Around the Coasts of Arabia

Here's a piece of vintage orientalism I came across while looking for sources on seafaring in the Indian Ocean in times past: an essay by Alan Villiers, author of Sons of Sindbad.  That latter book is his account of his voyage with an Arab trading dhow in 1938-39, with the north-east monsoon from the Gulf of Aden down the East African coast to Zanzibar and back to Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, where he spent some time with pearl divers.  I haven't tracked down a copy of this yet either; most of Villiers' books are out of print or very expensive and Not Available In My Region.  But the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has put Villier's spectacular photographs from that trip and others online.  You can even buy prints.
  

Excerpted from 'Around the Coasts of Arabia,' published in the Marine Corps Gazette, May 1949:

Muscat, in Oman, is a port of importance in world steamship routes. It is on the regular mail route between Bombay and Basra, and the Indian government, under British rule, maintained a post and telegraph office there. Native craft generally used the smaller, more open port of Mutrah, immediately to the north of Muscat harbor.  

Muscat, Oman 1913 (source)

Badans at Mutrah. The larger of these typically Omani craft could make the voyage to East Africa, while the smaller ones were used for fishing.

Alan Villiers

Here there is the usual covered bazaar, and fish market most unhygienic - on the beach beneath the hot sun. Many of the inhabitants are Baluchi, from Baluchistan across the Gulf of Oman. At Mutrah bay I have seen some of the most primitive sailing-vessels still using the deep sea, some of them dating back, surely, to Phoenician days. Incredibly small and inefficient vessels sail from there down to Zanzibar, in the good season, and frequently also sail back again.

Becalmed off the Swahili coast (Alan Villiers)

Ready for auction, freshly caught tuna await buyers at Sur, Oman’s chief fishing center. From the 7th to the 19th centuries Sur was a hub for the slave trade that stretched from East Africa to India. (NatGeo)

Around the whole of the southern coasts of Arabia and in the Gulf of Oman, the good season is the northeast season. There are two annual monsoons, northeast and southwest. The northeast lasts from October to the middle of April or some time in May; the southwest blows during most of the rest of the year. From the beginning of November to the end of February, the northeast monsoon prevails as a steady moderate breeze with fine, settled clear weather and a smooth sea. These are the conditions which the dhows revel in, both coastwise and deepsea. It is not at all uncommon to find 50 in together at a place like Ma'alla. The area of greatest regularity in this northeast wind is to the eastward and southeastward of the island of Socotra. In March the winds are variable, and now the big dhows begin to come home from Zanzibar and across the Indian Ocean, for they do not like to be out in the southwest monsoon. The weather then is often thick, hot, and extremely unpleasant, and the wind may reach gale force with a nasty sea. The southwest season is no time for amphibious exercises. [...]

A boom under full sail often carried a jib to take full advantage of the wind, like this one probably off the south Arabian coast. (Alan Villiers)

A fine baggala, probably the 'Bedri' of Kuwait, having her hull cleaned, Kwale Island.

Alan Villiers

The most trying conditions for personnel travelling in the Red Sea are to be found aboard transports going either north or south, with the wind following them at the same speed as the ship, and insufficient or no air conditioning. These conditions cause heat prostration, for which the Red Sea is notorious. But ashore the climate is not so bad, especially if people learn quickly to gear their lives to the existing climatic conditions and not those they knew back home. The busiest time in the Arab day is from dawn to about 10:30 am. The Arab eats lightly at dawn, generally breakfasting on a little unleavened bread and some strong tea, heavily sweetened: at 10:30 he has his mid-morning meal, and does not eat again until the early evening. His robes are cool and comfortable; his house, though lacking in sanitation and almost always without even running water, is cool, and well ventilated. He sleeps in the open, whether he be Beduin or Sheikh. He wears his picturesque head-cloth so that he can wrap up his face against severe dust storms, and his head-ropes are to keep his headgear on. He has learned to live properly under the conditions of his country; it would be a good idea to study how he does it, if so be you ever get the opportunity.

Nejdi had come on ahead to the Hadhramaut coast to drum up custom for his boom. These prospective passengers were trekking to Mukalla from the hinterland.

