Читать книгу Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King - Ben Macintyre, Ben Macintyre - Страница 14

Fifteen years earlier Shah Shujah al-Moolk had welcomed Mountstuart Elphinstone to Peshawar, seated on his gilded throne. Now the Afghan king was an exile, and Ludhiana’s resident celebrity. ‘His Majesty might be seen almost daily in the vicinity of Loodianah in regal state,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The throng of a long procession proclaimed the approach of the King, shouting to the listless winds and unpeopled highways, as though he was in the midst of obedient subjects, with the deep and sonorous intonation of self-important command, where there was none to obey!’

The spectacle of this displaced potentate, parading the streets and demanding subservience from invisible subjects, struck the American as both touching and admirable, the display of a monarch who ‘never compromised his royal dignity’, and never disguised his belief that his protectors and hosts were infidels and inferiors. As Harlan observed with sly pleasure, even Captain Wade, the senior British official in Ludhiana, was treated as a minion. ‘The forms and etiquette of his court were no less strictly preserved by the banished king than they were in the brightest days of his greatness! Under no circumstances, however urgent, would His Majesty deviate from the etiquette of the Kabul court [and] his high and mighty hauteur could not be reconciled to an interview on equal terms with another human being.’

Ousted by his own brother, Shujah had fled to the Punjab in 1809, taking with him his harem and most of the Afghan royal jewellery, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the priceless gem originally taken from the Moguls by the conquering Nadir Shah of Persia and today a centrepiece of Britain’s Crown Jewels. Throwing himself on the mercy and hospitality of Ranjit Singh, Shujah found himself a prisoner of the maharajah, who had fixed his acquisitive eye on the diamond. ‘Sentinels were placed over our dwelling’, the exiled king wrote, as Ranjit gradually increased the pressure by depriving the king of the ‘necessaries of life’ which, in the case of Shujah and his luxury-loving entourage, were very considerable. Finally, the reluctant Shah Shujah had agreed to hand over the Koh-i-Noor in exchange for five thousand rupees and a promise that Ranjit would help him regain his crown. Instead of fulfilling his side of the bargain, however, Ranjit set about trying to extract Shujah’s remaining treasure.

Recalling his pleasant encounter with Elphinstone, Shujah resolved to make a dash for British India. Smuggling out some four hundred wives, children, concubines, eunuchs, retainers and others from under Ranjit’s nose was no easy task, but by bribing his guards, most of the harem was successfully moved to Ludhiana. Ranjit reinforced the ‘bodyguard’ surrounding his royal guest. ‘Seven ranges of guards were put upon our person, and armed men with torches lighted our bed,’ Shujah recorded. Finally the deposed king escaped by secretly tunnelling through several walls and then wriggling to freedom through the main sewer of Lahore, arriving smelly but safe on the other side of the city wall. After a series of adventures that took him through the passes of Lesser Tibet, he eventually reached Ludhiana. ‘Our cares and fatigues were now forgotten and, giving thanks to Almighty God who, having freed us from the hands of our enemies and led us through the snows and over the trackless mountains, had now safely conducted us to the lands of our friends, we passed a night for the first time with comfort and without dread.’ Reunited with his wives and provided with a substantial home and pension by the British, Shah Shujah al-Moolk had settled into comfortable exile, and immediately began plotting his return to Kabul.

The ousted king was a strange, violent, but curiously romantic figure. Astute, charming, vain and greedy, Shujah could be unexpectedly merciful on occasion, but by inclination he was brutal, capable of the most capricious and revolting cruelty. He had ruled for just six years, but was convinced he would one day return in triumph to Kabul. Visitors were always impressed by his poise, despite the indignities he had suffered, yet there was something mournful about him. It was said that he had been born under an unlucky star. Shujah talked a good military game but tended to balk on the battlefield at the critical moment, and despite removing the crown jewels en masse, he complained that he was almost broke. ‘He wanted vigour,’ wrote one observer. ‘He wanted activity; he wanted judgement; and, above all, he wanted money.’

Shujah repeatedly lobbied the British for help to win back his throne, but without success. ‘His Majesty strenuously kept alive the impression amongst his followers and contemporaries that he was about to attempt the invasion of Kabul, sustaining their hopes and anticipations,’ wrote Harlan, but the British insisted on maintaining strict neutrality, at least for the time being. The exiled king argued that he did not need a British army, but British cash. ‘Money would readily achieve all that was necessary,’ he had told Captain Wade. ‘By the loaning of a few hundred thousand rupees, he would disseminate confusion amongst his enemies. From the diffusion of gold, he proposed to create and nourish a powerful party that should sustain his own policy and by these means, which have ever been the successful mode of controlling the Avghaun tribes, to mount again that unsteady throne.’

