As the sun sets on Arwad Island, off Syria's second port of Tartus, old men sit smoking narghile and nibbling sunflower seeds in front of the coffee shops lining the marina. Behind them is an ancient castle with honey-coloured stone walls, and a maze of narrow, scruffy lanes that wind between houses with peeling paint and green wooden shutters. All of a sudden, a murmur of admiration and approval ripples through the crowd as an elegant, high-sided wooden vessel with a large purple-and-white striped sail and a prow in the shape of a horse's head glides elegantly into the harbour and parks itself among the squat fishing boats. After eight months of construction, the Phoenicia, a replica of a Mediterranean trading vessel as used by the Phoenicians around 600BC, is ready to launch.
The ship is the brainchild of the British skipper Philip Beale and, with a crew of 20, he is attempting to sail around Africa's coastline to see whether the Phoenicians would have been able to make the same journey two-and-a-half thousand years ago, as is claimed they did in an account by the Greek historian Herodotus. A civilisation that lived on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon and Syria between 1200 and 200BC, the Phoenicians were traders, colonists and seafarers, travelling as far west as England and as east as China. They are credited with many discoveries and inventions, including an early version of the alphabet, purple dye and the pole star. According to Herodutus, the first journey around Africa began in the Red Sea and finished in the Mediterranean three years later, but Beale is planning for a journey of approximately 10 months.
Arwad Island, the northernmost Phoenician trading post, still has a Phoenician-built wall on its sea front. When Beale was researching places to have a his vessel built, he combed the Lebanese, Turkish, Cypriot and Syrian coastlines in search of a community of traditional boatbuilders. Finally he discovered Arwad, only 35 kilometres from the Lebanese border but part of Syria, where there are still two families (one of three members, the other of 25 members) who build boats with traditional methods. A chance chat in a restaurant on the island with the 24-year-old business student Orwah Bakker, now project-manager of the expedition, led him to Khalid Hammoud, who built the ship with four others.
Hammoud's family has been building boats for many generations. However, constructing an ancient vessel was a huge challenge, particularly as an ancient technique had to be used. It took two years of planning and design before the first plank of Aleppo pine was even laid and Bakker says that the hardest part for the team was the design stage, when every detail had to be painstakingly translated and explained.
Built of pine - whereas Phoenicians would have used the now-endangered and more expensive cedar - Phoenicia is an example of "plank-first construction", an ancient technique that involves building the boat's frame first and inserting the planks afterwards. The positioning of the first plank is a delicate process because it sets the shape of the whole ship. Each successive plank is then carefully joined by mortice and tenon pegs of olive wood, and each tenon fixed with two wooden dowels. The whole ship consists of 8,000 pegs, fixed with 16,000 dowels. "Usually it takes three men and two months to build any type of ship," says Bakker. "But this time, we needed at least five or 10 builders to work on it over eight months to make it ready. It has been hard but enjoyable."
Phoenicia's route will take it first into the Suez Canal, and then into the Red Sea, which it has to enter before the tides change in early September. It will then pull in at Aden, Mombassa, Dar es Salaam, Maputo, Richard's Bay, Cape Town, Accra, Gibraltar, Carthage, Alexandria, and, all being well, return to Arwad in May of next year. The stops have been chosen mainly because they make sense from a sailing point of view, but Carthage in Tunisia has particular significance because it was a Phoenician colony. Similarly, Alexandria is also where Beale suspects the Phoenician expedition to have ended, because Herodotus states that it was somewhere on Egypt's northern coast.
Beale calls his expeditions "experimental archaeology". Each voyage so far has been an attempt to see whether it would have been possible to sail such a vessel in certain seas at a certain time. His last adventure, the Borobodur Ship Expedition, involved building a copy of an eighth century sailing vessel that he had spotted on a relief at Borobodur Temple in Indonesia, and sailing it from Indonesia to Africa in 2003 to 2004. For the Phoenician ship, he used documentation from a wreck of a sixth century ship discovered in the 1990s off Marseille, in France, to design the boat, as well as a multinational team of consultants and boat specialists.
On board the 21.5-metre ship, there is the overwhelming (but not unpleasant) scent of tar and pine, and the main cabin is bare and sparse with a large fridge and a large pine kitchen table dwarfing the space. Below deck are cramped bunks, and one small bathroom for the 20-member crew. There is a radar navigation system so that the crew will not have to steer solely by the stars like the Phoenicians did. In addition to life rafts, the crew have equipped themselves with an LRAD (long-range acoustic device) which fires 1,000 decibels in the direction of a potential attacker within a 200-300 metre range, in case of trouble with pirates off Somalia.
John Bainbridge, 22, a crew member and recent British graduate in international relations, saw an advertisement in his local paper in Dorset, England, to join the Phoenicia crew. "I don't have much sailing experience," he says, "But then nobody has had experience of sailing this kind of ship for 2,000 years. There are so many other things to do apart from sail [on this expedition]. For example, I have been put in charge of co-ordinating the humanitarian projects in our ports of call."
These humanitarian projects will take water as their theme. The expedition team will co-ordinate with the Global Water Fund to highlight issues around the provision of drinking water to communities in Africa, and the crew plan to get involved in physical labour, such as digging wells, in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. The crew member Eric Hebert, a Canadian seafarer from Oakville, Ontario, took part in the Borobudur expedition, and when Beale asked him to join this trip back in 2005, he accepted without hesitation. "We will have to be cautious around the Wild Coast, around South Africa," he explains. "It's a graveyard of ships where there is only one harbour in 300 kilometres of coastline. If the wind changes on us we will be in a very difficult position, pinned against a rocky coast with no harbour nearby."
Beale estimates that they have a 70 per cent chance of returning, as planned, to Arwad. "What people don't realise is that the vessel is pretty primitive, it's very hard physically to sail, and it only sails with the wind at its stern. Any other yachtsman would have a boat that goes into the wind at an angle of twenty to thirty degrees. And [any other yachtsman] has the option of switching on an engine or staying at home if conditions are not ideal. We don't have a support boat following us, and the chances of us getting stuck on rocks or on a coral reef are quite high. If that were to happen, and the back of the ship were broken, the expedition would be over. We have two life rafts, hopefully to save our lives. We only need to make one mistake to put the whole expedition in jeopardy."
A week ago, the local community slaughtered a sheep to send the boat on its way. Beale adds, "We're going to need all the luck we can get."
