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

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.

3 MY SWORD IS MY PASSPORT (#ulink_56ad7aba-b9c3-572d-8a7f-daec7b8d2a18)

The Afghan empire had once been powerful beyond legend, wealthy beyond words. As Harlan wrote: ‘During the rule of the antient regime the kings possessed countless treasures and jewels and gold, supplying the expenses of licentiousness and luxury from previously accumulated hereditary wealth. Vast sums were disbursed in the capital cities of Kandahar, Cabul and Peshour.’ This was the empire forged in the mid-eighteenth century by the Afghan conqueror Ahmad Shah Abdali, founder of the Durrani dynasty, who had extended his rule from Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore, and finally to Delhi, Kashmir and Sind. He had crossed the Hindu Kush, subduing the Hazara tribes en route, and then vanquished the Uzbeks of Balkh and Kunduz, taking his realm to the border of modern Afghanistan. The death of Ahmad Shah in 1773 started the steady, bloody disintegration of his empire, and by the 1820s it had fragmented, shot through with fantastically complex internecine feuds, like veins through marble. For as long as anyone could remember a brutal civil war had raged in Afghanistan, punctuated by occasional interludes of tranquillity. Like the Wars of the Roses, two great families, rival clans within the Durrani elite, battled for supremacy: the Saddozai, of which Shah Shujah was the leading claimant, and the Barakzai, whose paramount chief, Dost Mohammed Khan, now ruled in Kabul. The Saddozai princes fought each other while resisting the growing power of the Barakzai clan, whose scions fought bitterly among themselves for supremacy.

The period immediately before Harlan set out for Afghanistan had seen some particularly Byzantine plotting and fratricidal violence. In 1783, Zaman Shah, Ahmad Shah’s grandson (a Saddozai), ascended the throne with the support of Painda Khan (a Barakzai), who became his vizier. Nervous of Painda Khan’s growing power and aware that he was plotting a coup, Zaman Shah first dismissed, then executed him. The Barakzai vizier, however, had left behind no fewer than twenty-three sons, each anxious to avenge him and take power himself. The eldest of these, Fatah Khan, immediately set about provoking a rebellion: Zaman Shah was ousted in favour of his half-brother Shah Mahmud, and then blinded by having his eyeballs pierced with a lancet, the traditional fate of a deposed Afghan king. Shah Mahmud held on for just three years before he was deposed by another Saddozai, Zaman Shah’s brother Shah Shujah al-Moolk.

Shah Shujah was in Peshawar, opening presents from Mountstuart Elphinstone, when he learned that Shah Mahmud was up in arms once more, with the backing of the troublesome Fatah Khan. After six years as king, Shujah was himself ousted and set off on the wandering path that would eventually lead him to Ludhiana. Shah Mahmud was reinstalled, but not for long. In 1818, history repeating itself, he became deeply suspicious of his Barakzai vizier, and Fatah Khan was put to death with an imaginative cruelty spectacular even by the exacting standards of the time. His eyes were removed with a dagger, and the top of his head was peeled off (‘an operation similar to the African mode of scalping’, observed Shah Shujah in his memoirs) before a slow public dismemberment. The blind vizier was led to a large tent erected for the purpose outside the western city of Herat, surrounded by his mortal enemies, and systematically murdered: ears, nose, hands and beard were cut off, and then his feet, before his throat was finally cut.

This lingering death drove Fatah Khan’s many surviving brothers to a peak of vengeful fury (and temporary unity), and after a series of battles Mahmud, the Saddozai king, was beaten back to Herat. The Barakzai brothers set about dividing up the country among themselves: four of them held Peshawar, another five ruled over Kandahar, while Dost Mohammed Khan, the ablest of them all, established himself as chief of Ghazni and gradually set about extending his rule over Kabul. Having divided up the country as completely as their brother had once been dismembered, the remaining brothers naturally now fell to fighting each other.

The Barakzais were a polygamous recipe for friction, sharing a single father but divided by multiple mothers: siblings sharing both mother and father tended to be allies, while half-brothers were more often at loggerheads. The bewildering confusion of plot and counterplot, blood feud coagulating on blood feud, brother against brother, king against vizier, had reduced what is now Afghanistan to a Hobbesian war of all against all, riven with feuds between interrelated warlords. As one commentator said: ‘Sovereignty was an exceedingly uncertain commodity. One moment the Amir of Kabul might be a potent monarch, in the next he might be an object of ridicule, an outcast whose life would be very precarious, if indeed it existed at all.’

Elphinstone and others had painted what they knew of Afghanistan’s turbulent history in the most lurid colours, and Harlan marvelled at the duplicity of the various contenders, the bewildering rise and fall of the claimants. ‘Prince after prince in confused succession mounted the tottering throne,’ he wrote. ‘The prize was literally handed about like a shuttlecock. The king who in the battle may have dispatched a favourite son in the command of his army would probably before night find himself flying from his own troops.’

