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Bahrein [sic]: Port of Pearls and Petroleum
By hisham
Some of you might have noticed the January 2007 issue of National Geographic with Dubai as one of its cover articles. On that note, here’s a little something to look at from my archives.
National Geographic, February 1946:
That’s right, probably one of the first articles in NG dealing solely with our little island of hope, Bahrein: Port of Pearls and Petroleum – With 6 illustrations and Map, 11 Natural Color Photographs by Maynard Owen Williams.
Some gems from the article (keeping in mind fair use!):
Even before petroleum outranked piracy and pearls as a source of riches, Bahrein was credited with the highest per-capita wealth on earth. The archipelago contains only 120,00 inhabitants, and the receipts from pearls alone have been as high as $9,000,000 in a single year.
Mr. [Charles] Belgrave welcomed me to his wide-open house, which is set in a lovely garden. He also arranged for me to attend the weekly levee and photograph His Highness Sheik [sic] Sir Salman bin Hamed al Khalifa with an up-to-the-second wrist watch strapped to his traditional gold-incrusted dagger.
Awali has an 18-hole golf course, softball is played at night, even in summer, and cricket, tennis, and swimming are provided for. Among the magazines at Bapco Club, the National Geographic helps keep the workers in touch with the world.
One oil executive foresees the day when a lowered infant mortality and improved general health and prosperity may lead to overpopulation on Bahrein, to which both kerosene and drinking water were formerly imported and where wide extension of agriculture is unlikely.
“Some day,” he told me, “these wells may be exhausted. By that time we want to leave Bahrein better than it was before we came.”
Some Arab pearl divers, tired of enduring debt, penury, and exploitation in the vain hope of striking it rich are drawing regular wages as oil workers, and fewer than 300 Bahrein pearl boats now sail the summer sea.
Dr. [Paul] Harrison, one of Bahrein’s 26 National Geographic Society members, has trained competent Arab assistants, and friends and relatives come in to nurse and feed the patients.
and
One of her [Anna Harrison, Dr. Harrison’s wife] guests had come to meet me because the favorite books in his five-foot English shelf are bound National Geographics. Of course I wanted to jot down his name.
“Write it the way it sounds,” said Anna Monteith Harrison. So I wrote down “Ahmed Fakhroo” and the name of another tea guest, “Hussein Yatim.”