SECTION V.
Of the Monsoons, or Periodical Winds, with which Ships depart from Place to Place in India. By William Barret.[5]
It is to be noted, that the city of Goa is the principal place of all the oriental India, and that the winter begins there on the 15th of May, with very great rain, and so continues till the 1st of August; during which time no ship can pass the bar of Goa, as, by these continual rains, all the sands join together hear a mountain called Oghane, and run into the shoals of the bar and port of Goa, having no other issue, and remain there, so that the port is shut up till the 1st of August; but it opens again on the 10th of August, as the rains are then ceased, and the sea thus scours away the sand.
[Footnote 5: Hakluyt, II. 413.]
It appears, from the journal of John Eldred, in the preceding section, that William Barret was English consul at Aleppo, and died in 1584.
In the immediately preceding article in Hakluyt, vol. II. p. 406, et seq., is a curious account of the money weights and measures of Bagdat, Basora, Ormus, Goa, Cochin, and Malacca, which we wished to have inserted, but found no sufficient data by which to institute a comparison with the money weights and measures of England, without which they would have been entirely useless.
In the present article, the dates are certainly of the old stile, and, to accommodate these to the present new stile, it may be perhaps right to add nine days to each for the sixteenth century, or twelve days to reduce them to corresponding dates of the present nineteenth century.--E.]
To the northward, as Chaul, Diu, Cambay, Damaun, Basseen, and other places, the ships depart from Goa between the 10th and 24th of August; and ships may sail to these places at all times of the year, except in winter, as already described.
Ships depart for Goa from Chaul, Diu, Cambay, and other parts to the northward, betwixt the 8th and 15th of January, and come to Goa about the end of February.
From Diu ships depart for the straits of Mecca, or the Red-Sea, about the 15th of January, and return from thence to Diu in the month of August. They likewise depart from Din for the Red-Sea in the second monsoon, betwixt the 25th of August and 25th of September, and return to Diu between the 1st and 15th of May following.