Yet by 1826 a vague pattern of power had emerged from the bloody morass, with the rise of Dost Mohammed Khan as amir of Kabul, the nearest thing to an Afghan monarch. He was owed at least nominal allegiance by his restive brothers, and ruled by a volatile combination of dictatorship and oligarchy. As Harlan observed: ‘In the course of civil war distant provinces threw off their allegiance or were seized by neighbouring powers. The dominion of Cabulistan became contracted and reduced. The government was seized by an usurping dynasty and the royal family banished.’ Whatever Shah Shujah, lurking in Ludhiana, may have told Harlan about the man currently in power in Kabul, Dost Mohammed Khan was proving a tenacious and increasingly popular ruler. Even today, Afghans use the phrase: ‘Is Dost Mohammed dead, that there is no justice?’ He would not be easy to unseat. Shah Shujah and Dost Mohammed Khan, the old Saddozai pretender and the young Barakzai prince, would represent the opposing political poles of Harlan’s life for the next two decades.

The chronic instability of Afghanistan had infected the surrounding regions. Harlan estimated that his six-hundred-mile route to Peshawar led through at least ‘four independent principalities, divided into many subordinate chieftainships, some as fiefs and others as tributaries to the above mentioned principalities’. None of these was remotely predictable, and any or all might be hostile. The region was also infested with bandits, and Harlan had to restrain his natural inclination to wander off alone in search of plants. The most immediate menace, however, came from his own troops; he had not been out of Ludhiana more than a few days before the first threat to his life.

From among his Indian domestics Harlan had appointed a quartermaster, whose task was to travel ahead of the main body of troops to select that night’s campground and obtain supplies. Although Harlan chose the man he believed to be the most honest of his staff, he rapidly came to suspect that the quartermaster was buying cheap food and retaining a profit. ‘More than human patience and foresight are necessary for one to guard against the chicanery, deceit and falsehood of domestics in India,’ Harlan wrote in exasperation, a familiar complaint among colonists. Once Harlan had established his guilt, the quartermaster was promptly demoted. This should have been a routine matter, but it swiftly erupted into Harlan’s first major crisis when the former quartermaster appeared at his tent, determined on revenge and carrying a loaded and cocked musket. As Harlan emerged, the man aimed the weapon at his head. Harlan reacted instinctively. ‘To knock up the fellow’s musket and throw myself upon him and seize him by the throat was the act of a moment. He fell back and prostrate from the force with which I projected myself against him. The musket changed hands and he was now the victim with the weapon at his breast! He had not a word to utter or a struggle of resistance.’

By disarming the mutineer, Harlan subdued a potentially wider revolt. ‘Had this fellow’s insolence been suffered with impunity, I should have been utterly at the mercy of my servants,’ he wrote. The rest of the entourage, expressing elaborate abhorrence at such behaviour, cheerfully offered to kill the miscreant on the spot to demonstrate their own fidelity. Harlan preferred clemency, and merely ordered the man to be manacled and placed under guard. At the next village he was handed into the custody of the local headman. Harlan remarked: ‘He was probably released immediately after I left.’

The incident convinced Harlan that there was only one member of the party he could trust implicitly: ‘Amongst my followers there was one of low degree who held an elevated position in my regard and was certainly the most faithful, disinterested and by no means the least useful of the cortege.’ He was referring, of course, to his dog, Dash.

Harlan was anxious to push on quickly, but the baggage animals flatly declined to be hurried. ‘The old camels especially cannot be made to move above one coss and a half per hour,’ he complained. A coss was the old unit of Indian measurement, which Harlan calculated at one mile and three quarters. Distance seemed to expand as the column trudged on through a landscape of desert fringed with jungle, and such measurements became almost meaningless, Harlan reflected. ‘The peasant whom you interrogate as to the distance of the next village will sometimes reply, “As far as the twice boiling of a pot of milk” [or] “As far as you can carry a leaf without [it] wilting.”’ The population was sparse, but the local tribespeople seemed reasonably well-fed, with a diet that included mutton from the fat-tailed sheep, goats’ meat, beef, fowl, eggs and butter. Harlan gorged on ‘the finest perch and a species of catfish peculiar to the Indus’, but noticed that locals seemed to regard fish as an inferior food. Finding grain and forage for the cattle was far more problematic. As a visiting dignitary he expected to be sustained with free supplies from the local chiefs, in accordance with the ancient traditions of hospitality. If they seemed unwilling to provide such necessities, Harlan believed he would be within his rights, according to local custom, in taking what he needed. The local chiefs had once lived under Afghan rule, but they were now unwilling subjects of the aggressively expanding Sikh empire; each paid tribute, either directly or through a superior, to Ranjit Singh. Since Harlan was assumed to be a representative of the great British power to the east, and therefore a potential counterweight to Sikh domination, he expected a cautious welcome from the native barony. ‘All who were opposed to the Lahore paramount – and the tributaries generally were – showed by their alacrity of service and obsequious bearing the candidness with which they desired to recognize in every Christian traveller a representative of an antagonist power.’ Harlan was only too happy to be mistaken for a British officer, and if the local rulers thought that by providing him with food and forage they were currying favour with the powers in India, that was just fine with him.

