Rats, dhows, and dates
— life aboard the El Ghar, my
little Iraqi Survey Vessel.
After India was given its
independence in 1947, the year in which the Jewel in the Crown was so awkwardly
and hastily chiseled from its Imperial setting, there was one outlying and
functional adjunct of the Royal British Raj that still continued working
smoothly and peacefully for several more years. This was the Basra Port Directorate in southern Iraq.
The Colonial Indian Government
had long considered the extreme southern tip of Iraq, as also was the Kyber
Pass leading down from Afghanistan, to be part of a vital first line of defence
against any encroachment or invasion from possible Russian expansion. So the Indian Government, which often
acted surprisingly independently of the British government in London (even
siding with the French against Westminster on one occasion) fostered much
interest in the Basra area and the wide reaches of the Shatt-al-Arab river.
Following the British-Indian
Army’s overthrow of the Turkish Empire’s 500-year-long occupation of
Mesopotamia, in the opening years of the First World War, 1914-1918, the Port
of Basra had operated as part of the British Mandate, formed in Paris during
the 1919 Peace Conference under the auspices of the League of Nations.
Though in 1932 Britain persuaded
the League to grant Iraq full independence as a royal kingdom under King
Faisal, the directorate remained responsible for keeping the commerce of Iraq,
and the flow of Iranian oil from Abadan steadily available for the sea-going
tankers arriving in a steady stream from many nations around the globe.
This was especially important as
before the 1960s there was no hardened road across the desert between Baghdad
and Syria or other Mediterranean country.
The only such travel was by infrequent desert buses across the sandy
wastes following an ever shifting track marked out and constantly updated by
empty oil drums every two or three miles.
So the port of Basra was of
vital national importance. Before
the advent of air travel most all commerce and passengers arrived and departed
by ships sailing up the Persian Gulf.
In the post-war years following
1945, British influence in Iraq, though militarily unobtrusive, was still
diplomatically significant in the region.
It was quietly backed up by the presence of two semi-operational RAF
stations, one near Baghdad, another near Basra, and also by the frequent
courtesy visits of Royal Navy warships, which regularly patrolled the Sheikdoms
of the Persian Gulf, displaying their White Ensigns.
Thus the
flavour of colonial India was ever present in Basra and especially in the tiny
compound of Fao, nestled on the Shatt-al-Arab river shore amid the date palms
that sheltered it from the nearby empty desert.
In Basra, a
few days staying at the notably luxurious rest house with its pleasant bar and
fine dining room was always a festive occasion. This holiday spirit was augmented by visits to the nearby
luxurious Port Club not far down the road in Ma’gil, the pleasant residential
area for the authority’s officials.
Mainly
because of the myriad little lights strung through the trees and bushes around
the spacious club gardens with its swimming pools and tennis courts, it always
seemed to be Christmas at the club.
And the long curving bar and sumptuous meals served in the spotless
dining room were delights to enjoy.
Much of this sumptuous living was due to the meticulous professionalism
and diplomatic competence of Mr John, the club’s Armenian manager.
Though it was a faithful remnant
of colonial bureaucrats and office wallahs in their air-conditioned
administrative quarters in the ornate Port Office Buildings up in Basra who
dealt with the paperwork and diplomacy it was a smaller force of mainly wartime
hardened British Merchant Navy officers stationed 75 miles down river in the
tiny compound called Fao, who kept the ships coming in and the ships going out.
The main force of this prosaic
operation consisted of five big seagoing suction dredgers, which operated at
the head of the Persian Gulf.
There, where the Shatt-al-Arab,
carrying the combined outflows of Iraq’s Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was
massively swollen in springtime by water from melting winter snows in the far
distant Persian mountains. All
these formed a torrent of outgoing silt-laden fresh waters, which confronted
head on, the strong incoming tides of salt water of the Persian Gulf
itself. The result was huge
deposits of silt that if left to natural forces would block the river’s
entrance to any but the smallest of vessels.
