sailing-galley which used to infest the Barbary coast in days gone by.
They do everything different from our occidental methods. For example,
they reef and furl their tall lateens from the peak, and have to send a
man up the long tapering gaff to do it. Their masts rake forward and not
aft, which enables them to swing gaff, sail, and sheet round in front of
the mast when they come about, instead of keeping the sheet aft and
dipping the butt of the gaff with the sail to the other side of the
mast, which would be an impossibility for that rig, as the butt of their
enormous mainyard or gaff is bowsed permanently down in the bows, while
the soaring peak may be nearly a hundred feet above the water. Cooking
was done over charcoal in a kerosene tin half full of sand, and the
"first-class" passengers lived under an improvised awning on the poop,
the women's quarters being under that gim-crack structure. All the same,
they are good sea-boats and remarkably fast, especially _on_ a wind,
quite unlike the big-decked buggalows which are built for cargo capacity
and have real cabins aft but sail like a haystack on a barge.

It was inhuman (as well as an infernal nuisance) to keep all those
people sweltering indefinitely at sea; on the other hand, our orders as
to the strict maintenance of the blockade were explicit. The "owner" and
I conferred and decided that the situation could be met by transferring
their cargo to the ship and letting the dhows beach. This was referred
and approved by wireless. The job took us some days, as the weather was
rather unfavourable and all the cargoes had to be checked by manifest
with a view to restitution later. Each dhow as she was cleared had to
make for the shore and dismast or beach so that she could not steal out
at night and add to the difficulties of the blockade. None attempted to
evade this order, most carried out both alternatives; perhaps a casual
reminder that they would be within observation and gun-fire of the ship
had some influence on their action.

Hitherto the Turco-Teutonic brand of Holy War had been fairly
successful. The Allied thrust at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli had
failed, the Aden Protectorate was in Turkish hands, we had spent a most
unpleasant Easter in Sinai, and Kut had fallen. Still, the Turks were
soon to realise that a wrongly-invoked _jihad_, like a mishandled
musket, can recoil heavily, and, before the end of May, signs were not
wanting that trouble was brewing