page_title: William Richard Williamson
section_title: Trade and pearls
hierarchical_section_title: William Richard Williamson / Trade and pearls
caption_attribution_description: English: Bird's-eye view of Kaaba crowded with pilgrims
context_page_description: William Richard Williamson was an English adventurer who became an oil company representative in the Persian Gulf.
context_section_description: Williamson’s next incarnation was as a trader of camels and horses in Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait. With the money he acquired from this venture, in 1894 he was able to join the Hajj caravan to Mecca and thus gained the sobriquet “Haji”. Thereafter Williamson traded horses with the British Army in Bombay and imported foreign goods to his home town of Zubair in Iraq. On one occasion, he caused uproar when he appeared in the local suq on a penny-farthing bicycle, never before seen in those parts.
  Relations with the British were changeable: they suspected him of gun running in the Persian Gulf and yet were happy to use him as a secret agent and spy hunter during World War I. In later years, his trading interests in the Persian Gulf meant that he veered towards legitimacy. The profits of horse-trading allowing him to buy a dhow, he undertook a number of voyages around the Persian Gulf. He regularly met Royal Navy gunboats as they criss-crossed the Persian Gulf in stop and search operations to suppress an illicit trade in rifles, slaves and contraband.
  Williamson also tried his hand in the pearling business, joining the great pearling fleet in the Persian Gulf.  The pearling season known al-Ghaus al-Kabir (“The Big Dive”) ran from May to September when a fleet of some 4,000 dhows ranging from the regular sambuk to the larger boum and baghlah would set out from the many ports of the Persian Gulf. Each carried a master, mate, divers, assistant divers and apprentices drawn from those ports, Oman and beyond. Their purpose was to fish for the most valuable pearls.  The venture was not particularly successful and, with a large family to support, a steady job was an attractive proposition.
caption: Mecca, ca. 1910. Bird's-eye view of Kaaba crowded with pilgrims
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