Harlan’s attitude towards the local inhabitants, in common with most white men in India, was paternalistic, haughty and often dismissive, and a vein of cultural condescension runs through much of his early writing. Yet his outlook was similar to that of Thomas Jefferson himself, who maintained that the American Indians were noble savages who could be absorbed into the expanding American empire through education and religion. ‘I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman,’ wrote Jefferson in 1785. In the same way, Harlan regarded the various Indian, Sikh and Afghan tribesmen he would encounter over the next two decades as potential equals, held back not by any inherent racial inferiority but by physical circumstance and ignorance. He would immerse himself in the local ethnology, history and languages with all the enthusiasm that Jefferson devoted to his Indian studies. He might scorn the local customs as superstitious and barbaric, yet he observed them with fascination and described them with care. This openness of mind would develop over time, as his early distrust and disdain of native ways turned to understanding, and in many cases admiration. The colonist would eventually be colonised, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it.

About seventy coss from Ludhiana, after two solid weeks of marching, Harlan’s troop entered the district of Mamdot, the dominion of Qutb ud-Din Khan, one of those chiefs who was eager to rid himself of the obligation to pay tribute to the Sikh maharajah. The men were pitching camp when an envoy appeared from Qutb, accompanied by a troop of horsemen, to welcome the supposed British envoy with an avalanche of compliments. ‘This was the first instance in which I had been received with the ostentation that marks the Oriental display of festive diplomacy,’ Harlan observed. The envoy explained that although Qutb himself was on a hunting trip, he had sent a message for the noble feringhee, to be delivered in person by his son. This, Harlan calculated, would be an excellent moment to make an impact on the locals, in the knowledge that the bush telegraph would swiftly pass on news of the arrival of a powerful foreign prince, and so ensure a welcoming reception further ahead. The etiquette for the occasion was planned with care: first the tents were pitched to form a large, covered reception area, the floor spread with the finest hessian carpet. At one end of the enclosure, on an elevated platform, Harlan placed his armchair, where he would receive the prince in seated grandeur. Amirullah, toting the mace, formed a reception committee alongside Gul Khan in the full regalia of a native officer, while the guard of sepoys were drawn up before the tent door to greet the prince.

At the appointed hour, Qutb’s son swept into the encampment mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and surrounded by a small army of retainers armed with swords, shields and matchlocks. Gul Khan held the prince’s bridle as the young man dismounted, and then ushered him into the tent. Harlan was immediately struck by the ‘grace and dignity’ of the handsome, olive-skinned youth who now bowed before him, clad in a shimmering white robe embroidered with gold, a huge shield in one hand and a long sword tucked into his waistband. Long dark curls tumbled down to his shoulders from beneath a striped silk turban decorated with golden thread, while his slippers were similarly spangled in gold and silver. Even more remarkable than his exquisite outfit, however, was his age: the prince of Mamdot, calculated the astonished Harlan, could not have been more than seven years old.

‘His manner and address were no different from a man of mature condition and polite education,’ Harlan observed. This dignified, heavily-armed child approached with a peace offering: ‘a beautiful green bow of Lahore and a green velvet gold embroidered quiver’. After a lavish exchange of compliments the boy-prince presented a letter, complaining of the iniquities of Sikh rule, which he asked Harlan to forward to the British lords of India. Harlan, of course, had no formal connection with the British, and was anyway heading in the other direction. Tactfully, he advised the young man ‘that his father should represent his case in person to the Company’s resident at Delhi’.

The following morning, accompanied by a small contingent from Qutb’s tribe to guarantee safe passage through the bandit-infested region, Harlan crossed the frontier into Bahawalpur, the land of the formidable Nawab Bahawal Khan. Founded and named after Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in 1748, the princely state of Bahawalpur had won a large measure of independence during the civil war that dissolved the Afghan empire, but it now faced simultaneous threats from the expansionist Sikhs to the north and the looming British in the east. As Harlan wrote, ‘the present incumbent stood in an unenviable posture, with the prospect “of being ground between two stones” as the Persian proverb goes’. Like many native princes, Bahawal Khan was tempted to throw in his lot with the British. But as Captain Wade had warned Harlan, the nawab remained exceedingly nervous, and might not take kindly to having a force under an unknown flag marching unannounced through his territory.

