D’Arcy captures the secret of the burning rocks

propulsion, the oil-fi red ship required one-third the engine weight, and almost one-quarter the daily tonnage of fuel, a critical factor for a fl eet, whether commercial or military. The radius of action of an oilpowered fl eet was up to four times as great as that of the comparable coal ship.1 But at the time, Fisher was regarded by his English peers as an eccentric dreamer.

Meantime, a German engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, had by 1885 developed the world’s fi rst workable petroleum motor to drive a road vehicle. Although automobiles were regarded as playthings of the ultra-rich until the turn of the century, the economic potentials of the petroleum era were beginning to be more broadly realized by many beyond Admiral Fisher and his circle.

D’ARCY CAPTURES THE SECRET OF THE BURNING ROCKS

By 1905, the British secret services and the British government had fi nally realized the strategic importance of the new fuel. Britain’s problem was that it had no known oil of its own. It must rely on America, Russia or Mexico to supply it, an unacceptable condition in time of peace, impossible in the event of a major war. A year before, in 1904, Captain Fisher had been promoted to the rank of Britain’s First Sea Lord, the supreme commander of British naval affairs. Fisher promptly established a committee to ‘consider and make recommendations as to how the British navy shall secure its oil supplies.’

Britain’s presence in Persia and the Arabian Gulf—the latter still part of the Ottoman Empire—was at this time quite limited. Persia was not part of the formal British Empire. For some years, Britain had maintained consulates at Bushire and Bandar Abbas, and kept British naval ships in the Gulf to deter other powers from entertaining designs on strategic waters so close to Britain’s most vital colonial source of looting, India. In 1892, Lord Curzon, later viceroy of India, writing on Persia, stated, ‘I should regard the concession of a port upon the Persian Gulf to Russia, by any power, as a deliberate insult to Great Britain and as a wanton rupture of the status quo, and as an international provocation to war.’2

But in 1905, His Majesty’s Government, through the agency of the notorious British ‘ace of spies,’ Sidney Reilly, secured an extraordinarily signifi cant exclusive right over what were then believed to be vast untapped petroleum deposits in the Middle East. In early 1905, the British secret services sent Reilly (born Sigmund Georgjevich

Rosenblum, in Odessa, Russia) on a mission to extract the rights to exploit the mineral resources of Persia from an eccentric Australian amateur geologist and engineer named William Knox d’Arcy.

D’Arcy, a devout Christian who had studied history deeply, became convinced that accounts of ‘pillars of fi re’ in the holy sites of the ancient Persian god of fi re, Ormuzd, derived from the practice of the priests of Zoroaster lighting naptha—oil—seeping from the rocks in those select sites. He spent years wandering the areas where these ancient Persian temples existed, searching for oil. He made numerous visits to London to secure fi nancial support for his quest, with diminishing support from British bankers.

Sometime in the 1890s, the new Persian monarch, Shah Muzaffar al-din, a man committed to modernizing what today is Iran, called on d’Arcy as an engineer who knew Iran thoroughly, asking him to aid Persia in the development of railways and the beginnings of industry.

In 1901, in exchange for a signifi cant sum of cash up front, the Shah awarded d’Arcy a ‘fi rman,’ or royal concession, giving him

full powers and unlimited liberty, for a period of sixty years, to probe, pierce and drill at their will the depths of Persian soil; in consequence of which all the sub-soil products sought by him without exception will remain his inalienable property.

D’Arcy paid the equivalent of $20,000 cash and agreed to pay the Shah a 16 per cent royalty from sales of whatever petroleum was discovered. Thus the eccentric Australian secured one of the most valuable legal documents of the day, granting him and ‘all his heirs and assigns and friends’ exclusive rights to tap the oil potential of Persia until 1961. D’Arcy’s fi rst successful oil discovery came in the region of Shushtar, north of the Persian Gulf.3

Sidney Reilly managed to track down d’Arcy in 1905, just as the latter was on the verge of signing a joint oil exploration partnership with the French through the Paris Rothschild banking group, before retiring back to his native Australia.

Reilly, disguised as a priest, and skillfully playing on d’Arcy’s strong religious inclinations, persuaded d’Arcy instead to sign over his exclusive rights to Persian oil resources in an agreement with a British company which he claimed to be a good ‘Christian’ enterprise, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Scottish fi nancier Lord Strathcona was brought in by the British government as a key