Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/379

Rh just time which that prince reigned. This, indeed, as errors compensate full as frequently as they accumulate, will seldom amount to a difference above three years; a space of time too trivial to be of any consequence in the history of barbarous nations.

, it will occur that even this agreement is no positive evidence of the exactness of the time, for it may so happen that the sum-totals may agree, and yet every particular sum constituting the whole may be false, that is, if the quantity of errors which are too much exactly correspond with the quantity of errors that are too little; to obviate this as much as possible, I have considered three eclipses of the sun as recorded in the Abyssinian annals. The first was in the reign of David III. the year before the king marched out to his first campaign against Massudi the Moor, in the unfortunate war with Adel. The year that the king marched into Dawaro was the 1526, after having dispatched the Portuguese ambassador Don Roderigo de Lima, who embarked at Masuah on the 26th of April on board the fleet commanded by Don Hector de Silveyra, who had come from India on purpose to fetch him; and the Abyssinian annals say, that, the year before the king marched, a remarkable eclipse of the sun had happened in the Ethiopic month Ter. Now, in consulting our European accounts, we find that, on the second of January, answering to the 18th day of Ter, there did happen an eclipse of the sun, which, as it was in the time of the year when the sky is cloudless both night and day, must have been visible all the time of its duration. So here our accounts do agree precisely.