“You must not think of Ned as leading an uncivilized existence. When I saw him last as the train left the station, he was wearing white flannels, socks and red slippers, with a white Magdalen blazer, and was talking to the governor of Biredjik in lordly fashion.”
That parting at Jerablus was to be the last time the brothers would ever see each other.
Chapter 3
Another and Another Nice Thing
Always my soul hungered for less than it had.
T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
How do you put a collar on a leopard? Very carefully, according to the old joke, but in the autumn of 1913, T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley were in need of a practical answer to that question. They had recently been given a young leopard as a gift by a government official in Aleppo, and had found that so long as he remained chained in the courtyard of the Jerablus compound, he made for a very effective watchdog. The problem, though, was that leopards grow very quickly, and it was now just a matter of time before he tore through the flimsy collar he had been delivered in.
The archaeologists’ first idea was to throw a large slatted box over the cat, then reach through the slats to effect the collar exchange, but since the leopard was “not very sweet tempered” to begin with, according to Lawrence, this confinement only put him in a fouler mood. Their solution was a rather clever one. Slightly enlarging an opening in the box, they kept stuffing in burlap sacks until eventually the leopard was wedged so tightly that he couldn’t move.
“Then we took the top off the box, collared him, and let him loose again,” Lawrence wrote to his family. “He will make a most splendid carpet some day.”
Along with learning how to recollar a leopard, it was in that autumn 1913 digging season at Carchemish, Lawrence’s fifth, that he and Woolley would make a spectacular find—the site’s main temple. It was an archaeologist’s dream, the discovery of a lifetime, and it helped fuel in Lawrence a sense that he had found his true calling, and perhaps his true home. The spacious main living room of the Jerablus compound was now a cozy space adorned with artwork on the walls and carpets and animal hides on the floor, a library with books in seven languages, and an enormous fireplace constantly stoked with hot-burning olivewood. He revealed his feelings in a letter to a close friend from his Oxford days that autumn.
“I have got to like this place very much,” he wrote, “and the people here—five or six of them—and the whole manner of living pleases me.… Carchemish will not be finished for another four or five years and I’m afraid that, after that, I’ll probably go after another and another nice thing.”
But heartbreakingly, funding from the British Museum—always extremely tight and always conditionally doled out from one season or year to the next—had been effectively exhausted. Unless an unforeseen new funding source suddenly appeared, the next digging season, spring 1914, was slated to be the last. This knowledge hung over Lawrence and Woolley, and it overshadowed their excitement over that season’s discoveries with a deepening sense of despair. It was only when they began closing down the site in preparation for their off-season break that a new possibility presented itself.
Under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British Museum director explained, a group of Royal Engineers was about to embark on an archaeological survey of the so-called Wilderness of Zin of southernmost Palestine; might Lawrence and Woolley be interested in joining them during their upcoming break?
For Lawrence and Woolley, it presented a choice between spending two months of leisure in England, or trekking through one of the world’s most inhospitable corners. But the lure of exploration really made this no choice at all; both men immediately signed on.
LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in a two-room shanty and pulling rods in an Oklahoma oilfield, and now he was traveling through one of the most ruggedly beautiful landscapes on earth, a land only a handful of Americans had ever seen.
Adding to his sense of awe was that in all the time he’d spent in Oklahoma daydreaming about where Standard Oil might send him, he had scarcely considered the Near East. Instead, on that day he walked into the Socony headquarters in New York, he had assumed he was being dispatched as a sales representative to China.
Yale’s misconception was understandable. In 1913, Socony was primarily an exporter of petroleum products, and China was by far its largest market. In comparison, the company’s exports to the Ottoman Empire, primarily kerosene to fuel its embryonic industrial facilities, were minuscule. To put into perspective how minuscule, while Standard’s kerosene represented the second biggest American export to the Ottoman Empire, the largest was Singer sewing machines.
