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Updated: June 21, 2025
We took them back to India with us the following spring, keeping Lobo as our servant during the time of our stay there. We had a calm and pleasant voyage of three days to Maskat with Captain Whitehead on the B.I.S.N. steamer Chanda, arriving just in time to escape a violent storm, which lasted for days, and in its commencement prevented our landing at the usual place.
We left Maskat on Monday, December 17, and had a very calm voyage, but this being our fifth steamer since we left home, we were anxious for a little dry land journeying. We saw the high mountains all Tuesday, but nothing on Wednesday after early morning. The coast recedes and becomes low where the desert comes down to the sea. We passed the Kouria Mouria Islands in the night.
The reply from the sultan of Jedid was also unfavourable, so we had nothing left but to hire a batil and set sail along the coast for Kishin, to the sultan of which place my husband had a letter from the British political agent at Maskat.
Cutters and jolly-boats have taken their names from 'kattira' and 'jahlibot. Merbat, which is sixty-four miles from Maskat, is the first point of the Dhofar district after the long stretch of desert has been passed. It is a wretched little spot consisting of some fifty houses and a few Bedou huts, with about two hundred inhabitants.
When we visited the town for the second time an even more serious rebellion was impending, the Bedouin of the interior, under Sheikh Saleh, having attacked Maskat itself. The sultan and his brother, who hastily became friends, retired together to the castle, and the town was given up to plunder.
It is also partly due to the jealousies which prevail between the descendants of Sayid who rule in Zanzibar and in Maskat. Palgrave in 1863 describes Maskat as having 40,000 inhabitants; there are probably half that number now.
We had no sooner deposited our baggage than a The whole Wady was flooded in a moment, and we expected that it would be necessary to pass the whole day here. I found shelter in the tent of the merchant of Maskat. In the afternoon the storm ceased.
Nominally it is under the sultan of Oman, and I may here emphatically state that the southern coast of Arabia has absolutely nothing to do with Turkey from Maskat to Aden there is not a single tribe paying tribute to, or having any communication with, the Ottoman Porte.
We two and Lobo, whom we retained, went to a hotel in Bombay, but Imam Sharif, Khan Bahadur, his four men, our Goanese cook, Hassan, and a certain young Afghan, Ahmet, who had been a sort of odd man and tent-pitcher, went to a caravanserai; and after Hassan's steamer had departed to Maskat, Imam Sharif came and told us the doleful tidings that Ahmet had disappeared with the good silver dollars and the gold watch and chain of Hassan.
Although Maskat has been under Indian influence for most of this century, it has latterly gone down much in the world; the trade of the place has well-nigh departed, and with a weak sultan at the head of affairs, confidence will be long in returning. Unquestionably our own Political Agent may be said to be the ruler in Maskat, and his authority is generally backed up by the presence of a gunboat.
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