Sailing Around Africa

We went into central London this afternoon, to see the replica Phoenician ship currently moored at St Katharine's Dock. It's not a static replica, like the Amity brig in Albany, but a working, seaworthy vessel, built to an ancient pattern to repeat a journey made in 600 BCE when -- at the request of the 26th Dynasty Pharoah Necho II -- a flotilla of Phoenician merchant vessels sailed clockwise around Africa (or Libya, as the continent was then known) "just because". Herodotus records this in his Histories, but says that he does not believe it because the Phoenicians reported that when they were rounding the southern part of Libya they had the sun on their right, i.e., to the north: a point which to a modern reader confirms that the Phoenicians did indeed make that voyage.

We arrived in time for a guided tour of the ship by the skipper, who said that one of the things they'd found when sailing up the west coast of Africa was the impossibility of beating the prevailing winds and currents, which required them to sail way out to the west and eventually turn back to make landfall on The Azores from the northwest; ergo, the Phoenicians must have been the first to have discovered the archipelago. This is apparently a sore point with the Portuguese, whose national mythology is built around the islands' discovery by Prince Henry the Navigator in the 15th century; however, it would seem that recent archaeological discoveries on the islands have confirmed that the Phoenicians got there first. (The link talks of Carthaginians of the 4th century BCE, but Carthage was of course a Phoenician city. In addition, an exploratory voyage two centuries previously may have left little if any non-organic material to mark that it had been there.)

The ship was -- as the original would have been -- difficult: it had a large square sail which could be turned about the mast but couldn't properly tack against the wind; it had two side steering oars rather than a central rudder, and therefore couldn't easily be turned into or held against the wind; and it had no ratlines, which meant that hauling in the sail requiring pulling on ropes from below (or even lowering the boom) rather than rolling it up from above. That it took the crew two years and two months to sail around Africa is not at all surprising.

Below are some photographs -- a general view of the ship from across St Katharine's Dock; a view of the horse's head on the prow of the ship; a view of the stern showing the starboard steering oar; a view of the mast and the boom, showing the ropes needed to haul in the sail; and one of the explanatory boards from the display in the hold, showing how the ship was put together. This last is not conjectural, but based on the recovery of a wrecked Phoenician ship from the seabed off Marseilles: a construction method the Romans later appropriated but (typically) were keen to pretend was their own invention. I'm not sure that I'd trust my life to it, but I greatly admire those -- ancient and modern -- who did.