Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
The salt spray of the Indian Ocean impregnates the atmosphere when the monsoons blow, stimulating the palms to unwonted vigor and fruitfulness. So uniform is their growth along the level shore that the tall white trunks with their feathery crowns seem to stand in closed ranks like a line of soldiers at "parade rest."
Every intelligent reader will readily conceive how the change of seasons and varied configuration as well as unequal arrangement of land and water, will reverse, alter, and modify the direction and strength of the monsoons. Land and sea breezes are the next species of wind to which we would direct attention.
Along the western coast of Africa and in some parts of the Indian seas, the periodical winds, or monsoons as they are termed in the latter, blow from the west-north-west and south-west, according to the situation, extent, and nature of the nearest lands; the effect of which upon the incumbent atmosphere, when heated by the sun at those seasons in which he is vertical, is prodigious, and possibly superior to that of any other cause which contributes to the production or direction of wind.
The following remark of Horsburgh's, in describing the monsoons, is extremely valuable, and assists to explain Hadley's theory of these matters: "The parts where the north-west and the south-east monsoons prevail with greatest strength and regularity are in the Java sea, and from thence eastward to Timor, amongst the Molucca and Banda islands, and onward to New Guinea;" for it will be obvious to any one who inspects the globe, on reading this passage, that there occurs in the neighbourhood of the spots alluded to a powerful cause for the strength and regularity of the monsoons.
The Hoogly River is visited, during the monsoons, about the last of April, by a tidal wave, which dashes up from the sea at a speed of twenty miles an hour, causing much destruction. Ships lying off the city often part their cables, and are driven on shore; while many small craft, along the eighty miles of river course, are not unfrequently destroyed altogether.
During the monsoons, when strong winds blow upstream, sails are used instead of oars. The mast is composed of two bamboos lashed together at the top, their lower ends being made fast to the gunwale.
After our leaving Java head we were 11 days before we got the General South-East Trade wind, in which time we did not advance above 5 degrees to the South and 3 degrees to the West, having all the time Variable light Airs of Wind, interrupted by frequent Calms, the weather all the time hot and sultry, and the Air unwholesome, occasioned most probably by the Vast Vapours brought into these Latitudes by the Easterly Trade wind and Westerly Monsoons, both of which blow at this time of the Year in this Sea.
Meanwhile the governments were quietly gathering their ships against the bold pirates who dared, single-handed, to assail a whole quarter of the globe; in the harbor of Mydaw alone there were eleven ships waiting only for the King Solomon with its eighty guns, and the Swallow with its hundred and ten, to set sail in pursuit of Robert Barthelemy as soon as the monsoons were over.
The season chosen for the pearl fishery, which gives employment to large numbers of the natives, is naturally when the sea is most calm, that is, between the termination of the northeast and the commencement of the southwest monsoons.
Far back into the darkness of time, the folk-lore of Somo cast a glimmering light. On a day, so far back that there was no way of estimating its distance, one, Somo, son of Loti, who was the chief of the island fortress of Umbo, had quarrelled with his father and fled from his wrath along with a dozen canoe-loads of young men. For two monsoons they had engaged in an odyssey.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking