SAUDI ARABIA: Fish to Jidda

The juiciest overseas plum secured by Yankee traders since inauguration of the Good Neighbor Policy is a 60-year concession to exploit oil lands throughout the whole of Saudi Arabia. This plum fell to Standard Oil Co. of California last summer—almost unnoticed, since U. S. citizens were then so busy watching the European volcano burp. What soft-collared, spatless Standard businessmen had achieved was signal defeat of top-hatted Japanese, Ger man and British diplomats who had been struggling for years to win this Near East prize.

During the struggle Adolf Hitler feted at Berchtesgaden with lavish honors swarthy envoys of King Ibn Saud, the potent super-Sheik who in the last generation has carved out in Arabia a kingdom roughly one-quarter as large as the U. S. After high German and British bids for Saudi Arabia’s oil were in, Japan bid frantically still higher. Standard bid low but kept reminding the King of what German or Japanese—or even British—agents might soon be doing to disrupt his realm if let in on the ground floor. When he finally closed with Standard, His Majesty exclaimed: “Gentlemen, the Japanese offered me twice as much for one-third of what you now obtain!”

What Standard had won the State Department could not ignore, although Washington had hitherto not thought it necessary to have diplomatic relations with the Near East’s largest State. On July 26 orders were given to accredit His Excellency Bert Fish, already U. S. Minister to Egypt, additionally to Saudi Arabia, and last week down the Red Sea at last sailed Bert Fish.

Jidda, chief port of Saudi Arabia, is too scorching hot for tourists, and death is traditionally the penalty for any non-Mohammedan who should venture inland from it to Holy Mecca, birthplace of Mohammed. Jidda harbor is protected by two miles of treacherous reefs, and gingerly last week the chugging little steamer bearing Bert Fish went threading in through the narrow, twisty channel called “Jidda Gate.” The blinding white and torrid town, where every window is latticed against the sun, is a maze of narrow streets into which tall stucco houses jut at crazy angles. All but one of the city gates are generally kept locked, and a Christian in Jidda is acutely conscious of the hostile glances of the purely Arab citizens, all of whom carry knives. Christian prospectors for Standard Oil were careful to grow beards and assume native dress. Jidda, however, had no terrors last week for smooth-shaven, cosmopolitan Bert Fish, a wealthy Florida real-estate operator who several times circled the globe before he became finance director of the Democratic National Committee, thence broke into diplomacy. To meet him King Ibn Saud went down from Mecca for a day and Prince Feisal, second of His Majesty’s 20-odd sons, offered a sumptuous banquet.

Although His Majesty has had some 150 wives, he belongs to a most ascetic Moslem sect, the Wahabis,and his courtiers explain: “Our King has never had more than four wives at any one time.” Bert Fish last week voiced hopes “for the personal happiness of Your Majesty and the prosperity of your people,” presented Ibn Saud with a silver-framed photograph of President Roosevelt. Before returning to Cairo, the U. S. Minister will travel narrowly in Saudi Arabia, widely in the Sudan and Upper Egypt.

Gossiping with Saudi Arabians, members of the U. S. delegation learned that Ibn Saud was having electric light installed in Holy Mecca and in Medina, where Mohammed is buried, that His Majesty now owns some 30 expensive pleasure cars. Ford agent in Jidda is the eminent British Orientalist St. John Philby, B. A., C. I. E., F. R. G. S. About 150,000 Moslem pilgrims yearly visit Mecca (pop. 80,000), and nearly all now go by motor bus, so that the once-famed camel pasturage outside the Holy City has been turned into a vast bus park. Latest innovation by His Majesty is a modern plant at which the Holy Zam-zam Water from an ancient Mecca well is sterilized, squirted into bottles, capped, labeled and sold like soda pop to pious Moslems.

Standard paid Ibn Saud $1,156,400 when he granted the concession and agreed to pay $165,000 yearly rental until commercial discovery in the new areas or until surrender of rights. Last year His Majesty inaugurated Standard’s newly constructed Persian Gulf oil port Ras Taruna, turned a valve opening the new 43-mile pipe line from Dammam. Average oil production leaped from 243 barrels daily for all Saudi Arabia in 1938 to 10,210 barrels daily last year, is steadily spurting higher.