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

Calcutta, where Harlan now abandoned ship, was the seat of British rule in India, the capital city of the Honourable East India Company. The ‘Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’, ‘the Company’, as it was universally known, was an extraordinary outgrowth of British history, an alliance of government and private commerce on an imperial scale, and the precursor of the British Raj. Chartered under Elizabeth I, by the early nineteenth century the Company could wage war, mint currency, raise armies, build roads, make or break princes and exercised virtual sovereignty over India. Twenty years before Harlan’s arrival, the Company’s Governor General had become a government appointment, serving the shareholders while simultaneously acting in Britain’s national interests. The Company was thus part commercial and part political, ruling an immense area through alliances with semi-independent local monarchs, and controlling half the world’s trade. This was ‘the strangest of all governments, designed for the strangest of all empires’, in Lord Macaulay’s words. Only in 1858, in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, would the British crown take formal control of the subcontinent.

Service with the East India Company promised adventure and advancement, and potential wealth. More immediately, for Harlan, it offered distance from Eliza Swaim, and a paid job as a military surgeon. That he had never actually studied medicine was not, at least in his own mind, an impediment. Years later he would claim that he ‘had in his early life studied surgery’, but what medical knowledge he possessed appears to have been entirely self-taught. A medical textbook was a part of every educated traveller’s baggage, and before his first voyage to Canton, Harlan had ‘taken a few of his brother’s medical books with him and then decided to use their contents in treating persons other than himself’. The rough life aboard a merchant vessel had presented opportunities to observe and treat a variety of ailments and injuries. In July 1824, with no qualifications whatever, relying on an alloy of brass neck and steely self-confidence, Harlan ‘presented himself for examination at the medical board, and was appointed surgeon at the Calcutta general hospital’. Calcutta was one of the most unhealthy places on earth, and with war looming in Burma, surgeons, however novice, were in hot demand.

For decades the expansionist Burmese had been steadily advancing along the eastern frontier of the Company’s dominion, conquering first Assam and then Shahpuri Island near Chittagong, a Company possession. Fearing an attack on Bengal itself, the British now responded in force with a seaborne army of some 11,000 men. On 11 May 1824, using a steamship in war for the first time, British forces invaded and captured Rangoon, but with Burmese resistance hardening, Calcutta ordered up fresh troops. Harlan had been on the payroll for just a few months when, to his intense satisfaction, he was transferred to the Artillery of Dum-Dum and ordered to the battlefield; if he had any qualms about violating the Quaker rules on pacifism, they were suppressed. The voyage to Rangoon by boat took more than a fortnight. Harlan was deeply impressed by the resilience of the native troops. ‘The Hindu valet de chambre who accompanied me consumed nothing but parched grain, a leguminous seed resembling the pea, during the fifteen days he was on board the vessel.’ Arriving in Rangoon in January 1825, Harlan was appointed ‘officiating assistant surgeon and attached to Colonel George Pollock’s Bengal Artillery’.

The British defeated a 60,000-strong force outside Rangoon, forcing the enemy into the jungle, but they were suffering numerous casualties, mostly through disease, and the Burmese showed no sign of surrendering. In February a young English adventurer named James Brooke was ambushed by guerrillas at Rangpur, and severely wounded by a sword thrust through both his lungs. Brooke would recover and go on to become Rajah Brooke, founder of the dynasty of ‘white rajahs’ that ruled Sarawak in Borneo from 1842 until 1946, the best-known example of self-made imperial royalty. It is tempting to imagine that the future Prince of Ghor tended the wounds of the future Rajah of Sarawak, but sadly there is no evidence of a meeting between Harlan and Brooke, two men who would be kings.

That spring the artillery pushed north, and Harlan was present at the capture of Prome, the capital of lower Burma, after ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. The Treaty of Yandaboo, in February 1826, brought the First Anglo-Burmese War to a close. After battling through two rainy seasons, the Company had successfully defended and extended its frontier, but at the cost of 15,000 troops killed and thousands more injured or debilitated by tropical disease. One of the casualties was Harlan himself, who was put on the invalid list and shipped back to Calcutta suffering from an unspecified illness.

