The Indian army's voyage towards Egypt in 1801 required an accommodation with the Arab chiefs along the Red Sea coast. Two were regarded as particularly important: the sharif of Mecca and the imam of Sanaa. The sharif of Mecca was the hereditary guardian of the Holy Cities, the most important political influence in Jeddah, Mecca's port, and the most powerful local embodiment of Ottoman sovereignty over the Hijaz. At the southern end of the Red Sea, the independent imam of Sanaa rather than the Ottoman sultan exercised sovereignty over Yemen and the Yemeni ports, of which the most significant was Mocha. Indian merchants, especially the Banyan, had had trading links with Jeddah and Mocha for centuries, which the French occupation of Egypt had badly damaged. Overwhelmingly, British interest in 1801 focused on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. On the western coast, the two main harbours south of Kosseir, at Suakin and Massawa, still owed the Ottomans allegiance.
As Britain had learned in the 1770s and 1780s, Muslim concern to safeguard Mecca and Medina gave Red Sea politics its distinctive flavour. From 1798, British policymakers stressed that their pursuit of influence in the Red Sea would rest on defence of Islam---against the French soldiers from a revolutionary secularist regime who were now so near the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.
In July of that year, Spencer Smith pledged to the Porte that British ships there would show the "most exact and scrupulous respect" for Islam, and for "religious institutions of every persuasion," just as Britain did in India. In 1801, Baird's army brought presents from Governor-General Wellesley for the sharif of Mecca, the imam of Sanaa, and the sultan of Aden, together with letters reassuring them that the British troops were there "to provide for the security of the Mahomedan possessions on the Arabian side of the Red Sea." On landing at Kosseir in Upper Egypt in 1801, Murray made the same pledge, urging the inhabitants to "fulfil the sacred precept of the Koran which teaches 'you must put to death your enemies wherever you may find them, and rout them out from places from whence they have driven you', for the loss of your religion is more to be dreaded than death itself." This was shrewd politics, but it was not original. Napoleon had initiated this game by sending warm letters in early 1799 to the sharif and to the imam of Muscat, at the same time as to Tipu Sultan in Mysore, urging mutual cooperation to defeat "the Iron yoke of England." These letters were intercepted by Captain Wilson at Mocha, and alerted Bombay to the urgent need to woo the Arab chiefs.
Jonathan Duncan, governor of Bombay, had a more ambitious plan to mobilise Arab Muslim sentiment. He sent Mahdi Ali Khan, a financially astute Persian Muslim and long-time associate of his, to Jeddah and Mecca to lead an Arab revolt against the French, to coincide with the arrival of Baird's army. Mahdi Ali Khan had made the pilgrimage to Mecca twenty-five years before and claimed that, by repeating it, he could rouse an independent Arab army. His formal function would be to recruit camels and horses for Baird's impending invasion of Egypt, but his underlying obiective would be to find "7 or 8 principal people among the Arabs to send them as agents among the different tribes of the wild Arabs to bring these last into the interest of our government," and ideally to begin an Arab land march up the eastern Red Sea coast into Egypt. Duncan allowed any "reasonable expense" for this mission, and Mahdi Ali Khan set off with 61,000 rupees, plus a pearl rosary, muskets and pistols, mirrors, a watch, fine cloths and spices for the sharif of Mecca. After arriving at Jeddah in May 1801, he claimed to have arranged that the sharif would supply the cause with six thousand Arabs. Within a couple of months, he expected also to assemble, from desert tribes, a force of potentially one hundred thousand, "some thro motives of gain, and others influenced by religious zeal."
Mahdi Ali Khan's plan was probably always fanciful, but any initial warmth that the sharif may have displayed to the enterprising pilgrim dissipated once he realised his connection with the impending arrival of over five thousand Indian troops under Baird, seeking to replace the French in Egypt with a revived Ottoman sovereignty. The sharif was dependent for corn on the French regime in Egypt; he also enjoyed great practical independence from the sultan in Constantinople, which Baird seemed to threaten. When Baird arrived at Jeddah with this army, the sharif became hostile to all his British visitors. He complained about an outrage inflicted on one of his merchants who had been arrested at Bombay, and demanded a more beneficial customs arrangement for his coffee there. Baird realised that it was prudent to leave Jeddah as soon as possible, and sail to Kosseir, taking the gamble that Murray whom he had sent ahead, could get camels and horses there.
