Sailing the Open Seas

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“The Mediterranean is a passionate collector,” writes European scholar Predrag Matvejevicá in Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999). Indeed, over the past half-century, essentially since the invention of the aqualung in the 1940s, divers have discovered the remains of well over 1,200 ancient shipwrecks.^a

Most of these wrecks date to Roman times (200 B.C.–300 A.D.), though examples have been found from nearly every major period of antiquity. Roman-period ships tended to carry amphoras full of olive oil, wine or fish sauce. But marine archaeologists have also found other cargoes: raw metal (such as copper and tin ox-hide ingots), bronze and iron weapons, precious metals, jewelry, stone statues, building materials, musical instruments, religious objects, games, tools, ostrich eggshells and even one of the world’s oldest books (see photo of hinged book).¹

Almost all of these wrecks have been excavated (or, sadly, looted) in shallow coastal waters less than 200 feet deep—the limit for ordinary diving. The 022conventional wisdom has long been that ancient mariners did not sail the open sea—at a time when there were no compasses (a 13th-century A.D. invention) or nautical charts. Bound to coastal waters by their limited technology and their fear of the great unknown, they sailed by day and then beached their ships at night or anchored them close to shore. According to a recent book on ancient travel, “Just as a mouse placed in the center of an empty room will immediately dash toward one of the walls, so Greek sailors … were accustomed, even when sailing the comparatively placid Aegean, to hug the coasts and stay within sight of land at all times.”²

The idea that the ancients hugged shorelines is also suggested by a series of sailing directions called periploi (literally “sailings around”), a literary genre that goes back at least to the fifth century B.C. These early travelogues listed distances along the Mediterranean coast measured either in stadia (about 600 feet) or in terms of a “day’s sail.” The periploi tell of distances between promontories, headlands, river mouths and coastal cities, proceeding around the entire Mediterranean. In the Roman period, geographers such as Strabo (c. 60 B.C.–21 A.D.), Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.) and Ptolemy (100–168 A.D.) drew from these works in compiling their geographies of the inhabited world.

Recent archaeological finds, however, have forced scholars to question this picture of ancient mariners as timid shore-huggers.

In 1988 the American explorer Robert Ballard, then with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered a late-fourth-century A.D. Roman ship about 2,600 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Sicily (see accompanying article). A year later, Ballard and archaeologist Anna Marguerite McCann explored the shipwreck with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

Ballard and McCann also investigated nearby Skerki Bank, a mountain that rises from the sea floor to just a few yards below the surface, where they found seven wrecks. The nearest point of land, on Sicily, lies 80 miles to the east.

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In early 1999, while searching for the Israeli submarine Dakar (which was lost in 1968) on the Herodotus Abyssal Plain midway between Rhodes and Alexandria, a marine search and recovery team found several amphora mounds spaced closely together in about 10,000 feet of water. One of the mounds turned out to be the remains of a Hellenistic merchantman, dating around 200 B.C., with a load of about 2,500 amphoras. Also visible on the mound were five lead anchors, kitchenware, a large metal cauldron and wooden hull fragments. The nearest land is approximately 170 miles away.

Later that year, Ballard and archaeologist Lawrence Stager of Harvard University explored two eighth-century B.C. Phoenician merchantmen (initially discovered two years earlier by an American submarine also searching for the Dakar) west of Ashkelon, an ancient Philistine city on the coast of southern Israel. Named Tanit (for a Phoenician goddess) and Elissa (for the legendary Phoenician princess, also called Dido, who founded Carthage) by the team, the ships may have been sailing together when they sank in over 1,300 feet of water, hitting bottom only about 2.5 miles apart. Their cargoes: hundreds of jars of wine (see photo of jars of wine in “Exploring the Deep”), probably from the Phoenician city of Tyre (in modern Lebanon), along with cooking pots, a grinding bowl, an incense stand and a wine decanter. The bows of the two ships point westward, suggesting that they were heading to Egypt or perhaps to Phoenician settlements further west in the Mediterranean. Ashkelon, the nearest point of land, is 35 miles to the east.³

What are we to make of these ancient shipwrecks in deep water, often far from shore? Perhaps they were dragged by storms onto the high seas, where they met their demise.