The five tough sea-going
dredgers, built in Scotland, and each manned by three deck officers, three
engineer officers and scores of Iraqi crew members, spent continuous periods of
ten days, or more, far out at sea, continuously sucking up the sea-bed silt
washed down from the Shatt-al-Arab and keeping open the ever-changing shipping
channels across the far reaches of the estuary, far off from the sight of land.
Periodically for a weekend, they
would come up the river to tie up at Fao for two or three nights before heading
back down to resume their lonely work at the head of the Gulf again.
At that time the little port of
Fao consisted of a wooden wharf connected by a crane track to the workshops a
few hundred feet inland. From the end of the wharf a chain of four massive iron
barges was permanently anchored in a line parallel with the extremely muddy and
soft silt shoreline. The dredgers and other large vessels tied up to the
outsides of the barges and smaller craft like my El Ghar survey vessel tied up
to their inshore sides.
In the compound onshore there
was a marine workshop, a modest office for a small number of Iraqi draughtsmen
and clerks, and a generator house. Half a dozen bungalows housed such people as
the workshop manager, the electrical-radio engineer, the Cable and Wireless
man, and their wives. Others
bungalows served the bachelors: the medical officer; the communications
officer; and the overall boss—the Dredging Superintendent. Also there were several dwellings for
Iraqi office staff, a small hospital, a swimming pool, two tennis courts and,
in the centre of everything a bare sandy football field for the local Iraqis.
As relief there were patches of greenery and date palms. There was also a thick mud-walled
building, left over from the centuries-old Turkish era of the Ottoman
Empire. This housed the local
Iraqi customs chief, his harem and his motley force of a dozen khaki-clad,
rifle-toting, soldier-constables.
Most importantly, there was the
club or Port Officers Shore Mess, a rather nice airy, high-standing, cool,
building containing a polished red tiled hall about the size of a school
gymnasium, a billiard room with snooker table, a small library and again most
importantly, a bar. It was here that the dredger and other port officers
intermittently congregated and where our special parties and dances were held. Isolated as we were by the ninety miles
of indistinct desert track stretching south from Basra, our club was the social
centre of our tiny community.
Outside, through the compound
gate, which was left permanently open to all, and all around and along the shore
line, were scattered the spread-out serifa mud dwellings of the local
inhabitants, interspersed with date palms, narrow irrigation ditches and a few
rickety places of basic commerce.
Half a mile to the west, away
from the river and the last date palms, the desert abruptly began.
Our small compound, of perhaps
six acres in extent, populated with its sparse dozen and a half British
residents, and distanced from contact with any other compatriots, was the ideal
setting for an Agatha Christie mystery. But any small intrigues that may have been present
were either mild or tinged with good humour. The unchanging lives for the compound’s dozen officials and
a few wives and children were harmonious.
The swimming pool and tennis courts, books and a rare film show in the
club, helped ease our placidly quiet lives.
In many ways Fao’s traditional
close links with the newly defunct British Raj in India were apparent day by
day. Our dredgers would sail to
Bombay for boiler cleaning when necessary, several local shopkeepers were
Indian, many of our Iraqi crewmembers spoke Hindi or Punjabi, as did many of
our Port Officers. Our daily
routine included being addressed as sahibs, burra sahibs, memsahibs, and noonday Tiffin-time chota pegs were followed
by distinctly Indian curries with chappatis.
My crew members would accuse
each other of being jungly if considered
careless or ignorant, and most every day one of the British-India Steamship
Lines’ passenger vessels, either the Dwarker, Dumra or Daressa, would pass up
or down river, on their routine voyages between Basra and Bombay. In fact there were still a dwindling
number of travelers between India and Britain who took passage by ship from
London to Beirut, then rode the big overland Nairn Transport Bus over the
unstable and ever-changing track across the desert between Damascus and
Baghdad, (roads were non-existent at that time) then by train to Basra and
passage by BI liner down the gulf to Bombay. Two or three years later burgeoning air travel would eclipse
such romantic forms of travel.
