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A ship under British colours was wrecked near
Aden. The crew and passengers were badly treated
by the Arabs and an explanation of the outrage was
demanded by the Bombay government. Sultan Mahsin of
Lahej undertook to make compensation for the plunder of
the vessel, and also agreed to sell Aden town and its
port to the English.
Commander Stafford Bettesworth Haines of the Indian navy was
sent to complete these arrangements, but the sultan's
son refused to fulfill the promises that his father had
made. A combined naval and military force was thereupon
despatched from Bombay. Aden was captured and annexed to British
India in the name of the East India Company on the 16th
of January 1839.
The British Squadron
preparing for action, January 1839
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‘Scarcely two centuries and a half ago’, wrote Haines, ‘this city
ranked among the foremost of the commercial
marts of the East the superiority of Aden is
in its excellent harbours, both to the East
and to the West; and the importance of such
a station, offering as it does a secure
shelter for shipping, an almost impregnable
fortress, and an easy access to the rich
provinces of Hadhramaut and Yemen is too
evident to require to be insisted upon’. |
Arms of the East India
Company
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The withdrawal of the
trade between Europe and the East, caused by the
discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope,
and misgovernment by the native rulers, had
gradually reduced Aden to a state of comparative
insignificance; but about the time of its capture by the
British the Red Sea route to India was reopened, and
commerce soon began to flow.
Aden was at this time a
small village with a population of 600 Arabs, Somalis,
Jews and Indians — housed for the most part in huts of
reed matting erected among ruins recalling a vanished
era of wealth and prosperity.
Haines stated that it could become a major trading
centre and the latter part of the British period proved
him correct with Aden growing to become one of the
busiest ports in the world.
During the fifteen years he governed Aden from 1839
to 1854
Haines turned a barren headland and a
derelict village of six hundred inhabitants into a
thriving international market-place of twenty thousand
through his understanding of the Arab character, his
remarkable intelligence service and his capacity for
work. Though Aden prospered
Haines was arrested. He
had not kept strict enough control over his accounts
and, although acquitted of embezzlement, the East India
Company had him confined for six years in a debtors'
prison in Bombay and he died in 1860 aged 58, shortly
after his release. But in South West Arabia his name
lived on and for decades local tribesmen referred to the
inhabitants of Aden as Awlad Haines (‘Haines’
children’).
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