Page 12 - Arabian Gulf Intellegence

asked Hamerton to act as Adviser to his son Khalid whom he had designated to
succeed him in his African dominions. After Khalid died Said relied on Hamerton to
ensure the smooth succession of his son Majid. The Sayyid and the Consul nego­
tiated a series of agreements to put an end to the slave trade. The Treaty that was
signed in October 1845, in which the ruler prohibited the export of slaves from his
African possessions and their import into his Arabian dominions and consented that
ships engaged in the traffic might be confiscated, is usually called the Hamerton
Treaty. The two men saw each other almost daily for fourteen years and, when
Hamerton was gravely ill and unconscious, the Sayyid sat hour after hour by his
bedside. They had had a lot of fun in common, such as the occasion in 1842 when
Hamerton on behalf of Queen Victoria solemnly presented the Ruler with a state
carriage sent specially from England, richly adorned but impractical in a country with
no roads at all. A subsequent presentation was even worse: Hamerton, informed that
the Queen was sending a large silver tea-set to the Imam, duly handed over a packing
case which, when opened, was found to contain a gravestone: he reported ‘His
Highness took this affair in the highest good humour’. Hamerton had, according to
Richard Burton, an uproarious Irish sense of fun and dispensed such hospitality that
Speke recorded that the Consulate was ‘one continuous scene of pleasure and
festivities’. Visiting French officers were welcomed but departed suspecting machia­
vellian plotting behind the cheerful face. According to Burton, Hamerton’s unwilling­
ness to leave East Africa led to his premature death.
As we have seen, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the British knew very
little about the topography of the Gulf and, once security was ensured, it fell to the
Survey Service of the Indian Navy to remedy this deficiency. Although some of its
most distinguished officers such as Haines (the conqueror of Aden), Wellsted
(explorer of Oman), and Moresby (mapper of the Red Sea) are not represented in
these pages, there are several reports from its members about both sides of the Gulf.
The work was incredibly arduous, the physical conditions appalling and the toll that it
took prevented most of the officers engaged in it from going on to long and
distinguished careers. Lieutenant Grubb, whose survey of the Island of Kenn, sub­
mitted in October 1822, is the third paper in this volume, went on to survey Kishm
and died immediately after completing it in June 1823. Lieutenant John Guy, who
participated in the report on Kuwait included here, won notice through his survey of
the Qawasim coast, facilitating the attack that ended piracy. Guy was the first
European to penetrate the Elphinstone Inlet at Musandam, the so-called ‘hottest
place on earth’, continued mapping systematically along the coast, and was working
on Qatar when, in 1823 after three years without leave, his health broke down and he
was succeeded by George Barnes Brucks whose work is also represented here.
Brucks was more fortunate despite the length of time he spent on the survey. In
1819 he was responsible as transport officer for the details of the landing at Ras al-
Khaymah and then worked with Guy, taking over his command. He finished the
survey of Qatar and continued along the Arabian shore until he had finished at the
end of 1825. He then immediately started on the Persian coast, completing that in
1828. He was described as not such a skilled scientific observer as some of his
colleagues but as a fine team leader and as the only man never ill during the survey. In
1829 he started on the Gulf of Oman but, after ten years in the area, he too broke
down and, having handed over to Haines, was compelled to take two years’ leave.
Brucks was back in the East in 1834 when he pioneered the steamer route from
Bombay to Suez and surveyed Socotra with the object of establishing a coaling depot
there. Brucks was then given command of the Semiramis of 700 tons and 300
horsepower, the third steamer to be owned by the Indian Navy. When it was decided
to occupy Khaij, Brucks commanded the naval escort, proceeding with such speed
and in such heat that both his engine and his engineer broke down and he had to act