Harlan, however, was breezily confident. ‘The friendly relations existing between that prince and the British government precluded the possibility of hostilities against a Christian,’ he wrote, noting that Elphinstone had been graciously received by Bahawal Khan’s father. If the nawab could be persuaded to believe Harlan was a British official, he was probably safe. Moreover, he wanted to make contact with Bahawal Khan, for it was likely that Shah Shujah would have to cross Bahawalpur with a far larger army in the event of an invasion.

Harlan’s troop had penetrated some ten miles into the nawab’s territories, when a body of armed men, mounted on camels and horses, suddenly bore down on them. The little army immediately prepared for battle: the sepoys took up positions among the baggage animals, with muskets levelled, while Harlan and the other mounted men rode a few yards ahead, ‘threatening them by the evolutions of our firearms with a reception at once repulsive and determined’. The demonstration had the desired effect. ‘They rode down upon us in a swarm, but our display made them draw up [and] they spread out upon the plain, apparently intending to surround our party.’ Harlan ordered Gul Khan to shout out that unless they halted where they were, the men would open fire.

Retreating just beyond rifle range, the riders now stared at the intruders with what seemed to Harlan more like curiosity than hostility. They were a fearsome-looking group. ‘Their filthy appearance and barbarous visages peering out from beneath long black and greasy locks of matted hair seemed to forbid the conclusion that they could be men entertained in the military service of a chief.’ This, however, is precisely what they proved to be. A series of shouted exchanges between Gul Khan and the leader of the other troop established that these were scouts of Bahawal Khan’s army who had heard of the approach of ‘an army of feringees accompanied by Shah Shujah’ and had come to reconnoitre.

While the local warriors watched from a distance, Harlan ordered the advance, collecting the sepoys around his horse with bayonets fixed. Still looking distinctly unfriendly, the hairy horsemen and camel-riders fell in some distance behind. The strange procession had gone less than a mile when a smartly dressed individual, flanked by two horsemen, rode up to Harlan and presented himself as ‘the attaché of Nadir Shah, commander of the Nawab’s forces’. With a low bow the envoy welcomed Harlan in the name of Bahawal Khan, and invited him to pitch camp at a village a little way ahead, where he promised that supplies of every kind could be found. In spite of the man’s polite manner, Harlan was deeply suspicious. The line moved off once more, with Bahawal Khan’s man leading the way, and an hour later they pitched camp outside a small, apparently deserted village.

As he had feared, Harlan was now effectively a prisoner. ‘Our camp was quickly surrounded by numerous irregular infantry of the Rohillah and Beloochee races, soldiers in the service of Nawab Bhawal Khan.’ These had been instructed to prevent the advance of the newcomers until orders arrived from Bahawal Khan himself. Harlan was furious. ‘I entertained a feeling of infinite contempt as a military force for the miserable guards surrounding us,’ he wrote. Summoning Gul Khan to his tent, he told his lieutenant that they would march the following day, and if the nawab’s troops tried to stop them, they would fight their way out. The Rohillah accepted this order with visible, and entirely justified apprehension. The nawab’s army might look a fright, but they were numerous, heavily armed and, if provoked, likely to prove murderous. But Harlan was not to be dissuaded. Not for the last time, he wondered quite how valiant his warlike commander would prove in a fight.

At sunrise the next morning, the bugle sounded, the camels were loaded and the men were preparing to march when Gul Khan, who had spent the previous hour ‘in earnest conversation’ with the leader of the native troops, approached Harlan, ashen-faced, and warned that the nawab’s men were ‘determined to prevent our baggage from leaving without orders from their chief’. The surrounding troops began to close in. Harlan’s solution to the impasse was simple and dramatic. ‘I called the captain of Bhawal Khan’s men into my presence and immediately placed him under a guard of fixed bayonets, holding him as a hostage with the threat of instant death in case of any turbulent movement on the part of his troops.’

Feeling exceedingly pleased with himself, Harlan now marched off with his new hostage in chains alongside him, the troops in fine regimental order, and a mob of Bahawal Khan’s soldiers trailing angrily behind. They had not marched two miles before, as Harlan put it, ‘the consequences of my headstrong efforts began to show themselves’. On the eastern horizon, he saw ‘a vast cloud of dust rising in the desert’. Minutes later, a troop of tribesmen mounted on camels appeared just out of range, and then vanished. They were followed by horsemen, galloping in circles, their cries carrying across the flat land, impossible to count due to the clouds of dust raised by their mounts. Through the gritty haze Harlan glimpsed footsoldiers stretched out across the desert, and finally, in the distance, ‘a train of heavy artillery drawn by oxen slowly lumbered upon carriages lazily creeping over the plain’. It was now that Gul Khan belatedly passed on a rather crucial piece of information: the man Harlan had taken hostage was none other than the brother of Nadir Shah, military commander of Bahawalpur, who had now mobilised the full force of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s army to get him back.