they all board ship on the fifteenth day of the Augustan month.

The soldiers are necessary because Paul is not the only prisoner under transport. A group of manacled damnati — thieves, tax absconders and the merely unlucky — are also on their way to Rome, so that their blood can fertilize the arena’s barren soil.

But Paul is not herded with those others. He is no convict, but a person awaiting Caesar’s court, who should be extended some courtesy. Paul is a man of substance and a citizen. During his time at the prefect’s palace, the apostle has even taken to wearing the toga, a hot, woollen encumbrance. A cloth sixteen feet long and ten across, which drapes upon the body, held in place under its own weight. But which carries weight also in what it signifies: that one is a person of wealth and standing. To add to the picture, Aristarchus and Timothy pose as Paul’s slaves and because of this are allowed to accompany and attend to him.

Centurion Julius accords Paul so much respect that when the ship ports at Sidon in Syria, on the first leg of the journey, Paul is allowed into the town to visit supporters there and to stay with them while the vessel’s captain awaits favourable winds. The other prisoners remain on board, manacled and caged, sickening from the swells and close-confinement.

As soon as the weather allows, the ship travels onwards, skirting the coast, far to the sheltered east of Cyprus. A voyage of ponderous progress, making creeping use of the changeable local land breezes and the steady westward currents, frequently anchoring as advance is thwarted. When the days are clear, the ship passes within sight of many places that have shaped Paul’s life: Antioch, which once was his great base, until he was driven from it by those Judaizers; the Taurus Mountains, behind Tarsus, his boyhood home; Perga, where John-Mark deserted; and numberless sites of triumphs across the shores of Pamphylia and Cyprus, where communities of the sanctified were founded.

More than two weeks it takes, of nautical dawdle, to make port in Myra. The ship is ultimately bound for Troas, where it will harbour for some months. Sailing becomes ever more dangerous as autumn progresses and not even the unhinged take to the seas in the turbulence of winter.

The centurion Julius had planned to travel overland for much of the route from Troas. But by chance, while at Myra, a grain-ship docks, having come from Egypt. More than half of the Nile delta’s crop props up the Roman corn-dole. A premium is paid to those captains brave enough to deliver late in the sailing season and this ship, large enough to cross open seas, still intends to make direct route to Rome.

Julius’s rank secures passage for his soldiers and prisoners and the ship is then a skillet of grain and blood, all that buttresses the Emperor Nero from the urban beast he rides.

Including crew, Paul counts seventy-six souls on the ship that might be saved, but few are of a mind to listen to him. The west wind continues to run against them; progress is hard and slow. A distance past Cnidus, which could have been done in a single day with a following draught, instead steals the best of a week.

When the wind shifts even worse, to north-west, exactly opposing the direction they should be travelling, the captain is forced to sail past Crete and seek refuge in the natural harbour called Fair Havens, on the southern side of that island. And there they are stranded, at anchor for so many days that the Israelite Day of Atonement passes while they are there. Not that any on board fast, but it is a measure of how perilously late into the sailing season they are running. It begins to seem likely they will be forced to spend all winter in the bay.

As it is, the ship is marooned deep into the month of Octobris, but then a slight southerly breeze starts to blow, and a council is taken on how to proceed. A person of rank and an experienced traveller, Paul is allowed to attend and give his view, which is that they ought to remain precisely where they are. But the captain thinks it better to use the beneficial zephyr at least to sail further around the Cretan coast to the port of Phoenix, which is better shielded for the ship to winter in and will allow them freer access to supplies and is in any event in the direction they must ultimately travel so might promise a faster spring departure. The grain-ship being under the command of Rome, the centurion Julius has the final decision and naturally he favours the advice of the mariner; they hoist anchor and resume sailing along the shore of Crete.

But the ship hasn’t covered half the distance to Phoenix when there tears down from the Cretan mountains the wind they call Euraquilo: a violent north-easter, typhonic in ferocity. The squall strikes with sudden force, near to tearing the single square sail from the mast, or the mast from the ship. The hull groans with the leverage of the great beam, and old hands cry that the clinkers will burst and send them all to choking death.

Such oars as the ship has are only for manoeuvring close to port, useless in a gale. The crew has no choice but to let the ship be ripped away from the Cretan shore and further out to sea, running with the wind to avoid being sunk by the strain of resisting it. Rain comes thick as ropes, so dense the passengers fear they will drown each time they breathe. Waves lift the ship high as city walls. The decks shudder and the sea grows black.

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.

Some deckhands lower the ship’s boat, saying that they are going to lay more anchors in advance of the bow — each two-armed of jujube wood and iron — so that the ship can be eased slowly into land when daylight comes. Probably their intentions are honest — it would seemingly be suicide to make for an unknown and stormy shore in a small craft in the dark — but Paul is convinced the men are trying to escape to save only themselves and he persuades the centurion of it. So Julius slices the lifeboat’s rope and it is set adrift, an empty vessel on a shadow sea.

Daylight reveals a coast that no one on board recognizes but which has at one point a sandy bay. Because the ship is anchored from the rear, it is proposed that they raise the foresail, cut the lines and attempt to beach the ship.

So they slot the steering oars, and at the captain’s signal, as the cloth fills, soldiers hack all four anchor ropes at once and the ship, under full sail for the first time in two weeks, ploughs at speed towards the land. Their course runs true at the bay and even the damnati cheer and laugh. But then, still some distance from shore, the ship strikes a sandbar and every man is thrown from his feet.

The fore of the ship is held fast by the bank, but waves continue to pound into the stern, and the much battered boards begin to fragment. Many weep then, to have come so close to salvation, only to face the water, after all. Those of the sailors who can swim, seeing that the ship is breaking up and knowing the first will have it best with the sharks, leap into the sea and make for the beach. The prisoners plead to be freed from their chains, so that they, too, might try for land. Some of the soldiers would sooner put them to death, to prevent escape. But Paul repeats to Julius the angel’s promise that all would be saved and the centurion orders that the damnati be released. And the soldiers leave their weapons, to better their chances with the billows.

The ship wails, while the waves tear it apart, as if it came alive only in death. And those men still on board aid in their vessel’s destruction, rending from it such pieces as they hope will float. Some jump and some tremulously descend upon ropes. But all take themselves into the swells, grasping at planks and debris.

Paul, Timothy and Aristarchus cling together on a section of cross-shaped flotsam, which once had formed part of the aft, and supported by it the three of them kick their way towards the land. And not only they, but every single man of the ship — bone-cold, bloodied, drenched and starving — staggers up the sand alive.

Through the darkness of the tempest they drifted from Crete more than five hundred miles to Malta. And they will stay wintered on that island, until another vessel carries them onward to Italy.

Over the quarter-century of Paul’s missionary journeys, he travelled perhaps as many as ten thousand miles. But upon arrival he will never leave Rome again.