3,000 Donated Hours During Summer 2022

We are happy to report that during the last fourteen weeks there have been more than 100 workers who have given more than 3,000 hours of work for the restoration of the PHOENICIA.

There is no doubt that the complicated task of joining the cut pieces of the ship is in the right hands and is on course for its successful completion.

The directors of the project, Mike and Betty LaFontaine, will now take some personal time with their family in Florida. This weekend they will shut down the on-going project after which they will come back to continue the important work of bringing together the pieces of the world’s oldest ship replica that crossed the Atlantic from the Old to the New Worlds.

Without Philip Beale there would be no PHOENICIA

More than ten years ago Philip Beale hired archaeologists and traditional shipwrights to construct the boat based on the design of an ancient galley found wrecked in the western Mediterranean.

PHOENICIA is nearly 65 feet in length, with a single sail and emergency oar holes for when the wind dropped.

In 2008 Philip set sail to prove that the Phoenicians had the naval technology to sail around Africa using only the power of the wind and the tide.

Philip demonstrated that the Phoenicians - referred to in the Bible as ‘rulers of the sea’ - had the capability to circumnavigate the great continent 2,000 years before the first recorded European which was Bartolomeu Dias in 1488.

Setting sail from Syria in 2008, he covered 20,000 miles over two years, battling everything from six-meter waves off the Cape of Good Hope to Somali pirates.

The ship tells the story of Philip Beale’s sailing against the wind around Africa. The ship in Montrose sailed 30,000 miles around Africa and across the Atlantic.

The remarkable historical fact of this ship is that her design came from a time and place that connects to Biblical Jerusalem at a time of great trouble when (1) the First Temple burned, (2) the walls of the city came down, (3) the Ark of the Covenant was lost, (4) the Babylonians took the Jews into captivity, and (5) Nebuchadnezzar II killed all but one of the heirs to the Throne of David. The ship stands as a witness in Montrose that the Ancient World connected to the New World 600 years before Christ.