(a) “Stephens followed what he found in the King of France’s copies, Acts xxvii. 14, ἄνεμος τυφωνικὸς, ὁ καλούμενος ΕΥΡΟΚΛΥΔΩΝ ; and he is followed by your translators, there arose against it a tempestuous wind called EUROCLYDON. This reading, perhaps, your learned doctor would not have now be made precarious : but if that printer had had the use of your Alexandrian MS., which exhibits here ΕΥΡΑΚΥΛΩΝ, it’s very likely he would have given it the preference in his text ; and then the doctor, upon principle, must have stickled for this.
“The wind euroclydon was never heard of but here ; it’s compounded of εὖρος κλύδων, the wind and the waves ; and it seems plain a priori from the disparity of those two ideas, that they could not be joined in one compound ; nor is there any other example of the like composition.
“But εὐρακύλων, or, as the Vulgar Latin here has it, euro-aquilo (approved by Grotius and others) is so apposite to the context, and to all the circumstances of the place, that it may fairly challenge admittance as the word of St. Luke.* ‘Tis true, according to Vitruvius, Seneca, and Pliny, who make eurus to blow from the winter solstice, and aquilo between the summer solstice and the north point, there can be no such wind or word as euro-aquilo, because the solanus or apheliotes from the cardinal point of east comes between them. But eurus is here to be taken, as Gellius, ii. 22, and the Latin poets use it, for the middle equinoctial east, the same as solanus ; and then in the table of the xü. winds according to the ancients, between the two cardinal winds septentrio and eurus, there are two at stated distances, aquilo and καικίας. The Latins had no known name forκαικίας : Quem ab oriente solstitiali excitatum Græci καικίαν vocant, apud nos sine nomine est, says Seneca, Nat. Quæst. v. 16. Καικίας, therefore, blowing between aquilo and eurus, the Roman seamen (for want of a specific word) might express the same wind by the compound name euro-aquilo, in the same analogy as the Greeks call cúpóvotos the middle wind between eurus and notus, and as you say now south-east and north-east. Since therefore we have now found that euro-aquilo was the Roman mariners’ word for the Greek καικίας, there will soon appear a just reason why St. Luke calls it ἄνεμος τυφωνικὸς , a tempestuous wind, vorticosus, a whirling wind ; for that’s the peculiar character of kalkias in those climates ; as appears from several authors, and from that known proverbial verse, Ἕλκων ἐφ’ αὑτὸν ὡς ὁ καικίας νέφη.
So that, with submission, I think our Luther’s and the Danish version have done more right than your English to the sacred text, by translating it NORD-OST, north-east ; though, according to the present compass, divided into xxxii., euro-aquilo answers nearest to OST-NORD-OST, east-north-east ; which is the very wind that would directly drive a ship from Crete to the African Syrtis according to the pilot’s fears , in the 17th verse.
“The Alexandrian copy, then , though it has vastly increased the number of readings, as you see in your Polyglot and Dr. Mill’s edition, has been of excellent use here ; and so in many other places ; retrieving to us the true original, where other copies failed. And what damage if all the other copies of near the same antiquity, which Mr. Montfaucon has discovered, and Dr. Mill never saw, were sometime collated as exactly, and all the varieties published, let the thousands grow never so many?(S. P. Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament, p. 53-54)
