The Hadhramaut

Evening Meeting of the Society, 13 June I938 J CONFESS that I have not found it easy to plan what shape this paper should take. I would rather have been able to give you a straightforward account of a single pioneering journey, and if when my wife and I returned to the Hadhramaut on i6 November 1936 things had gone as we had expected, I should have hoped to tell you about a journey made in the time-honoured way by camel from the Hadhramaut eastwards through the Mahra country to the sea beyond Cape Fartak. We left Aden for Mukalla with six weeks allotted us and had hoped to make the journey when the immediate tasks arising out of our previous journey in I934 had been completed. But our destiny was written otherwise, and though the six weeks spun out into months and though we have now become permanent residents of the Hadhramaut we have not yet found the time or opportunity for our journey. So it happens that I am unable to give you all those fresh first impressions of a new country once visited which are so interesting to those who have to do their travelling as listeners or readers. It may none the less be interesting to attempt a fuller perspective of the Hadhramaut by describing, with that knowledge which comes from day-today familiarity, a country which is still little known from many points of view; and I shall hope, too, to describe occasional excursions over its hitherto unvisited districts. When I look back over these past eighteen months I am struck by the great contrasts between the Hadhramaut then and now, contrasts which are probably more marked than any other changes the country has seen in its history. Eighteen months ago the Hadhramaut had, it is true, already become one of the better-known regions of Arabia. There had been quite a spate of writing and talking about it and within a short period it had seen quite a number of European visitors, comparatively speaking, for I suppose the total number of Europeans who had seen it since i843, when Von Wrede went there, was twenty to thirty, of whom all except an odd half-dozen had been there since I9

Geography · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Environmental Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Islamic Studies and History