Harlan discussed Shah Shujah’s predicament with Wade, and found the British agent doubtful that the Afghan king would ever regain his crown. ‘We conversed together upon the future probabilities of Shah Shujah’s restoration,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The subject of Russian influence was even then frequently discussed in the social circles of British India [and] the opinion of Captain W. sunk deep into my mind when he calmly observed, “There is no possible chance for Shujah’s restoration unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire at Kabul”!’ This was Harlan’s initiation into the Great Game, the shadowy struggle between Britain and Tsarist Russia for influence and control in Central Asia. Harlan would later recall the ‘singular prescience’ of Wade’s observation. Fear of Russian encroachment would eventually persuade the British to restore Shah Shujah to his throne, with horrendous consequences.

The exiled king’s poignant daily cavalcade, the tales of his fabled wealth and the wild, primitive land beckoning from beyond the Indus captured Harlan’s imagination entirely. He wrote: ‘I had determined to indulge the spirit of adventure that then absorbed my views of life.’ If the British would not return this great man to his throne, then Harlan himself might take a hand in the restoration, perhaps winning power and fame in the process. Europeans had forged their own kingdoms here before, starting with Alexander the Great. The most recent self-made king had been George Thomas, an Irish mercenary who at the end of the previous century, with a combination of guile, good fortune and extreme violence, had carved out a realm east of Delhi and assumed the title of Rajah of Haryana. Here were kingdoms for the making, requiring only enterprise, energy and luck. ‘Every man in his own estimation is a king,’ wrote Harlan, ‘enfeafed in the royal prerogative of divine right, with whom self is the God predominant.’

Any audience with the exiled king would have to be arranged without alerting the British. Through an intermediary, Harlan sent a secret message to Shujah’s vizier, or chief counsellor, outlining ‘a general proposition affecting the royal prospects of restoration’. The king snapped at the bait, and Harlan was summoned to a private interview in the garden of the royal residence.

At twilight on the appointed evening, a figure clad in Afghan turban and shalwar kamiz slipped quietly out of Wade’s house and headed in the direction of Shujah’s walled compound. ‘I assumed the disguise of a Cabulee,’ wrote Harlan, ‘although then unaccustomed to the role and unaddicted to the air of a native.’ The British had posted a pair of guards at the gates to Shujah’s residence, ostensibly for his protection but also to spy on visitors, including the numerous local ‘dancers’ attending the king and his court. The soldiers had been bribed in advance, and at a prearranged signal they melted away. ‘The Indian sentries were well trained in the amatory service of His Majesty,’ Harlan remarked wryly. ‘The magic influence of “open sesame” could not have been more effective upon bolts and bars. The portals were thrown open and I approached the small wicket gate that afforded secret egress in a retired part of the wall.’

On the other side of the gate stood Mullah Shakur, Shujah’s vizier, personal cleric and sometime military commander. ‘The priest was a short fat person,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The rotundity of his figure was adequately finished by the huge turban characteristic of his class, encased in voluminous outline by a profusion of long thick hair which fell upon his shoulders in heavy sable silvered curls.’ There was a reason for the vizier’s elaborate hairdo, for Shakur’s most obvious distinguishing feature was the absence of his ears. These had been cut off on the orders of the king many years earlier, as a punishment for cowardice on the battlefield, and Mullah Shakur had grown his flowing locks to conceal the mutilation.

Harlan would soon discover that Shujah had an unpleasant penchant for removing the ears, tongues, noses and even the testicles of those of his courtiers who had offended him; and despite his own disfigurement, Mullah Shakur was an enthusiast for this brutal form of chastisement. The result was an ‘earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king’s service’, including one Khwajah Mika, the chief eunuch, an African Muslim in charge of the royal harem. The king had ordered Khwajah to be de-eared during a royal picnic, after the tent protecting the king’s wives from sight had been blown down by a gust of wind. ‘The executioner was of a tender conscience,’ Harlan wrote, and ‘merely deprived Khwajah Mika of the lower part of the organ’. Having already lost his manhood, the African appears to have been philosophical about the additional loss of his lobes, and unlike the mullah he ‘shaved the head and fearlessly displayed the mark of royal favour’.

Earless and suspicious, Mullah Shakur eyed the American visitor carefully. ‘Having assured himself by carefully scanning my features that I was the person he expected, for my dress entirely concealed the Christian outline, he replied to my salutation in a subdued tone and turning about without another word, led the way into the interior.’