Once he had recuperated, he was posted to the British garrison at Karnal, north of Delhi, and it was there that he discovered a soulmate who would become his ‘most faithful and disinterested friend’. Looking back, Harlan would write that this companion ‘rendered invaluable services with the spontaneous freedom of unsophisticated friendship, enhancing his favours by unconsciousness of their importance. He accompanied me with, unabated zeal throughout the dangers and trials of those eventful years.’ His name was Dash, a mixture of red setter and Scottish terrier, a dog whose fierce and independent temperament matched Harlan’s exactly. ‘Dash never maintained friendly relations with his own kind. Neither could he be brought to tolerate as a companion any dog that was not perfectly submissive and yielding to the dogged obstinacy and supremacy of an imperious and ambitious temper,’ wrote Harlan. The description fitted both man and dog. ‘Dash had always been carefully indulged in every caprice and accustomed to the services of a valet. He was never beaten and his spirit, naturally ardent and generous, maintained the determined bearing which characterises a noble nature untrammelled by the servility arising from harsh discipline. Dash could comprehend the will of his master when conveyed by a word or a glance.’

Harlan passed the time in Karnal training his puppy, cataloguing the local flora, treating the dysentery of the soldiers, and reading whatever he could lay his hands on. In 1815, literary London had been briefly enthralled by the publication of An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India, comprising a View of the Afghaun Nation and history of the Dooraunee Monarchy, a colourful two-volume description of the exotic, unknown land inhabited by the Afghan tribes. The author was the splendidly-named Mountstuart Elphinstone, an East India Company official who in 1808 had led the first ever diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, accompanied by an entire regiment of cavalry, two hundred infantry, six hundred camels and a dozen elephants. The Englishman described a wondrous journey among ferocious tribesmen and wild animals, through a landscape of savage beauty. Elphinstone had been received at Peshawar, with great pomp and ceremony, by Shah Shujah al-Moolk, the Afghan monarch then in the sixth precarious year of his reign. Ushered into the royal presence, the Englishman had found the king seated on a huge golden throne. ‘We thought at first he had on an armour of jewels, but, on close inspection, we found this to be a mistake, and his real dress to consist of a green tunic, with large flowers in gold, and precious stones, over which were a breastplate of diamonds, shaped like two flattened fleur-de-lis, an ornament of the same kind on each thigh, large emerald bracelets and many other jewels in different places.’ On Shujah’s arm shone an immense diamond, the fabled Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light.

Elphinstone’s orders were to secure Afghan support against a potential Franco-Persian alliance, and his visit became an elaborate exchange of diplomatic pleasantries and gifts. The English officers were presented with dresses of honour, the Oriental mode of conferring esteem. In return Elphinstone showered the Afghan court with presents, to the ire of the Company’s bean-counters who rebuked him for ‘a principle of diffusion unnecessarily profuse’. In spite of the rather unseemly way Shujah gloated over his haul (he particularly coveted Elphinstone’s own silk stockings), the Englishman had described the king and his sumptuous court in the most admiring terms: ‘How much he had of the manners of a gentleman, [and] how well he preserved his dignity.’ The British mission never penetrated past the Khyber Pass and into the Afghan heartland, for as Shujah explained, his realm was deeply unsettled, with the looming possibility of full-scale rebellion. Indeed, within a few months of Elphinstone’s departure Shujah would be deposed.

Although Elphinstone had never actually seen Kabul, his Account was heady stuff. Harlan absorbed every thrilling word of it: the jewels, the wild Afghan tribesmen, the sumptuous Oriental display and the ‘princely address’ of the handsome king with his crown, ‘about nine inches high, not ornamented with jewels as European crowns are, but to appearance entirely formed of those precious materials’. The book’s vivid depiction of the Afghan character might have described Harlan himself: ‘Their vices are revenge, envy, avarice and obstinacy; on the other hand they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, laborious and prudent.’

