when he had thus spoken he took bread - assuming the lead.
and gave thanks to God in presence of them all - an impressive act in such circumstances, and fitted to plant a testimony for the God he served in the breasts of all.
when he had broken it, he began to eat - not understood by the Christians in the ship as a love-feast, or celebration of the Lord’s Supper, as some think, but a meal to recruit exhausted nature, which Paul shows them by his own example how a Christian partakes of.