Alan Villiers

While the Bedouin still herd camels and goats and move camp every three or four months to find forage, they no longer depend on them for subsistence. (NatGeo)

On the whole, though trying, the climate is by no means as bad as it is reported to be. Up in the mountains, of course, it is cool enough. The local Beduin have a curious belief that indigo dye will keep them warm. I have seen them coming down from the interior into the roads of Shihr with no clothing other than a brief, black sarong, long matted hair thick with ghee, and black indigo smeared heavily on their lithe and almost fleshless bodies, though they had come straight from the hills. [...]

Now that the age-old seclusion of much of Arabia is becoming a thing of the past, the standard of local government, and services, is improving almost everywhere. But there still are bad spots. On the coast near the Kuria Buria Islands, there are tribes of pirates who are still held in awe by date-laden dhows: in many parts of Oman, the locals would sooner take a pot shot at the stranger than hang out any flags. Policing much of South Arabia was from the air, mainly by the Royal Air Force; when a tribe of Beduin break the raiding rules with persistent carelessness, sometimes they must be bombed. But on the whole there is more peace now than there has been for many years, and the influx of wealth and western ideas is making for good government. [...]

 

HM Taimur bin Turki, Sultan of Oman, 1913 (source)



The typical Arab has two things which very greatly sustain him, no matter what he might otherwise lackand these things are his calm philosophical outlook, the growth of much contemplation in an existence very close to a harsh and unforgiving Nature; and his Moslem religion. To him, both these are very real things indeed. He may know little of mass production and his greatest industry may be concerned with the production of some indifferent tobacco or good coffee beans, or queerly flavored honey. He likes to rub some perfume on his forehead, in the evenings, and to waft the fumes of burning incense into his wide nostrils. He eats in silence, crouching and using the right hand only; womenfolk are neither present nor discussed: he is at home on a strip of rough carpet beneath the stars, or upon a camel's back, or seated cross-legged hour after hour in the stern sheets of a dhow. He may have slaves, concubines, vast possessions (some of the wealthiest property-holders in Singapore are Arabs, and in Java) ; or he may not have a change of indigo. He may trade in pearls or sheep from Berbera, dates from Basra, cotton-goods in the cheap bazaar at the Crater in rainless Aden. He may speak no language the average Westerner understands, though the business man is often at home in four or five difficult Eastern tongues. He may wear a dagger, carry an ancient rifle (not quite so out of date as it may appear), ride a racing camel, fondle his amber rosary.

A old man resting outside a shop in Muttrah Souq. (Times of Oman)

All these things he may well do; but one thing also you may depend upon. He will comport himself with quiet dignity like a man, and a man he is, and was, and always will be. A man's man, at home in a tough man's country. It is a country, too, where we can learn a lot.

I won't say much about 'quiet dignity.'  But I take it Villiers never saw men shouting at each other, sitting around talking and laughing.  Or he just forgot about it.  Confirmation bias and all.  That's a very narrow and Noble Savage view of Omani men.

The Sheikh of Kais, 1913 (source)

And Villers seems to have forgotten that Oman contains as many women as men. 

A picture from September 1955 showing women carrying waterpots in Muttrah with the office of the “Wali” in the background. (Andy in Oman)

'A crowded market in Fanja' undated photo (Every Culture)

Women who live and work and give birth to children and raise them in what were and sometimes still are tough conditions.  He must have encountered women at some point; they were around doing things, but it strikes me how much he and Thesiger and other European travellers considered Oman and the Arabian Peninsula masculine countries inhabited by very masculine men, and rarely mention women or their contributions.  It's not just that women were frequently segregated and they mostly dealt with men, but also how endurance and going on trips involving hardship, especially in foreign lands, are gendered masculine and seen as things men do, and the experiences and contributions of other genders dismissed and discounted.

