Solomon visited Eloth and Ezion-gaber *[1] in person, and fortified them. He collected a number of pilots, shipwrights, and mariners, dispersed by his father's conquest of Edom, most of whom had taken refuge in Tyre and Sidon, the commercial states in 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 the one from the other; 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
- ↑ * 2 Chron. chap. viii. ver. 17.
- 2 Chron. chap. viii. ver. 17.
