He peered into the glassy stillness of the sea, saw the rocky cliff face underwater disappear into the shimmering blue. His mind was racing, his heart pounding with excitement. Could this be it? Could this be the most famous shipwreck of all antiquity?
The shipwreck of St Paul?
‘You there?’
Jack raised his foot and gently prodded the other form in the boat. It wobbled, then grunted. Costas Kazantzakis was about a foot shorter than Jack but built like an ox, a legacy of generations of Greek sailors and sponge-fishermen. Like Jack he was stripped to the waist, and his barrel chest was glistening with sweat. He seemed to have become moulded to the boat, his legs extended on the pontoon in front of Jack and his head nestled in a mess of towels at the bow. His mouth was slightly open and he was wearing a pair of wraparound fluorescent sunglasses, a hilarious fashion accessory on such an unkempt figure. One hand was dangling in the water, holding the hoses that led down to the regulators at the decompression stop, and the other was draped over the valve of the oxygen cylinder that lay down the centre of the boat. Jack grinned affectionately at his friend, who meant far more to him than his official role as IMU’s chief engineer. Costas was always there to lend a hand, even when he was dead to the world. Jack kicked him again. ‘We’ve got fifteen minutes. I can see them at the safety stop.’
Costas grunted again, and Jack passed over a water bottle. ‘Drink as much as you can. We don’t want to get the bends.’
‘Good on you, mate.’ Costas had learned a few comically misplaced catchphrases in his years based at the IMU headquarters in England, but the delivery was still resolutely American, a result of years spent at school and university in the States. He reached over and took the water, then proceeded to down half the bottle noisily.
‘Cool shades, by the way,’ Jack said.
‘Jeremy gave them to me,’ Costas gasped. ‘A parting present when we got back from the Yucatán. I was truly moved.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.’ Costas passed back the bottle, then slumped down again. ‘Been touching base with your past?’
‘Only the good bits.’
‘Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?’
‘We’re talking Cambridge University, remember. The brightest and the weirdest. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, and would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.’
‘With a dose of good old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.’ Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. ‘Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any good finds?’
‘It was a typical Roman merchantman,’ Jack replied. ‘About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras, filled with olive oil and fish sauce on the edge of the African desert, in Tunisia due south of us. Plus there was a fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship’s galley. We were able to date it all to about AD 200. And we did make one incredible find.’
There was a silence, broken by a stentorian snore. Jack kicked again, and Costas reached out to stop himself from rolling overboard. He pushed his shades up his forehead and peered blearily at Jack. ‘Uh huh?’
‘I know you need your beauty sleep. But it’s almost time.’
Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. ‘I don’t think beauty’s an option.’ He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Jack peered with concern at his friend. ‘You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You’ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucatán, and that was well over a month ago.’
‘You should stop buying me toys.’
‘What I bought you,’ Jack gently admonished him, ‘was an agreement from the board of directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.’
‘You should talk,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven’t jumped on board.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Costas stretched and gave a tired grin. ‘Okay, a week by my uncle’s pool in Greece wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, sorry. Was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find.’
‘Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Pete and Andy should have anchored the shotline. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, containing sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden phials, filled with unguents and powders including cinnamon and cumin. That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilograms in weight. At first we thought it was ship’s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.’
‘Go on.’
‘What the ancients called
lacrymae papaveris
, tears of the poppy,
Papaver somniferum
. The sticky, milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy. What we call opium.’
‘No kidding.’
‘The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes about it, in his
Natural History
.’
‘The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?’
‘Right. When Pliny wasn’t writing, he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew that the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That’s present-day Afghanistan.’
‘You’re kidding me.’ Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. ‘Opium. From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We’re talking the first century AD here, not the twenty-first century, right?’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘An ancient drug-runner?’
Jack laughed. ‘Opium wasn’t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn’t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep and cure headaches, so they knew all about the pain-killing properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first ever account of a deliberate Class A drugs overdose, a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.’
‘So what you found was really a medicine chest,’ Costas said.
‘That’s what we thought at the time. But a very odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo.’
‘Apollo?’
