Yemen by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Author:Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Codes: HIS000000; HIS026000; HIS026010; HIS037030; HIS054000; TRV000000; TRV015000;
ISBN: 9781468309980
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

‘Like a pair of resurrectionists’, on a dark night in January 1839, two men prowled around Aden’s graveyard. They were looking for a choice and movable specimen of the finely carved marble grave slabs littering the ground. One of them was John Studdy Leigh, 24-year-old supercargo of an English trading vessel that had put in at Aden. Next morning he ascended ‘Djebel Shunsum’ with some companions: they had a picnic breakfast, raised three cheers and waved the Union Jack. ‘We left as usual with escaladers like ourselves a memorial of our visit in a claret bottle, which we had emptied.’

It was still some months before the British flag was to flutter more permanently over Aden, but Leigh, an adventurer with a patriotic bent, embodied the soul of the new age. The Napoleonic Wars had marked a turning-point, and just as the Great War a century later loosened corsets and raised hemlines, so Waterloo condemned the powdered wig to its block. The last of the Hanoverian kings had sired ten bastards, but now the debris of the Regency party was being swept away: on the throne sat Victoria, virgin and immaculate, and Aden was the first imperial acquisition of her era.

British interest in the area was not new. The little island of Mayyun, or Perim, in the Bab al-Mandab Strait had been garrisoned in 1799 to prevent the French from sailing to India; but they were soon forced out of Egypt by the Battle of Alexandria, and the British out of Mayyun by lack of water. What brought them back was the need for a coaling-station for the new steamships on the Suez-Bombay run. The first steam-powered vessel to sail the route was the Hugh Lindsay in 1830, and the decade that followed saw a flurry of activity in search of a suitable stop near the mouth of the Red Sea. The Island of Suqutra was tried but abandoned when the troops succumbed to fever. Aden was the obvious choice.

The man chosen to take it over, Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines, belonged to a recent and more swashbuckling past, the age of Clive and the English nabobs. He was to run Aden for sixteen years by a mixture of chicanery, blandishments, and brute force, which earned him the contempt of Victorian Bombay society who dubbed him the ‘sultanized Englishman’. His portrait does indeed give him a foreign and disreputable air, a corsair forced into a stiff collar. Had he ended up further off the beaten track, like Rajah Brooke in Sarawak, he would have escaped the snooty opprobrium of the Establishment, but in Aden he was caught between the East India Company’s Secret Committee in London and the Governor of Bombay. The military in particular were wary of the way in which he courted local rulers and encouraged trade. His dreams of Aden’s mercantile renaissance resembled those of Raffles in Singapore, but Bombay wanted to straitjacket him within the town’s defences. Haines’s character was a curious amalgam: Bombay accused him of going

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.