Most of the sources I found when I searched for "oman women in history" talked about how oppressed Omani women were/are by their culture, the need for Western organisations to liberate them, and the great strides they've made since Westernisation. It's all very colonial.  The introduction to the 'Women in Oman' Wikipedia article (the first hit for that search) pretty much sums up that narrative:

Women in Oman were historically excluded from the forums of everyday life. But with the dispersal of Omanis in the early 1900s and their return in the early 1970s, a more contemporary population of Omanis that were influenced by the British colonial values during their time abroad have slowly challenged many traditions of gender segregation. Women now pursue careers and professional training, slowly moving from their previous household confinement to the public sphere.^[2] In Oman, 17 October is celebrated every year as the Omani Women's Day with various pro-female events.^[3] (Wikipedia)

That whole article is terrible, and I do not recommend it.  It's written by people who fully believe in the development narrative - the modern form of the old colonial civilising mission; their rhetoric's just less obviously racist than it was in Kipling's time.  It's not that there weren't ever major problems in Omani society or aren't still, it's that Omani women are portrayed as victims of their backwards culture who need to be saved by the enlightened West.  Which is totally not misogynistic or exploiting the rest of the world for its own gain, nope.  The past was very different, and great changes have happened in the last forty years, but this narrative of Western influence liberating the world rather than local women and people around them working to change their own society from the inside while dealing with imperialist pressures and using foreign resources as they see fit is racist and ethnocentric, and covers up the real purposes of imperialist projects.

There was one result on the first page of Google result that talks about a few Omani women who were prominent in recorded history:

Indeed, the history of Oman also includes its share of women noted and recognized for their various contributions to public life.  To name a few, based on Al Balushi (2000), Seyyida Moza bint Al Imam Ahmad bin San Said was a top military strategist in the early eighteenth century, while Seyyida Khawla bint Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the daughter of the Sultan who ruled Oman from 1856 to 1857, was a known thinker, planner, and the most reliable member of the ruling family.  Shamsaa bint Al Alama Said bin Khalfan Al Khalili was a well-respected scholar and thinker in Islamic jurisprudence who was consulted to interpret some of the most difficult issues of the early nineteenth century.  Aisha bint Sheikh Issa Al Harthy was a famous poet of her time.  Al Ghalia bint Nasser bin Hmeid played a major role in national unity and social cohesion in Oman in the early 1900s.  The list is long and diverse, and continues from the noted late-nineteenth-century book author Seyyida Salma bint Sultan Al Seyyid Said bin Sultan to the more contemporary scholarly contributions of Nagiya bint Amer Al Hijriya, Sheikha bint Hilal Al Hinaiya, and Nasira bint Suroor Al Riyamiya, to mention only a few.

(Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change,  by Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, Routledge (2013) pg. 217 on Google Books)

I'm not going to do the research right now, but it's clear just from one source that there are many more, and countless other women who were not members of the ruling family or upper classes who lived ordinary lives and were never recorded.  But they were there, and they contributed. (I haven't read the whole book, but the section I quoted from is titled 'Omani women: the journey to empowerment'; it goes on to talk about outside influence empowering Omani women, which is also a pretty problematic narrative.  Empowerment in general is.  It can be hard to find sources in English on topics like this that aren't problematic to some degree.)

The world outside Europe was not only populated and participated in and at times ruled by local women as well as local men, it was explored and colonised and Christianised by Western women as well as Western men.  Women participated in imperialist exploration and mapping projects - quite a few of them.  There were a lot more than I realised before I went looking for lists.  Women were there, on both sides.  But they get left out of accounts, and left out of history.

Explorer Gertrude Bell in Iraq in 1909 (Wikipedia).  She explored and mapped parts of Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Arabia, and wrote about her travels.

Here's a long list of Western female travellers and explorers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.  Here's another one.  Their imperialism and ethnocentrism and sense of superiority to other races weren't good things, but they were part of history and they should be included in history when we write about it.

Roses

I suddenly have a craving for pink roses, I have no idea why.  Just pink ones, no other colour will do.  It's not true that I've always loved roses, it just came on suddenly this week.  They're nice enough flowers but that's all I usually feel for them.

Rosa centifolia from Les Roses (1817) (Country Garden Roses)

My grandmother did love roses and worked hard at growing them in a climate that was not really suitable for them. 

