On 5th September I mentioned I would be going to Malta for a week or so. In fact, I stayed there for approximately ten days with my wife. We booked into a hotel on the waterfront at Sliema. There were three places I wanted to visit: St. Paul’s Bay, St. Thomas Bay and the Maritime Museum at Vittoriosa.
St. Paul’s Bay, which has an island named after the saint, is
thought by some to be the place where he may have swam ashore when he was
shipwrecked while en route to Italy. He was a prisoner aboard an Alexandrian
ship that was taking on water because her seams were leaking. The ship had been
at sea in a prolonged period of gales. After fourteen days being tossed about
by the seas the sailors sensed they were nearing land, and after taking
soundings they set four anchors from the stern of their vessel. It was dark,
and they were fearful their ship would be wrecked. When daylight came they saw
a bay with a beach where they decided they would run the ship ashore. They let her
anchors go, hoisted sail and drove her towards the beach, but the prow caught on
shallows before the beach. The stern started breaking up because of the onslaught
of the waves. Everybody miraculously survived, as the Paul said they would.
St. Thomas Bay, to the east of Malta, could have been the
actual location where the ship was wrecked. No one truly knows, but not so long
ago, four anchors of the type used by ships of the time were found by divers in
fifteen fathoms off St. Thomas Bay. The anchors were subsequently retrieved,
and they are the ones I wanted to see in the Maritime Museum.
Anchors at the Maritime Museum
I came away at the end of my holiday, satisfied because I
had been to both possible locations of Paul’s shipwreck and I had seen the
anchors.
Note
An account of Paul’s ordeal can be found by reading Acts 27.
Links
Malta
The
Shipwreck
Searching
for Paul’s Shipwreck on Malta
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