Telegraph Island

Telegraph Island, known in Arabic as Jazirat al-Maqlab, is a tiny rocky island in Khor Ash Sham, a long fjord-like inlet among the bare mountains of Musandam, in Oman. In the 1860s it was a station on the telegraph line that linked Britain with India, and the ruins of the station still stand on its small summit.

In 1864 the Indo-European Telegraph Department laid a submarine cable through the Gulf, running from Gwadar on the coast of Baluchistan to Bushehr on the Iranian coast, and from there overland across Iran to Europe. A repeater station was built on this island to boost the signal through the Strait of Hormuz, and a handful of British operators lived there, cut off by the sea and the steep mountains in the extreme heat of the Gulf summer.

Life on the island was so hard that it is often said to have given English the phrase “going round the bend”, from the operators who lost their minds after sailing around the bend of the inlet, though the story is a popular one rather than an established fact. Within a few years the station was moved to Hengam Island, off the Iranian coast, and Telegraph Island was abandoned. Today dhows bring visitors from Khasab through the inlet to swim and snorkel around it, and dolphins often follow the boats between the steep cliffs of Musandam. The low stone walls of the station, the remains of a stair and a landing, are all that is left of a building that once carried messages between two continents.