We were all heartily sick of Cosseir embarkations, but the vessel of Sidi Ali el Meymoum, tho’ small, was tight and well-rigged; had sails of canvas, and had navigated in the Indian Ocean; the Rais had four stout men on board, apparently good sailors; he himself, though near sixty, was a very active, vigorous little man, and to the full as good a sailor as he was a saint. It was on the 5th of April, after having made my last observation of longitude at Cosseir, that I embarked on board this vessel, and sailed from that port. It was necessary to conceal from some of my servants our intention of proceeding to the bottom of the Gulf, least, finding themselves among Christians so near Cairo, they might desert a voyage of which they were sick, before it was well begun.
For the first two days we had hazy weather, with little wind. In the evening, the wind fell calm. We saw a high land to the south-west of us, very rugged and broken, which seemed parallel to the coast, and higher in the middle than at either end. This, we conceived, was the mountain that divides the coast of the Red Sea from the eastern part of the Valley of Egypt, corresponding to Monfalout and Siout. We brought to, in the night, behind a small low Cape, tho’ the wind was fair, our Rais being afraid of the Jassateen Islands, which we knew were not far a-head.
We caught a great quantity of fine fish this night with a line, some of them weighing 14 pounds. The best were blue in the back, like a salmon, but their belly red, and marked with blue round spots. They resembled a salmon in shape, but the fish was white, and not so firm.
In the morning of the 6th we made the Jaffateen Islands. They are four in number, joined by shoals and sunken rocks. They are crooked, or bent, like half a bow, and are dangerous for ships sailing in the night, because there seems to be a passage between them, to which, when pilots are attending, they neglect two small dangerous sunk rocks, that lie almost in the middle of the entrance, in deep water.
I understood, afterwards, from the Rais, that, had it not been from some marks he saw of blowing weather, he would not have come in to the Jaffateen Islands, but stood directly for Tor, running between the island Sheduan, and a rock which is in the middle of the channel, after you pass Ras Mahomet. But we lay so perfectly quiet, the whole night, that we could not but be grateful to the Rais for his care, although we had seen no apparent reason for it.