Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King

I extended my search: to the Punjab, where Harlan had lived in the 1820s; to his birthplace in Pennsylvania; to San Francisco, where he died; and back to Kabul. Gradually his life began to take shape: in the official records of Maharajah Ranjit Singh of Lahore, in the memoirs and diaries of contemporary travellers and soldiers, and in the intelligence archives of imperial India. In a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I finally discovered Harlan’s lost voice: in an old box, buried and forgotten among the files, was a tattered manuscript handwritten in curling copperplate, a large section of Harlan’s missing autobiography, unnoticed and unread since his death, along with letters, poems and drawings.

In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the Prince of Ghor or Ghoree, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. ‘He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever,’ Harlan was quoted as saying. ‘The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved.’ This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.

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Josiah Harlan’s hunt for a crown began with a letter. A grubby, much-handled, unhappy letter that followed the young American merchant seaman from Philadelphia to Canton in China, and finally to Calcutta, the teeming capital of British power in India, in 1822. It was written by one of Harlan’s brothers, back in Chester County, Pennsylvania, who had entrusted it to another seaman, bound for the East, in the hope that the bad news might reach Josiah before he set sail for home. After many months, the dog-eared document caught up with Harlan in Calcutta: he read it, burned it, swore that he would never return to America, and set off alone on an eighteen-year odyssey into the heart of Central Asia.

That was the way Harlan remembered it. A Byronic act of impulse prompted by a broken promise and an injured heart; but in truth his journey had started many years earlier. It began in the avid imagination of a schoolboy, in the dockside stories of the seamen, in a newly-born American empire of limitless promise and adventure. It began in the mind of a youth who was born a humble Quaker, but imagined himself an ancient king.

Joshua and Sarah Harlan, Harlan’s parents, were prosperous, pious people of quiet pacifism and deep faith. A merchant broker, Joshua had made sufficient money in the great port of Philadelphia to buy a small farm in Newlin Township, Chester County, where he had raised a large family. There had been Harlans in the county since 1687, when one Michael Harlan, from Durham in England, had emigrated like so many Quakers to the New World. Joshua and Sarah were plain of dress and speech, rejected the trappings of worship, never swore an oath or drank a drop of alcohol, and passionately opposed war. They were, therefore, somewhat unlikely candidates to produce a son who would become an Oriental potentate with his own army and a taste for exotic royal costumes.

Josiah Harlan arrived, with little fanfare, on 12 June 1799, the latest addition to a brood that already included Ann, James, Charles, Sarah, Mary, Joshua, William and Richard. Edward was born four years later. We know little of Josiah’s earliest years, save that they were noisy, joyful and scholarly, for the Quaker education system was excellent. Josiah read widely and voraciously: Shakespeare and Burke, Pliny and Plato, histories and romances, poetry and politics, treatises on natural history, physics, and chemistry.

Josiah was just thirteen when his mother died, worn out by childbirth. Sarah bequeathed an estate of $2,000 to her three daughters, but left nothing to her seven sons, who were expected to make their own fortunes – which they did in ways that show Josiah was not the only Harlan anxious to explore the world beyond Chester County. Charles departed for South America as soon as he was old enough to leave home, and was never seen again; James went to sea and died aboard an English man-of-war at the age of twenty-seven; and Richard wandered the East before becoming a celebrated anatomist (his hobby was studying human crania, and he finally amassed 275 of them, the largest collection in America). While the sons of the family were off collecting crowns of gold and bone and dying in exotic locations, the daughters remained at home: all three of Josiah’s sisters would die spinsters in Chester County.

Motherless, Josiah Harlan plunged deeper into a world of imagination and learning. At the age of fifteen, one contemporary recorded, he ‘amused himself with reading medical books and the history of Plutarch, as also the inspired Prophets’. A natural linguist, he read Latin and Greek, and spoke French fluently. He could put his mind and hand to anything, whether or not the results were worth it: his poetry was poor, and his watercolours were worse. Botany became a passion, and his writings overflow with observations on plants and flowers, wild and cultivated. His prose style, particularly at moments of emotion or elation, tended towards the flowery.

