Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/106

6 coast of Egypt is exceedingly low, and, if the weather is not clear, you often are close in with the land before you discover it.

current sets constantly to the eastward; and the way the masters of vessels pretend to know their approach to the coast is by a black mud, which they find upon the plummet at the end of their sounding-line, about seven leagues distant from land.

master pretended at midnight he had found that black sand, and therefore, although the wind was very fair, he chose to lie to, till morning, as thinking himself near the coast; although his reckoning, as he said, did not agree with what he inferred from his soundings.

I was exceedingly vexed at being so disappointed of making the best of our favourable wind, I rectified my quadrant, and found by the passages of two stars over the meridian, that we were in lat. 32° 1′ 45″, or seventeen leagues distant from Alexandria, instead of seven, and that by difference of our latitude only.

this I inferred that part of the assertion, that it is the mud of the Nile which is supposed to shew seamen their approach to Egypt, is mere imagination; seeing that the point where we then were was really part of the sea opposite to the desert of Barca, and had no communication whatever with the Nile.