Just down river from the jetty
at Fao there would often be a score of deep-sea sailing dhows anchored just
offshore. Some would be from far off Zanzibar, Malaya and other parts of the
Persian Gulf and far distant parts of the Indian Ocean perimeter. Many were larger in size than the
vessels in which Columbus and other western explorers of old had made their
epic voyages, and had crews of fifty or sixty men. These lateen-rigged sailing
dhows showed distinct characteristics as to their place of origin especially in
the shape of their bowsprits, which ranged from scimitar shapes to dauntingly
two-fathom long painted phallic symbols.
Though some traded in general
merchandise the main cargo they loaded in Fao consisted of tons of dates for
which they would get high prices owing to their top-banana quality. This
because their limited cargo tonnage would mean much of their load would be in
good shape and not overly squashed. This was in like manner to the top layers
of bananas, carried by freighters in other parts of the world, which are better
preserved from damage by not having the weight of too many other tons piled on
top of them—hence the term ‘top-banana’.
The crews of the dhows would
often be many weeks at sea if hindered by adverse winds and storms and
sometimes, while I was surveying the far offshore areas, we would see one
flying a distress flag as it approached the estuary of the Shatt, or perhaps
lying becalmed some miles off. So
we would give them a few gallons of fresh water and a sack of rice to last them
until the flood tide would make and take them northwards up river.
When becalmed a dozen of their
crew might man a long boat and tow their ship by pulling on the oars to the
rhythm of a song and the haunting playing of a conch shell.
When they came ashore at Fao
after so many hard weeks at sea I was intrigued at seeing the dhow captain and
his senior officers saunter proudly up the wharf dressed in highly coloured
ladies swagger coats, mostly tailored by New York garment factories. If out of
fashion or miss-made in some way these cut-price slim-waisted coats would be
shipped out east by their western manufacturers to find an eager market.
After an hour or two sitting in
the coffee shop outside the compound gate, or doing whatever else they did for
relaxation, these sea captains would return to their ships perhaps dangling a
half-dozen small sardine-like fish from a string. Forbidden by religion from
usurious dealings the dhows carried gold for buying and selling their cargoes.
Often through ignorance or
because of bad visibility a dhow would anchor in the deep water of one of the
shipping channels to wait for a favourable wind or time of the tide. But
sometimes a loaded tanker was already traversing the narrow dredged channels on
its way into deep water. In this case we would take the El Ghar alongside the
dhow, make ourselves fast to it, and tow them to safer waters. And then often
the knockader or captain would invite me and my serang, Ashoor Ahmed, to go on
board for coffee. This was served during a rather elaborate little ceremony as
we sat squatted down by the ship’s steering position upon the raised
aftercastle. A young boy would come with a tray of little metal cups and a
typical long, thin-spouted metal coffee pot nestled over his shoulder. He would
hand one a cup to each and with a little twitch of his shoulder send a spurt of
coffee that would unerringly land in the cup without a drop being spilled. A
few little noisy sips and the tablespoonful of extremely bitter hot coffee
would be gone whereupon another shoulder twitch by the serving boy would send a
refill into one’s cup.
I soon found out that this
sequence of events would go on and on despite my holding up my hands and making
other gestures of ‘No thanks. No more coffee.’ Little spurts would continue to
come my way until I learned to use the correct ‘no-more, thank you’ signal,
which was to waggle the little cup from side to side.
Using my serang, Ashoor, as
interpreter I would question the dhow captains about their navigation
techniques, which were both surprisingly simple and yet puzzlingly involved at
the same time. Passed down from fathers to sons over the many centuries they
relied heavily on clearly seeing the night heavens during their deep-sea
passages. But they also showed me their copies of British Admiralty charts and
some showed me their sextants, all made by the Hughes factory in Barkingside
where I had worked as a young teenager.
It was strange being there in
such exotic circumstances and seeing the testing and error calibration
certificate affixed to the inside of the lid of the sextant box, with the
certifying signature of Mr. Perkins, the sextant shop manager at Hughes whom I
had known, reproduced at the bottom. Often I would explain how that test sheet
should be used, how to look after the instrument and how to adjust the index
error. I could only do this because Ashoor had such a fine command of English.
