Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎33r] (65/118)

When I arrived at Bandar Abbas by the shortest possible but very roundabout
route I had covered about 800 miles. I was shocked by the shabby decay of the
town as I came in from the north. My first sight of it had been from seaward
during the Jask Lights scare. Then the high ring of craggy mountains soaring
up steeply behind it made it a harbour site of truly imposing grandeur more
dramatic though not more beautiful than Rio or Vancouver and far outstripping
Capetown and Hong Kong. But the stage below this magnificent backdrop let the
theatre down badly. There was no deep water harbour, only shallow water off a
beach of muddy sand bridged by a modest jetty. The shallow water had mattered
less when in 1623 the great Shah Abbas with East India Company help drove the
Portuguese out of their great trading base on nearby Hormuz island and invited
the Company to leave Jask and set up in the mainland village of Qombrun which he
re-named Bandar (port) Abbas.
In his account of the Political Service in the Gulf Creagh Coen refers to its
'fiendish climate', a very well documented reproach. 'A very sickly place' runs
the entry in Marco Polo's tourist handbook of 1271. After Ralph Fitch's 16th
century dismissal - 'Nature seemed not to have intended that it should be
inhabited', Fryer a century later called it 'a sensible Map of Purgatory' and
English sailors capped him by saying that there 'was only an Inch-Deal between
it and Hell'. If I now write forty years later that with the resilience of
youth I found the 'fiendish' Gulf and my recurrent malaria first contracted in
Bengal (as also my recurring dysentery) far from intolerable, and that I was
strangely attracted by that wide wilderness of hot salt sea and endless rocky
shore, I stand to be accused of nostalgic self-delusion. Yet my friends and
relatives say that at the time I gave no other impression of the Gulf than its
fascination for me.