Page 14 - Arabian Gulf Intellegence

1
i
of them never reported, his ‘petty meddling and querulous interference’ and ‘the
humiliation of being represented by him’. Jones received only derisory compensation
after an abrupt termination of 35 years’ service. He retired to Norwood and had just
finished another map of the Middle East when he died in 1878.
Only one officer of the Royal Navy contributed to this volume -Captain Henry
Hart, whose account of a visit to Sayyid Said in Zanzibar is of considerable impor­
tance. He was bom in 1781, joined the Royal Navy in 1796 and fought under Nelsoa
His visit to Sayyid Said in 1834 greatly angered the Bombay Government which had
not been informed that the Admiralty proposed to contact one of ‘their’ people. He
also aroused the wrath of the Foreign Office by discussing the Treaty which the
Sayyid had recently concluded with the U.S.A., and embarrassed the Admiralty by
agreeing to take over a second-hand warship which Said considered superfluous to
his needs. He seems also to have become involved in the complicated long-range
courtship by Sayyid Said of the Queen of Madagascar. However he must have
weathered this, and presumably many other storms, for he was knighted in 1836, and
laid in state on his death in 1856.

A Note on Names
It is anticipated that this book will be used almost exclusively by people who already
possess a considerable knowledge of the Gulf and who will therefore encounter no
great difficulty at meeting names transcribed in a way that will not be found on
modem maps. Diacritics were not used and there seems to have been no precise and
formal method of transliteration, although once a form of name was adopted, it
appears to have been used consistently. ‘Pheleechi’ for Failaka, ‘Aboothabee’ for
Abu Dhabi, ‘Brymee’ for Buraymi or ‘Amulgavine’ for Umm al-Qaiwain look odd but
are perfectly identifiable. Many others have a kind of period charm, such as ‘Bussora’
for Basra, and appear to me closer to the local pronunciation than those used today.