Above all, he steeped himself in Greek and Roman history. Many years later, an educated traveller who came across Harlan in the wilds of the Punjab found him immersed in classical literature, ‘in the which study I found him wonderfully well versed’. Harlan’s obsession with Alexander the Great dates from his earliest boyhood. He could recite long passages from Plutarch’s The Age of Alexander, and he carried a copy of The History of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus throughout his travels. Alexander’s conquests in Persia, Afghanistan and India, were an inspiration to the young man growing up among the placid green fields of Pennsylvania, and he idealised the Macedonian conqueror: ‘In seven years Alexander performed feats that have consecrated his memory amongst the benefactors of mankind, and impressed the stamp of civilization on the face of the known world,’ he wrote. Harlan would follow Alexander to the uncharted corners of Afghanistan, and back again.

A young American in a young America, Josiah Harlan was impatient, ambitious and utterly convinced of his own abilities: some considered him arrogant, others thought him charming; no one ever found him boring. By the age of eighteen he was over six feet tall, a striking, muscular, raw-boned and handsome young man with a long face, high forehead and somewhat unsettling dark hazel eyes. He might have been the embodiment of a growing nation in young adulthood, as described by Henry Adams: ‘Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.’

Harlan grew up in the America of Thomas Jefferson, a place of infinite space and possibility. Explorers like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had started to open up the western two thirds of North America, but vast areas of the globe remained undiscovered and unmapped: the interior of Africa, Australia, Antarctica and, somewhere beyond the borders of India, the mysteries of Central Asia and China. The very breadth of the American continent inspired faith in the potential of a world to be discovered. Walt Whitman rejoiced in the scale of the American horizon:

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,

I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,

I am afoot with my vision.

Intrepid Americans were moving west in their thousands; young Harlan, however, shed the ballast of his childhood and headed east.

Josiah’s wanderlust, and his growing interest in medicine, can be traced to the influence of his brother Richard. Three years older than Josiah, Richard had entered the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, and then travelled to Calcutta as a surgeon on an East India Company ship in 1816. After a year at sea he had returned to complete his medical degree, bringing back tales of his voyage and the sights and sounds of India. In the spring of 1820 Joshua Harlan arranged a job for Josiah as ‘supercargo’, the officer in charge of sales, on a merchant ship bound for Calcutta and Canton.

Before setting sail for the East, Josiah joined the secret fraternal order of Freemasons. Quite when or why he came to take the oath is unclear, but there was much in Freemasonry to attract a man of Harlan’s temperament: the emphasis on history (Freemasonry traces its origins to the stonemasons who built Solomon’s Temple), on masculine self-sufficiency and the exploration of ethical and philosophical issues. America’s Masonic lodges tended to draw freethinkers and rationalists, men of politics and action: a third of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, had been Masons. Joined by high ideals and a shared fealty to the lodge, Freemasons were expected to demonstrate the utmost tolerance while following a moral system clothed in ritual with allegorical symbols adopted from Christianity, the Crusaders of the Middle Ages and Islam. Like Rudyard Kipling, who would also join the organisation as a young man, Harlan ‘appreciated Freemasonry for its sense of brotherhood and its egalitarian attitude to diverse faiths and classes’.

Harlan seldom discussed his religious beliefs, but his Quaker upbringing moulded him for life. Founded in England in the seventeenth century, the Quaker movement had taken deep root in America, with a credo that set its adherents apart from other Christians. Quakers – a name originally intended as an insult because they ‘tremble at the word of God’ – worship without paid priests or dogma, believing that God, or the Inner Light, is in everyone. All of human life is sacred. ‘Therefore we cannot learn war anymore,’ declares the Quaker testimony. ‘The Spirit of Christ which leads us into all truth will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the kingdoms of this world.’ Harlan was brought up in a spirit of religious egalitarianism: men and women were granted equal authority in meetings, Quakers declined to doff their hats to those of higher status, and as early as 1774 the Society of Friends prohibited Quakers from owning slaves. Quaker mysticism was directed towards social and political improvement rather than dry theological speculation. In the course of his life Harlan would move away from some Quaker tenets, most notably the prohibition on war, but the religion remained central to his character and beliefs, revealing itself in a hardy independence of thought, belief in sexual equality, deep-rooted opposition to slavery and a marked disinclination to bow and scrape to those who considered themselves his superiors.

Harlan’s journey to the East would last thirteen months, taking him to China, India and then, with a full cargo of Eastern merchandise, back to Philadelphia. Enchanted by his first adventure on the high seas, he was preparing to set sail again in the summer of 1821 when he accidentally fell in love.

