Page 11 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

Chcsncy’s survey was successfully carried out in 1835-37 and in
1850 lie published an account of the expedition in four large
volumes. I11 one of them lie devoted several chapters to the
exploits of Alexander and Ncarchus.
Encouraged by his friends, Loch determined to get his manu­
script published; lie was advised that ‘London was the place where
it should be brought out. So oft'we all went, I expecting that it
would at once be placed in the hands of one of the great pub­
lishers, by them to be got up in the usual way, being placed in the
hands of one of their “Mack Writers’’, who, as you must know,
arc the real book makers, frisking out such parts as meet his
approbation, dressing it up for the sake of the public, adding what
lie thinks of advantage and cutting off what he thinks extraneous.
I11 fact, a mail’s book is not his book but the mind from which it
is compiled is all that belongs to him. While I buoyed myself
up with the hope that there would soon be published “A Narra­
tive of Transactions, written by Francis E. Loch, esqr, Captain
R.N. while in command of the Eden in India”, I received, to my
chagrin, a letter saying that the papers had not been sent to a
publisher but were to be read to some more of my friends in
London.’
Some of Loch’s friends thought that it was too late to publish
a book because other people had written on the subject since lie
had been in the Gulf, and some suggested that ‘the people of the
Gulf had totally changed from what they were at the period of
my having written about them. Another thought that it ought.
not to be published, but should be kept as a private Memoran­
dum.’ The suggestion that the Gulf Arabs had ‘totally changed’
in a p.criod of fifteen years shows how little Loch’s friends knew
about the Gulf.
After these disappointments, Loch decided to place the manu­
script in the hands of‘some entire stranger, on whose judgement
I might depend’. But after six months, he received an unfavour­
able report from ‘the entire stranger’, who pointed out that much
of Loch’s scientific information had been anticipated by later
publications.
At the end of Loch’s long letter, he says;

... the time lost, the aspersions against the book appearing, the
feelings of some of my nearest friends against it being brought
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