It was the golden moment just before sunset in India known as the time of hawa khana, ‘breathing the air’, when the cooling earth exhales. What Harlan saw in the dusk light took his breath away: a vast and perfectly tended Oriental garden in full bloom: ‘His Majesty’s tastes and exiled fancies sought gratification in the floral beauties of his native soil, and the royal mind had ameliorated its misfortunes in the construction of a garden on the model of Oriental horticulture practised in the City of Cabul. This enclosure, which was three hundred yards square, included the fruit trees, the parterres of flowers, the terraced walks and the well irrigated soil incident to the place of his nativity, and thus the king caused to be transplanted a part, at least, of the dominion which he had lost.’ Like many expatriates, Shujah had surrounded himself with memories of home, but he had done so in spectacular style, reproducing the gardens of Kabul’s Bala Hisar fortress, from the harem buildings to the flowerbeds to the pavilions, where he would play chess in the evenings.

Motioning Harlan to follow, the vizier set off down a cool avenue of lime and orange trees. Many years later, Harlan recalled the delightful sensation of leaving the parched evening heat of India to enter the refreshing shade of a make-believe pleasure garden with blooming flowers, ornamental ponds and fountains, their cool spray shining in the moonlight.

As they neared a large terrace walled with richly embroidered cloth, the mullah touched Harlan’s shoulder, indicating that he should remain where he was, and slipped inside the enclosure. Household servants and slaves flitted between the trees, observing the newcomer in Afghan robes, who tried to calm his nerves by identifying the different varieties of fruit trees. Silently Mullah Shakur reappeared at Harlan’s elbow, drew him towards the terrace and lifted the flap. Inside, on an elevated banquette, sat Shujah al-Moolk, the exiled king of Afghanistan, enthroned in a vast armchair.

Harlan snapped off his best military salute. Shujah responded with a courteous nod, a few words of welcome and a sprinkling of light compliments. Harlan had been boning up on Afghan courtly etiquette, and struggled through the fantastically ornate language required when addressing royalty. ‘I replied in bad Hindoostani and worse Persian,’ he conceded, ‘for I was then but a neophyte in the acquisition of Oriental languages.’

Harlan studied the exiled monarch, a stout and imposing figure in middle age with a thick beard dyed the deepest black. His clothing was expensively simple, a plain white tunic of fine muslin over dark silk pantaloons, but his headgear was priceless: a large velvet cap, scalloped at the edges and adorned in the centre by a large diamond. Harlan was immediately struck by ‘the grace and dignity of His Highness’s demeanour’. Every movement, every word, was freighted with unquestionable authority. The heavy-lidded eyes radiated power and menace, but also sadness: ‘Years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation.’ His commands were barked in monosyllables, and his servants, including Mullah Shakur, were plainly terrified of him, loitering in submissive attitudes like dogs waiting to be kicked.

Courtesies over, in a mixture of languages Harlan made the king an offer. He would travel secretly to Kabul, and link up with Shah Shujah’s allies to organise a rebellion. Meanwhile Shujah should begin raising troops for an assault against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had usurped his crown. Once Harlan had managed to ‘ascertain and organise his partisans’ in Kabul, he proposed to return to Ludhiana and lead the king’s troops in a full-scale invasion. If all went according to plan this would coincide with a mass uprising in Kabul, and Shah Shujah al-Moolk, with Harlan at his side, would return in triumph to the throne of his ancestors. Harlan even offered to provide some of the troops. ‘I engaged to join the royal standard with a thousand retainers,’ he wrote, ‘holding myself responsible for the command of the army and the performance of all duties connected with the military details of an expedition into the kingdom of Kabul.’

If the king was surprised by this audacious proposition, he was far too clever to show it. His popularity in his homeland, he told Harlan, ‘far preponderated above the present leader in Kabul’, and he listed the powerful supporters who would flock to the royal banner. Indeed, he would have launched such an invasion already, but the British had declined to promise him a safe haven in case of failure, and he was concerned for the safety of the harem, which he could hardly take into battle. If the British government would look after his family, and promise that he could return to Ludhiana if the invasion failed, then he would immediately begin to prepare an expedition. Shujah had not yet recruited a single soldier to his cause, and already he was talking about defeat. This, as Harlan would soon learn, was typical of a man whose arrogance was matched only by his timidity.

And what, Shujah asked pointedly, did Harlan expect for himself, should this daring plan come to fruition? Harlan’s response was astonishing. In return for restoring Shujah’s crown, this young American adventurer without references, Persian or experience of military command, expected to govern the kingdom, in fact if not in name. If their joint enterprise was successful, Shujah would reign once more in Kabul, but Harlan proposed to rule as his vizier, an Afghan potentate in his own right.

