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of Arabia to Zanzibar, Tanzania and Mombasa, Kenya. For centuries
they had sailed to Africa to load up on poles about 4-6 inches thick,
which were used in the roofs of Arab housing. In the old days, they had
also brought back black African slaves. I once talked to an old Arab sea
captain who had sailed that route for many years. After the British had
forbidden slave trade, he and others like him still continued to trade.
He told me that he once had a boatload of slaves en route back to the
Persian Gulf when they sighted a British naval vessel that was patrolling
the area. To escape capture by the British for slave trading, he and his
crew killed all the slaves, dumped their bodies overboard and washed
the decks with seawater to hide any evidence of their crime. Awful!

Kuwait was deriving tremendous royalties in taxes from the oil
production. In Kuwait City much of the new construction was designed
by British architects. The buildings bore the mark of both British and
Arab ancestry. Money was so available to the Kuwait government (from
oil company taxes) that Kuwaiti children were provided free school uni-
forms, free school education and they were paid to go to school! It was
already apparent that such largesse was undermining the Kuwaitis’ will
to work. Many of them had already imported Palestinian refugees to do
their work.

Kuwait had semi-brackish water wells. To improve the quality
of drinking water there was a huge bank of the biggest furnaces I had
ever seen. The furnaces boiled the brackish water from which was dis-
tilled fresh drinking water.
Kuwait Oil Company had some capable British and American
people with whom we dealt. They had some fascinating stories to tell
about their experiences in World War II. One night in Kuwait, our
group of four Americans went to see a character whom we had heard
of. He was an American who had originally come to Arabia to work on
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Bechtel, he went to Bahrain to establish a jewelry business. He got into
some sort of trouble with the authorities there and moved to Kuwait. His
jewelry store was in a very old part of town that even lacked streetlights.
We made our way through alleys lit by an occasional kerosene lantern.

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