It is the half-glimpsed, forgotten story of an unknown Kuwaiti child, drowned on February 25, 1863, as his elders attempted to board a British ship in the Arabian Gulf to do business with the visiting British political resident from Bushire.
History would know nothing of the incident, nor the fate of the nameless child, had it not been for the presence on board the ship of Haji Ahmed, the residency translator. He kept a journal of the voyage being taken by Lewis Pelly, an officer of the East India Company, who the previous year had been appointed political resident, based at Bushire on the Persian shore of the Gulf.
In driving rain and a fierce north-easterly wind, Pelly's steamer had been forced to remain at anchor off Kuwait. Such were the conditions, recorded Ahmed, that "no one could communicate with the town".
In the end, a party of Kuwaiti officials decided to brave the rough waters and set out for the steamer in a small boat and, wrote Ahmed, they "reached here from shore with great trouble". In the process, "there fell from the boat a boy ... and was drowned and owing to the strong wind no one could catch him".
But after that, it was business as usual: "The people of Kuwait who were on board met the resident."
This small slice of human tragedy is just one of myriad historical details of life, death, trade, war and politics in the Gulf now emerging into the daylight after decades or even centuries of obscurity, thanks to an ambitious £8.7 million collaboration between the British Library and the Qatar Foundation.
From next year, tens of thousands of priceless documents relating to the history of the Gulf and its peoples will be available online, offering a unique insight and, in the words of the British Library, "transforming our understanding of Middle Eastern history".
Although the bulk of the more than half a million pages of maps, papers, photographs, journals, letters and artworks being digitised have in theory been available for years to readers and researchers visiting the British Library in London, the reality is that the vast majority will have lain undisturbed and unstudied ever since they ceased to be part of the working documents of the East India Company and its successor, the British government's India Office.
Now they will be available to the entire world at the click of a mouse.
Work on bringing this buried treasure to the surface began last July. Now the British Library has opened the doors for the first time on a project that has caused a large portion of the sixth floor of the library's building at St Pancras, London, to be given over to what the head of the operation calls the "quasi-industrial" process of sorting, cataloguing and digitising nearly 200 years of history.
"This project will transform access to the material," says Oliver H Urquhart Irvine, the former head of the British Library's Asian, Middle East and Africa department, who now heads the partnership with Qatar and began putting together the specialised team and technology 18 months ago.
"It will be free for use under creative commons. We want people to be able to enjoy it and use it in research settings, teaching and classrooms, share with their friends on Facebook - that's the whole point and the fantastic opportunity of this whole project. This material isn't going behind a commercial paywall."
The key to successfully opening up access to such detailed information lies in scrupulously detailed cataloguing of the contents and, once the portal being designed for the project goes live sometime next year, searches will be able to be made in English and Arabic.
Once online, much of the material will be accompanied by scholarly articles, in Arabic and English, setting the contents in historical context.
At the start it was just Mr Irvine. But now there are close to 50 other experts - curators, archivists, librarians, conservators, photographers and Arabists, carefully assessing, scanning and cataloguing the wealth of material that comes from the library's cavernous basement.
"When we bring material up from the basement we assess it to make sure it is fit to be imaged, and that's partly to make sure we get the best possible image," says Mr Irvine.
"For example, if there's a rusty little 19th century Treasury tag, we remove that because it makes it easier to get at the material. But it is also just basic good curatorial stewardship, to always think of the conservation and long-term preservation of the material."
The documents are "triaged" when they arrive on the sixth floor and those that need it are cared for by a team of conservators before going on to be imaged and catalogued. It is painstaking work that gives some idea of the ambitious scale of the entire project.
One of the conservators, Kath Knowles, is working on a typed report sent to a political agent in Bahrain on October 26, 1929. Where documents are torn, before they can be scanned she mends them using strips of tissue paper and a specialised glue she makes herself.
"This is wheat-starch paste," she says. "Almost like flour and water, but without the gluten, so it is very pure - the PH is neutral. And we use Japanese tissue, because it is also PH-neutral and has a very good wet strength."
The letter in front of her now, from a senior British police officer, seeks approval for the removal from Bahrain of "Abdul Majid of Iraq, currently in the state police. I consider it most undesirable that he be allowed to remain".