But as the Standard vice president, William Bemis, had explained to the three men brought to his office that morning, they weren’t being sent to the Near East to rustle up new purchasing clients, but rather to find and develop new sources of oil.
It was simple economics. By the end of 1913, the exponentially growing demand for oil and petroleum products around the globe meant that demand would soon outstrip supply. In the United States alone, the number of combustion-engine vehicles on the road had increased twentyfold in less than a decade, from some seventy-five thousand in 1905 to well over 1.5 million in 1913—and already a number of the oldest American oilfields were starting to run dry.
Oil was rapidly becoming a crucial military asset as well. In 1912, just a year before Yale’s summoning to New York, the first lord of the admiralty of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, had made international headlines with his plan to convert the entire Royal Navy from coal to oil. As might be expected, this proposed modernization of the world’s most powerful fleet was already causing the navies of other nations, including Germany, to scramble to follow suit.
As a consequence, both American and European oil companies were now rushing to find and exploit new fields wherever they might exist. One especially promising region was the Near East. In the 1870s, huge oil and gas deposits had been discovered around Baku on the Caspian Sea, and this had been followed by another large strike in the Persian Gulf in 1908. Those fields were quickly dominated by European consortiums, and the race was on to tap and lay claim to the next big find.
To that end, the Socony branch office in Constantinople had quietly obtained a six-month option from a consortium of three Jerusalem-based businessmen who held vast exploration concessionary rights in three different regions of the Ottoman Empire. It was to perform preliminary fieldwork in these concessionary zones that Yale, McGovern, and Hill had been dispatched from New York. As for the elaborate secrecy surrounding their mission, there were two reasons: to throw any potential competitors off the scent, naturally, but also to keep the Standard name in the background for as long as possible. Its recent breakup notwithstanding, the Standard brand was still regarded with such abiding distrust in the Near East, as in many other parts of the world, that the easiest way to besmirch the reputation of a business rival was to accuse it of being a Standard Oil front.
But despite its stealth approach, there were indications that Standard Oil of New York was not quite the smoothly run, rapacious machine its progenitor had been. Indeed, one such indication was the composition of the team it had sent to explore the Ottoman concessions. J. C. Hill, the chief, was a Pittsburgh steel man with no experience in the oil industry. Rudolf McGovern was a college-trained geologist, but had never actually set foot in an oilfield. And while William Yale certainly knew his way around an oilfield, he had absolutely no knowledge of geology.
Certainly J. C. Hill had an unusual approach to exploration, one that might best be described as fatalistic. Arriving in Constantinople in early October, the team had set out for the first concessionary zone, a broad stretch of mountainous terrain in central Anatolia, just south of the Black Sea. Accompanied by a small team of local guides, the three A
mericans spent a couple of weeks roaming the high plateau on horseback, but each time McGovern pointed to a distant spot he deemed worthy of closer inspection, Hill thought better of it. A critical moment came when the group learned there was a boat heading back to Constantinople in thirty hours’ time, and that there wouldn’t be another for at least two weeks; they made the boat with just minutes to spare.
Their pace slowed considerably once they reached the second exploration zone, the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, in November 1913. Essentially a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from a geological standpoint the region held a good deal more promise than Anatolia. For several weeks, the team traveled the western shore of the Dead Sea, picking their way through shale screes and the surrounding limestone cliffs. Time and again, they found tantalizing clues to the presence of oil—lumps of pure asphalt floating in the sea, surface limestone so impregnated with petroleum that it gave off the odor of gasoline—but nothing to confirm that a commercially viable reservoir might lie beneath.
Then again, it was hard to say much with any definitiveness since Hill, employing the exploratory style he had honed in Anatolia, soon began to veto nearly every spot that McGovern recommended for closer investigation. At times it seemed to Yale that they weren’t so much looking for oil as trying to hide from it.
Matters finally came to a head in early January when Hill announced that their work there was done and ordered the breaking of camp for the return journey to Jerusalem. Yale, fueled by three months of frustration, could hold his tongue no longer. He confronted Hill, and the two ended up in a heated argument.
