Sailing from Fair Havens close to the land, they might hope, with a south wind, to reach Phcenice in a few hours. Hut soon the weather changed; the ship was caught in a typhoon which blew with such violence that they could not face it, but were forced, in the first instance, to scud before it. It follows from this that the wind must have blown off the land, else they would have been stranded on the Cretan coast. This sudden change from a sonlli wind to a violent northerly wind is a common occurrence in these seas. The (ireelt term typhouic means that the wind was accompanied by the agitation and whirling motion of the clouds caused by the meeting of the opposite currents of air. By this single word are expressed the violence and direction of
the gale. The wind Euroclydon (according to the most ancient versions, Euroa(iuilo = east -northeast) forced them to run under the lee of Clauda. Here they avail- ed themselves of the smooth water to prepare the ship to resist the fury of the storm. Their first care was to secure the boat by hoisting it on board. Luke tells us that they had much difiiculty in doing this, probably because it was filled with water. The next care was to undergird the ship. Only one naval officer with whom Mr. Smith had met had ever seen it put in prac- tice. Mr. Henry Hartley, who piloted the Russian fleet in 1815 from England to the Baltic, mentions that one of the ships, the "Jupiter," was frapped round the mid- dle by three or four turns of a stream-cable. Sir George Back, on his return from his perilous arctic voyage in 18.37, was forced, on account of the shattered condition of his ship, to undergird her.
AVe are next told that, fearing they should be driven towards the Syrtis, they lowered the gear (not " strake sail," which would be equivalent to saying that, being apprehensive of a certain danger, they deprived them- selves of the only possible means of avoiding it). A ship preparing for a storm sends down upon deck the " top hamper," or gear connected with the fair-weather sails, such as the siippara, or topsails. When the ship was thus borne along, she was not only undergirded and made snug, but had storm-sails set and was on the star- board tack, i. e. with her right side to the wind, which was the only course by which she could avoid falling into the Syrtis (q. v.). On the next day they threw over- board the ship's tackling. From the expression " with our own hands'' Mr. Smith supposes the main-yard is meant, an immense s]iar, probably as long as the ship, and which might require the united efforts of passen- gers and men. The storm continued with unabated fury for eleven daj's more. " All hope was taken away ;" probaljly not so much from the fury of the gale as from the state of the ship, their exertions to keep her from foundering being unavailing. At length, on the four- teenth night, the seamen suspected (to use the graphic sea-phrase of Luke) " the land was Hearing them," prob- ably from the noise of the l)reakers. No ship can en- ter St. Paul's Bay in JMalta from the east without pass- ing within a quarter of a mile of the point of Koura; but before reaching it the land is too low and too far from the track of a ship driven from the eastward to be seen on a dark night. When she does come within this distance, it is impossible to avoid observing the breakers, which are so violent as to form its distinctive character. On Aug. 10, 1810, the British frigate " Live- ly" went to pieces on these very breakers at the point of Koura. Mr. Smith here goes into calculations iia order to show that a ship starting late in the evening from Clauda would, by midnight on the 14th, be less than three miles from the entrance of St. Paul's Bay. A coincidence so close as this is, to a certain extent, ac- cidental; but it is an accident which could not have happened had there been any inaccuracy on the part of the author of the narrative with regard to the nu- merous incidents upon which the calculniions are found- ed, or had the ship been wrecked anywhere but at Malta. The number of conditions re(inired in order to make any locality agree with the narrative are so nu- merous as to render it impossible to supi)ose that the agreement in the present case can be the effect of chance. The first circumstance is that the shipmen suspected the approach of land evidently without see- ing it, Tiie ((uartermaster of the " Lively" states, in his evidence at the court-martial, that at the distance of a ((uarter of a mile the land could not be seen, but that lie saw the surf on the shore. Another point is this: the shipmen when they sounded found twenty fathoms, and then fifteen fathoms. Everj' ship, indeed, in ap- proaching the land must pass over twenty fathoms and fifteen fathoms; but here must not only the twenty- fathom depth be close to the spot where they had the indications of land, but it must bear east by south from