grim traffic passing from India to the Red Sea. The decadent Mohammedan administration was accentuated by natural disadvantages of an exceptional character.
Nature seems to have taken revenge for conferring upon Aden a dominating position by endowing her with perhaps the driest climate and the least productive soil of any habitable spot on the globe. The place is little better than a vast volcanic cinder heap, picturesque in a sombre fashion, but bearing on its gaunt, grim face an aspect of desolation which prohibits the idea of an extensive local commerce. The Arabian littoral of the Red Sea is a fitting complement of this "Gibraltar of the East." The region is "mostly light land," to use a phrase applied by the late Lord Salisbury, when in a sardonic mood, to a disputed region bordering on the Sahara. Its chief importance is derived from association with the Holy Places of Mohammedanism and to the stream of pilgrims which is continually entering and leaving its ports. In the period with which we are dealing, a certain amount of trade was carried on between Abyssinia and the Arabian ports, and there was in addition a flow of traffic up and down the Red Sea from Egypt. But the commerce of the region was of too insignificant a character to repay the enterprise of a Western mercantile organization in the most favoured circumstances. The bigotry and fanaticism of the population added, and still add, weight to the limitations which Nature has imposed upon the country. At the present time, three centuries after the visit of the first English ship to the Red Sea, the difficulty of establishing direct trading relations by Europeans at the Arabian ports is still considerable.
It was to this unpromising corner of the East that in the spring of 1608 the Company dispatched the ships of its
