Travel Oman: Glimpses of history at Telegraph Island

Oman Tuesday 12/November/2019 18:13 PM
By: Times News Service

A tiny island located off the coast of Musandam, Telegraph Island may not seem like much today, but once upon a time it played a huge role in connecting Asia to Europe, when technology was not as advanced as it is today. Telegraph Island was a small entity that played a pivotal role among bigger things, acting as a crucial transmission point for cables that were sent between Great Britain and India during the 19th century. While communication through letters was time-consuming as they would often take up to a month to cross from one nation to the other, telegraph messages could be sent across in a matter of a few hours. Although Telegraph Island today is a popular tourist and diving hotspot, it was initially run by the Red Sea and Indian Telegraph Cable Company until 1859, after which the Indian, Persian and Turkish governmental authorities decided to merge their connections using an underwater cable that spanned 2,400 kilometres and passed through Musandam on the way to Karachi in modern-day Pakistan.
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The island then played a vital role in making communications between the two nations easier and more efficient. However, Telegraph Island remained a station for no longer than three years. “From 1864 to 1869, Jazirat al Maqlab, or Telegraph Island, was an active telegraph outpost crucial to communication between India and Britain. For five years after the telegraphy was decommissioned, British soldiers continued to man the isolated outpost,” said the Ministry of Tourism in a statement. “Today the island is a ghostly remnant of the once-great British Empire. The outpost was abandoned in the mid-1870s, and the buildings have crumbled. The island now serves as a snorkeling and fishing destination rather than a strategic communication hub.”