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I suppose there is a narrative in which I do love roses and always have, but it's a story someone else might tell about me, not one I would say is true of myself:  When I was a little kid, my grandmother had a cabbage rose bush. 

Unidentified pink cabbage rose (source).

I remember scooping petals up off the lawn and putting them in a shoebox.  I think I also put my grama's Siamese cat in the box and then piled rose petals on top - picture the cat hunkering down like grumpy cat.  I filled my orange plastic pumpkin from Halloween which I used as a handbag with petals and took them home, spending the long car trip up the island ruffling the petals and putting my face into the pumpkin to smell them. 

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.”

― Anne Bronte

David Austin rose 'Spirit of Freedom' (source)

I was five or six and roses didn't grow where we lived.  It was too cold and wet.  Petunias didn't grow there either, they melted.  Not much besides fir trees and ferns grew.  Maybe that's why I love tropical plants and now suddenly roses so much - as much as it's possible to find a reason. 

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”

― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques  

(source)

My grandmother had a huge stack of Herb Digest or something like that which I read through in her bathroom when I was in elementary school.  I read about monastery gardens and medieval herbal medicine and nuns.  I tried making rosary beads - despite not being Christian.  I was a complete heathen, never baptised or christened or confirmed or churched, but I have always liked ritual.  The burgundy and green carpets and incense and calligraphy and salaah five times a day and tasbeeh are some of the things I like about being Muslim, although they're trappings.  They're not the heart of the religion.

I chopped up rose petals and mixed them into a flour dough and rolled them into balls and painstakingly poked holes through them and laid them in the weak summer sun and turned them several times a day.  I eventually ended up with a string of crude musty-smelling brown beads.  I sometimes think about trying to do that again, now that I'm not ten years old and could produce something of better quality, if I had rose petals.

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? 

Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.  

Funny, it seems to by keeping it's dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air.  

Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”

― Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete

Iskwew's Images

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:

But, for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth. 

 - Shakespeare's Sonnet 54

source

 I don't even like the roses that much in person, and I wouldn't want to have to grow them, but I like the idea of them and I like looking at pictures of them.

Merchant, keep your attar of roses,
your ambers, your oud,
your myrrh and sandalwood. I need
nothing but this dust
palmed in my hand’s cup
like a coin, like a mustard seed,
like a rusted key.

I need

no more than this, this earth

that isn’t earth, but breath,

the exhalation of a living city, the song

of a flute-boned woman,

air and marrow on her lips.

 - Amal el-Mohtar, 'Song for an Ancient City.'

Passport renewal

Whaaaat a clusterfuck.

The Canadian Embassy in Riyadh (Oman no longer has a Canadian consulate) told me I need to send my passport and renewal forms and bank order etc by Amex, which is in al-Qurum.  So I walked and took a taxi and took another very expensive taxi and then spent two hours walking around in the sun trying to find the damn office.  It was 48C that day.  My map was wrong.  Nobody knew where the Ernst and Young Building was and when I finally found it it was on the wrong side of the highway and I couldn't get a taxi.

I called Amex twice to ask for directions, which would have worked if I was driving a car, but not on foot.  There was no way I could take exits or cross the highway and I called twice begging the office not to close, I was almost there.  I didn’t have a lot of dignity left by that point.

I got there, fucking finally, and someone was waiting outside the Amex office for me and let me in the back.  He may actually have been an angel.  I continued having a meltdown in the office.  At least it was air conditioned, and they gave me a glass of water.  Having to do major stuff while autistic really sucks sometimes; I only have so much go and when I run out of go, that's it.  He asked me how much I needed to send and I told him I needed to send my passport renewal forms, the embassy told me to do it here, and he told me I needed the *Aramex* office.  Which is in Khuweir, and I don’t know where Khuweir is much less how to find the office.

Two very kind Amex employees, a Syrian and a Pakistani, took me to Khuweir, where I paid fifty-five rials to send my application.  That’s like 15% of my monthly salary.  I hope they don’t charge me on the return trip too.  And I really pray that nothing else goes wrong because I need a passport to renew my work visa and I have to start doing that in July or August at the latest.

