It is 1820, and Bedouin nomads in the Persian Gulf are mystified. Pale creatures arrive in boats, armed with a strange array of tools—sextants for positioning, theodolites for triangulation, chronometers for longitude, compasses for bearings. Surveyors lean out of the bows of boats, dropping ten-pound plumbs and calling out depths to a man hunched over a notebook. Hundreds of readings a day, seven days a week. They even move across barren deserts, taking measurements, not sure what they’re looking for—just measuring. They do this for years. Year after year. Foot by foot. Patiently. Expensively.
Why? You could justify the Great Trigonometrical Survey, the 70-year mapping of India. After all, it's the Jewel in the Crown: cotton, tea, indigo, and opium. But the Persian Gulf? It's a backwater, a nearly dead sea. Little trade exists outside pearls. Meanwhile, the land is so salty you can barely get a fig from it. Yet here they are, the pale British. Day after day, dropping plumbs, calling out numbers, pulling strings. It's unfathomable. The Bombay Marine, the Admiralty's Hydrographic Office, and the Royal Geographical Society. It sounds like a Gilbert & Sullivan trilogy—windbags in stuffy rooms patting each other on the back. And wasting money. So much money wasted.
But to their credit, they know things other Europeans do not: Kuwait Bay is deep enough to accommodate big ships and is sheltered from the northwesterly shamal winds. It's the only credible port at the head of the Gulf. Bahrain Island has an aquifer, allowing it to resist subjugation from the larger powers on the Arabian Peninsula. In the Hormuz channel, the Persian shore drops off slowly while the Omani side is steep, allowing big ships to pass.
The British even map the desolate Kharg Island. They can't know that a century later pipes will pump oil out to it, where it gets loaded on massive tankers. They don't know what oil is when they map Kharg, or what will happen in the future, or why anyone might want a map for this wasteland.
Imagine how outraged investors back home would be by this spectacle: British men crawling around a windswept sand patch of an island in the withering heat with tripods and string. All the while, they are harassed and attacked, though disease is more likely to plant them in the ground—or see them tossed overboard in a rushed burial at sea. What drives men to waste their lives like this? What makes an empire at once so precise while seemingly so illogical?
Because one thing is clear: This land is worthless.
It is May 1908, and George Bernard Reynolds is out of time. London has ordered him to stop drilling. Actually, they'll let him complete his last two holes just to prove they are dry. That's how confident they are in Reynolds's ability to find nothing. It's disheartening and ungrateful considering he's spent years fighting off murderous Bakhtiari tribesmen and working in withering heat. Cholera and dysentery ravage his camps, and for what? It's hell on Earth, punching holes in planet Earth for years with nothing to show for it.
He's just another one of history's losers.
We know what he's looking for, of course. It permeates every moment of our modern day—from the gas in the tank to the plastic of our dash to the fluorescents in our classroom to the rubber beneath our feet.
But this is 1908. Outside of Titusville and Baku, no one talks about oil. Coal is king. Ships like the Goeben run on it, with hissing boilers and stokers dropping dead. London air is choked with the soot and smoke of it. Canaries asphyxiate in mines, and black lungs form in otherwise healthy men.
Reynolds is in Persia, where the oil oozes out of the ground. It's everywhere, only not in usable quantities. A few barrels here, a few barrels there. Gas hisses out of other holes, taunting Reynolds. Some leaks catch on fire and never go out. Eternal flames. A religion has been founded from this hot ground—Zoroastrianism, the first belief system to winnow the reality show in the sky down to two key players: good and evil, darkness and light.
But this is probably just a cover story, right? It's just a way to make sense of the earth beneath our feet—similar to Hercules punching a hole through the Atlas Mountains at Gibraltar. The reality is more mind-bending.
Are you ready? Can you handle it?
Hundreds of millions of years ago, there is no Persia, no Arabia, no India. It's all water, the Tethys Sea. As with any sea, sediment drops to the bottom. More sediment drops down atop that, pushing the original layers deeper and deeper. Over time—like hundreds of millions of years—that sediment is pushed closer to the Earth's hot core. It simmers, a stew of fossil life. But there is no cover on this pot. Not yet. We'll need a lid to really get things cooking.
Then Africa, Arabia, and India break off from the southern supercontinent Gondwana (good band name) and start drifting north toward Eurasia. But it's slow, 2-4 centimeters a year, though the India plate is absolutely hauling ass at 15-20 centimeters a year—a whopping 0.00000001 mph, or about a school bus length per human lifetime—enough speed to result in the Himalayas.
Africa and Arabia catch up and do a little crashing of their own, sprouting lesser mountains—excess water drains out into the remaining part of the Tethys Sea—the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Dried salt from the dying seas lies a base on top of our simmering sediment. As for the land, imagine two pieces of white bread hitting each other and arching up. Underneath that arch is a stew of fossils cooking under the salt layer. Now we have our lid.