Whether that argument had some effect or it was mere coincidence, on the very next day, as the group climbed into the Judean foothills for the return to Jerusalem, Hill suddenly drew up his horse to gaze at a mountainous outcrop some thirty miles to the south. It was a strange geological formation, an irregular massif rising from the surrounding desert plain. Examined through binoculars, there appeared to be pools of something collected at the mountain base, something shimmering and iridescent.
“There.” J. C. Hill pointed off to the mountains of Kornub. “That is where we will find oil.”
Events moved very quickly after that. Hurrying his bedraggled caravan back to Jerusalem, Hill immediately cabled Socony headquarters with news of his “find.” By return telegram, he was ordered to gather up the two primary concession holders of the Palestine tracts, Jerusalem businessmen Ismail Hakki Bey and Suleiman Nassif, and personally deliver them to the Socony office in Cairo as soon as possible. In Hill’s absence, Yale and Rudolf McGovern were to go on to Kornub and conduct tests to determine just how immense this new strike might be.
Hastily hiring guides and camp orderlies for the expedition, Yale and McGovern decamped from Jerusalem around January 6, only to meet T. E. Lawrence and his companions outside Beersheva a few days later. Following that humiliating encounter, the Socony party continued south until they at last reached the desolate peaks of Kornub. What they were to discover there would have momentous consequences.
ON MARCH 15, 1913, Aaron Aaronsohn was invited to a luncheon at an exclusive club in Washington, D.C. The guest of honor was former president Theodore Roosevelt.
Maybe it was out of respect that Aaronsohn’s hosts, two prominent American Jewish leaders named Julian Mack and Felix Frankfurter, sat their guest beside the former president, or maybe it was born of a sense of mischief; both Aaronsohn and Roosevelt, still referred to as “the Colonel” by his intimates, had hard-earned reputations for being nonstop talkers, and their table companions may have thought it amusing to see who would win out. To the amazement of Mack and Frankfurter, it was President Roosevelt who barely got a word in; instead he listened to Aaronsohn with rapt attention. Aaronsohn clearly appreciated the uniqueness of his achievement; he wrote in his diary that night that “from now on, my reputation will be the man who made the Colonel shut up for 101 minutes.”
Much like the former president, Aaron Aaronsohn came on like a force of nature. A towering man given to portliness, he was both brilliant and arrogant, passionate and combative, one of those people who seem to believe they are always the most interesting person in a room. In the case of the thirty-seven-year-old Aaronsohn, he was usually right.
By March 1913, he had also emerged as one of the most persuasive spokesmen for a cause that had recently gained currency in certain Jewish circles: Zionism. Calling for a return of the Jewish diaspora to their ancestral homeland of Eretz (Greater) Israel, the Zionist movement had gained some adherents among international Jewry over the previous two decades, but more frequently had been met with skepticism, even hostility. What made Aaronsohn so influential was that his Zionist arguments were not based on political or religious abstractions, but on the purely practical, almost the mundane: agriculture. Already recognized as one of the most accomplished agronomists in the Middle East, Aaronsohn had spent thirty-one of his thirty-seven years in Palestine, and he was now conducting a wide range of scientific experiments—on plants and trees and soils—that might restore the region to the verdant land it had been in ancient times. All high-minded Zionist principles aside, he frequently pointed out, the first prerequisite for the Jews’ return to Israel was to have something to eat; Aaronsohn knew how to feed them.
He hadn’t come to any of this easily. The eldest child of a Jewish grain merchant, Aaronsohn was born in 1876 in a small town in central Romania. He was just two when the Russo-Turkish War led to Romania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. For the nation’s large Jewish population, what had been a tolerably bad existence under a Muslim autocracy quickly became an intolerably bad one under a Christian democracy. Effectively barred from obtaining citizenship, which also meant being barred from most schools and professions, the Jews began a mass exodus out of Romania. In 1882, when Aaron was six, his parents joined the flight. Rather than make for the émigrés’ preferred destination of the United States, however, the Aaronsohns joined some 250 other Romanian Jews in sailing for the Palestine region of Ottoman Syria.
