PRECIOUS WATER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 November 1938, Page 7

PRECIOUS WATER

ANCIENT RESERVOIRS IN USE AGAIN. BRITAIN’S YOUNGEST COLONY. Aden, Britain’s youngest colony, is setting to work to celebrate its centenary as a British possession. A Red Sea port, one of the hottest positions in the world, Aden is a place of wonders of an unusual kind, and wonders enter into its history. The land on which it stands is the gift to the world of a long extinct volcano, which shaped the harbour that man has since perfected. We came to it by a tragic accident. Once famous as a Roman station, and associated with ancient Persia in her mightiest era, it passed into the possession of the Turks and then of the Arabs. Exactly a century ago the crew and passengers of a British ship wrecked off the coast were barbarously illused by the Arabs, whereupon the Arab rulei' of the time offered compensation, and expressed his desire to sell the town and port to England. His son, succeeding him, refused to ratify the bargain, so a military and naval expedition was sent from India, and conquered and annexed the stronghold. That was on January 16, 1839, the date which is now to be celebrated.

Under British rule the port regained much of its former importance, an importance vastly increased with the opening of the Suez Canal.

Heat and the scarcity of water were always among the chief hardships of Aden, and it seemed strange that the Romans could ever have built a great shipping centre in such arid conditions. All records of their works were lost until, in the fifties of last century, there arrived at Aden young Lambert Playfair as an official assistant-engineer; he was also a crusader against the slave trade then rampant in those latitudes,

and, moreover, he was a discoverer. His discovery took the form of lost and forgotten tanks, concealed reservoirs built nearly two thousand years before by the Romans, or perhaps even earlier by the conquering Persians. Here was a new water supply ready for use as soon as repairs and developments were completed. Without such a supply the tale of Aden as a firstclass possession lying between Great Britain and India would have been a very different and less prosperous one, yet very few of us have ever heard of these wonderful tanks, or of the young Scotsman who brought them back to knowledge and human service. Young Playfair was assigned the task of supervising the work of great gangs of Arabs employed in the removal of centuries’ accumulation of drifted sand.

Sir R. Lambert Playfair, K.C.M.G., cr. 1886, Consul-General, retired 1896. died February 18, 1899. He was born at St. Andrews in 1828 and was the son of Dr. George Playfair, InspectorGeneral of Hospitals, Bengal, and a grandson of the Rev., J. Playfair, Principal of St. Salvator’s College, and Royal Historiographer of Scotland. Lord Playfair, the prominent scientist, was a brother. Lambert Playfair entered the Royal (Madras) artillery 1846; Assistant Executive Engineer at Aden 1852-53; Political Resident 1854-62; Consol-General at Algiers 1867-89. He had a profound knowledge of Arabic and was the author of History of Arabia Felix, Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis, Bibliography of the Barbary States. Algeria. Cyrenaica Morocco, et seq and some handbooks,