Let's get that stew served. We'll need a ladle, and it's going to have to be long—very long—and planted in the exact right spot. And it's 1908. Drilling 1,500 feet into the rock is a major undertaking, especially when it takes six weeks to get replacement equipment. Sounds good, right? You can take a break, except homicidal tribesmen still roam the neighborhood, and it's still 120 degrees, so it's not exactly a picnic. But the real suffering comes from digging a hole in the ground and watching it sink deeper and deeper for nothing. Miss the oil by a few feet, and you get nothing but more years of watching drills sink deeper.
Reynolds doesn't know it, but he's walking on top of the largest petroleum system on Earth, 60% of the world's conventional oil. And it's sweet: rich in marine life, producing a light, low-sulfur oil that flows easily. Beautiful crude. Only he can't find it. He should have called it quits long ago and gone home. Forget Persia. Go back to England and slowly drink himself to death, none the wiser about the black ocean beneath his feet.
On May 25, 1908, he goes to sleep in his sweltering tent. In the dead of night, he awakens to find the earth shaking. The thunder comes from beneath his cot, sending him reeling out of his tent. The sky is darker than night, and a viscous liquid lands on his face. The well is a blur of force and fluids. The low rumble is replaced with gas escaping the earth, an ear-splitting roar.
There, Reynolds stands, covered in crude. It's a nightmarish vision—and it is also victory, one that outstrips everyone's understanding of what is possible. Vindication. And here he will stay, working for London, building British Petroleum, which is now the BP station you pull into. He'll break his back for years bringing this wild ocean under control, then be fired for being disagreeable. But how does one manage being agreeable in a place like this?
For now, let's give him his moment. Let that oil rain down on him.
It will never be as good as this again.
As for this place, Persia, it will never be the same.
The crude filling the night sky will give, and it will take. It will make and break shahs and spies. It will birth a modern nation, give it international standing, subject it to a revolution, then place it in perpetual danger. Because you can't have oil beneath your feet and live a quiet and peaceful life.
There will be no escaping this good fortune.
None of this would have been possible without a century of British cartography. The mapping was always waiting for this moment, even when no one knew what they were mapping it all for. Surveying the sand of nowheresville Persia led Reynolds to his sea of oil. He just needed to get lucky and tap it. And now the sleepy Gulf, so well documented by the British, will be the perfect stillwater to port this oil to market. Because the history of petroleum is less about the pumping of it and more about the transport. Right now, 40% of shipping is the movement of fossil fuels. If that oil were moved by truck instead, it would cost 20 to 30 times more, which gives credence to our simple maxim: You got something heavy to move? Go find a body of water.
And not only do the British map the place, but they make friends along the way. They arrive in the big tent with a wooden crate. Inside, there’s a pair of rifles and a bejeweled dagger wrapped in cloth. The local Sheikh examines the gifts, saying nothing. But that’s the point—the silence is the negotiation. Finally, the Sheikh speaks, asking about the depths of the channel—his channel. The surveyor knows the answer, of course, and can tell him exactly how deep it is. The Sheikh nods and asks for more detailed records, which the surveyor may or may not remember to hand over. But now they are on speaking terms—they are allies. A little bit of dagger, a little bit of information, all dutifully recorded in a ledger sent back to Bombay so the next agent knows exactly what to bring to this Sheikh and what to say to him.
This is how the British make alliances, prioritizing coastal elites up and down the Gulf. Sheikh Maktoum bin Buti al-Maktoum of Dubai, for example. Even back then, Dubai wants to play ball with the world order. Mubarak the Great signs the Anglo-Kuwaiti agreement of 1899, protecting his fiefdom from Ottoman absorption and the threat of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. Shah Mozaffar al-Din of Persia sells England the original oil concessions, allowing Reynolds and his men unfettered access to crawl the barren wasteland.
‘Twas ever thus. Wherever there is trade, elites hug the coast. The British know how to cultivate them. They can plumb the depths and rake the terrain, but politics are as important as place. They can't be sure anything will come from this stillwater cul-de-sac. But so many other bets are spread across the table of planet Earth, and the English know how to play the long odds.
With the Reynolds strike, their ship comes in. And out. And in again.
These days, you won't find too many Union Jacks whipping in Gulf winds, but their footprint is there. Britain stations troops in five Gulf states and maintains three standalone bases. Why? Because in the last five years, they've sold $30 billion worth of arms to Gulf states, and these bases train their armies to use them. Tens of billions of dollars of Emirati, Saudi, Qatari, and Kuwaiti capital sit in UK property, equities, infrastructure, football clubs, and Treasury holdings. Their friendship with Oman goes back to 1798, and they won't let Hormuz slip into the wrong hands. England may not hold that knob, but they're in good with the doorman and want to stay in the club.
England remains two hundred years after the original mapping. All those plumb lines, the awkward tripods, and the tedious string.
Go ahead, fly to Dubai. Don't be distracted by the indoor ski slope or the vending machine dispensing gold bars. Forget buying a ticket to swim with the overfed sharks at the aquarium. As you begin your descent in that fat Airbus A380, look out the window. Through the haze of the desert morning, count the islands, count the tankers, count the bases. You won't see borders from up here, but they're down there. Those lines have been there since long before we had names for them, or an explanation for why they should exist—way before anyone gave a damn—lines in the sand drawn by the Crown for unknowable reasons.