Jack nodded. ‘I know. When you find medical equipment it’s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulphur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.’
‘It could have been smoked,’ Costas murmured. ‘Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a draught.’
‘People went to those places seeking cures, to the Sibyl and other prophets,’ Jack said. ‘Organized religion at the time didn’t provide much personal comfort, often excluding the common people and fixated on cults and rituals that were pretty remote from daily concerns. The Sibyl and her kind provided some kind of emotional reassurance, psychological relief. And the Sibyls must have known it, and played on it. All we hear about from ancient accounts is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.’
‘And a highly addictive one. It could have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.’
‘So I began to think our little ship wasn’t carrying an apothecary or doctor, but a middleman travelling with his precious supply of opium for one of the oracles in Italy, maybe even procured for the Sibyl at Cumae herself.’
‘A Roman drug-dealer.’ Costas rubbed his stubble. ‘The godfather of all godfathers. The Naples Mafia would love it.’
‘Maybe if they found out, it would teach them a little respect for archaeology,’ Jack said. ‘Organized crime is a huge problem for our friends in the Naples archaeological superintendency.’
‘Doesn’t one of your old girlfriends work there?’ Costas grinned.
‘Elizabeth hasn’t been in contact with me for years. Last I heard she was still an inspector, pretty low down on the food chain. I never really worked out what happened. She finished her doctorate in England before I did and then had to go back, part of her contract with the Italian government. She swore to me that she’d never return to Naples, but then it happened and she completely shut down communication with me. I suppose I moved on too. That was almost fifteen years ago.’
‘Ours is not to reason why, Jack.’ Costas shifted. ‘Back to the opium. Procured from where?’
‘That’s what worried me.’ Jack rolled out a laminated small-scale Admiralty chart of the Mediterranean over the equipment on the floor of the boat, pinning its corners under loose diving weights. He jabbed his finger at the centre of the chart. ‘Here we are. The island of Sicily. Bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the apex of ancient trade. Right?’
‘Go on.’
‘Our little Roman merchantman, wrecked against this cliff with its cargo of north African olive oil and fish sauce. It does the trip to Rome three, maybe four times a year, during the summer sailing season. Up and down, up and down. Almost always within sight of land, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Italy.’
‘Not a long-distance sailor.’
‘Right.’ Jack stabbed his finger at the far corner of the chart. ‘And here’s Egypt, the port of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred miles away to the east of us, across open sea. Everything points to the drug chest coming from there. The wood’s Egyptian acacia. Some of the phials had Coptic letters on them. And the opium was almost certainly shipped to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, a trade in exotic eastern spices and drugs that reached its height in the first century AD.’
‘The time of St Paul,’ Costas murmured. ‘Why we’re here.’
‘Right.’ Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa from Egypt. ‘Now it’s possible, just possible, that the opium was shipped along the African coast from Alexandria to Carthage, and then went north to Sicily in our little merchantman.’
Costas shook his head. ‘I remember the navigational advice in the
Mediterranean Pilot
from my stint in the US Navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline between Egypt and Tunisia has always been a death trap for sailors, avoided at all costs.’
‘Precisely. Ships leaving Alexandria for Rome sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Italy. The most likely scenario for our opium cargo is one of those ships, blown south-west from the Ionian Sea towards Sicily.’
Costas looked perplexed, then his eyes suddenly lit up. ‘I’ve got you! We’re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve dived on ships’ graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.’ Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel. He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item on to his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of towelling away.
‘Let me guess.’ He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. ‘A golden disc covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost city?’
Jack grinned. ‘Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.’
Costas raised the last fold and held the object up. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. ‘A sounding lead?’
‘You’ve got it. A lead weight tied to the end of a line for sounding depths. Check out the base.’
Costas carefully held the lead upside down. In the base was a depression about an inch deep, as if the lead had been partly hollowed out like a bell, and below that was a further depression in a distinctive shape. Costas raised his eyes again. ‘A cross?’
‘Don’t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of sea-bed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.’
‘This came from the wreck below us?’
Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. ‘My first ever major find from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow sea bed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.’