Page 166 - Gulf Precis (V)_Neat

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APPENDIX A.
(Sec preface.)
Extracts from non-official reports about Koioeit,

1.—Extract from Stocquclcr's Fifteen Months' Pilgrimage, 1832.
Koete, or Grano as it is called in the maps, is in extent about a milo long
and a'quarter of a milo broad, It consists of houses built of mud and stones,
occasionally faced with coarse chunam, and may contain about four thou­
sand inhabitants. These houses being for the most part square in form, with a
courtyard in the centre (having the windows looking into the yard), present but
a very bare and uniform exterior, like indeed all the houses in the Persian Gulf.
They have flat roofs, composed of a trunk of the date tree. The streets of Kocto
arc wider than those of Maskat or Bushirc, with gutter running down the centre.
A wall surrounds the town on the desert face, but it is more for show than pro­
tection, as it is not a foot thick. To keep up the farce, however, a trench has
been dug around the wall, and two honeycombed pieces of ordnance protect
each of the three gates. Beyond the wall nothing is to be seen but a vast sandy
plain, extending to a distance of more than GO miles. Not a tree, nor a
shrub affords the eye a momentary relief.
?
Koete within the walls is equally sterile; it literally yields nothing ; and when
to this is added the fact of the water being far from sweet, it is diflicult to conjec­
ture how such a site could have been chosen for the establishment of four hun­
dred families.
I was informed that the Arabs had only been in possession of the place
about one hundred and fifty years, and that previously to that period it was
occupied by Englishmen and their forces, who received or conquered it from the
Portuguese, in whose hands it enjoyed some notoriety during the plcntitudc of
their importance in India.
It certainly is a commodious harbour for small craft, and may probably
have been occupied by the Portuguese (the English could have had nothing to
do with itj on account of the command it gives over the mouth of the river of
the Arabs and the power is thus conferred of interrupting the Turkish and
Venetian trade with India.
Koete is governed by a Sheikh, who keeps up no armed force.
He levies a duty of two per cent, upon all imports.