One totally wrecked dhow aground
on a mud bank had a dozen or more crazed rats running back and forth along its
broken spars. I sent a couple of men to take off the ship’s wheel for me. I had
some idea of using it as an ornament. But it somehow it disappeared, how I just
don’t know. I found that strange because over the years I never lost anything
else even though I was careless in leaving my things all over the place.
In the same way, even in Ashar,
the oldest part of Basra, there was no fear of being mugged nor did any of the
wives and daughters of port officers worry, even when out shopping alone. Iraq
under the royal family of King Faisel, Prime Minister Nuri Said, and the
Nakibs, was safer then than are our own cities today.
Rats abounded on our survey
vessel. At night I used to balance empty tins on the angle-iron longeron that
ran alongside my bunk so that any rat running along it would make a clatter and
wake me up—and it was a common occurrence. I also had a stick by my pillow with
which to rap on the double deckhead above my bunk. The rats’ constant scuffling
and pattering up there would sometimes keep me awake but often a loud tattoo on
the metal would quieten them down long enough for me to fall asleep.
Once a year we sailed up the
river to Basra for our annual fumigation. With the El Ghar alongside the wharf
all the crew were ordered off the ship to nearby accommodation for three days
while I took myself off to the rest house and the amenities of the luxurious
Port Club. Then the next morning the vessel was sealed up and the cyanide
pumped in and left to poison everything for a day and a night.
The first time this happened the
serang told me that during the first night all the rats left the ship. Then the
night the ship was left open to air out the gas all the rats jumped back on
board. The only rat caught was one which in the middle of the night was seen to
be undecided as to whether to go in a cage-trap after the bait, or not. The
serang said one of the lascars leaped out of bed and kicked it into the cage.
After the fumigation the crew swept up several buckets of dead cockroaches from
the underdecking and bilges. Then we sailed back down the river with a brand
new certificate of fumigation attesting to our vessel being rat-free in my desk
drawer. That night I was awoken by something heavy on the covering over my
legs. I looked down into the eyes of the largest rat I had yet seen on the
ship.
Sometimes before going ashore in
the evening to our club in Fao I would bait a rattrap cage placed at the bottom
of the ladderway leading down to my cabin. If the dredgers and tugs were all
out at sea all would be extremely quiet along the mooring barges which were
connected end-to-end by little wooden bridges as walkways. This deep silence
was enhanced because as soon as our ship tied up to the farthest barge our
vessel’s mistri, or engineer, would plug us into the shoreline's 220-volt
current and switch off the ship’s 110-volt generator. So in the midnight
silence as I walked back along the crane track and was yet still about four
hundred feet from the El Ghar I would know if I had caught a rat. Because at the
sound of my coming I would hear it starting to scream.
As I stepped from the first
little wooden bridge onto the metal surface of the first massive iron barge my
footsteps would echo eerily in the still night and resound from the surface of
the fresh water stored below in each barge. And the trapped rat would scream
louder. As I crossed the next little bridge onto the second barge the screams
would become louder still and even louder as I crossed onto the third. When I
trod down onto the fourth and last barge I would wonder why the terrible
screams did not wake any of my crew who were sleeping on board, let alone the
watchman, who as usual, was fast asleep at his post.
Then I would climb down my
ladderway and see the frenzied rat with its mouth a bloody mess from trying to
bite through the cage and its droppings and urine fouling the deck. Then I
would grasp the rope tied to the top of the cage and climb back up the
ladderway and carefully cross the upper deck to the ship’s side and lower the
screaming cage into the water and at last listen once more to the blessed
silence of the night.
Then. Leaving the trap well
submerged, I would bend the rope to the ship’s rail with a clove hitch and go
back down the ladderway once more, step over the mess where the trap had been,
and get into my bunk. And fall asleep.
For this night at least, for an
hour or two, after the screaming of my victim, the rest of the rats would lie
quiet and subdued.
