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In the Book of Acts, Chapter 27, Luke gives a detailed account of Paul’s journey on a Roman ship which wrecked off of the southeast coast of the Island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.   He reports that they encountered a severe northeaster storm (v. 14) dropped four anchors(v.29) in 15 fathoms of water (v. 28), and eventually headed for a “bay with a beach” (the correct translation of v. 39, some versions erroneously have “a creek with a shore”).  They eventually wrecked, running the ship aground, in an unfamiliar place (v. 39) where the “two seas meet” (v. 41), 14 days after they had set sail from Crete (v. 33).   They swam to shore from where the ship had wrecked  (v. 43)  So goes the biblical description of this shipwreck.

There is a site on the Northeast coast of Malta that is the traditional site of this event, called St. Paul’s Bay.  Explorer Bob Cornuke, a former police investigator and author of a book called The Lost Shipwreck of Paul,  decided to investigate.  He found that the traditional St. Paul’s bay site had none of the right features to fit the bible account.  No anchors or artifacts had been found despite much dredging of the entire bay over the years.  There was no reef before the shore on which the ship could have wrecked, and the occupants swum to shore.  There was nothing that could be called a beach on this bay. There was nothing there that fit the description “where the two seas meet”.  Furthermore, St. Pauls bay was a well known port, and the site was not designated as the shipwreck location until almost 1,200 years after the events.

So Cornuke decided to look for a bay that fit the biblical description instead of the traditional site.   And he struck figurative “gold!”  He found a bay called St. Thomas bay on the Southern shore of Malta, that fit all the biblical descriptions.  It was a bay with a beach and reef.    There were two currents that collided especially whenever storms of the northeaster type developed, and this region was called the place where the “two seas collide” by the locals.  Investigating further, Cornuke eventually tracked down four Roman anchors that were all found in the same spot by local divers.  The anchors turned out to be from the correct time period, and amazingly, when he went to the place where they were found, the depth of the water was about 90 feet, or 15 fathoms, just as Luke had so precisely described!

As if this wasn’t enough evidence, the Maltese Armed Forces has a sophisticated computer program that is able to precisely calculate and predict the drift course of ships and other objects.  This program has been used in rescue operations, contains many years worth of data, and by putting in the size and type of vessel, the weather conditions, and the days at sea, the drift of the ship can be calculated.  So they put in the parameters for the type and size of vessel Paul was on, as well as the type of storm they encountered, and ran the program.  To the suprise of even the official who ran the program, the calculated drift of Paul’s ship not only landed them in the correct area on the Maltese coast, but in exactly 14 days!

In this case, as it has been in many other cases, tradition was wrong, and the Bible was exactly right!