The negotiations between the British and the sharif at Jeddah were led by the naval officer Home Popham, who was accompanying Baird. He had arrived in the Red Sea in order to pursue the trade mission to the sharif, the imam, and the sultan of Aden that he had planned with Dundas in 1800. Popham's aim was to knit these chiefs, and the Mamluks in Upper Egypt, into a network of commercial allies. None would become too powerful; all would be bound into British trade: there would be no reason for them to side with French agents instead. Popham claimed that his mission was in the interests, and in the name, of the sultan.
The sharif, however, successfully disputed Popham' claim to speak for the sultan, asserting his own loyalty to his caliph and understanding of his interests. Popham's attempt to intimidate him with British power was a failure. Moreover, Popham had to rescue Mahdi Ali Khan, whom the sharif had effectively imprisoned, and to pay his debts. Mahdi Ali Khan had not helped himself by supporting the party of the sharif's rival Abdullah. Popham had likewise hoped---albeit more subtly---to help the local faction opposed to the sharif's rapacity, confident that replacing him would boost British popularity. Wellesley, however, vetoed any British challenge to the guardian of Mecca, on the grounds that it risked inflaming "every Mussulman state in India." As it happened from 1803, Sharif Ghalib's local power was seriously compromised, not by Britain, Constantinople, or local enemies, but by the Wahhabi, and eventually by Mehmet Ali.
Popham was no more successful on the western side of the upper Red Sea, where he faced a similar problem in deciding how far to distance himself from the Ottoman interests that he was in principle sent to uphold. His main aim was a treaty with the powers of Upper Egypt, which would get the corn of Kosseir into British hands. In April 1802, when he returned to Kosseir to escort Baird's troops home, he tried to make a trade arrangement directly with the Mamluk leaders there. This was, naturally, vetoed by the Ottomans, and also by Wellesley, who insisted that any arrangements for Egyptian trade must be made only with those who had been authorised to do so by Constantinople.
Popham was left with nothing to show for his efforts in the northern Red Sea. Once the French had been removed from Egypt, Arab chiefs had no incentive to pursue his offers of alliance, British assertiveness now risked appearing alien and threatening. Once again, it was clear that Europeans interfered in the Hijaz at their peril. There was less and less urgency on the British side as well. From 1803, civil war in Egypt and Wahhabi incursions in the Hiiaz underlined regional instability. The Red Sea remained almost impossible to navigate in the monsoon season.
However, the sea's southern end was more promising. There had twice been an EIC factory at Mocha, reflecting its historic importance as a coffee trading port, though in recent decades most coffee had been taken north by Ottoman traders. Since the seventeenth century, Mocha had owed allegiance to the imam of Sanaa, rather than to the Ottomans. Murray had been based there when Red Sea commissioner, and had left behind a Bombay surgeon, John Pringle, as acting resident. American merchants from Salem had started buying coffee there in 1801 as an alternative to Java, which suggested that an international market could be re-established there. In 1801, Baird and Popham sent Pringle to Sanaa to court the imam, with Wellesley's letter, and he agreed to allow the British expedition to use Mocha as a base for their expedition up the sea. Popham returned in 1802, invested by Wellesley as ambassador to Arabia and commissioner for the Red Sea (replacing Murray), in order to underline his authority to make commercial treaties. Popham's idea was to resurrect the Mocha trade on such a large and lucrative scale that the imam and the local chief, the dola of Mocha, would become dependent on British wealth rather than Ottoman or French.
His planned treaty making failed. Popham and his guard got only a quarter of the way inland to Sanaa, encountering many indignities en route. They were waylaid and tricked by a "hoary villain"; some of the party had their buttons torn off by Arabs looking for gold; their surgeon was lucky not to be judged guilty of killing a dying man by giving him an opium pill. Where they had hoped to encounter commercial potential, they found grinding poverty and hostility. Moreover, the imam had little power in Mocha itself, where the local chief, the dola, treated Popham's party with "every insult." This was perhaps because he saw no reason to disrupt the existing trade links, especially in view of the promising new connection with Massachusetts. Popham left Pringle in Mocha and appointed him resident---an appointment resented by Bombay, which had to pay for it. Popham fell back on Aden, and in September 1802 signed a treaty of amity and commerce with its ruler, Sultan Ahmed, securing a low duty of 2 per cent for British goods for ten years, which would then rise to a maximum of 3 per cent. Popham hoped thereby to make the imam jealous of Aden's trade benefits. He was also aware of Aden's strategic potential, just as Murray had been, and anxious to stop France taking it.
