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Evidently Albuquerque got an order from his sovereign for pearls, for he writes, in 1515, that he is getting the pearls which the king had ordered for 'the pontifical of our lady. To this day in their dealings the pearl merchants of Bahrein still make use of the old Portuguese weights and names.
No big vessels can approach the opposite coast of Arabia; hence, in olden days, when the caravan trade passed this way, all goods must have been transhipped to smaller boats at Bahrein.
In the bazaars, too, you may find that queer El Hasa money called Tawilah, or 'long bits, short bars of copper doubled back and compressed together, with a few characters indicating the prince who struck them. The coffee-pots of Bahrein are quite a specialty, also coming from El Hasa, which appears to be the centre of art in this part of Arabia.
They divide them into different sizes with sieves and sell them in India, so that, as is usually the case with specialties, it is impossible to buy a good pearl on Bahrein. Diving here is exceedingly primitive; all the necessary paraphernalia consists of a loop of rope and a stone to go down with, a curious horn thing to hold the nose, and oil for the orifice of the ears.
Coffee-shops take the place of spirit and wine shops, which in the strict Wahabi country would not be, for a moment, tolerated. In private houses it is thought well to have four or five coffee-pots standing round the fire, to give an appearance of riches. Besides the coffee-pots, other objects of El Hasa workmanship may be seen in Bahrein.
To manure their date-groves they use the fins of a species of ray fish called awwal, steeped in water till they are putrid; awwal, by the way, was an ancient name of the Island of Bahrein, perhaps because it was the first island of the group in size, awwal in Arabic meaning first.
They have held it ever since, despite the attempts of Seyid Said of Oman, of the Turks and Persians, to take it from them. The Turks have, however, succeeded in driving them out of their original kingdom of El Hasa, on the mainland of Arabia opposite, and now the Bahrein is all that remains to them of their former extensive territories.
Church decoration is an abomination to the Wahabi; therefore, in Bahrein the mosques are little better than barns with low minarets, for the very tall ones of other Mohammedan sects are forbidden.
After a bloody conflict, they prevailed in the province of Bahrein, along the Persian Gulf: far and wide, the tribes of the desert were subject to the sceptre, or rather to the sword of Abu Said and his son Abu Taher; and these rebellious imams could muster in the field a hundred and seven thousand fanatics.
Towards the close of the sixteenth century the Portuguese came under the rule of Spain, and from that date their power in the Persian Gulf began to wane. Their soldiers were drafted off to the wars in Flanders instead of going to the East to protect the colonies; and the final blow came in 1622, when Shah Abbas of Persia, assisted by an English fleet, took Hormuz, and then Bahrein.
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