Page 201 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

One of Loch’s difficulties in Bushirc was to supply his ship with
water, for the wells were several miles distant from the town.
One morning, when lie was riding along the coast near Bushirc,
lie saw a villager planting young date trees in holes which he had
made in the clay close to the shore. Loch noticed that as soon
as the holes were dug, they filled with fresh water. He asked the
man if he could dig deeper, to find out whether there would be
sufficient water to supply the ship. The man agreed; next day,
Loch sent a party ashore in a boat. Only four feet below the
surface, they found ‘as good water as could be produced anywhere
in that part of the country’. So while the Eden was at Bushirc,
Loch sent a boat ashore every day to get fresh water. ‘This man,
beginning to cultivate a piece of ground, was one of the first good
effects I had seen from the extinction of the piratical power.
Previously, no property near the seashore was safe from their
depredations.’
Before he sailed, on May 3rd, the Shaikh sent Loch ‘a famous
sword of valuable Persian workmanship as a mark of our friend­
ship and long acquaintance’. Bruce, who was going on leave to
Bombay, sailed in the Eden with Loch. They put in at Ras al
Khaima, where they found Perronct Thompson ‘in quiet posses­
sion of the garrison of the fortress, as well supplied with provisions
as that miserable country could do, and most plcnteously replen­
ished with fish which was, for the native troops, a great luxury’.
Hassan bin Rahmah and the other Joasmi Shaikhs were still living
in the date groves near the town, the Arabs and the English had
no communication with each other, each side regarding the other
‘with watchfulness and distrust’.
The Eden spent the next four months in the Indian Ocean,
visiting Bombay, Trincomalee, Madras and Pondicherry. In
Bombay, she refitted, and took on some volunteers from two
East Indiamen. At Madras, Loch accompanied the Commander-
in-Chief when he called on the Nabob of Arrat. The naval offi­
cers were carried to the palace in palanquins, which Loch found
‘uncomfortable, inconvenient, wretched things from which to
observe anything, for the occupant had to lie on his back in what
was like a long, closed box, with a small door in the centre of one
side, through which it was impossible to see out. The palace
was approached by a road ‘as smooth as the smoothest Kensington
gravel’, through a magnificent park of stately trees. Loch says
173