The Haj traffic continued to expand between 1909 and 1911, the total number of pilgrims who left Bombay for Jeddah in those years being 19,748 and 21,965 respectively. From 1912 the numbers commenced to decline until the year after the outbreak of the War, when the traffic virtually ceased altogether. The period witnessed a struggle on the part of a British shipping-firm to secure the monopoly of the Red Sea trade, including the pilgrim traffic, by ousting the few Muhammadan-owned vessels which had hitherto catered for the pilgrims. The firm in question was unquestionably in a position to offer better vessels and a better organization for the return journey than the Indian ship-owners: but one or two of the latter resented the effort to drive them out of the traffic, with the result that the Commissioner of Police and the Pilgrim department, who endeavoured to act in a strictly neutral manner, ran the risk of blame from both parties for showing undue preference to their rivals. At the moment of the Declaration of War all the vessels engaged in the traffic were owned by the British firm, except one or at most two which belonged to a well-known Muhammadan resident. It might have been supposed that, considering the wholly Islamic character of the pilgrimage, a British firm would have acquiesced in the continued presence of a Muhammadan-owned vessel, and have trusted to time and the ordinary economic law for its ultimate disappearance from the Jeddah route. Such, however, was not the case; and at the instance of the local manager of the firm, a pushing Scot from Aberdeen, the Bombay Government was asked practically to insist upon the Commissioner and the Pilgrim department refusing all facilities to the Muhammadan ship-owner to sell his tickets and dispatch his vessel. The outbreak of War in 1914, and the consequent cessation of the traffic to and from Jeddah, solved a dispute which for some time imposed additional work upon the Police and Pilgrim authorities.