"دليل الخليج. مجلد I. القسم التاريخي. الأجزاء Iأ و Iب. ج.ج. لوريمر ١٩١٥" [‎٣‎١‎٠] (١٧٨٢/٤٥٣)

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A first indication of the strategical importance attached by Russia to
the straits forming the entrance of the Persian Gulf was afforded by the
journey of a Russian engineer officer, who came by Kirman and Bandar
'Abbas, to Hormuz in the spring of 1 cS95 ; he remained for two days,
made a survey of Hormuz, and at his departure gave it to be under
stood that the island would be made a Russian coaling station.
After 1896 the existence of bubonic plague in India provided Russia
with a new pretext for intervention in Gulf affairs. In 1897, in pur
suance, it cannot be doubted, of a plan which in other parts of Persia
served admirably to obstruct British interests, two Russian medical agents,
MM. Ost and Marc, the latter being the physician of the Russian Legation
at Tehran, were deputed to study plague at Bushehr, where the disease did
not then exist, and where it did not appear until two years later. In 1898
these doctors were followed by two others, MM. Rodzewitz and Korna-
jewski; and they in their turn were succeeded by M. Paschkowski, who
made Bushehr his headquarters in 1898 and 1899, and who displayed
considerable professional activity during a slight outbreak of plague there
in the latter year. It was a significant fact in connection w r ith the designs
of Russia at the mouth of the Gulf that all these medical men paid visits
to Bander 'Abbas as well as Bushehr; and MM. Rodzewitz and Korna-
jewski visited Basrah also. The fact that the sanitary precautions on the
southern coast of Persia against the introduction of plague had been offici
ally entrusted by the Persian Government to British agency, together with
the short duration of the single small epidemic that occnrred at Bushehr,
rendered the Russian medical missions inefficacious for the purposes which
they were really intended to serve; and a threat made by the Russian
Legation at Tehran in 1899, that Cossacks would be sent to Bushehr— as
they had been to STstan —to form a plague cordon, remained unexecuted.
The action taken at Baghdad in 1898 was connected with a scheme for
the establishment of a Russian port in the Persian Gulf, on which subject
the new Russian Consul at Baghdad had orders to report; and the fact
that in 1898 Count Kapnist, a Russian of good family, applied to the
Porte for a concession to construct a railway from Tripoli in Syria to
Kuwait in the Persian Gulf seemed to show that Kuwait was the point
then specially in view.
During this period Germany for the first time made an appearance in
Persian Gulf affairs. She had, though the fact was not yet known abroad,
railway designs on the country between the Mediterranean and the Persian
Gulf. In 1894, in which year the German war vessel " Cormoran ; visits
Masqat, a German Consulate was established at Baghdad by means of a
German resident of private means ; and in 1897 a German Vice -Consul was