Page 84 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

shipped to ‘the Eastern Islands’ for which ‘spiccrics’ and the pro­
duce of China were received in return. Some of the Abyssinian
slaves who were brought to Muscat, after being given their free­
dom, set up as shopkeepers, and many of them became important
merchants. Buckingham tells the story of an Abyssinian who
was a slave and, when given his freedom, became a wealthy
merchant and ship-owner: he transferred his business to Bombay
where he lived for some time, but eventually returned to Muscat,
which he regarded as his home. Intermarriage between Arabs
and Abyssinian women was not infrequent. Maurizi mentions:
‘the richer classes of courtesans from Persia and other countries
who swarm in the capital’.
The Eden stayed for three days in Muscat, during which time
two of the crew died and several others were put on the sick list.
Loch describes Muscat as the most unhealthy place in or near the
Persian Gulf, ‘and no great wonder, for the surrounding hills,
absorbing the rays of a tropical sun during the day, emit at night
the absorbed heat, raising the temperature even higher than it is
in the shade at midday, this continues until the refreshing sea
breeze sets in on the following afternoon’. James Fraser, in his
Journey to Klwrasan, written in 1825, enlarges on Muscat’s climate,
saying that in one day, three lieutenants of H.M.S. Liverpool died
of sunstroke at Muscat, and the men who dropped giddy and
unconscious on the decks were given blood-letting, and bathing
in tepid water. This was in the month of August, the hottest
time of the year.
The climate of Muscat is more trying for Europeans than any
other place in the Gulf, for there is no cold season to bring relief
after the sweltering summer. But many Englishmen have lived
there happily for long periods. Some, however, have allowed
the atmosphere of the little town, wedged on a narrow strip of
shore, between towering stark cliffs and the sea, to affect their
mentality with a form of claustrophobia. There have been tra­
gedies in Muscat, and some people believe that the British Agency
is haunted. At Solium, on the Western Desert of Egypt, during
the 1914 war, men were affected in the same way, by being cooped
up on a narrow strip of sand, between the sea and the escarpment,
though the cliffs behind Solium were lower, and less forbidding
than the mountains which shut in Muscat.
One of the people who is very often mentioned by Loch in his
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