Page 150 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

dark night, they brought their fleet close to the pirates’ anchorage.
Rahmah, seeing some lights at sea, told his friend, Faisan, that it
must be the Khalifah fleet. Faisan regarded this as impossible,
believing that the Khalifah Shaikhs were still captives in the
Wahabi capital, where some of them had been held as hostages.
At daylight, the Bahrain fleet was seen off the coast. Owing to
the superior strength of the enemy, Rahmah thought it prudent to
avoid an engagement, knowing that the Khalifah were unlikely
to make a landing. Faisan jeered at Rahmah, calling him a
coward, which was a trait of which Rahmah could never be
accused. Against his better judgement, Rahmah decided to fight.
Led by Rahmah in his big ship Al Manowar (a name evidently
acquired from the English), the pirate fleet sailed out of the
harbour, and soon the ships of the two fleets were joined in battle.
The ship commanded by the son of the Shaikh of Bahrain was
alongside Al Manowar, and in the hand to hand fighting the
young Shaikh was killed, then both ships caught fire and sank.
Rahmah, whose arm had been badly burned, found himself in
the sea, and he and Faisan clung to a floating spar, until they were
rescued. It is said that while they were hanging on the wreckage,
Rahmah reminded Faisan that he had recommended avoiding
battle with the Khalifah. The pirates suffered a defeat, and shortly
afterwards, Rahmah left Qatar and settled in the island fort of
Dammam on the coast of what is now Saudi Arabia. He soon
recovered from his setback, and in 1816, hearing that the Sultan
was again preparing an expedition against Bahrain, he hurried to
Muscat and offered his services against his enemies, the Khalifah.
The Wahabis were on bad terms with the Sultan, and Rahmah s
sudden change of loyalty angered them. They turned his follow-
ers out of the fort at Dammam and, for some years, Rahmah had
no fixed base. When not at sea, he and his pirates spent their
time between Muscat and Bushire.
When Buckingham was at Bushire in 1816, Rahmah arrived
with a fleet of nine ships, and about 2,000 men, most of them being
negro slaves over whom he had absolute authority, ‘he is somc-
times as prodigal of their lives, in a fit of anger, as he is of those
of his enemies who he is not content to slay in battle, but basely
murders in cold blood after they have submitted’. Buckingham
tells how, when some of Rahmah’s men used mutinous expres­
sions, he put them into the big wooden water tank in his ship,
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