These Boats Are Almost Flat-Bottomed And Very
Strong, Yet Serve Only For One Voyage, As It Is Impossible To Navigate
Them Upwards.
They are fitted for the shallowness of the river, which in
many places is full of great stones which greatly obstruct the
navigation.
At _Feluchia_ a small city on the Euphrates, the merchants
pull their boats to pieces or sell them for a small price; as a boat
that cost forty or fifty chequins at Bir sells only at Feluchia for
seven or eight chequins. When the merchants return back from Babylon, if
they have merchandise or goods that pay custom, they travel through the
wilderness in forty days, passing that way at much less expence than the
other. If they have no such merchandise, they then go by the way of
Mosul in Mesopotamia, which is attended with great charges both for the
caravan and company. From Bir to _Feluchia_. on the Euphrates, over
against Babylon, which is on the Tigris, if the river have sufficient
water, the voyage down the river may be made in fifteen or eighteen
days; but when the water is low in consequence of long previous drought,
the voyage is attended with much trouble, and will sometimes require
forty or fifty days to get down. In this case the boats often strike on
the stones in the river, when it becomes necessary to unlade and repair
them, which is attended with much trouble and delay; and on this account
the merchants have always one or two spare boats, that if one happen to
split or be lost by striking on the shoals, they may have another ready
to take in their goods till they have repaired the broken boat If they
were to draw the broken boat on the land for repair, it would be
difficult to defend it in the night from the great numbers of Arabs that
would come to rob and plunder them.
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