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Updated: June 21, 2025
The Monday's market is filled with quaint countryfolk, bringing in baskets of fruit and wearing the upper garment of red cotton and the large white girdle and turban. At El Matra live most of the richest merchants, and it is the point from which all the caravan roads into the interior start; it, too, has a Portuguese castle, and presents a much more alluring frontage than Maskat.
I have seen the route of an Indian pilgrim caravan, laid down in several maps as starting from Maskat, and coming by Nedjed to Mekka; but I could obtain no information respecting it; that such, however, existed formerly, appears from the frequent mention of it made by the historian Asamy.
The Sultan of Zanzibar has to pay an annual tribute of 40,000 crowns to his relative of Maskat in order to equalise the inheritance, and this tribute being a constant source of trouble, of late years he has taken to urging the wild Bedouin tribes in Oman to revolt against the present, rather weak-minded sultan who reigns there.
Two years later they were also driven from Maskat itself, and those two forts Jellali and Merani which they had built, the last foothold of the Portuguese on the Omani territory, were taken from them. The historian Salil tells the amusing story of the final fall of Maskat into the hands of the Arabs.
Al Hafa is 640 miles from Maskat in one direction and 800 from Aden in the other; it is, therefore, about as far as possible from any civilised place.
I am not going to describe India, but will only tell of our money difficulties. So ignorant were we and everyone at Maskat as to what money was in use in Dhofar, that we were persuaded that it was necessary to take an immense quantity of small change in the shape of copper coins about the size of a farthing, supposed to be Omani.
Writing in 1624 to the East India Company, Thomas Kerridge speaks of Maskat as 'a beggarly, poor town, and 'Ormusz, he says, 'is become a heap of ruins. At last, in 1737, owing to the jealousies of the rival imams, Seid and Ibn Murshad, Maskat was taken by the Persians.
In the market outside the walls we lingered until nearly driven wild by the flies and the stench, so we were glad enough to escape and pursue our walk to the Paradise valley and see the favourable side of Maskat.
The empire of the Himyarites, which filled Yemen and the Hadhramout valley with interesting remains, does not appear to have extended its sway so far eastward; no Sabæan remains have as yet been found in Oman, nor are there any that I have heard of further east than the frankincense country of Dhofar, over six hundred miles west of Maskat.
This admiral first attacked and took Hormuz, then governed by a king of Persian origin. Here, and at Maskat, he thoroughly established the Portuguese power, thereby commanding the entrance into the Gulf.
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