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

As Harlan was wondering what to do next, a horseman appeared through the dust and respectfully invited the visitor to pitch camp at the next village where his master, Nadir Shah, ‘desired the honour of an interview’. Harlan reluctantly complied. ‘We found ourselves in the same situation as we were at sunrise,’ he remarked. The only difference being that they were now surrounded by an entire army, ‘encamped a short distance from us, out of view, secluded within the vast jungle of high reed grass which grew in tufts tall enough to hide a mounted spearman [for] many miles in all directions’. Any attempt to force their way out would be suicide. Releasing his hostage, Harlan now adopted a different, but equally brazen tactic: he would treat this Nadir Shah with complete contempt. ‘I refused to see him,’ he wrote, ‘replying to his earnest solicitude with the cool and phlegmatic indifference of a superior.’ Whenever Nadir’s mirza or envoy politely tried to arrange a meeting, the American replied, with feigned petulance: ‘I’m not in the vein.’ Nadir Shah was a man to be reckoned with in Bahawalpur, and Harlan’s lofty manner sent the envoy, despite being surrounded by thousands of hostile warriors, into a paroxysm of toadying. ‘With reverential respect and servile attitude, he said that his master was a great man, a very great man, no less a person than the dignified commander in chief of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s invincible army, the unconquered and exalted chief of chiefs, the cream of his contemporaries and the pillar of empire etc, etc.,’ wrote Harlan, who resolutely declined to be impressed and sent the mirza back with the message that he intended to march the next day. ‘I gave him to understand I acknowledged no superior and that my sword was my passport.’

Apparently bowing to the inevitable, Nadir Shah sent a guide, a senior member of his entourage, to show the strangers the way, but no sooner had the army set off again than it became clear the man was deliberately trying to buy time by leading Harlan on ‘a devious line, sometimes to the right and at others to the left, like a ship in a headwind’. Once again, Harlan’s riposte was to place the guide in chains.

Gul Khan made no secret of his belief that by chaining up the locals at every turn Harlan was inviting disaster, and contravening all the rules of Oriental diplomacy. ‘The old blear-eyed Rohillah rolled up his eyes in astonishment, exclaiming: “May God bring good in the future.”’ Nettled by his lieutenant’s negativity, Harlan demanded: ‘Wherefore is Gool Khan afraid of these ragged mendicants?’, and then immediately regretted it, for the question prompted a torrent of oratory from the one-armed soldier on the subject of his own bravery and the corresponding villainy of the local people. Exhausted by the tense march, and Gul Khan’s loquacity, Harlan ordered a halt near a small village. As soon as the tents were pitched he released the guide and sent him to collect supplies, and retired to rest. ‘The whole camp excepting a single sentry soon fell into a deep sleep solicited by unusual fatigue,’ he wrote, but less than an hour later Harlan awoke to find yet another crisis brewing. Outside his tent stood Gul Khan, looking more than usually glum. ‘It’ll be later before we get the forage, unless Your Highness is disposed to become responsible for the unoffending blood of our guide,’ he said gloomily.

While Harlan had been asleep, the luckless guide had requested food at the nearby fortress, where he had promptly been taken prisoner. The commander of the fort, Gul Khan explained, was not only refusing to provide food and forage but threatening to cut off the guide’s head if the troops helped themselves. Harlan faced a dilemma. Seizing what he needed by force could lead to the death of an innocent man, and that, he reflected, would be ‘ungenerous and unbecoming a man of high sentiments’. A little of Shah Shujah’s money would surely bring the commander round. Sure enough, after some bargaining by Gul Khan, the guide was released and supplies provided. Grateful that the unpredictable feringhee had seen fit to prevent him being beheaded, the guide was now as helpful as he had previously been obstructive. Instead of pushing on quickly, it was agreed that the force would proceed slowly towards Bahawalpur and await a decision by the nawab.

