I and my companion, William Shales, came to Aleppo on the 11th June, 1584, being joyfully welcomed at twenty miles distance by Mr William Barret, our consul, accompanied by his people and janisaries.  He fell sick immediately after, and departed this life in eight days illness, having nominated, before he died, Mr Anthony Bate to succeed him as consul for the English nation, who laudably executed the office for three years.  In the mean time, I made two other journeys to Bagdat and Basora, returning in the same manner through the desert.  Being afterwards desirous to see other parts of the country, I went from Aleppo to Antioch, which is 60 miles, and from thence to Tripoli, where, going on board a small vessel, I arrived at Joppa, and travelled by land to Rama, Lycia, Gaza, Jerusalem, Bethlem, the river Jordan, and the sea of Sodom, and returned to Joppa, from whence I went back to Tripoli; but as many others have published large discourses of these places, I think it unnecessary to write of them here.  Within a few days after my return to Tripoli, I embarked in the Hercules of London, on the 22d December, 1587, and arrived safe, by the blessing of God, in the Thames, with divers other English merchants, on the 26th March, 1588; our ship being the richest in merchant goods that ever was known to arrive in this realm.

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.]