The guys were trying to immigrate to Canada, since work in Oman has gotten worse and worse and they can't change jobs here (neither can I), and had a lot of questions about immigration which I couldn’t begin to answer because I was born a citizen.  They were puzzled about how I ended up in Oman, and I didn't want to discourage them, but I told them I came here to work, and people aren't always accepting of Muslims in Canada (bit of an understatement, where I come from.  I did not mention fascists or Nazis).  But their situation is not the same as mine - they're able young men with business degrees and good English and the whole world before them.  If they're lucky and they work hard - which they clearly do - they could make it.  You'll never make it if you stop hoping.

They seemed cool.  I would like to be their friend, but I am a lady, so that can't happen.  Which always seems stupid and wasteful to me, but it's how it is.

I saw what must be the largest pedestrian bridge in Creation, you could drive two cars along it if you could get them up the stairs and avoid the square holes down the middle where trees were supposed to go but aren't.  I'd be surprised if nobody's tried it. This picture doesn't show how it arches or do it justice, but:

The Qurum shopping centre had some cool mosaics mixed in with a lot of ones that didn't work so well:

Hadith 19 from the Imam an-Nawawi's 40 hadith is always a comfort to me.  It's one of my favourite books and one of the few that I own in paper:

(Translation:)  In a version other than that of al-Tirmidhi it reads:

"..Be mindful of Allah, you will find Him before you. Get to know Allah in prosperity and He will know you in adversity. Know that what has passed you by was not going to befall you; and that what has befallen you was not going to pass you by. And know that victory comes with patience, relief with affliction, and ease with hardship."

Wadi Dayqah Dam

A lady started visiting me last week.  She came several times, often more than once a day, and brought a few relatives with her.  I was glad to see her, but a little apprehensive because in Jordan there would be a 98% chance she had someone whom she wanted me to marry.  This is not Jordan and people here are not as fired up about all ladies getting married asap, and most people know that it's illegal for Omanis to marry foreigners - although it's not quite that simple.  I'm sometimes selfishly relieved that law exists, although it causes other people a lot of trouble.

But it turns out, she's the imam's wife and wanted to be welcoming to a foreigner and no a3rees has come out of the woodwork yet, which is the best outcome I'd hoped for, alH.

She and her husband took me and their two kids on a day-trip to Wadi Dayqah last Friday.  It was a great trip overall.  We had long conversations, the kids slept part of the way, and there was only one vomiting incident. 

Wadi Dayqah Dam is reputed to be the biggest dam in the Middle East, and it is the biggest dam in Oman and an important part of Oman's water projects.  The research was begun on the dam, which traps winter flood water so that it can be used year-round, in 1978, but the dam was only opened to the public in 2012.

The storage lake covers an area of about 350 hectares and extends to about 6km from the main body of the dam.

The observation post. 

There's a walkway with rails for visitors to walk about halfway out along the dam, although it's somewhat messy due to construction right now.  There is a grassed area with gazebos for visitors to sit in in the shade by the reservoir, but we only walked across it and I didn't want to take pictures of other people.  You can find pictures of it if you Google the wadi name, there's lots available in English.

Water flows down the wall in flood season.

Men swimming in the basin at the bottom of the wadi.

Wadi Dayqah is one of the few that flow year-round, but it's massively reduced in summer.

Villages in the valley.

Wadi Dayqah currently provides agricultural water free of charge to villages in Qureiyat, and is part of a US$ 120 million water supply scheme that aims to provide potable water to Muscat and Qureiyat.  I haven't found any projected completion dates for that, but they wouldn't likely be very useful anyhow.

Book Review: Memoirs of a Smuggler.

Memoirs of a Smuggler: Compiled from His Diary and Journal by John Rattenbury
(J. Harvey, London, 1837).

aMy rating: 3 of 5 stars

The ebook is available for free from Google Books (PDF or epub; the epub has a few scanning errors) or from Smugglers' Britain (html, proofread).

This is Jack Rattenbury's account of his exploits as a smuggler, mainly between France and the Devon coast, in the late 18th and early 19th century.  According to this website, a Unitarian pastor, John Smith (who was also involved in smuggling) helped him write it.