As the evidence piles up, however, it seems more plausible that these ships were sailing the open sea deliberately when they ran into trouble—from storms, piracy, faulty construction, wear and tear, or any number of causes. But what gave ancient mariners the confidence to sail the open sea? Without navigational instruments—compasses, nautical charts and chronometers—how did they find their way?

The Mediterranean was conducive to early navigation—especially the northern Mediterranean with its numerous inlets, peninsulas and islands, and its natural separation into smaller seas. Its weak currents generally flow predictably counter-clockwise, tides are negligible, and stars are nearly always visible in the summer skies, when maritime activity was most intense. The Mediterranean also has predictable seasonal winds, such as the northerly and 026northwesterly winds of the eastern basin.

One of the seas abutting the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, was a kind of “navigational nursery,” where seafaring even predated agriculture. In the late-Paleolithic levels (c. 11,000 years ago) of Franchthi Cave in southern Greece, archaeologists have found blades of obsidian from the Aegean island of Melos, which lies about 70 miles from the cave. Even at this early date, then, Aegean peoples had developed seafaring abilities enabling them to cross short stretches of sea. Our ancient travelers probably moved from island to island, as if on stepping-stones, eventually covering great distances. The Adriatic, where distances between the eastern and western shore average about 100 miles, was probably explored and colonized in the same manner.

The 3,000-mile coastline of the southern Mediterranean, by contrast, does not offer offshore islands and natural harbors. During the summer, when sailing activity was at its peak, this was a dangerous lee shore. The first-century B.C. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus describes it as

a sandbank extending along the whole length of Egypt, not discernible to the unacquainted approaching by sea. Consequently, those who think that they have escaped the menace of the sea, and in their ignorance are glad to turn toward the shore, suddenly run the ship aground; and some, unable to see land beforehand on account of very low-lying ground, are barely aware that 027they are being cast ashore when it happens, some of them in swampy and marshy places, others in desert areas (Library of History 1.31.3–5).

Three large areas of sea between Europe, the Near East and North Africa are “maritime deserts,” that is, areas in which the coastline cannot be seen. The Algerian-Tyrrhenian Basin, where Skerki Bank lies, has a maritime desert area of 68,000 square miles and a maximum depth of 12,500 feet. The Ionian Basin, with a desert area of 159,000 square miles and a maximum depth of 16,000 feet, has yet to yield any deepwater shipwrecks; however, since ships sailing the open sea from the eastern to the western Mediterranean would have passed through this basin, wrecks will almost certainly be found upon further investigation. The third maritime desert region is the Levantine Basin, which comprises 105,000 square miles of desert area and has a maximum depth of 15,000 feet—a stretch of sea traveled by Egyptians, Syro-Canaanites, Cypriots, Phoenicians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Greeks and many others.

The total area of empty sea amounts to 332,000 square miles.^b On any given day in the Mediterranean, however, haze and dust (particularly off the Sahara during the temperate months) can enlarge these desert areas even further.

Coastal sailing, of course, was practiced in antiquity. Fishing vessels, local traders and transports, itinerant merchants and warships had little reason to head for the open sea if their destinations lay across a strait or a day’s sail down a patch of coastline. We know from classical sources that ancient war galleys tried to keep the shoreline in view while transiting between landfalls. The open sea, even on calm days, could be hostile to ships with oar ports close to the waterline. Also, the space taken up by the rowers meant that food and water, the “fuel” of ancient galleys, often were only to be had on shore—thus shorter trips.

From at least the Late Bronze Age (1500–1200 B.C.), however, sailing the open sea was a routine practice. One common route was a counterclockwise path running from the Aegean south to the Libyan-Egyptian coast (about 350 miles of open sea), east to the Nile Delta and then north along the Levantine coast (either close in or far offshore) to Cyprus. The route then continued westward beneath Anatolia, forcing ships to beat against headwinds to make it back to the Aegean.

This circuit was determined by the prevailing northerly winds (that is, winds blowing from north to south) in the Aegean and northwesterly winds in the Levantine Basin. The northerly winds made the long, open-sea southern passage relatively simple. On the other hand, the northwesterly winds posed a problem for mariners on the last leg of the journey; ships beating their way from Cyprus to the Aegean had to keep predominant winds on the stern or abeam as much as possible, and they had to take advantage of alternating on-shore winds (in the morning as the land heats up) and off-shore winds (in the evening as the land cools down).

