Come tales of oily fountains
Roll’d up by the third sand.
OIL-WELLS IN INDIA.
The Rangoon district of India long yielded four-hundred-thousand hogsheads annually, the Hindoos using the oil to heal diseases, to preserve timber and to cremate corpses. Birma has been supplied from this source for an unknown period. The liquid, which is of a greenish-brown color and resembles lubricating-oil in density, gathers in pits sunk twenty to ninety feet in beds of sandy clays, overlying slates and sandstones. Clumsy pots or buckets, operated by quaint windlasses, hoist the oil slowly to the mouth of the pits, whence it is often carried across the country in leathern bags, borne on men’s shoulders, or in earthern jars, packed into carts drawn by oxen. Major Michael Symes, ambassador to the Court of Ava in 1765, published a narrative of his sojourn, in which is this passage:
“We rode until two o’clock, at which hour we reached Yaynangheomn, or Petroleum Creek. * * * The smell of the oil is extremely offensive. It was nearly dark when we approached the pits. There seemed to be a great many pits within a small compass. Walking to the nearest, we found the aperture about four feet square and the sides lined, as far as we could see down, with timber. The oil is drawn up in an iron-pot, fastened to a rope passed over a wooden cylinder, which revolves on an axis supported by two upright posts. When the pot is filled, two men take hold of the rope by the end and run down a declivity, which is cut in the ground, to a distance equal to the depth of the well. When they reach the end of the track the pot is raised to its proper elevation; the contents, water and oil together, are discharged into a cistern, and the water is afterward drawn through a hole in the bottom. * * * When a pit yielded as much as came up to the waist of a man, it was deemed tolerably productive; if it reached his neck it was abundant, and that which reached no higher than his knee was accounted indifferent.”
Labor-saving machinery has not forged to the front to any great degree in the oil-fields of the East Indies. For the Burmese trade flat-boats ascend the Irrawaddy to Rainanghong, a town inhabited almost exclusively by the potters who make the earthen jars in which the oil is kept for this peculiar traffic. The methods of saving and handling the greasy staple have not changed one iota since John the Baptist wore his suit of camel’s-hair and curry-combed the Sadducees in the Judean wilderness. Progress cuts no ice beneath the shadows of the Himalayas, notwithstanding the missionary efforts of Xavier, Judson, Carey, Morrison and Duff.
GROUP OF NATIVE OIL-OPERATORS IN INDIA DOWN FROM THE HILLS.
Petroleum in India occurs in middle or lower tertiary rock. In the Rawalpindi district of the Panjab it is found at sixteen localities. At Gunda a well yielded eleven gallons a day for six months, from a boring eighty feet deep, and one two-hundred feet deep, at Makum, produced a hundred gallons an hour. The coast of Arakan and the adjacent islands have long been famed for mud-volcanoes caused by the eruption of hydrocarbon gases. Forty-thousand gallons a year of petroleum have been exported by the natives from Kyoukpyu. The oil is light and pure. In 1877 European enterprise was attracted to this industry and in 1879 work was undertaken by the Borongo Oil-Co. The company started on a large scale and in 1883 had twenty-four wells in operation, ranging from five-hundred to twelve-hundred feet in depth, one yielding for a few weeks one-thousand gallons daily. The total pumped from ten wells during the year was a quarter-million gallons; and in 1884 the company had to suspend payment. Large supplies of high-class petroleum might be obtained from this region, if suitable methods of working were employed.