Born in 1778, Rattenbury went to sea as a fisherman at the age of nine, but soon left and took up as a privateer by the age of 15. From that point on, he was constantly pursuing and being pursued by French and Spanish vessels, and made many daring escapes - or so he tells us.

Returning home from privateering at the age of 16, Rattenbury says he

...remained at home about six months, part of which was occupied in fishing, but I found the employment very dull and tiresome after the roving life I had led; and as the smuggling trade was then plied very briskly in the neighbourhood, I determined to try my fortune in it" (pg. 11).

Rattenbury spent the next thirty years alternately smuggling, fishing, piloting, and running a public house which ultimately failed. His account is mostly a fairly dry recitation of the trips he made, places he went, and ships and cargoes he lost, but there are dramatic bits when he's chased by the preventive services and has to toss his tubs of spirits or tea overboard and hope to haul them up later, before the king's cutters or local inhabitants do and before they spoil.

Some of his anecdotes seem exaggerated for effect, as when he tells how he deserted from the Royal Navy and, in between smuggling trips, a militia sergeant found him in a pub and tried to capture him.

...in answer to his charge, I replied, “Sergeant, you are surely labouring under an error; I have done nothing that can authorize you in taking me up, or detaining me; you must certainly have mistaken me for some other person.” In this manner, I contrived to draw him into a parley; and, while it was going on, I jumped into the cellar. I then threw off my jacket and shirt, to prevent any one from holding me; and, having armed myself with a reaphook, and a knife which I had in my pocket, I threw myself into an attitude of defence at the entrance, which was a half-hatch door, the lower part of which I shut, and then declared that I would kill the first man who came near me, and that I would not be taken from the spot alive. At this, the sergeant was evidently terrified, but he said to his men, “Soldiers, do your duty, advance and seize him;” to which they replied, “Sergeant, you proposed it: take the lead, and set us an example, and we will follow.” No one, however, offered to advance, and I remained in the position which I have described, for four hours, holding them at bay (pg. 52).

A group of women then came into the pub and claimed that a boy was drowning, and Rattenbury claims that he charged through the militiamen, and because he had taken off his shirt, they couldn't catch him and he was able to jump into a boat and escape. A tall tale if I ever heard one.

At least once, Rattenbury smuggles people, in this case, four French officers who escaped from custody in England:

They came to Beer, and I concealed them in the best manner I was able, in a house near the beach, where I supplied them with such provisions as they wanted. But a vigilant inquiry was commenced; their steps were traced, and the place of their retreat discovered. The next morning, there was a special warrant out against myself and five others, who were connected with the affair, and the constables came to my house, while I was up-stairs considering how I had best act. Finding that my companions had absconded, and being captain of the boat, I immediately surrendered myself up to them. I was then taken before the magistrates, where I found the French gentlemen in custody. They were examined through the medium of an interpreter, but their replies were cautious, and they said very little that could tend to implicate me in the transaction. My turn then came; and, in reply to the questions from the bench, I briefly stated that I was engaged to take the gentlemen to Jersey, of which island I understood that they were natives. A lieutenant of the sea-fencibles being in the room, asked me if I did not know a native of Jersey from a Frenchman; to which I was going to have replied, but my attorney, who was present, said that this was a question which he had no right to prefer, and which I was not bound to answer. The magistrates then conversed together; and, after a little consultation, dismissed me, with a gentle admonition to go home, and not engage in any similar transaction for the future (pg. 51).

Rattenbury and his sons and gang of smugglers (he doesn't go into any detail in the narrative, but you can read about them here) are frequently on the wrong side of the law. Rattenbury repeatedly escapes the preventives and press-gangs and service in the Royal Navy, but he is in and out of court, is fined numerous times, and does a few stretches in prison. But no sooner is he released than he returns to smuggling and recoups his losses. Despite the frequent ups and downs of his career, it's clear that Rattenbury is a resilient and optimistic man:

I have also experienced, as may be seen in the foregoing narrative, the greatest vicissitudes, my spirits having been alternately elated by success, or depressed by misfortune; but in the midst of the whole I never yielded to despair, for hope was the pole-star which shed its cheering rays, and illuminated my path in the darkest storms of adversity (pg. 106).