Even Shah Shujah’s poise appears to have been temporarily undermined by this presumptuous suggestion, and instead of replying directly, the exiled king began extolling the splendours of Kabul, its music, its gardens, its trees laden with luscious fruit. ‘Kabul is called the Crown of the Air,’ he declared. ‘I pray for the possession of those pleasures which my native country alone can afford.’

Then he fell into a reverie, and for several minutes nothing was said. Finally he fixed his visitor with a beady stare, and spoke: ‘Should success attend your measures, I am ready to relinquish all political power into your hands and claim only for myself the summer and winter residences, with the fruits of Kabul and Kandahar. Heaven grant we may enjoy together the revival of those sweetly varied and luxurious hours which daily haunt my imagination and in unison participate in possession of an inheritance which fate at this moment denies to me.’

The interview was over. Harlan bowed and backed out of the royal presence. His encounter with this pining potentate had moved him. ‘My feelings warmed into deep sympathy for the exiled monarch and I took leave of His Majesty with the confirmed determination of devoting myself to his service.’ Harlan was elated by the pure romance of his imagined mission, and the opportunity to invent himself as the liberator of a country oppressed by tyranny. Of course he only had Shujah’s word for this, but that was enough: ‘I saw him [as] an exiled and legitimate monarch, the victim of treasonable practices, popular in the regard of his subjects, opposed by a combination of feudal chiefs against the hereditary ruler [they] had driven into banishment.’

Harlan eventually came to see the Old Pretender in a very different light, and would conclude that ‘In his true colours he was unparalleled in infamous debauchery.’ The mutilated mullah who now led him away was warning enough that he was dealing with a most unpredictable man. Ears or no, Mullah Shakur had been listening intently throughout the interview, and as they walked back down the avenue of fruit trees the scarred old warrior-divine instructed Harlan to begin military preparations while awaiting Shujah’s decision on the timing of his quest. At the wicket gate Harlan bade farewell to the vizier and the two men parted, as Harlan wrote, ‘he to revalue with His Majesty the probabilities of success which my proposals encouraged, and I to devise additional and appropriate measures for the prosecution of castle building’.

To build castles Harlan needed troops. With impressive hubris he ordered a Ludhiana tailor to sew him an American flag, ran it up a makeshift flagpole on the edge of town and, without any authority to do so, began recruiting an army under the stars and stripes. There were plenty of native mercenaries knocking about the border station looking for work and adventure, and word soon spread that the feringhee was prepared to pay good money for fighting men. Local Europeans were convinced that this peculiar American planned to carve out his own kingdom, as George Thomas had done a generation earlier, an impression he did nothing to dispel. William McGregor, an English doctor posted in Ludhiana, wrote that Harlan ‘started out with the intention of subduing all the countries across the Sutlej’, noting that he had ‘hoisted the American flag at Loodhiana, and collected a rabble’. Joseph Wolff, the wandering missionary, recorded that Harlan had left British India intending ‘to make himself king of Afghanistan’.

Harlan had little choice but to confide in Captain Wade, and told the Englishman that Shujah had invested him with ‘the powers of a secret agent, in which he was commissioned and stimulated to revolutionize Avghanistan in favor of the “true King”’. Indeed, the British agent, with his wide network of informers, was probably aware of what Harlan was up to from the moment he entered Shujah’s pleasure garden. Wade, maintaining British neutrality, did not overtly encourage the scheme, while indicating that any information Harlan cared to relay about the Afghan situation would be received with great interest – unofficially, of course. The British official wrote to Calcutta: ‘Dr Harlan proposed to communicate his progress to me as opportunities might offer, and should his communications contain anything of interest to the government, I shall consider it my duty to report.’

Wade had another, more specific task for the young American: to determine what had happened to the last white man to reach Kabul, an explorer who had set off into the wilderness four years earlier, and never come back. The fate of William Moorcroft, horse doctor, pioneer and British spy, was and remains one of the great mysteries of the period.

An English veterinary surgeon employed by the Company as superintendent of its stud, Moorcroft had become convinced that in the wilds of Tartary, beyond the fabled Hindu Kush, were horses of such strength and beauty that they would transform the bloodstock of the Company’s cavalry. He would make three extraordinary journeys in search of the legendary Turcoman steeds, the last of which would take him to the Punjab, Ladakh, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Bokhara, and kill him.

