44° Appendix II 



matters within my personal knowledge that the case of His Majesty's 

 Government is technically less strong than they perhaps understand it. 

 The delay in publishing recent correspondence prevents me, of course, from 

 knowing what has passed lately between the Foreign Office and the Otto- 

 man Government, but, taking the older documents as they stand with the 

 statement made by you yesterday in the House of Commons, I think it not 

 difficult to show that the position taken up by Lord Cromer in 1892 was 

 founded on a double error both as to these and as to the local facts. 



"Lord Cromer's contention originally was that the Sinai Peninsula, in 

 which he seems to have included not only the geographical triangle known 

 as Tor Sina, but the desert lands north of the pilgrim road between the 

 Suez Canal and the Syrian frontier, was part of the old Pashalik of Egypt, 

 and he made appeal to its " ancient boundaries." But a closer examination 

 of historical documents has shown that this was an error, and I observe 

 that the reference to ancient boundaries has been abandoned by His 

 Majesty's Government in favour of another hardly better founded. 



' The contention now is that the district in question has been adminis- 

 tered by the successive Viceroys since Mohammed Ali's time in such a 

 way as to constitute a territorial right. This I believe to be a wholly 

 untenable view, in accordance neither with the facts of the case nor with 

 a right interpretation of the political situation. With regard to the facts, 

 my recollection of the district as it was in the time of Ismail Pasha and 

 later in that of Tewfik is clear. My first visit to it wr.s made in the 

 spring of 1876, and I have continued ever since in touch with the Arab 

 tribes who are its almost sole inhabitants. At that date there certainly 

 existed nothing in the way of civil administration, and military authority 

 was only represented by a score of soldiers holding the small isolated fort 

 of Nakhl, seventy miles eastward from Suez on the pilgrim road, whose 

 sole duty it was to prevent Bedouin interference with the highway for the 

 protection of travellers. Civil authority there was none. No taxes were 

 collected, no justice was dispensed, no conscription was enforced. I 

 believe I am right in saying that no part of the Peninsula was included in 

 any Egyptian mudirieh. With the exception of the monks in the Mount 

 Sinai convent and a few persons, principally Greeks, at the port of Tor, 

 connected with it, there was absolutely no settled population. The few 

 Bedouin tribes, grouped principally in the south, governed themselves pre- 

 cisely as in Arabia, according to tribal custom — and so long as they did 

 not interfere with the pilgrim road or molest travellers they were free to 

 all Government interference. There was not a soldier or policeman except 

 at Nakhl. 



" As to the Gulf of Akabah, I travelled up its western shore from Mount 

 Sinai to the fort of Akabah, a distance of some seventy miles, and found 

 not a living soul on my way, except one naked Arab, who had his home 

 under a tussock of rough grass and was living on shellfish. I can testify, 

 if necessary on oath, that neither the island of Faraoun nor the well of 

 Tabah possessed a single inhabitant. It was only at the head of the Gulf, 

 in the Wady Akabah, that I found any Bedouins. The' eastern half of the 

 Peninsula is without camel pasturage, and the Sinai Bedouins do not 