Reading by candlelight in Karnal cantonment, Harlan dreamed of new adventures. He was growing impatient with the routine of service in the East India Company, and increasingly unwilling to follow the orders of pimply young Englishmen. One of the many contradictions in his personality was his insistence on strict military discipline among his subordinates, while being congenitally incapable of taking orders from those ranking above him. The freeborn American was also decidedly free with his opinions, and the young surgeon’s outspokenness, often verging on insubordination, did not endear him to his superiors: ‘Harlan does not appear to have obtained a very good name during his connection with the Company’s army, which he soon quitted,’ wrote a contemporary. One later account claimed that he was on leave when the order was issued for the dismissal of all temporary surgeons, but Harlan insisted that the decision to leave the service was his alone.

Elphinstone painted a thrilling picture of princely Afghan warlords battling for supremacy, in a medieval world where a warrior could win a kingdom by force of arms. ‘A sharp sword and a bold heart supplant the laws of hereditary descent,’ wrote Harlan. ‘Audacious ambition gains by the sabre’s sweep and soul-propelling spur, a kingdom and [a] name amongst the crowned sub deities of the diademed earth.’ The Company, by contrast, kept subordinate princes on the tightest rein, and in British-controlled India the native monarchs were little more than impotent figureheads, he reflected. ‘Under English domination we have his stiff encumbered gait, in place of the reckless impetuosity of the predatory hero. The cane of the martinet displaces the warrior’s spear.’

Harlan was already imagining how his own bold heart and sharp sword might be used to supplant the laws of hereditary descent, and in the summer of 1826 he ended his allegiance to the British Empire. He had witnessed British imperialism in action, but his own imperial impulse was of a peculiarly American sort. Thomas Jefferson himself had spoken of ‘an empire for liberty’ and imagined the ideals of the American Revolution stretching from ocean to ocean and beyond; the America of Harlan’s youth had expanded at an astonishing rate. He had been just four years old when Jefferson doubled the nation’s size by purchasing from France the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi, and throughout his childhood the white population had been steadily pushing westward. Harlan’s world view reflected this urgent, embracing outward impetus, what one historian has called ‘the heady optimism of that season of US empire at surge tide’. New lands and peoples were there to be discovered, scientifically explored, introduced to the benefits of civilisation by force, exploited and brought into the great American experiment. That the inhabitants did not actually wish to be absorbed into a greater America was immaterial.

Harlan deeply admired Jefferson, and retained a lifelong faith in republican values, but at the same time he considered himself a ‘high Tory in principles’ and an admirer of ‘kingly dignity’. America had won its independence from Great Britain just sixteen years before Harlan’s birth. He came to loathe the more oppressive aspects of British imperialism, yet he firmly believed that sovereign power should be invested in a single, benign ruler, whether that power came through democracy (as with Washington and Jefferson) or through conquest. In this sense, Harlan’s imperialism resembled the original imperium, the authority exercised by the rulers of Rome over the city state and its dominions. In his mind, no figure in history represented this combination of civilised expansionism and kingly dignity more spectacularly than Alexander the Great. ‘His power was extended by the sword and maintained by the arts of civilization. A blessing to succeeding generations by the introduction of the refinements of life, the arts and sciences, in the midst of communities exhausted by luxury or still rude in the practices of barbarism … Vast designs for the benefit of mankind were conceived in the divine mind of their immortal founder, the universal philanthropist no less than universal conqueror.’ Conquest, benevolence, philanthropy and immortality: Harlan saw Alexander’s empire, like the expanding American imperium, as a moral force bringing enlightenment to the savages, and he would come to regard his own foray into the wilderness in the same way: not simply as a bid for power, but the gift of a new world order to a benighted corner of the earth.

Harlan’s ideas of empire were still in their infancy when he left the roasting Indian plains and made his way to Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where British officialdom was on retreat from the summer heat. Technically, as a civilian, he was now persona non grata, since neither British subjects nor foreigners were allowed to live in the interior of India without a licence, but following an interview with the Governor General Lord Amherst himself, the permit was granted. Harlan chose not to linger in the hill station. Instead, armed with his copy of Elphinstone, he headed towards Ludhiana, the Company’s last garrison town in north-west India.