Moorcroft’s mission went beyond horse-hunting: by penetrating the unmapped regions he hoped to open up the markets of Central Asia, and establish a British commercial presence there before the Russians did so. In 1820 he had set off on what would be an epic five-year, two-thousand-mile journey, accompanied by a three-hundred-strong entourage including another Englishman named George Trebeck, George Guthrie, an Anglo-Indian doctor, and a Gurkha guard. He had crossed the Sutlej on inflated animal skins, traversed Sikh territory and entered the Himalayan heights via the Rohtang Pass, becoming one of the first Europeans ever to reach the remote Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh. Along the way his veterinary expertise was used to treat a variety of human ailments, most notably cataracts. From Ladakh he continued through Kashmir, and after journeying across the Punjab plains he had crossed the Indus into the land of the Pathans. In December 1823 he arrived in Peshawar. Ignoring written instructions to return, he had pressed on through the Khyber Pass and on to Kabul. The Afghan city was going through one of its regular periods of bloody upheaval, and Moorcroft did not care to linger. Following the old trade route, he crossed the mountains, becoming the first Englishman to reach the steppes of Transoxiana since the sixteenth century.

There, however, Moorcroft fell into the clutches of Murad Beg, the Khan of Kunduz, an Uzbek warlord with an unsavoury reputation for slave-dealing. Murad Beg did not disguise his opinion (a valid one) that Moorcroft was a spy, deserving immediate and painful death. Trebeck described Murad as ‘a wretch who murdered his uncle and brother, prostituted to a robber his sister and daughter, and sells into slavery women he has kept for a considerable time in his seraglio’. Only after paying Murad 23,000 rupees was Moorcroft able to continue his journey to Bokhara; the canny Khan was perfectly well aware that he would have to come back the same way.

Moorcroft finally reached Bokhara in February 1825, at the same moment Harlan was fighting his way through the Burmese jungle. There he obtained sixty horses, and turned back towards British India. At Balkh, successor to the fabled Bactrian city where Alexander the Great had built an outpost of Greek civilisation, Moorcroft was once more forced to negotiate for his life with the repulsive Murad Beg. In the last entry in his journal, the fifty-nine-year-old explorer wrote of the ‘confusion, oppression and tyranny’ inflicted by the Uzbek chief. And there, abruptly, his diary ended. Quite how he perished is unknown. Officially he died of fever, a victim of Balkh’s famously pestilential climate, but there were persistent rumours that he had been poisoned, or, less credibly, that he had survived and lived out his remaining days in secret retirement in Ladakh. All of Moorcroft’s possessions, including his books, notes and journals, were promptly stolen. The rest of the party remained trapped, for Murad Beg’s horsemen had sealed off every escape route. Guthrie succumbed to fever, followed by Trebeck. ‘After burying his two European fellow-travellers he sunk, at an early age, after four months suffering in a distant country, without a friend, without assistance, and without consolation.’ Extravagant rumours circulated in India that the entire party had been murdered at the instigation of Russian agents determined to prevent British commercial penetration of Central Asia. Without even the frail protection of their British leaders, the surviving members of Moorcroft’s party were captured by the Uzbeks and sold into slavery.

Moorcroft’s death was announced in the Asiatic Journal in 1826. The East India Company was happy to forget about its ill-fated and rebellious envoy, but John Palmer, a friend of the horse-vet and one of the most powerful merchants in Calcutta, was determined to get to the truth. From official documents, it appears that Palmer got wind of Harlan’s plans through Captain Wade, and commissioned him to find out exactly what had happened to Moorcroft, and if possible to retrieve his plundered property. One historian has estimated that Harlan was provided with between 50,000 and 60,000 rupees to retrieve Moorcroft’s effects, a very substantial addition to his war chest.

The recruits to Harlan’s expanding army came in a variety of shapes and sizes: Muslims and Hindus, a number of Afghans, and even Akalis, Sikh fundamentalists who were among the most ferocious and least reliable of mercenaries, as apt to kill their commanders as the enemy. Dr McGregor was unimpressed with the quality of these troops, and Harlan himself was well aware that he was employing a band of cut-throats loyal to his money and little else. At some expense, therefore, he recruited a troop of twenty-four sepoys, native Indian soldiers who had served in the Bengal army on whom he could place some reliance. Another former Company soldier, ‘a faithful hindoo of the Brahmin caste’ by the name of Drigpal, was appointed jemadar, or native officer in command of the sepoys.

By the autumn of 1827 Harlan had assembled about a hundred fighting men, and calculated that more could be impressed en route. ‘The time for my departure drew near,’ he wrote. ‘My camp was pitched in the vicinity of the cantonments, my followers were all entertained [employed] and the American flag before my tent door signalised the independence of the occupant.’