The nature of Majid's undesirability remains tantalisingly unknown, but a tersely scribbled note records that the request was sanctioned.
In addition to the documents relating to the long British influence in the Gulf, the project is also digitising 25,000 pages of handwritten medieval Arabic manuscripts - all of which will be freely available online for the first time and which together will paint a rich and detailed picture of the vast span of knowledge and creativity in the Arab world from the time of the Crusades onwards.
One of these priceless documents is copy of Nasir Al Din Al Tusi's 1258AD Arabic translation and revision of Euclid's Elements, 13 books on various aspects of mathematics written in Greek Alexandria in about 300BC.
Other volumes showcase Arabic advances in astronomy, medicine and navigation. One folio features a discussion on how to determine latitude, taken from a book called Al-Qanun al-Masaudi (The Canon Dedicated to Sultan Masaud), made in Baghdad in AD 1174.
In the imaging suite, experts are tackling the delicate, painstaking task of capturing material in far greater detail than could be seen with the naked eye.
Sarah Readings, one of the photographers, is working on a handwritten and illustrated book, held in place on a cradle designed by the team's head conservator that ensures each page can be opened to no more than 100 degrees. The cradle allows pages to be photographed without putting strain on the book's spine.
"Here we have these beautiful illustrations," she says, zooming her large screen in on the image she has just captured with a frame-mounted specialist camera boasting 60 megapixels - more than three times as sensitive as the very best commercial cameras.
"One can clearly see the ink and the paint and these absolutely beautiful calligraphic inscriptions."
As the image is blown up further, even the fibres in the paper are clearly visible - in a book that was produced by hand in Damascus in the 14th century.
"This is The End of Questions and Desires Concerning Horsemanship," says Bink Hallum, the Norwegian-born Arabic scientific manuscripts curator for the project. "It covers all sorts of things, from how to train your horse, what kind of weapons and armour to use, metallurgy and how to emblazon your shield with heraldry."
There is even a fascinating section on an early use of petroleum - to cover one's shield and helmet, setting it on fire to scare off an enemy.
The book was written by a man called Al Aqsarayi, who is thought to have been born in Cairo and died in Damascus in 1348. "So this was written right in the heart of the Mamluk Sultanate period, during the Crusade," says Mr Hallum.
It was a time when "all things military were important" in the Arab world.
"Damascus and Cairo were threatened from the west by the European crusaders, and from the east by the very real threat of the Mongols, who had now taken all of central Asia, had stopped at the Euphrates but were poised to take the Middle East."
Page by page, line by line, the details of such treasures are being uncovered every day, says Mr Irvine.
"We've never doubted the richness and potential of this material but it is turning out to be even richer than we thought it was," he says.
"For the first time we have a group of dedicated people sitting down and looking at it, and realising just how many different stories there are, how much information there is of interest to everybody across a whole spectrum, whether it's the social historian looking at what was being traded and what people were eating or somebody interested in historical data about public health, or trade routes and how they worked.
"At every kind of level there is much more information within this than we had even dared hope."
The first 500,000 pages are just a start; the project is a 10-year partnership that will run through to 2022 and the first phase, which ends next year, will have tackled only one sixth of the available material.
Funded by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, the digital archive will be one of the key foundations of the Qatar National Library in Doha.
Nearing completion, the library, a vital resource for the growing number of international universities setting up in Doha, is part of the country's plan, outlined in 2008 in its National Vision 2030, to "use the vast revenues from its substantial hydrocarbon resources to transform itself into a modern knowledge-based economy" and establish itself as the intellectual powerhouse of the Gulf.
"For us, the project was about really dramatically improving the access to which users and readers have to the content," says Mr Irvine. "For the Qataris, it's a major acquisition for their new national library but it's also about connecting a country with a very fast-changing society, culture and community with its past and about supporting the way in which they see the development of their knowledge economy."
The importance of making such material available not only to scholars around the world but also to young people throughout the Gulf was emphasised by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation, at a ceremony to mark the start of the partnership in October 2010.
The foundation, she said, would "work closely with the British Library to ensure that the resources are not used solely by researchers and academics but are open to the public so as to enable the young in particular to get involved in discovering, retracing and living their history".
