'Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, including a journey from Bagdad by Mount Zagros, to Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, researches in Ispahan and the ruins of Persepolis, and journey from thence by Shiraz and Shapoor to the sea-shore. Description of Bussorah, Bushire, Bahrein, Ormuz, and Muscat, narrative of an expedition against the pirates of the Persian Gulf, with illustrations of the voyage of Nearchus, and passage by the Arabian Sea to Bombay.' [‎390] (421/582)

390
TRADE OF BUSSORAH.
any nation having a tariff established by treaty with the Porte, is
seven and a half per cent, ad valorem. This, however, is not re
gulated by the price at which the commodity sells, as is done with
the English, but by an old standard of valuation contained in a
Dufter, or book of estimates, made, as some think, several centuries
ago, but certainly antecedent to the earliest period of the English
trade here. By this standard, the value of most Indian articles is
fixed at less than half their present selling price, some even at
one-fourth, and all of them at least a third below their real value
at the present day. Yet such is the veneration of the Turks for
old customs of this kind, that though their power to accommodate
this standard to existing circumstances has never been doubted,
the interest both of the individuals in office under the Government,
and of the Government itself, have not furnished a sufficiently
powerful motive to break in upon an established usage. By this
means, though the nominal duty of the English is less than that
of the other traders here, the real duty paid by them is often
more; as, for instance, on a chest of indigo, by the old valuation,
the duty of seven and a half per cent, makes just nine piastres and
a half; but as good indigo sells on an average at from 800 to
1000 piastres per chest, the English duty of three per cent,
amounts to thirty piastres !
One cause of this extraordinary difference between the old
estimate and the present value, independent of the real increase
of price in the article from that period to the present one, is that
the size and contents of every package is increased; and, as the
old estimates were neither made by measure nor weight, a chest is
still considered to be a chest, whether large or small; and all other
packages are numbered in the same way. Some of the native
merchants here tried a similar experiment in exporting goods to
Bengal, by packing up two bales together, and, to save the duty,
calling them, in their manifests, only one: but the officers of the
Customs at Calcutta, not being such slaves to old usages as the
Turks, opened these double bales, and taking the duty on one of