CHAP. IV. Some account of the Trade Winds and Monsoons-Application of this to the Voyage to Ophir and Tarshish. IT affords an afflicting proof of the vanity of all human attainments, and of the fate of the highest merit, when we reflect, that we have been employed in describing, and drawing from oblivion, the history of those very nations, that first conveyed to the world, not the elements of literature only, but all sorts of learning, arts, and sciences. We see that these had taken deep root, and were not easily extirpated. The first great and fatal blow they received was the destruction of Thebes and its monarchy, by the invasion of the Shepherds under Salatis, which shook them to the very foundation. The next was in the conquest of the Thebaid under Sabaco and his Shepherds. The third was when the empire of Lower Egypt (not including the Thebaid) was transferred to Memphis, and that city taken, as writers say, by the Shepherds of Abaris only, or of the Delta; though it is scarcely probable, that, in so favourite a cause as the destruction of cities, the whole Shepherd nation did not lend its assistance. These were the chief calamities, we may suppose, under which the arts in Egypt fell; for, as to the foreign conquests of Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians, they affected cities and the persons of individuals only. They were temporary, never intended to have lasting consequences; their beginning and end were prophesied at the same time. That of the Chaldeans was a plundering expedition only, as we are told by Scripture itself, intended to last but forty years*, half the life of man, and given to indemnify Nebuchadnezzar, for the hardships he sustained at the siege of Tyre. The Babylonians were a people the most polished after the Egyptians. Egypt under them suffered by rapacity, not by ignorance, as it did in all the conquests of the Shepherds. After Thebes was destroyed by the first Shepherds, commerce, and probably the arts along with it, fled for a time from Egypt, and centered in Edom, a city and territory, though we know little of its history, at that period the richest in the world. David, in the very neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon, calls Edom the strong city: "Who will bring me unto the strong city? Who will lead me unto Edom †?" From an old quarrel, and probably from the recent instigation of the Tyrians, his friends, that prince invaded Edom ‡, destroyed the city, and dispersed the people. He was the greatest military power then upon the continent; Tyre and Edom were rivals; and his conquest of that last great and trading state, which he united to his empire, would yet have lost him the trade he sought to cultivate, by the very means he used to obtain it, had not Tyre been able to succeed to Edom, and to Ezek. chap. xxix. ver. 11. + Psalm lx. ver. 9. and Psal. cviii. ver. 10. 2 Sam. chap. viii. ver. 14. 1 Kings chap. xi. ver. 15, 16. collect its mariners and artificers, scattered abroad by the conquest. David took possession of two ports, Eloth and Ezion-gaber*, from which he carried on the trade to Ophir and Tarshish, to a very great extent, to the day of his death. We are struck with astonishment when we reflect upon the sum that Prince received in so short a time from these mines of Ophir. For what is said to be given by King David † and his princes for the building of the Temple of Jerusalem, exceeds in value eight hundred millions of our money, if the talent there spoken of is a Hebrew talent f, and not a weight of the same denomination, the value of which was less, and peculiarly reserved for and used in the traffic of these precious metals, gold and silver. It was, probably, an African or Indian weight, peculiar to the same mines whence was gotten the gold, appropriated to fine commodities only, as is the case with our ounce Troy, different from the Avoirdupois. Solomon, who succeeded his father in the kingdom, was his successor likewise in the friendship of Hiram, king of Tyre. Solomon visited Eloth and Ezion-gaber § in person, and fortified them. He collected a number of pilots, shipwrights, and mariners, dispersed 1 Kings, chap. ix. ver. 26. 2 Chron. chap. viii. ver. 17. +1 Chron. chap. xxii. ver. 14, 15, 16. Chap. xxix. ver. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.---Three thousand Hebrew talents of gold, reduced to our money, amount to twenty-o -one millions and six hundred thousand pounds sterling. The value of a Hebrew talent appears from Exodus, chap. xxxviii. ver. 25, 26. For 603,550 persons being taxed at half a shekel each, they must have paid in the whole 301,775; now that sum is said to amount to 100 talents, 1775 shekels only; deduct the two latter sums, and there will remain 300,000, which, divided by 100, will leave 3000 shekels for each of these talents. § 2 Chron, chap. viii, ver 17. by his father's conquest of Edom, most of whom had taken refuge in Tyre and Sidon, the commercial states on the Mediterranean. Hiram supplied him with sailors in abundance; but the sailors so furnished from Tyre were not capable of performing the service which Solomon required, without the direction of pilots and mariners used to the navigation of the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Such were those mariners who formerly lived in Edom, whom Solomon had now collected in Eloth and Ezion-gaber. This last-mentioned navigation was very different in all respects from that of the Mediterranean, which, in respect to the former, might be compared to a pond, every side being confined with shores little distant one from another; even that small extent of sea was so full of islands, that there was much greater art required in the pilot to avoid land than to reach it. It was, besides, subject to variable winds, being to the northward of 30° of latitude, the limits to which Providence hath confined those winds all over the globe; whereas the navigation of the Indian Ocean was governed by laws more convenient and regular, though altogether different from those that obtained in the Mediterranean. Before I proceed, it will be necessary to explain this phænomenon. It is known to all those who are ever so little versant in the history of Egypt, that the wind from the north prevails in that valley all the summer months, and is called the Etesian wind; it sweeps the valley from north to south, that being the direction of Egypt, and of the Nile, which runs through the midst of it. The two chains of mountains, which confine Egypt on the east and on the west, constrain the wind to take this precise direction. It is natural to suppose the same would be the case in the Arabian Gulf, had that narrow sea been in a direction parallel to the land of Egypt, or due north and south. The Arabian Gulf, however, or what we call the Red Sea, lies from nearly north-west to southeast, from Suez to Mocha. It then turns nearly east and west till it joins the Indian Ocean at the Straits of Babelmandeb, as we have already said, and may be further seen by consulting the map. Now, the Etesian winds, which are due north in Egypt, here take the direction of the Gulf, and blow in that direction steadily all the season, while it continues north in the valley of Egypt; that is, from April to October the wind blows north-west up the Arabian Gulf towards the Straits; and, from November till March, directly contrary, down the Arabian Gulf, from the Straits of Babelmandeb to Suez and the Isthmus. These winds are by some corruptly called the tradewinds; but this name given to them is a very erroneous one, and apt to confound narratives, and make them unintelligible. A trade-wind is a wind which, all the year through, blows, and has ever blown, from the same point of the horizon; such is the south-west one, south of the Line, in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. On the contrary, these winds, of which we have now spoken, are called monsoons; each year they blow six months from the northward, and the other six months from the southward, in the Arabian Gulf: While in the Indian Ocean, without the Straits of Babelmandeb, they blow just the contrary at the same seasons; that is, in summer from the southward, and in winter from the northward, subject to a small inflexion to the east and to the west. The reader will observe, then, that a vessel sailing from Suez or the Elanitic Gulf, in any of the summer months, will find a steady wind at north-west, which will carry it in the direction of the Gulf to Mocha. At Mocha, the coast is east and west to the Straits of |