He sent a message to Mullah Shakur, informing him that the army was ready to depart, and the American was summoned back to the king’s garden for another private meeting, at which plans of action and routes of travel were decided upon, and Shujah provided him with letters which might prove useful to him. The vizier also handed over a large sum of money in gold and silver coin, to defray Harlan’s expenses and, most important, for bribery once he reached Kabul. When this was added to the funds he had saved from his Company service and the fee for finding Moorcroft’s property, Harlan believed he now had sufficient funds to start a revolution.

The date of departure was set for 7 November 1827, and as he prepared to strike camp, Harlan felt a twinge of melancholy. He was ambivalent about the British rulers of India, but he had made some close friends among them, admiring the sheer resilience and energy of men like Claude Wade. ‘A shadow of regret passed like a fleeting tide when I looked back upon the happy period of my residence in British India, and concern for the future began to crowd upon me in the anticipation of dangers unknown.’ Those dangers could hardly have been more extreme, for Harlan had set himself a series of monumental tasks: to unseat the incumbent ruler of a country famed for its savagery, at the behest of an exile with the habit of lopping off bits of his employees; to spy for the British (who would disown him completely if he was caught); and to find the property of a man who had probably been murdered by slave-dealing Uzbeks. In his spare time he intended to write a treatise on natural history.

William Moorcroft had failed to return from the wilderness despite taking with him the Company’s official seal, a unit of heavily-armed Gurkhas, two light artillery pieces and two European companions. Harlan was now proposing to follow him, with only a motley group of mercenaries and a bag of gold, on a quest inviting disaster and an exceptionally messy death. And as an American, he had no imperial power to fall back on in case of difficulty. While his future appeared uncertain, and in all probability brief, he viewed the coming trials with almost morbid pleasure: ‘I had just stepped within the threshold of active life, was alone in the world, far removed from friends and home, inadequately acquainted with the language of the country I was about to visit, and surrounded by selfish and deceitful and irresponsible people in the persons of my domestics and guards – consisting of Avghauns, Hindus and Musslemen of India – with all the world in boundless prospect and none with whom to advise or consult. Completely alone, companionless and solitary, I plunged into the indistinct expanse of futurity, the unknown and mysterious, which like the obscurity of fate is invoked in the deep darkness of time.’

Two days before the army was due to depart, a most peculiar figure appeared outside Harlan’s tent and demanded an audience. Tubby, barrel-chested and at least fifty years old, the man was missing his left arm from above the elbow, one eye was partly clouded over, the other glittered with intelligence, and both were crossed in an alarming manner. The fellow’s military bearing was complemented by a pair of enormous moustaches and a mighty curved sabre, or talwar, dangling from his belt. After offering a crisp salute with his remaining hand he launched into a bizarre prepared speech: ‘I have served His Majesty by flood and field, through good and evil fortune, to the footstool of the throne and the threshold of the jail. For twenty years have I been a slave to the king’s service in which I lost my left hand and had nothing but the stump of my arm to exhibit in lieu of honours and wealth and dignities, which the worthless have borne off in triumph, and I am still the unrewarded, the faithful, the brave, the famous Khan Gool Khan, Rossiladar, commander of a thousand men, fierce as lions, yesterday in the service of Shah Shujah, may he live forever.’ Finally, he got to the point: ‘Here I am in the Saheb’s service. May his house flourish, for the future I am his purchased slave and respect even the dog that licks his feet!’

Once Gul Khan had regained his breath he explained that he was a Rohillah, a member of the Afghan tribe whose horse-trading enterprises in India had led to their establishing a number of small states along the north India trading routes. The Rohillahs were expert horsemen, and famous as mercenaries. Gul Khan announced that he had served for years as a soldier under the banner of Shah Shujah. ‘He had wandered many years with His Majesty, [and] had followed the fortunes of the ex-king when he fled from the prison to which Ranjeet Singh, after securing the Koh-i-Noor, had ignobly confined Shujah who was then his guest, had traversed the great Himalaya mountains when the royal fugitive, to escape the danger of recapture, fled from Lahore through the Kashmir and penetrating into Tibet, threaded the intricate mazes of those deep glens and unknown valleys, crossing pass after pass over mountainous routes covered with heavy forest or eternal snows and scarcely inhabited by man, the redoubt of the hyena, the leopard and the wolf, braving the rapacious brutes in his flight from the still more ferocious creature man!’

Since Shujah’s arrival in Ludhiana, Gul Khan and his fellow Rohillahs had worked as mercenaries (or, more accurately, as freelance bandits) serving various princes in the surrounding areas. Declaring himself ‘thoroughly acquainted with the country I had before me’, the great Gul Khan now offered his services as risaldar, or native commander. Harlan had come across Rohillah mercenaries before, and noted sardonically: ‘The versatility of service for which the Rohillahs are remarkable gives them pre-eminent claims as traitors to their salt, and renders them useful but dangerous and unfaithful agents.’

