'The Penetration of Arabia a record of the development of Western knowledge concerning the Arabian Peninsula with illustrations from drawings, photographs, and maps by J. G. Bartholomew.' [‎43] (76/496)

NIEBUHR IN YEMEN 43
nudity of the folk in the country districts, are facts
now familiar; and the " temple " which Varthema
saw in " Taesa," and likened to S. Maria Rotonda in
Rome, had been identified with the great mosque of
Ismail Mulk. His is a scant record. More account,
for example, might have been expected of the great
buildings in Sana. But so far as it went, it proved
that the ancient fertility of Yemen was no myth, and
that a relatively high civilisation was still flourishing
in the spice-lands.
Five years later Portuguese sails were off the coast,
and within a generation Turkish as well. The secure
independence of Yemen was at an end. For more than
a century, however, Europeans were to affect the state
of Yemen less by their guns than by their discovery
of coffee, said to have remained unappreciated by the
Arabs until their advent. The new berry, first men
tioned by a European writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. in 1592, grew so rapidly
in favour that the trade of Yemen came to be desired
equally with the trade of India; and a new competitor
for it appeared presently in the shape of the British
East India Company, which sent Captain Sharpey in
the ship " Ascension " to the Red Sea in 1609. He
did little but irritate the Turks, now in power in
Yemen, and fearful for their monopoly of the Jidda
trade; and his successor, Henry Middleton, command-
ing the three ships which formed the sixth expedition
of the Company, paid the penalty. Calling at Aden
and Mokha late in the following year, he was trapped
by the Turkish governor of the latter, and informed