Solomon, who succeeded David in his kingdom, was his successor likewise in the friendship of Hiram king of Tyre. Solomon visited Eloth and Ezion-gaber[275] 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 in that valley all the summer months, and is called the _Etesian winds_; 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 south-east, 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.