Harlan never mentioned the name of his first love, whose memory he carried with him for the rest of his life. He refers to her obliquely in his writings, but he was too much of a gentleman ever to divulge her identity. Yet he bequeathed a clue. Among the handful of documents he left behind, sandwiched between a miniature watercolour and a recipe for Albany cakes, is a floral love poem in his own handwriting, entitled ‘Acrostick in explanation of the lines addressed to Miss Eliza S. on presenting a bouquet’.

Each quickening pulse in Coreopsis speaks

Lo at first sight my love for thee was mov’d

Iris love’s messenger salutes those cheeks –

Zephyrs! sweetly breathe where Alfers lov’d

Althea says with passion I’m consumed

Be wreathed the moss rose bud and locust leaves

Emblem of love confess’d beyond the tomb –

Thy Captive made, Peach blossoms fernèd leaves

Heliotropes blue violet and Tulip red

Secure devotion love its declaration –

Whilst ecstasy from fragrant Jess’mine’s bred –

Ambrosia means love’s acceptation

In Verbena, Daisy red, Cowslip and Mignonette

Must sense and beauty, grace, divinity set.

From Marigold – that’s cruelty! – abstain

And Rose, fair lady, for it means disdain!

This style of love poetry is now, mercifully, long out of fashion, but Harlan’s horticultural verse was the product of some expert pruning: reading the first letter of the first fourteen lines reveals the name ELIZABETH SWAIM.

The Swaims were a large, well-to-do Philadelphia clan of Dutch origin. Early in 1822 Josiah Harlan and Elizabeth Swaim were engaged, although no formal announcement was made. Harlan again set sail for Canton, telling his fiancée that they would be married when he returned home the following spring.

Eliza Swaim seems to have had second thoughts from the moment the ship left port, but for months, as Harlan slowly sailed east, he remained unaware that she had jilted him. Not until Richard’s letter caught up with him in Calcutta did he discover that Eliza had not only broken off their engagement, but was now married. A decade later, Harlan was still angrily denouncing the woman who had ‘played him false’. When Joseph Wolff, an itinerant missionary, met him for the first time in 1832, Harlan unburdened himself: ‘He fell in love with a young lady who promised to marry him,’ Wolff noted in his journal. ‘He sailed again to Calcutta; but hearing that his betrothed lady had married someone else, he determined never again to return to America.’ He would stick to his vow for nearly two decades. But he would keep the love poem to ‘Eliza S.’ until he died, alongside a second floral poem, written after he had received the devastating news, as bitter as the first was adoring.

How sweet that rose, in form how fair

And how its fragrance scents the air

With dew o’erspread as early morn

I grasped it, but I grasped a thorn.

How strange thought I so fair a flower,

Fit ornament for Lady’s bower,

Emblem of love in beauty’s form,

Should in its breast conceal a thorn.

Harlan embraced his own loneliness. Henceforth, the word ‘solitude’ appears often in his writings. He had reached out and grasped a thorn; he would never clasp love in the same way again. The broken engagement was a moment of defining pain for Josiah, but Elizabeth Swaim had also set him free. Cutting himself off from home and family, determined never to return, he now plunged off in search of a different sort of romance, seeking adventure, excitement and fortune, caring nothing for his own safety or comfort.

Emotionally cast adrift in Calcutta, Harlan learned that the British were preparing to go to war against Burma and needed medical officers for the campaign. The jungles of Burma seemed an adequate distance from Pennsylvania, and so, following his brother’s example, Harlan signed up as a surgeon with the East India Company. That he did so in order to escape the mortifying memory of Eliza Swaim is apparent from a reference in his unpublished manuscript. ‘Gazing through a long window of twenty years’, he wondered what would have happened ‘if, in place of entering the service for the Burma War in the year 1824, I had then relinquished the truant disposition of erratic motives and taken a congenial position in the midst of my native community and quietly fallen into the systematic routine of ordinary life – if I had sailed for Philadelphia instead of Rangoon or had I listened to the dictates of prudence, which accorded with the calculations of modest and unambitious views, and not a personal incident that occurred during my absence from home’. This ‘personal incident’ would lead Harlan into a life worthy of fiction – which in time it would become. From now on he began to fashion his self-plotted saga, acutely aware of his role as the protagonist, narrator and author of his own story. ‘It is from amongst such incidents and in such a life that novelists have sought for subject matter,’ he wrote. ‘In those regions, which are to me the land of realities, have the lovers of romance delighted to wander and repose and dream of fictions less strange than realizations of the undaunted and energetic enterprise of reckless youth.’