Writing almost 200 years after the events in question, Herodotus records in The Histories the Phoenicians’ claim to have sailed into dangerous, uncharted waters and circumnavigated Africa. It was either a fantastic—almost inconceivable—achievement or a wild hoax. Herodotus himself doubted the claim.
Enter Philip Beale. The former British naval officer and adventurer is reopening this ancient question. He intends to vindicate the Phoenicians’ claim—and he plans to do it in dramatic fashion: Having spent months overseeing the construction of an exact replica of a seventh-century B.C. Phoenician ship, Beale will skipper a crew of 20 on a ten-month odyssey around Africa.
The Phoenician Ship Expedition will depart from Arwad, Syria (i.e., ancient Phoenicia), in August 2008 and head south. After negotiating the dangers of the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, a critical point in the expedition, the voyage will continue up the west coast of Africa, through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean to return back to Syria in June 2009—ten months later and 17,000 miles wiser.
Hoping to re-create, as much as possible, the technical circumstances of the ancient voyage—from living conditions to sailing methods—Beale hopes to gain precious insight into the secrets of the earliest sailors. Beale is calling the mission a “test, from an exercise in experimental archaeology, of the performance characteristics of the Phoenician/Mediterranean ship under sail.”
The project is also trying 015to create history, bringing together an international crew from Europe, America, Africa and the Middle East to make this a special, collective human endeavor. The voyage will be full of serious challenges and very real dangers, from severe storms to pirates. The mission seeks to gain not only technical but psychological insights into ancient seafaring: exploring the human experience of being on the sea in a spare, low-tech vessel.
Having successfully navigated the 2003 Borobudur Ship Expedition, the voyage of an eighth-century B.C. Indonesian ship to West Africa (to demonstrate that early Indonesian seafarers could have reached West Africa by sail rather than by land), Beale knows the human toll of sea adventure.
“It is a bit of a mad idea,” he conceded. “But some of the best ideas are the mad ones.”—A.S.
Writing almost 200 years after the events in question, Herodotus records in The Histories the Phoenicians’ claim to have sailed into dangerous, uncharted waters and circumnavigated Africa. It was either a fantastic—almost inconceivable—achievement or a wild hoax. Herodotus himself doubted the claim. Enter Philip Beale. The former British naval officer and adventurer is reopening this ancient question. He intends to vindicate the Phoenicians’ claim—and he plans to do it in dramatic fashion: Having spent months overseeing the construction of an exact replica of a seventh-century B.C. Phoenician ship, Beale will skipper a crew of 20 on a ten-month odyssey […]
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