Acts 27:42

And the soldiers' counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of them should swim out and escape.

This was the old Roman code, that the custodian of a prisoner should answer with his life for any who escaped; and the present emergency suggested to the soldiers that it would be better to kill the prisoners than to risk any of them getting away. Their heartless suggestion shows how little they regarded the providential escape from death which had already come to themselves.