Publications, Newspaper Cuttings, Photographs and Correspondence about Persia and the Persian Gulf [‎135r] (270/879)

Bennett
2
LORD CURZON AND PERSIA.
Before setting forth the various stages in the
evolution of the British status in the Gulf, one
observation has to be made as to the sources
of the information which bears upon the sub
ject. They are abundant, and they are not
difficult of access. But whoever examines
them, no matter with what searching industry,
and then turns, as he is bound to do, to Lord
Curzon’s monumental work on Persia, will find
that well nigh every footstep in his wanderings
through the literature of the subject has been
already trodden by that most untiring and most
vigilant of explorers. His Excellency is en
titled to the thanks of his countrymen, not
only for the clear enunciation, in sentences
which have already taken their place amongst
the axioms of the discussion, of a policy
worthy of an imperial people, but for the
abundance and exhaustiveness of a work which
so competent an authority as Dr. Sven Hedin,
himself also an authority at first hand upon
Persia, declared in Bombay the other day to
be a monument of industry and knowledge.
The Caspian Trade Route.
The earliest connection of England with
Persia had little or nothing to do with the
Gulf. It was by the Caspian, and not by the
Gulf, that the pioneers of British trade with
Persia made their way into that country. In
each case it was to a great trading company
that the enterprise was due. What the agents
of the East India Company were destined to
do on one line of approach in the 17th century,
the agents of the British Muscovy Company
did in the 16th. The discovery by Burrough
and Chancellor, two of Cabot’s " Merchant
Adventurers,” of the port of Archangel, may
be said to mark the first stage in a movement
which opened up the Caspian and the lands
beyond to English trade. It was followed five
years later—in 1557—by the incorporation,
under a charter of Philip and Mary, of the
British Muscovy Company, under whose
auspices Anthony Jenkinson set out on a
commercial voyage of discovery, in the course
of which the banner of England was hoisted
on the Caspian—that sea from which, since
the Treaty of Gulistan, even the Persian flag
has not been tolerated on armed vessels by
Russia. Jenkinson, who penetrated as far as
Bokhara, brought back an account of the
trading potentialities of Persia which, though
it went to show that the Persian trade lay
mostly on the western side, was deemed to be
encouraging. On his second voyage to
Persia Jenkinson took with him a letter from •
Queen Elizabeth to Shah Tahmasp. The
enterprise then moved apace. The Muscovy
Company, in 1563, sent three agents to
the Persian Court—then at Kasvin, a town
on the route of the present Russian-made road
from Resht towards Teheran—and they seem to
have obtained sufficient assurance of protec
tion to warrant them in steadily pursuing their
trading ventures in North-Western Persia.
The Company was filled to the full with the
courageous spirit of Elizabethan adventure.
Before it had been in existence a quarter
of a century it had obtained a footing, not
only in Tabriz, but in the Caspian province of
Mazanderan, and in Khorassan—territories now
virtually monopolized by Russian trade—its
movement thus far eastward being at the time
looked upon as a stage in its progress towards
far Cathay. Yet, despite the enterprise of
the Company, and the daring and endurance
of the men who served it on these perilous
adventures, the history of this period is the
history of a failure, and no serious attempt to
re-establish the Caspian trade route to Persia
was made until the reign of Peter the Great.
The story of this revival is told by Jonas Hanway, •
in a work which, for straightforward, ingenuous,
and informing narrative qualities has a front
place amongst the books of travel belonging
to the 18th century. Hanway, who was as
much given as the old factors of the East India
Company in their official correspondence were
to write of business matters in a religious spirit,
calls to mind, in the introduction to his work,
the religious zeal of the Russia Company in
building a church at St. Petersburg, and asks,
” may it not be expected that the Supreme
Being, who directs all events by His providence,
will enable you either to revive your Caspian
trade, or to strike out some other branch more
beneficial?” Events, indeed, had for a time
favoured a revival of the ventures abandoned in
1581. Peter the Great, whose commercial policy
had been marvellously liberal for his time and
country, had shortly before his death opened
negotiations with London merchants for
reviving the Muscovy Company’s endeavour to
establish a trade with Persia through Russia.
Czar Peter, Hanway says, thought none had
so good a right to a commerce through his
country to Persia as the English—against
which we may set the modern policy of Russia
inchargingherfull protective tariff-on all foreign
goods in transit. The Czar’s liberal aspira
tions, however, were not realized until ten years
after his death, when the Empress Anne sanc
tioned a treaty providing for the transit of British
goods for Persia, and vice versa, on payment
of three per cent. duty. This was met on
the side of the British Government by an Act
enabling the Russia Company to import Per
sian silks through Russia, a measure necessi
tated by certain obstacles presented by the
Navigation Acts. Yet the undertaking, despite
the active goodwill of the Russian Court, was
not more successful than that which had failed
a century and a-half before. Russian favour
had gone so far as to allow the Company to
build ships on the Volga, for the purpose of
the Trans-Caspian trade, and at one time the
venture seemed so promising that the East
India Company saw in the Russia Company a
dangerous rival to its own trade with Persia and
the East. But although it is difficult to imagine
any conditions under which permanent success
could have been assured to an enterprise which
might, at any moment, have been brought to
an end by the caprice of an autocrat at St.
Petersburg, it was nevertheless to a much less
conspicuous personage, and he an Englishman,
that the failure of the enterprise was imme
diately due. John Elton, whom Lord Curzon
describes as “the real father of the revived
scheme,” had all the courage and daring, the
love of adventure, and the resourcefulness that
go to make up the character of the true Viking
of commerce. He had been in Central Asia,
and had obtained from Nadir Shah’s regent per
mission to trade between the Caspian and the
Indies. Armed with this, he had petitioned the
British Minister at St. Petersburg, urging that
Meshed, then the seat ofthe Shah’s Government,