For Jack this opened up an extraordinary historical possibility, a porthole into one of the most famous episodes in maritime exploration. The sixth century BC was the most likely date for the voyages of the Carthaginians Hanno and Himilco. That was the reason why he had been reading the surviving account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa during his flight to Freetown the previous week. Himilco’s voyage was known only through a brief reference by the Roman historian Pliny more than five centuries later, but the possibility that he had gone north and reached the Cassiterides, the fabled Tin Isles, had tantalized historians ever since. Jack had hardly dared think that this might be a wreck from Himilco’s expedition, and he would let the archaeology speak for itself. Hanno and Himilco were explorers, to be sure, but they were also driven by the Phoenician passion for trade, and the discovery of a wreck filled with the kind of goods that the British in Cornwall might have traded for their tin made the possibility too compelling to put aside.
He saw the lead anchor stock now, cushioned between sandbags on the seabed, and sank down to look at the symbols cast on one side. They were a Phoenician letter B, an early type with an angular form, and a small bucranium, a shape like bull’s horns. Jack was certain that they were apotropaic, to ward off misfortune, a common function of symbols on later Greek and Roman anchors, in this case the B perhaps referring to the Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon and the bucranium to the sacred bull’s-horn shape seen in the mountain peak to the east of Carthage. If so, they had failed in their purpose, but seeing them did made Jack ponder the nature of the wrecking.
The anchors they had found were in the bow, facing the shore. He knew this because the other end of the wreck contained pottery and small finds, indicating the crew’s living area, a stern deckhouse where they would have cooked and taken shelter. The absence of anchors in the stern suggested that those must have been lost in an attempt to hold the ship against a westerly wind, the most likely cause of the wrecking. Unlike the steamship, therefore, which had been blown into the cove sideways and sunk beam-on, the Phoenician ship had gone down facing the shore. Jack had stood on the headland trying to put himself in the mind of the captain, imagining the sea as he had seen it during that winter storm. Laying out the anchors astern, knowing they would drag, might not have been an act of desperation but that of a skilled navigator, one who had sounded the seabed and knew there was no hope of holding in the sand but that he might at least prevent the ship from going in beam-on, allowing her the small chance of being thrown intact onto the beach.
What the captain could not have known about was what Jack saw during the storm, the sucking undertow down the beach that followed each huge wave as it crashed in, momentarily exposing the seabed at low tide almost as far out as the wreck site. In such extreme conditions, with the anchors still holding her bow-on to the shore, the ship might actually have been grounded rather than sunk, driven hard into the seabed while the next towering wave built up behind her. In that instant, with shore only a stone’s throw away, the captain must have known that they were doomed, that there would be no time to hack away the anchor ropes and hope for the best. The next wave would have inundated the ship, smashing away the mast and rigging and breaking the bodies of any men still aboard even before they were thrown on to the rocks.
It would have been a terrifying end, following hours of fear clinging to the ship as it was driven ashore, lashed by spray and lurching sickeningly in the swell as the anchors dragged remorselessly. But like those who had gone down in Clan Macpherson off West Africa, like so many who were buried along the clifftops and sand dunes of this coast, the Phoenicians were men of the sea who would have known the fate that might lie in store for them, that no manner of apotropaic sign or pleading to the gods was going to help them when the storm waters were raging and all hope was lost.
Rebecca dropped down again, pointing at the stern part of the wreck and swimming on her back toward it, looking at Jack. He gave an okay signal, and watched as she turned over and followed another huge jellyfish that had appeared overhead. He looked at where she had pointed, and felt a surge of anticipation. The project supervisor had seen his frustration the week before at having to leave his corner of the excavation incomplete when he had been called to Deep Explorer, and had left it sandbagged over for his return. He restrained himself from swimming straight for it, and continued to float slowly over the site, taking in everything that had been exposed while he had been away.
Instead of being covered with a latticework of grid squares, the only fixed structures on the site were twenty red-topped metal stakes that acted as datum points for the sonic high-accuracy ranging and positioning system they used to map the wreck. The system had been refined by Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident computer genius, and meant that with a click of a sonic gun an excavator could record the exact position of any new find. The data went straight into the master plan, and combined with photogrammetry and sonar mapping meant that a detailed 3D rendition of the site with up-to-date finds was available for anyone who could log on to the project website. Above all, it meant that the huge amount of time that used to be spent measuring and recording finds by hand was no longer required, a factor of supreme importance at a site exposed to vagaries of the weather where rapid excavation was of the essence.
Jack swam over the main area of the cargo hold, looking at the amphoras that had yet to be raised. The main type was for olive oil, a speciality product of the eastern coast of Tunisia to the south of Carthage; the few fish sauce and wine amphoras were probably for use by the crew. A number of the amphoras had been bound up by the excavators in protective wrap to cover inscriptions that had been found painted on the shoulders or bodies in pitch, most of them describing the contents or marking amphoras for export. One of the tents in the shore encampment was filled with buckets where broken sherds with inscriptions had been put to soak in fresh water prior to being taken to the conservation lab at IMU.
He saw the area of the excavation where Costas had been working the week previously, the lead weight with his name tag and a sand-filled gin bottle still there where he had staked out his territory. On the phone yesterday Jack had reminded him of his comment during their dive on Clan Macpherson about finding a sherd from the Cornwall wreck that might have had an unusual inscription, and Costas had promised to go fishing in the finds buckets in the conservation tent when he arrived this afternoon so that they could have a closer look.
Jack flashed through the other finds they had made, preparing himself for anything he might discover. One of the most amazing artifacts had been a small, thick-walled jar with a deep blue residue that the lab had quickly identified as dye from the murex shell, the famous “royal purple” from Tire that was a closely guarded Phoenician secret. It was a hint of the dyed textiles that the ship might also have been carrying, and a reminder of the close ties that the western Phoenicians retained with their Semitic homeland, with the peoples of the coast of ancient Canaan that extended from modern Syria and Lebanon to Israel. They had also found three distinctive Massaliot amphoras, made by the Greek settlers of modern Marseilles and containing high-grade wine, as well as a batch of beautiful black-glazed drinking cups from Corinth, showing that the Phoenicians were not above diversifying their cargos with goods acquired from their trade rivals.