This route is often referred to in ancient sources, from the Homeric poems of the eighth century B.C. to records of Roman-era trading ships (and, as mentioned above, we now have the Hellenistic shipwreck on the Herodotus Abyssal Plain, between the Aegean and Egypt). The second-century A.D. Greek writer Lucian gives an account of the journey of a large Roman grain ship, the Isis (a very common name for ships in antiquity, since the Egyptian fertility goddess, Isis, also protected sailors), which had 028been driven by storms to the Greek coast while sailing from Alexandria to Rome:

The captain said that after they left Pharos [in Alexandria] under a weak wind, they sighted Acamas [in Cyprus] in seven days. Then, as it blew against them from the west, they were carried abeam as far as Sidon. From there they encountered a strong storm and came through the strait to Chelidonenses [Cape Gelidonya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast]^c on the tenth day. There they nearly sank … But the gods took pity on their cries and showed them a fire from Lycia, so that they knew the place … [T]hey sailed across the Aegean beating against the etesians [northwesterly winds].⁴

The first leg of Isis’s journey was a seven-day voyage from Pharos, the lighthouse at Alexandria, to a cape in western Cyprus, some 400 miles away. Assuming the account is accurate, how on earth did the crew keep to its course on the open sea far out of sight of land, by day and night?

Seafarers in antiquity made use of numerous environmental clues to gauge where the ship was and where it was heading. By day, they used the sun; in Mediterranean latitudes during the summer, the sun rises in the northeast, slants obliquely southward towards its zenith (overhead position) in the southern sky, and then arcs back to set on the northwest horizon. The sun provides a dependable directional on clear days.

More important, however, were the winds. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) describes a diagram, called a wind rose, showing the relation of ancient wind directions to weather conditions. This wind rose indicates the specific “signatures” of 11 winds. Ancient seafarers knew these winds—wet, dry, cold, dust-laden, strengthening, weakening, and so on—and they served as a kind of compass for navigating across the open sea.

Eight of Aristotle’s 11 winds have been immortalized in Athens on the so-called Horologion of Andronikos, a first-century B.C. octagonal tower built to house an elaborate water clock. Known today as the Tower of the Winds, each of its eight sides contains a relief carving showing the personification of a specific wind. Boreas, the north wind, is dressed heavily and carries a triton shell symbolizing the wind’s howling. Kaikias of the northeast bears hailstones, while Apeliotes from the east carries fruit and grain. Euros, from the southeast, covers his face before the cold wind. The southern wind, Notos, holds a jar upside down (perhaps indicating the heat of the Sahara). Lips, from the southwest (also called the Sirocco), holds the stern post of a ship. Zephyros, the west wind, displays flowers. And Sciron, from the northwest, carries a brazier.

In the summertime, Boreas often blew with gale force, driving unfortunate seafarers before it. In the Odyssey, although Odysseus and his men sailed easily “on a North Wind” as far as Egypt (Book 14.252–258), the fleet of Menelaus (husband of Helen and brother of Agamemnon) was cut in half by Boreas’s “shrilling winds,” with some ships smashing into Crete and others driven to Egypt (Book 3.286–300). The fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus informs us that sailors from the islands of Samos and Crete knew the Libyan coastlines from being blown there by storms (Histories 4.151–162). Boreas does not prevail all the time, however; for short periods, particularly in the spring and late fall, the north wind gives way to the southwest wind, Lips. With the help of Lips, seafarers leaving North African ports could travel directly north, avoiding the longer, circuitous route via Cyprus.

In antiquity, the only real instrument of navigation was the sounding lead, which was dropped on a line into the water. Sounding leads (shown above) have been found in some quantity on ancient shipwrecks, especially those from the Roman period. Herodotus mentions their 061usefulness to ships approaching the perilous shallows of the Nile Delta (Histories 2.5). In addition to telling the depth of the water, the sounding lead was used to reveal the composition of the seabed. This gave the captain much-needed information about how to anchor his ship—that is, what kind of anchors to use and how many.