The group settled on a barren tract of rocky hillside near the port city of Haifa, an outpost they named Samarin. There they quickly discovered that the “land flowing with milk and honey” described in the Book of Exodus had changed a very great deal in the interim. The few Samarin settlers who knew how to farm—most had been small merchants back in Romania—were soon defeated by the arid landscape and poor soil. Within the year, the émigrés were so destitute they were forced to pawn their sacred Torah scrolls.
Salvation came in the form of the enormously wealthy French Jewish financier Baron Edmond de Rothschild. An early supporter and benefactor of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Rothschild had already established or bailed out a number of Jewish colonies in the region, and in 1884 he did the same with Samarin, renaming it Zichron Yaakov (Jacob’s Memorial), in honor of his deceased father. As the community soon discovered, though, Rothschild’s patronage came at a very steep price. In agreeing to lend financial support, his first condition had been “that he alone shall be the colony’s sole lord and that all things in its domain be under his rule”—and he hadn’t been kidding. The residents of Zichron Yaakov were told what crops they could grow, how they should dress, even who had earned the right to marry, and Rothschild’s resident agents made sure the rules were enforced.
But for the young and extraordinarily bright Aaron Aaronsohn, this feudalistic system had its benefits. In 1893, at the age of sixteen, he was chosen by Rothschild’s agents to be educated in France, all expenses paid, and for the next two years he studied agronomy and botany at the Grignon Institute outside Paris, one of the most prestigious agricultural academies in Europe. When he returned to Palestine, it was not to take up the life of a Rothschild serf in Zichron Yaakov but to serve as an agricultural “instructor” at another of the baron’s settlements. The arrangement didn’t last long. Within a year, Aaronsohn, just nineteen but already headstrong and impatient, broke with the baron and his agent
s and struck out on his own.
Finding work as an agricultural advisor to large absentee landowners, he also began meticulously studying and cataloging the flora and geology of Palestine. In this endeavor, his intense curiosity and indefatigable energy soon became legendary. By his midtwenties, already fluent in a half dozen languages, Aaronsohn began publishing articles in European agronomy journals. No one in the tightly knit and highly credentialed fraternity of European agronomists had ever heard of their colleague in Palestine, and the frequency and eclectic range of Aaronsohn’s work—learned studies on everything from sesame oil extraction to silk production—led some to wonder whether the name was a pseudonym for a collective of scientists.
His true breakthrough came in 1906 with his discovery of wild emmer wheat, a progenitor of cultivated wheat long thought extinct, growing on the slopes of Mount Hermon. At a time when the world’s population was still over 80 percent agrarian, the find made international headlines and won the young, virtually self-taught Jewish scientist the recognition of his peers around the globe. Three years later, he accepted an invitation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct a wide-ranging tour of the American West. There he was treated as something of a celebrity, offered college professorships, his highly anticipated lectures attended by overflowing audiences. But Aaronsohn’s time in the United States—his stay extended to nearly eight months—also exposed him to the currents of modern Jewish political thought, and especially to some of the foremost leaders of the American Zionist movement.
While the notion of a return to Israel had been a cornerstone of Jewish faith for millennia—for nearly two thousand years, Jewish Yom Kippur and Passover services have ended with the recitation, “next year in Jerusalem”—it was a Hungarian writer, Theodor Herzl, who transformed it into a modern political idea. In the face of institutionalized anti-Semitism in even the most “enlightened” nations of Europe, and the periodic massacre of Jews in places like czarist Russia, Herzl had argued in his 1896 book The Jewish State that international Jewry could only ever be truly safe and free by establishing their own homeland in the ancient land of Israel. The following year, Herzl presided over the first meeting of the World Zionist Congress in Switzerland, an event that electrified Jewish audiences around the world.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 7