When the book closes in 1836, Rattenburg is retired from smuggling, receiving a pension of a shilling a week for life from his patron Lord Rolle, and in court again.  His son, also a smuggler, is up on charges of assaulting customs officers, and Rattenburg is making jokes on the stand:

On this occasion I was cross-examined by Mr. Sergeant Bompas; and as it caused a great deal of amusement at the time, I have extracted the following passages from a newspaper, which contained an account of the trial. “I keep school at sea—fish for sole, turbot and brill; any kind of fish that comes to hook.” “Which do you catch oftenest, soles or tubs? “—” Oh, the devil a tub, (great laughter ;) there are too many picaroons going now-a-day.” You have caught a good many in your time? “—” Ah, plenty of it! I wish you and I had as much of it as we could drink.” (laughter.) “You have kept school at home, and trained up your son?”—” I have always trained him up in a regular honourable way, larnt him the creed, the Lord’s prayer, and the ten commandments.” “You don’t find there, Thou shalt not smuggle? “—” No, but I find there, Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” “Nobody smuggles now-a-day?” — “Don’t they, though!” (laughter) “So these horses at Beer cannot go above three or four miles an hour? “—” If you had not better horses, you would never get to London. I seldom ride a horse-back. If I do, I generally falls off seven or eight times in a journey.” (great laughter.)

Jack Rattenbury died in 1844 at the age of 65.

There is very little description of the methods of smuggling or political situation in this book; to understand fully what was going on, I recommend reading it along with Smugglers' Britain, which details how smuggling and the preventive services worked, and how they developed.

I found King's Cutters and Smugglers: 1700-1855 (E.K. Chatterton, London, 1912) helpful as well.  It's written in a more engaging style than Memoirs of a Smuggler and explains the background to it.  For example, King's Cutters states that it was policy for the Preventives to press-gang smugglers into the Royal Navy, due to their high level of seamanship:

Nor must we forget that those rough, rude men who ran backwards and forwards across the English Channel in cutters, yawls, luggers, and sometimes open boats, stiffened with a rich ballast of tea, tobacco, and brandy, were some of the finest seamen in the world, and certainly the most skilful fore-and-aft sailors and efficient pilots to be found anywhere on the seas which wash the coasts of the United Kingdom. They were sturdy and strong of body, courageous and enterprising of nature, who had "used" the sea all their lives. Consequently the English Government wisely determined that in all cases of an encounter with smugglers the first aim of the Preventive officers should be to capture the smugglers themselves, for they could be promptly impressed into the service of the Navy and be put to the good of the nation instead of being to the latter's disadvantage.

(Although, I'm puzzling over who constitutes the "nation."  Have smugglers been excluded from it?  Their efforts were to their own benefit and the benefit of probably the majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles in some fashion, while not being without detriment.  All sorts of people of all classes were involved in smuggling and bought smuggled products).

The steam-powered man

I was reading A Study in Scarlet while I was sick.  I went back to re-read now that I'm not feverish and I wasn't just woozy, there is some fine melodrama and over-exuberant description in this (I love Victorian writing for that).  Here's a bit I enjoyed:

"Are you a doctor?" He turned his fierce dark eyes upon me as he asked this last question.

 "Yes; I am," I answered.

"Then put your hand here," he said, with a smile, motioning with his manacled wrists towards his chest.

 I did so; and became at once conscious of an extraordinary throbbing and commotion which was going on inside. The walls of his chest seemed to thrill and quiver as a frail building would do inside when some powerful engine was at work. In the silence of the room I could hear a dull humming and buzzing noise which proceeded from the same source.

 "Why," I cried, "you have an aortic aneurism!"

 "That's what they call it," he said, placidly. "I went to a Doctor last week about it, and he told me that it is bound to burst before many days passed. It has been getting worse for years. I got it from over-exposure and under-feeding among the Salt Lake Mountains."

