CHAPTER V 



THE BEGINNING OF GREY'S BLUNDERS — AKABAH 



About this date an incident occurred which was to prove the 

 beginning of a series of violent mistakes made by Cromer in Egypt, 

 and endorsed by Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, and which, as 

 will be seen, led to the long quarrel between our Government and the 

 Mohammedan world, as represented by the Sultan at Constantinople. 

 This was what was known as the Akabah incident, which was briefly 

 as follows : 



It arose more or less accidentally. A young Englishman, Bramley, 

 had for some time past been making camel journeys in the Libyan 

 Desert, and with such success as to attract Cromer's attention, and, 

 though not in the Government service, had been given a kind of com- 

 mission by him to make a tour of the desert East of the Suez Canal, 

 and report to him about the Bedouin tribes inhabiting it, a district 

 known generally as the Sinai Peninsula. An ostensible object was to 

 inquire into disputes that had occurred among them, but in reality to 

 find out what truth there might be in reports which had reached Cairo 

 of an intention on the Sultan's part of making a branch line from Maan 

 on the Hedjaz railway to Akabah. During the course of his peram- 

 bulation Bramley had come across a small detachment of Ottoman 

 troops camped around a well at an uninhabited spot called Tabah, a 

 few miles outside Akabah on the Suez road. With them Bramley had 

 come to loggerheads, and had reported the incident in a serious light, 

 and Cromer had taken it up as seriously, seeing in it a first step on 

 the Ottoman part in the pretended railway scheme, not only to Akabah, 

 but beyond it, towards Egypt, and as such a danger to the British 

 Occupation. On this very slender suspicion, for it was nothing more, 

 a claim had been raised by him in the name of the Khedive to the whole 

 of the Sinai Peninsula as forming part of Khedivial Egypt, which 

 geographically it had never been, for it had always been reckoned part 

 of Arabia, and so of Asia, not yet politically, except in connection with 

 the land pilgrimage between Cairo and Medina, and a very doubtful 

 grant to Mohammed Ali of the fortresses on the pilgrim road. The 

 claim had been pressed with quite unnecessary violence by Cromer, and 

 the evacuation of Tabah demanded of the Sultan in peremptory terms 

 (as to which see later and in the Appendix and my letter to Sir Edward 

 Grey). 



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