between Bombay and Basra. Consulates
of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Turkey and several European
mercantile houses are established at Bushire, and [v.04 p.0871]
notwithstanding the drawbacks of bad roads to the interior, insufficient
and precarious means of transport, and want of security, the annual value
of the Bushire trade since 1890 averaged about L1,500,000 (one-third being
for exports, two-thirds for imports), and over two-thirds of this was
British. Of the 278,000 tons of shipping which entered the port in 1905,
244,000 were British.

During the war with Persia (1856-57) Bushire surrendered to a British force
and remained in British occupation for some months. At Rishire, some miles
south of Bushire and near the summer quarters of the British resident and
the British telegraph buildings, there are extensive ruins among which
bricks with cuneiform inscriptions have been found, showing that the place
was a very old Elamite settlement.

(A. H.-S.)

BUSHMEN, or BOSJESMANS, a people of South Africa, so named by the British
and Dutch colonists of the Cape. They often call themselves _Saan_ [Sing.
_Sa_], but this appears to be the Hottentot name. If they have a national
name it is _Khuai_, probably "small man," the title of one group. This
_Khuai_ has, however, been translated as the Bushman word for _tablier
egyptien_ (see below), adopted as the racial name because that malformation
is one of their physical characteristics. The Kaffirs call them Abatwa, the
Bechuana Masarwa (Maseroa). There is little reason to doubt that they
constitute the aboriginal element of the population of South Africa, and
indications of their former presence have been found as far north at least
as the Nyasa and Tanganyika basins. "It would seem," writes Sir H.H.
Johnston (_British Central Africa_, p. 52), "as if the earliest known race
of man inhabiting what is now British Central Africa was akin to the
Bushman-Hottentot type of negro. Rounded stones with a hole through the
centre, similar to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for
weighting their digging-sticks (the _graaf stock_ of the Boers), have been
found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika." The dirty yellow colour of the
Bushmen, their slightly slanting eyes and prominent cheek-bones had induced
early anthropologists to dwell on their resemblance to the Mongolian races.
This similarity has been now recognized as quite superficial. More recently
a connexio