Determining a ship’s position was accomplished by clues found in nature. On the open sea, the seafarer compared the sun’s position with wind direction and tried to keep to a course plotted in his “mental map” of the region. If the wind died down, he could measure its direction by swells that often continued for several hours. During lulls, or in seas confused by variable winds, the ancient pilot would try to sight land by looking for shore birds or birds that feed at sea but return to land in the evening (such as terns and boobies).

Contrary to popular wisdom, nighttime sailing was common in antiquity, as many routes simply required more than a day to complete. The night sky provided the equivalent of the modern compass. Instead of using just one star, the sun, as a point of reference, sailors at night had stars in all quarters, moving in a steady and predictable order. It is no surprise that the earliest known reference to steering by the stars comes from Homer’s Odyssey. While sailing from Calypso’s isle, Odysseus watches “the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes, and the Bear … The beautiful goddess Calypso advised him to keep this one on his left as he sailed over the sea” (Odyssey 5.270–77).

Some stars and constellations rise in the east and set in the west, such as the Pleiades and “late-setting” Boötes. Others are circumpolar, meaning that they simply circle around the north celestial pole. These include the Bears—our Ursa Major (Big Bear, or the Big Dipper) and Ursa Minor (Little Bear, or the Little Dipper). The north celestial pole today is occupied by Polaris, a rather faint star in Ursa Minor. In antiquity, however, this pole was occupied by the brightest star in Ursa Minor: Kochab. Both Bears proved useful to early seafarers. According to the third-century B.C. Greek writer Aratus, Greek seafarers

take their mark by Ursa Major, whereas the Phoenicians cross the sea trusting in the other [Ursa Minor]. Ursa Major, appearing clear at earliest night, is easily recognized; but the other is small, yet better for sailors; for all of her stars wheel in a smaller orbit; by her, then, the Sidonians [that is, Phoenicians] sail their ships.⁵

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Circumpolar constellations not only provided a sense of direction, but they also helped sailors determine their geographic position. Because the earth is spherical, as one sails south, the north celestial pole sinks lower in the sky; in our modern latitude-longitude system, it is a rule of thumb that the altitude of the pole star equals the latitude of the observer (that is, 90 degrees, or directly overhead, at the pole). In the Mediterranean, the difference in the pole star’s altitude between the northernmost area (the head of the Adriatic Sea) and the southernmost area (the Gulf of Sidra in modern Libya) is about 15 degrees, a difference easily visible to the naked eye.

Some of these techniques are described in a passage from the first-century A.D. Roman writer Lucan, in which a steersman tells the Roman general Pompey how he intends to navigate to Syria:

The never-setting pole star, which does not sink beneath the waves, brightest of the twin Bears, guides the ships. When I see this one culminate and Ursa Minor stand above the lofty yards, then we are facing the Bosporus and the Black Sea that curves the shores of Scythia. Whenever Arctophylax (Boötes) descends from the mast-top and Cynosura (Ursa Minor) sinks nearer to the horizon, the ship is proceeding toward the ports of Syria. After that comes Canopus, a star content to wander about the southern sky, fearing the North. If you keep it on the left [as you sail] past Pharos, your ship will touch Syrtis (in the Gulf of Sidra) in mid-sea.⁶

Even though the Mediterranean became Rome’s Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), her waters continued to be dangerous. Despite the honed skills of generations of seafarers, the refinement of navigation techniques and the increased understanding of the sea’s geography, ships still sank in great numbers year after year, some along the coasts and some in the deep sea. Hence the contrasting traditional images: the timid, coast-hugging mariner and the swaggering seafarer sailing beyond the sunset. Now, however, the question is not “Did they stick to the coasts?” but “How often did they brave the maritime deserts?” Only more deepwater exploration will provide the answer.

“The Mediterranean is a passionate collector,” writes European scholar Predrag Matvejevicá in Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999). Indeed, over the past half-century, essentially since the invention of the aqualung in the 1940s, divers have discovered the remains of well over 1,200 ancient shipwrecks.a Most of these wrecks date to Roman times (200 B.C.–300 A.D.), though examples have been found from nearly every major period of antiquity. Roman-period ships tended to carry amphoras full of olive oil, wine or fish sauce. But marine archaeologists have also found other cargoes: raw metal (such as copper and tin ox-hide ingots), bronze […]