Page 151 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

fastened it down, and left the men in it till they suffocated, and
then threw their bodies into the sea.
Of his appearance, Buckingham says: ‘his figure presented a
meagre trunk, with four lank members, all of them cut and hacked
and pierced with wounds of sabres, spears and bullets, to the
number of perhaps more than 20 wounds. He had a face naturally
ferocious, and ugly, now rendered still more so by several scars
and the loss of an eye. This Butcher Chief affects great simplicity
in dress, manners and living. He carries simplicity to a degree
of filthiness which is disgusting. His usual dress is a shirt which
is never taken off from the time it is first put on, till it is worn out,
no drawers, or covering for the legs, a large black goat’s skin
cloak wrapped over all, and a dirty handkerchief thrown loosely
over his head.
‘He was not only cherished and courted by the people of a
Bushire’, though this did not prevent him from seizing their ships,
or from blockading Bushire on several occasions, ‘but he was
courteously received and respectfully entertained when he visited
the British Factory’. One day, Rahmah arrived at the Residency
at breakfast time, and was invited to drink tea. ‘Some of his
followers took chairs around him, they were as disgustingly filthy
as could be imagined, and did not scruple to hunt for vermin in
their skins, of which there was abundance, and throw them beside
them on the floor.’ The idea of a ferocious pirate drinking tea,
at breakfast, is somewhat out of keeping, but being a Moslem
and a Wahabi, he would not have touched liquor.
Another time, Rahmah came to the Residency to show his
wounded arm to ‘some medical gentlemen from the Company’s
cruisers’. The wound was made by grape shot and splinters, the
arm was one mass of blood for several days. He gradually re­
covered, however, without surgical aid, the bone of his arm be­
tween the shoulder and the elbow being completely shivered to
pieces. The fragments progressively worked out, and the singular
appearance was left of the forearm and elbow connected to the
shoulder by flesh skin and tendons, without the least vestige of
bone. Some years later, he acquired a silver tube, which was
fixed round his arm so that it was ‘capable of exertion’.
Buckingham was disgusted at the way Rahmah was treated by
the British officers. One of the Englishmen asked him ‘with a
tone of encouragement and familiarity’ whether he could still kill
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