Soon after Popham's mission, Mocha, like most of the Red Sea's east coast, became vulnerable to a new threat---the expansionist Wahhabi Arabs from the centre of the peninsula. They had taken Mecca briefly in 1803, and forced the sharif to recognise their interpretation of Islam. Over the next few years, they imposed heavy tolls on the hajj, took effective control of Medina. and raided the Yemeni ports. Wellesley sent his own man to report on the area in 1804, partly in order to find out more about their threat and their popularity. This was Viscount Valentia, an Irish peer and political connection of his, who had arrived in Calcutta from Britain in early 1803, fascinated with Wellesley's new Indian empire, but also seeking to reinvent himself. He had left home after his wife had had a child by another man, alleging his preference for male servants: these affairs were aired in two court cases, which gripped society. In Calcutta, Wellesley and Valentia hatched a plan for the latter to explore and chart the Red Sea and its peoples, an adventure with clear geographical, anthropological, and strategic benefits. Valentia had been inspired by William Vincent's 1800 edition of the Periplus. He believed that Britain and India could learn valuable lessons from its account of the Roman-era Red Sea trade route, its peoples, and its navigation difficulties. He sought to make a name for himself as intellectual and patriot, by applying modern science to supplement the ancient Alexandrian author's observations. Wellesley agreed to give him a Bombay cruiser, the Antelope, and a captain to go with it. Armed with the Periplus, he left Bombay for the Red Sea in March 1804.
Valentia found his trip very frustrating. Captain Keys did not want to sail hundreds of miles up an uncharted coast under the orders of a vain, camp, and headstrong Irish peer---who seized much of the cabin as his private space. Keys preferred the security of Mocha, which Valentia hated because there was much less respect for Britain, and himself, than he had imagined. This was typifed by the behaviour of the dola, who ran a system of kidnapping sailors off boats, getting them drunk, forcing them to convert to Islam, and selling them into slavery as "renegadoes." Valentia blamed the upstart American traders for tolerating this practice, and exploiting Arab avarice in other ways, in order to get preferential access to local coffee. He was even more annoyed that neither Keys (who acquired two boy slaves) nor the resident, Pringle, seemed willing to challenge this system. Pringle had succumbed to drink, leaving Valentia to fight to liberate the sailors on his own. Valentia's contempt for the dola extended to the seventy-eight-year-old imam of Sanaa, a debauchee preoccupied with his "sooty harem." Valentia prophesied that neither man could resist the oncoming Wahhabi, who would subdue and purify the area as Muhammad had swept away previous dissolute Arabian rulers. There was no point in relying on existing authorities. Britain's future relationship would probably have to be with the Wahhabi.
Valentia drew the same conclusion as Murray and Popham: the best local port was Aden, which was independent of the Ottomans and could become free of Sanaa if the British induced the Yemeni coffee trade to switch there from Mocha. The Periplus's account of its history and harbour confirmed his conclusion. But the Bombay government wanted no territory in this confused part of the world, nor to make a deal with the Wahhabi: it worried that their recent victories so far from their base at Diriyya might be contested and temporary. It recalled Pringle in 1805 and Mocha was once again left without a resident.
The British might have given up on the Red Sea, had the European situation not got progressively worse. In 1805 and 1806, it seemed that the war with France would probably spread to the East again, and several rumours arose about French activities in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, instigated from their Mauritius base. One fear was that France would exploit local tensions over the island of Kamaran near the mouth of the Red Sea, between the Yemeni ports of Luhaya and Hudayda. In late 1805, a powerful merchant, Sayyid Muhammad Aqil, bought the island from the sharif of Abu Arish, who had established an independent position in northern Yemen. Aqil probably did so in order to assert himself against the Wahhabi, but three French naval officers from Mauritius visited the island with him, apparently seeking to restore a French factory in the area. Pringle and Valentia both reported that Aqil was courting French support in order to safeguard his position, and would offer them Kamaran. In April 1806, his "pirate" followers boarded an American ship from Salem, the Essex, and killed all but one of the crew. This showed his power and ruthlessness, but also justified a British intervention. In July 1806, two warships were sent from Bombay to force him from the island, though in fact he had already left. This intimidating military expedition had the side benefit of impressing the local Arab chiefs. Sharif Hamud of Abu Arish now confirmed that the sale of the island had been a mistake, pledged peace with Britain, and promised to supply the EIC with two thousand bales of coffee. This arrangement passed the test of Jonathan Duncan in Bombay--that visiting British naval officers could make deals with Arab coastal chiefs as long as they did not ofend the Wahhabi, or the imam.