Mulling this singular job application, Harlan enquired how Gul Khan had lost his arm. At this the talkative Rohillah became taciturn, muttering vaguely that his injury had been ‘sustained upon the field of battle’. ‘He seemed averse to talk much and openly on the subject however voluble upon other matters,’ wrote Harlan. ‘I afterwards heard there were several versions concerning Gool Khan’s handless limb, and some ascribed that misfortune to the royal displeasure.’

‘I had then no suspicion of his honour or honesty,’ wrote Harlan, who would later come to doubt both. There was no time to substantiate Gul Khan’s claims, and for all his odd appearance he seemed the ideal lieutenant, his band of Rohillahs a useful addition to the ranks. ‘This was an enterprise requiring the perseverance of a fearless and determined spirit and a knowledge of the country,’ wrote Harlan. ‘Of the two first requirements I could boast the possession. The other essential was attained by enlisting individuals who knew the language, the people and the routes. These were present through Gool Khan, and he was forthwith installed as leader of the mercenary band who followed my fortunes.’

On 7 November 1827 the inhabitants of Ludhiana turned out to witness Harlan’s departure: with Old Glory fluttering overhead, an American in a cocked hat rode out of town on a thoroughbred horse, accompanied by a mongrel dog, a ragtag army of mercenaries and a one-armed bandit. The British agent also watched him go, and informed Calcutta that Harlan was planning to cross the Indus, proceed to Peshawar and thence to Kabul itself. Claude Wade evidently did not expect to see him again.

Harlan had originally intended to take the most direct route into Afghanistan, by crossing the Sutlej, passing through the Punjab and entering the country via Peshawar. Ranjit Singh, however, was still refusing to grant safe passage. Harlan put the delay down to inefficiency, but more likely the Sikh maharajah had got wind of Harlan’s plans and did not want a private army marching through his territory. ‘The dilatory proceedings of the Punjab court quickly exhausted my patience and in contempt of the procrastinating ruler, I determined upon taking the route via Bhawulpore across the Indus below Mooltaun, [to] follow up the right bank of the celebrated stream and reach Peshawar,’ thus avoiding the Punjab itself.

Alexander the Great was much on Harlan’s mind, for he would be entering lands the Macedonian had conquered some twenty-one centuries earlier, although heading in the opposite direction. In 331 BC, having defeated the Achaemenid monarch Darius the Great, Alexander claimed the Persian empire, and marched eastwards into Afghanistan, founding cities as he went: Alexandria Arachosia near Kandahar, Alexandria-ad-Caucasum north of Kabul. Then, after a gruelling march over the Hindu Kush, he had penetrated the wild lands beyond the Oxus, building his most remote city at the northeastern limit of Persian influence: Alexandria-Eschate, ‘Alexandria-at-the-end-of-the-world’. As Darius had ruled through satraps, subordinate provincial governors, so Alexander appointed rulers in his wake to administer the expanding empire. In 327 BC he crossed back over the mountains, and set his sights on India, crossing the great Indus River in 326 B C and defeating Poros, the local king, at the battle of Jhelum. He had then marched south, through the lands Harlan now saw in the desert distance.

As the troop marched alongside the Sutlej – ‘the Hysudrus of the Greeks’, noted Harlan – its leader observed that the local people had carved irrigation channels to cultivate patches of land on either side of the river. ‘The country was made to smell like the rose,’ he wrote. British engineers would eventually build a vast network of canals and waterworks, creating a new and fertile agrarian region, but in Harlan’s time patches of thick jungle still bordered the rivers, with scrub and desert beyond. ‘Here and there we struck the desert border as we advanced, a flat surface of sand extending to the horizon without vegetation.’ His excitement mounting, Harlan gazed across the plain towards ‘the interior of Asia, the land of caravans, the land of the elephant and tamarisk, and the dominion of the horse’.

Before leaving Ludhiana, Harlan had purchased seven saddle horses for Gul Khan and the other officers, and seven camels to carry supplies, weapons and baggage. This included tents, a large armchair, folding chairs, tables, several dozen muskets (flintlocks and matchlocks), ammunition, gunpowder, rope and Harlan’s substantial library. For his own use the American had selected three horses: a sleek Arab, a grey from Tartary, and ‘a half-English brood mare named Flora’. Gentle and swift, Flora had been a gift from ‘a valued friend’, a British army colonel, and she was Harlan’s most prized possession.

