The Capture of Aden in 1839
A ship under British colours was wrecked near Aden. The crew and passengers were badly treated by the Arabs and an explanation of the outrage was demanded by the Bombay government. Sultan Muhsin of Lahej undertook to make compensation for the plunder of the vessel, and also agreed to sell Aden town and its port to the English.
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Commander Stafford Bettesworth Haines of the Indian navy was sent to complete these arrangements, but the sultan's son later refused to fulfill the promises that his father had made. A combined naval and military force was thereupon despatched from Bombay. Aden was captured and annexed to British India in the name of the East India Company on the 16th of January 1839.
‘Scarcely two centuries and a half ago’, wrote Haines, ‘this city ranked among the foremost of the commercial marts of the East the superiority of Aden is in its excellent harbours, both to the East and to the West; and the importance of such a station, offering as it does a secure shelter for shipping, an almost impregnable fortress, and an easy access to the rich provinces of Hadhramaut and Yemen is too evident to require to be insisted upon’.
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The withdrawal of the trade between Europe and the East, caused by the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, and misgovernment by the native rulers, had gradually reduced Aden to a state of comparative insignificance; but about the time of its capture by the British the Red Sea route to India was reopened, and commerce soon began to flow.
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Aden was at this time a small village with a population of 600 Arabs, Somalis, Jews and Indians — housed for the most part in huts of reed matting erected among ruins recalling a vanished era of wealth and prosperity. Haines stated that it could become a major trading centre and the latter part of the British period proved him correct with Aden growing to become one of the busiest ports in the world.
During the fifteen years he governed Aden from 1839 to 1854 Haines turned a barren headland and a derelict village of six hundred inhabitants into a thriving international market-place of twenty thousand through his understanding of the Arab character, his remarkable intelligence service and his capacity for work. Though Aden prospered Haines was arrested. He had not kept strict enough control over his accounts and, although acquitted of embezzlement, the East India Company had him confined for six years in a debtors' prison in Bombay and he died in 1860 aged 58, shortly after his release. But in South West Arabia his name lived on and for decades local tribesmen referred to the inhabitants of Aden as Awlad Haines (Haines Children).