Very vivid and dramatic, but I’m quite certain that’s not how aortic aneurysms work.  They would be so much easier to detect if you could just listen for the telltale humming and buzzing outside the patient's body.  A theory that makes more sense than 'aneurysm': the throbbing and quivering chest walls of the man who just confessed to murder give away what he really is: an early automaton, powered by a tiny steam engine.  He only pretends to tell all and then expire;  he'll escape in the night, his revenge accomplished, and slip back into the wilds of Nevada.

It's not so far-fetched.  Automata were a popular curiosity in the Victorian era; the word 'android' was rare but in use in the second half of the nineteenth century (it's in the 1879 OED and evidenced as early as 1863 in an American patent for a mechanical walking toy shaped like miniature human - which it also refers to as an automaton); there were contemporary stories about steam-powered automata in the American West even before A Study in Scarlet was written.

Edward S. Ellis published his story - which later became a novel - "The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies" in the dime magazine American Novels.  

In it, the teenage little person Johnny Brainerd invents a ten-foot tall steam-powered man; the concept basically is that he's a steam engine on legs instead of on tracks.  Brainerd harnesses the steam-powered man to a wagon and takes a party of men out west, where they search for gold, kill a lot of Native Americans, and make it back home safe and wealthy.

Cover of "The Steam Man of the Prairies" 1868 (Wiki)

It was the first of the Victorian and Edwardian 'Edisonade' sub- genre of proto-science fiction stories of brilliant inventors and their inventions, which appeared mostly as dime novels aimed at boys.  The term 'Edisonade' is modern, coined by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in their Encyclopedia of  Science Fiction and defined by them as follows:

As used here the term ‘edisonade' - derived from Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in the same way that ‘Robinsonade' is derived from Robinson Crusoe - can be understood to describe any story which features a young US male inventor hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from foreign oppressors. (Wiki)

He further clarifies the definition to include defense of nation:

It is an Edisonade, a paradigm kind of science fiction in which a brave young inventor creates a tool or a weapon (or both) that enables him to save the girl and his nation (America) and the world from some menace, whether it be foreigners or evil scientists or aliens; and gets the girl; and gets rich. (same source as previous).

In the case of  'The Steam Man of the Prairies,' Native Americans are the othered group seen as posing a threat to white America and set up as an obstacle in between the protagonist and his goals.

  The interest in fictional inventions was spurred by real ones, which were not as successful but no less fantastical.  In March of 1868, only five months before Ellis' story appeared, Zadoc P. Dederick and Isaac Grass, both of New Jersey, patented their steam carriage.  The pistons of the steam engine (or any other motor) propelled a complex system of levers which produced a walking motion in a humanoid robot, which pulled the carriage - as best I can make out. The patent seems to have been scanned and is quite garbled, but you can read it here.

Dederick's steam-powered man, photo from the patent (Wiki)

The original prototype cost $2000 (about $32,487 in modern US dollars); plans were made to construct it for only $300, but were abandoned.

It wasn't the last of its kind; Canadian George Moore invented another steam-powered man in 1893.  This time the prototype was a man of tin-plated iron sheet with an internal petrol-burning steam engine, legs operated by the pistons and a lever system; it walked in a circle at the end of a beam, attached at its waist.

Engravings show the mechanism clothed in a suit of armour, steam venting through a cigar between its lips and out its helmet.  

Prof. George Moore's 1893 steam man, from contemporary newspaper illustrations (source).

Moore exhibited his steam man around the United States; the engine was supposed to be able to turn at 3000 rpm, but while some reports claimed that the walking (very hot) tin man could not be held back by two men, others claimed that it could only manage half of one horsepower.  (In comparison, a basic gas-powered lawn mower with a 140cc engine manages three to four horsepower).  However, it seems to have been abandoned, as were Moore's plans for another iron man, which would be powerful enough to pull a wagon containing up to ten musicians in the streets.

It is not true that automata are a modern or a uniquely European or American phenomenon; they've existed for a very long time, in ancient Greece, the Abbasid Empire, ancient and early modern China, Renaissance Europe, and Edo period Japan, which traditions the Victorians drew on.  The Wikipedia entry, in this case, is quite good and cites plenty of useful sources.

Timeline of automata and related inventions in The Robot: The Life Story of a Technology