volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

292
APPENDIX I.
On February 28th Captain Hart Dyke, Dr. Morrison, the surgeon
of the " Sphinx," and I went up in the launch to Ma'kil to take
photographs. We visited the EngUsh cemetery there, which was
in a neglected condition ;
there were twelve graves there, one of them
being that of a Vice-Consul of Basrah, aged 33. A little way off we
found Robertson's grave, which was covered with a slab of Maltese
stone. The letters of the inscription had been filled in with lead,
but from several of them the metal had already been stolen to make
bullets. The two lines at the foot of the slab were from Newman's
" Lead, Kindly Light " :
And with the dawn those Angel faces smile.
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
The graves of his two little children are on the other side of- the
river. Many attempts to plant shrubs and trees about these graves
had been made by members of the English colony at Basrah who
loved Robertson, but the authorities had always had them pulled
up or destroyed within a few hours of their being planted. All such
plantings were regarded by the natives as attempts to acquire freehold
property without pajdng for it, and the authorities were afraid that,
if they allowed shrubs or trees to grow there, all the land covered by
their shadows would be claimed as British territory. From the
cemetery we went into the Khin to look at the tablet which was set
up by the Bombay Government to commemorate the foundering of
tlie s.s. " Tigris " in 1836.^ It is a large rectangular tablet with a
pediment, and the inscription is bilingual—Arabic and English. The
following is a copy of the English portion of the inscription :
This Fountain^ commemorates the awful event, which visited the
Euphrates Expedition 21st May, 1836, near Is Jaria, about 85 miles
above Ana.
The Expedition was descending the river with fuU prosperity,
when it was visited suddenly by a hurricane, with tremendous violence.
Both vessels were placed in imminent danger, from which the
• For a full description of the wreck see Ainsworth, Personal Narrative, vol i
p, 390 fS.
a 1 was told that the fountain, above which the tablet was to have been
placed, was never made.