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HISTORY OF THE INDIAN NAVY. 3(33
Seawright and Brucks, and the officers and men of the Hon.
Company's Marine, employed on this service, have been spoken
of in terms of high comnien(kition by the Major-General, and
also by Conimodore Collier, whose established rej)utation and
experience of the qualifications that distinguish the Naval
profession, renders his testimony to the character of the Bombay
Marine of peculiar value in the estimation of the Governor in
Council." The Governor-General in Council, in publishing the
despatches of the military and naval chiefs, on the 21st of
January, 1820, issued a General Order, concurring in the praise
bestowed by the Bombay Goverinnent, and, on the 21st of
March, 1820, on the return of the Expedition to Bombay, the
Governor in Council issued a General Order highly eulogising
the services of all arms, and expresssing the thanks of his
Government.*
The fleet were now employed visiting all the Joasmi ports on
the coast, and destroying their war-vessels and blowing up
their forts ; thus Jezirat-ul-Hamra, Ejman, Amulgavine,
Shargah,t and several other places, were visited and reduced to
a condition of impotence, but no resistance was encountered
anywhere.
On the 8th of January, 1820, a General Treaty of Peace was
concluded at Ras-ul-Khymah between ]\Iajor-General Sir
William Grant Keir, on the part of the British Government,
and nearly all the chiefs of the maritime tribes of Arabs in the
Persian Gulf, by whom it was subsequently signed at dill'erent
times and places. The sole purpose and scope of this treaty
was the entire suppression of piracy, and the adoption of such
* By an order, dated Bombay Castle, 17th of February, 1827. the military and
naval forces engaged in the operations against the Joasmis in 1810, were informed
that the Court of Directors, by dcspatuli dated tlie 12ih of April, 182(;, directed
that, " in addition to tlie prize property reahsed by agents," tlie "full valuation
of all boats captured and destroyed by the forces," iucluding the moiety legally
accruing to tlie Company, together with interest at six \)cv cent, per annum from
the 30th of September, 1820, making a sum of 2(j(;,()2o rupees, should be paid
to the captors. " John Company," though mercantile in his condition, was
assuredly, on some points, more lordly than his " Iniperiar' suecessors, and such
liberal conduct oifers a strikinLi contrast to the view, perhaps legally admissible,
entertained by the India Ollice on the Bauda and Kirwee prize ease, which has
given rise to so much protracted aiul expensive litigation.
t Sharjali, in Persian, or Shargah, as the .Vrabs call it, the most important
town on the coast, contains a poi)ulation of about ten thousand. Five miles to
the nortli-east is Aymaun or Ejman, a small place of about one thousand two
hundred inhabitants, who during the seastjn send nearly one hundroil boats to
the pearl fisheries. Amulgavine, or Anuilgawein, stands about twelve miles to
the north-cast of Ejman ; the old town was deserted after its destruction in this
year, and the people now reside at Eibini, a tln-iving i>liice having some ono
thousand live hundred souls, and sending seventy or eighty boats to the fisheries.
Jezirat-cl-Hamra is a fort and town ten miles south-west by west from Kas-ul-
Khymah, built on an island formed by a khor or iidet. The pimte coa.nt was
supposed to end at Debaye, a town of the Beni Yas tribe, having about^ ono
thousand two hundred inh'abitants, distant seven miles fi-on\ Shargah. From
Debaye to Abu Tluibi, the capital of the Beni Yas, the coast stretches in a south-
west direction a distance of sixty-scvou miles.