104 Chapter Three
the Petersburg got delayed; it should have gotten from Jeddah to Odessa in one
week, but instead it took three weeks.
In August 1903, the head of the Committee of the Volunteer Fleet, Rear-
Admiral P. Iurʹev, wrote a long, exasperated letter to the Naval Ministry to
explain why the fleet could not do as the Jeddah consul had proposed and orga-
nize Russia’s hajj transport. “It is not possible to name all of the numerous rea-
sons why” the fleet could not do this, he wrote, but he laid out the main ones.
They were logistical and economical. The committee, he wrote, had “long ago
come to the definitive conclusion” that it did not fit the “usual operations of the
fleet in transporting passengers and freight to the Far East to also transport
pilgrims.” To send reserve ships filled with hajj pilgrims to the Red Sea was
“completely absurd” from an economic standpoint: with their colossal naviga-
tional costs, without freight, and with deck passengers only for the return trip,
and the need to pay, for each trip, around 30,000 rubles in fees for use of the
canal, not including the fee per passenger, meant huge losses.^49 Iurʹev was point-
ing out what European officials elsewhere were also discovering: it was very
difficult to profit from hajj transport, given the demands and complexities of
the journey, and the added pressures of sanitary screening.^50 Not only did
steamships need to pay high fees for passing through the Suez Canal, and risk
long delays in quarantine, but there were complications because of the timing
of the hajj.
The logistics of the hajj made it impossible for the Volunteer Fleet to make
money from transporting pilgrims round-trip, Iurʹev insisted. Only steamships
operating in the Red Sea could afford to do this: they picked up pilgrims in Suez
(where they had gone by train from Alexandria), took them to Jeddah, and then
back to Russia. They were much bigger than Volunteer Fleet ships, and could
engage in local trade during the month-and-a-half wait for pilgrims to finish
their rituals in Mecca and Medina.^51 As Iurʹev’s letter made clear, Russia was at a
disadvantage compared to other imperial powers, above all the British, who had
trade networks and economic interests in and around the Red Sea that made hajj
transport not only feasible but profitable for British shipping companies.
There was also the problem of the powerful syndicate that had existed in
Jeddah since the 1880s, which controlled steamship service for hajj pilgrims. It
blocked outsiders from transporting pilgrims.^52 The only way to get around the
syndicate, Iurʹev explained, would be for the Volunteer Fleet to transport pil-
grims who already had return tickets, as the Jeddah consul proposed. But the
fleet could not possibly organize such a huge undertaking, Iurʹev objected. It
would require selling and issuing tickets to Muslims all across the vast empire.