When the fourteenth night was come. — The time is apparently reckoned from their leaving the Fair Havens. (Comp. Acts 27:18-19; Acts 27:33.)
As we were driven up and down in Adria. — — The name was used as including more than the Gulf of Venice, to which the name Adriatic has been confined by more recent geographers. So Ptolemy (iii. 16) speaks of the Adria as washing the south coast of the Peloponnesus and the east coast of Sicily (iii. 4). So Josephus (Life, c. 3), narrating his shipwreck, just two years after St. Paul’s, on his voyage from Judæa to Puteoli, states that he was picked up by another ship sailing from Cyrene to the same port, “in the middle of Adria.” The intersection of the lines of the two vessels would fall, as a glance at the map will show, within the region now mentioned by St. Luke under the same name.
The shipmen deemed that they drew near to some country. — Literally, they suspected, or surmised, that a certain country was approaching them. The sound of breakers, probably the white lines of foam seen through the darkness, gave rise, we may believe, to this impression. The country which they were nearing could hardly be any other than the head-land known as the Point of Koura, at the east extremity of St. Paul’s, Bay, in Malta. To the Apostle the sight and the sound would alike witness that his prediction was on the point of fulfilment.