Ludhiana marked the westernmost edge of British control, a dusty border post where civilisation, as the British saw it, ended, and the wilderness began. Beyond was the mysterious Punjab, and even further west, across the mighty Indus, lay mythical Afghanistan: a ‘terra incognita’, in Harlan’s words. In Simla Harlan he had learned that Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the mighty independent ruler of the Punjab, had already employed a handful of European officers to train his army in modern military techniques, and might be looking for more such recruits. The Sikh king was also famously obsessed with his health, and after barely a year as an army medical officer Harlan considered himself amply qualified to work for the maharajah as either doctor or soldier, or both.

On a late summer’s evening in 1826, accompanied by Dash and a handful of servants, Harlan rode into Ludhiana, caked in dust but still resplendent in his full service uniform complete with cocked hat. Presiding over this outpost of empire was one Captain Claude Martine Wade, the East India Company’s political agent and leader of its tiny colony of Europeans. Wade’s tasks were to police the border, maintain relations with the local Indian princes, and report back to Calcutta with whatever intelligence he could glean on the chaotic political situation beyond the frontier. He was the shrewdest of Company men, as dry and penetrating as the wind that blew off the western desert, and he observed the arrival of this unlikely young American with a mixture of interest and deep suspicion. Harlan made his way directly to Wade’s residence, and handed the British agent a document, signed by the Governor General himself, giving him permission to cross the Sutlej, the river separating the Company’s domain from that of Ranjit Singh.

Cordial but reserved, Wade invited Harlan to lodge at the residence while he made preparations for his journey. The offer was readily accepted, and having despatched a letter to Ranjit Singh by native courier requesting permission to enter the Punjab, Harlan settled down to await a reply in comfort. ‘I enjoyed the amenities of Captain W.’s hospitality,’ he wrote, noting that the Englishman ‘with the characteristic liberality of his country, extended the freedom of his mansion to all’. Over dinner, Wade explained that he maintained ‘respectful and obedient subservience from the numerous princely chieftains subject to his surveillance’ by playing one off against another. The English agent handled his delegated authority with ruthless skill, caring little what the local rulers did, to their subjects or to each other, as long as British prestige was maintained. As Kipling wrote in ‘The Man who Would be King’: ‘Nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States … They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty.’

Harlan was impressed by Wade’s cynical attitude to power, declaring him an ‘expert diplomatist’ and ‘a master of finesse who wielded an expedient and peculiar policy with success’. Wade in turn was intrigued by his energetic and enigmatic guest, who seemed to have plenty of money and who spoke in the most educated fashion about the local flora and classical history. Many strange types blew through Ludhiana, including the occasional European adventurer, but a mercenary-botanist-classicist was a new species altogether. Puzzled, Wade reported to Calcutta: ‘Dr Harlan’s principal object in wishing to visit the Punjab was in the first place to enter Ranjit Singh’s service and ultimately to pursue some investigation regarding the natural history of that country.’ He warned Harlan that the Company could not approve of the first part of his plan, since ‘the resort of foreigners to native courts is viewed with marked disapprobation or admitted only under a rigid surveillance’. Yet he did not try to dissuade him from heading west. In the unlikely event he survived, a man like Harlan might prove very useful in Lahore, Ranjit’s capital.

Harlan’s future was clear, at least in his own mind: he would join the maharajah’s entourage and rise to fame and fortune, while compiling a full inventory of the plants and flowers of the exotic Punjab. Like Lewis and Clark, with American bravado and learning he would open up a new world. The only hitch was that Ranjit Singh would not let him in. Although he had signed a treaty with the British back in 1809, as the greatest independent ruler left in India the maharajah was pathologically (and understandably) suspicious of feringhees, as white foreigners were called. The British were happy to let the Sikh potentate get on with building his own empire beyond the Sutlej. ‘Very little communication had heretofore existed betwixt the two governments,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The interior of the Punjab was only seen through a mysterious veil, and a dark gloom hung over and shrouded the court of Lahore.’ Which was exactly the way Ranjit Singh wanted it.

As he kicked his heels waiting for a passport that never arrived, Harlan began to form an altogether more extravagant plan that would take him far beyond the Punjab in the service of a different king, who also happened to be his neighbour in Ludhiana.

2 THE QUAKER KING-MAKER (#ulink_490dc593-d5b3-5709-83ab-577f01f79aa0)

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.