Behind the camels lumbered a line of carriage cattle, bearing additional food and forage. Since he was heading into country that was sparsely inhabited and probably hostile, Harlan wrote, ‘supplies of all kinds – water, flour, grain, forage and frequently wood – [must] be transported with the forces’. The baggage train moved with infuriating slowness. Nothing is ‘more certain to hamper the movements of an army than superfluous baggage or impedimenta’, wrote Harlan, who had brought only the bare minimum of personal luxuries, including tea, coffee, chocolate and spices. A plentiful supply of tobacco was stashed in his saddlebags, but in deference to Muslim beliefs he dispensed with alcohol entirely. ‘Long experience, general and personal, convinces me that the interdict of Muhammad had been attended with results divinely philanthropic to the myriads of his followers,’ he wrote. Harlan had been raised in a strictly abstemious Quaker culture, and while he sometimes drank socially or medicinally, he regarded drunkenness with pious disapproval.

In other respects, however, he wore his Quakerism lightly – too lightly for some of his brethren back in Chester County. While he was marching into the unknown, news of his activities had reached home, where the Society of Friends convened a meeting to discuss the case of wandering Brother Harlan. A painful decision was reached: ‘Josiah Harlan, who has for many years been absent from this country, has violated our testimony against war by serving in the capacity of surgeon in an army. This meeting is of the judgement that the time has arrived when it is proper to testify its disunity with his conduct, and that he no longer retains the right of membership with the Religious Society of Friends.’ Harlan did not know that he had been disowned by his own Church. As a Freemason, he had little time for dogmatic religion, whether Islamic or Christian, but throughout the ensuing years of warfare and intrigue he continued to consider himself a Quaker.

There was another, crucial item of luggage packed away on top of one of the camels, that no man who would be king, or king-maker, could do without. This was a large royal mace, described by Harlan as ‘an embossed silver stick five feet long tapering from a globular head two and a half inches in diameter’. The mace was an indispensable tool of courtly etiquette, a visible demonstration of royal clout to be carried on ceremonial occasions by a functionary known as the shaughaussy or ‘mace-bearer’, whose job, apart from looking appropriately official and dignified, was to act as the conveyer of important messages. The man responsible for this function in Harlan’s entourage was one Amirullah, a cadaverous Afghan with a long beard and opinions on everything, whose commanding figure and natural pomposity made him ideal for the task. He would become Harlan’s loyal confidant and his mascot. Impressing local chieftains along the route was not only good form, but a vital means of self-protection.

Harlan was determined that although his troop might look like a posse of brigands, they would march like an army and be regulated by military discipline. The day began at 4 a.m., when the camp was roused by a bugle call, with the march beginning no more than an hour later. Once the sun was up the troop would pause for a breakfast of cold chapattis before resuming the march. At midday a halt was ordered, and the men would disperse to prepare meals in large dekshies or cooking pots, according to their different religious traditions, all of which Harlan meticulously noted in his journals. After the main meal of the day the march recommenced, ending in late afternoon at a campsite selected by an advance party. For his own accommodation Harlan had obtained ‘a large single poled tent’ which was surrounded by ‘Connaughts or extensive walls of cloth with bamboo stretchers’ to create a semi-private enclosure. The soldiers gathered for the night under a large tent without walls, while ‘the house servants and inferior attaches’ were housed in a third, smaller tent.

When the march was passing through inhabited areas Harlan usually led the troop on horseback, noting that ‘the display of dignity is important’, but at other times he adopted another form of transport uniquely suited to the terrain. This was the cudjawa, or camel litter, the closest thing available to a first-class travelling compartment: ‘A covered box,’ in Harlan’s words, ‘provided with a cupola admitting of an upright sitting posture’ and made from scarlet woollen cloth. The cudjawa came complete with its own heating system for winter travel, and even bathroom facilities: ‘The interior being lined with woollen rugs, they prove to the traveller a very comfortable contrivance … ample enough to allow one to keep in them a small fire, and also to perform the required necessities.’ Regrettably, there is no contemporary account of quite how this mobile toilet operated.

The comfort and seclusion of a cudjawa was a mode of travel particularly suited to a bookish man, and Harlan observed that with ‘a few days’ experience and a supply of literature, the passenger could readily engross the measure of a long journey, continually and often agreeably varied by ever changing scenes and novel incidents which serve to enliven him in this singularly Oriental and primitive mode, to cure the spirits and amuse the mind with strange reflections upon unfamiliar objects’. Jolting along at about two miles an hour, Harlan had ample opportunity to reread Elphinstone and what little other literature existed on Afghanistan, and imagine the terra incognita ahead.