SANDY SHORES 77 



had been touched during the course of Challenger' s work on 

 Masira. 



It is sad to reflect that Sloan Miller, who had done so much 

 for these islanders of the Arabian coast, died at the hands of the 

 Egyptian mob in the Gezira Sporting Club in the post-war Cairo 

 riots. 



Christmas was spent this year in Karachi, and on completing 

 the work at Masira, Challenger entered the Persian Gulf and sailed 

 into Khor Kaliya, the anchorage close south of Manama. This is 

 the seat of the Sheikh of Bahrein, an island having political treaties 

 with the United Kingdom, lying half-way up the southern side 

 of the Gulf, between the territory of the Sheikh of Qatar and the 

 northern coast of Saudi Arabia. 



The California Standard Oil Company were at this time building 

 a refinery on the Saudi Arabian coast about 2^ miles north-east 

 of Bahrein, whence oil was to be exported from the wharves 

 now being constructed on the east side of the long, low headland 

 of Ras at Tannura. To reach these new wharves it would be 

 necessary to navigate in through reefs, out of sight of land, for 

 a distance of about ^o miles along a little-surveyed channel. 

 Captain Clausing, of the oil company, had laid down some spar 

 buoys as a guide to himself when he piloted vessels in through 

 these reefs, but the courses he had to steer to clear the dangers 

 were not those he would have expected by studying the existing 

 chart. Challenger laid a large permanent surveying beacon at the 

 seaward limit of the channel and fixed it by star sights. Such 

 beacons carry huge flags 3 o feet above the surface of the sea and 

 are moored with heavy anchors and many fathoms of wire rope. 

 They are used by surveyors as triangulation marks when working 

 out of sight of land, and the laying and recovering of these 

 cumbersome buoys forms a considerable feat of seamanship. 



Surveyors use a taut wire measuring machine to measure ac- 

 curately distances at sea by streaming piano wire under tension 

 astern of the moving ship, the end having been anchored to the 

 sea-bed. Up to 140 miles of wire can be used, and it has startled 

 more than one enquiring taxpayer to hear that no attempt is made 

 to recover this wire. The thought of steaming stern-first for many 

 miles to reel up thousands of yards of kinked and coiling piano 



