Page 137 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

loaded into boats from the end of the stone jetty, which caused
frequent casualties. There was a fine crane at the pierhead, which
had not been erected, and one day, Loch asked Shaikh Abdul
Rasool why he did not use it. The Shaikh said that it would cost
a great deal to put it into working order, and to keep it running,
without any financial return. Loch’s interest in it was mainly on
account of the horses, so he offered to send his ship’s carpenter
and a party of men on shore to put it together. The Shaikh was
profuse in his thanks, but again he complained about the cost of
running the crane, so Loch suggested that he should make a small
charge for its use.
Loch little knew that what he suggested to the Shaikh was the
very tiling that the merchants of Bushirc wished to avoid. They
knew their Shaikh only too well. Immediately he instituted a
system of charges, ostensibly for the use of the crane; but in fact,
he imposed a new tax on everything which was shipped from the
pier, irrespective of whether the crane was used or not. In this
way, he developed another method of squeezing the merchants
for money, with the apparent support of the British.
The Shaikh had, perhaps, some excuse for extracting as much
as he could from his people, for he himself was constantly under
pressure from his overlord, the Prince of Shiraz, to pay more tri­
bute. Though the Shaikhs of Bushire were virtually independent
they were nominally subject to the Prince of Shiraz, and through
him, to the Shah of Persia. The people of Bushire, which had a
population of about 5,000, were not Hawala Arabs, as were most
of the inhabitants of the Persian coast towns. The Bushiris were
of mixed Persian and Arab stock, many of them came originally
from Oman and intermarried with Persians. At one time, three
families controlled Bushire: two of them were long established,
and the third family came later from the Arab coast, and gained
an ascendency over the others. From this family which belonged
to the Abu Mchceri tribe, came two Shaikhs, both called Nasr,
predecessors of Shaikh Abdul Rasool. One of them led an
expedition against the Khalifah at Zabara in 1780, three years
before the Khalifah took Bahrain and transferred what had been
a Persian dependency into an Arab principality. Nasr was heavily
defeated by the Khalifah at Zabara, his sword was taken and is
still a family heirloom, and he became known in Arab history by
the derogatory name of ‘Nasur’, the diminutive of Nasr. One
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