After three days of slow marching, a messenger from Bahawal Khan was conducted to Harlan’s tent. There he ceremoniously handed over a letter, written on the finest paper, embellished with gold leaf and tucked into a bag of gold brocade with a pair of the nawab’s oval seals attached, each three inches in diameter. The letter, in Persian, was addressed to: ‘His Highness the Saheban of exalted dignity’. Saheban is the plural of the honorific Sahib – ‘a term’, as Harlan observed, ‘applied to the Christians governing India’. The nawab had concluded that Harlan must be a British official, albeit a most eccentric one, and his letter ‘set forth in florid terms the Nawab’s regard and was profuse in the profession of friendship’. The chief of Bahawalpur looked forward to a meeting when Harlan reached Ahmadpur, his capital south of the Sutlej on the edge of the Cholistan desert, but in the meantime ‘the country, himself and his possessions were at my service’. Finally the nawab’s envoy handed over a gift that made Harlan’s hungry eyes light up. ‘A large quantity of the fresh fruits of Kabul were presented, such as delicious grapes packed in boxes upon layers of cotton, apples and pears of Samercand, cantaloupes, dried apricots, raisins and watermelons of the country.’ Harlan adored fresh fruit, and the crops of Kabul were fabled throughout Central Asia. This was the first time he had tasted them; in time, they would become an obsession.

The evidence of the nawab’s friendly intentions was a relief to all, not least the guide who had so nearly been decapitated. Harlan sent him on his way with a handful of rupees, ‘as a reward, and to solace his feelings for the cavalier regard bestowed upon him’. After days of wondering whether he and his men would be massacred, Harlan was thoroughly enjoying his new incarnation as the honoured guest of the nawab, who had given orders that the newcomers should be provided with every necessity. Another march of three days brought them to the town of Bahawalpur, which had been the province’s capital before Bahawal Khan had moved his court to Ahmadpur, thirty miles to the south. Bahawalpur was a substantial town ‘about four miles in circumference, with gardens of mangoe trees within the walls [and] houses of unburnt bricks’. Here Harlan received another gold-leafed missive from the nawab, even more polite than the last, ‘conveying his impatience to be exalted by an interview’. Harlan declined to be rushed, calculating that the longer he took to get to Ahmadpur, the keener Bahawal Khan would be to pay his respects to the haughty feringhee chief. A terse message was sent back, declaring that Harlan was suffering from ‘a phlegmon’, a skin inflammation, and would not reach Ahmadpur for at least ten days.

While encamped at Bahawalpur, Harlan made a point of staying inside his tent, thus ensuring the cultivation of his own mystery. ‘A crowd assembled daily from the town to get a view of the stranger,’ and wild rumours about the tall, bearded foreigner spread rapidly. It was even claimed that he was none other than ‘the ex-king Shujah Ul Moolk travelling under the incognito of a Saheb from Ludhiana’. The story, put about by Gul Khan, that Harlan was ‘merely an amateur traveller’ met with blank incredulity from Bahawal Khan’s envoys: ‘What could have attracted an amateur traveller to an insignificant, worthless, poverty-stricken country like this region of Bhawulpore that yielded nothing but sand and thorns?’ they demanded. ‘An amateur traveller would have passed on with the rapidity of a flowing stream.’

The locals seemed more inquisitive than threatening; which was just as well, Harlan reflected, since he was now several hundred miles from the nearest English outpost. If relations turned nasty, there was nowhere to flee. Only one Westerner had come this way before and lived to record the fact. ‘The Honourable Mount Stewart Elphinstone passed through Bhawulpore about twenty years before my transit on an embassy to the king of Cabul,’ Harlan recorded proudly, ‘but with this exception no Christian of note had been known to appear in the territory.’ He was therefore astonished, and a little piqued, to learn from an excited Gul Khan just hours before leaving Bahawalpur that he was not the only feringhee in the vicinity. A few weeks earlier, the locals reported, two ragged white men had staggered into Ahmadpur, claiming to be European soldiers and offering their military services to the nawab. Both were said to be stricken by chronic fever. Harlan now recalled that before he left Ludhiana Wade had shown him a message from Calcutta, warning that two deserters from the Company artillery, named James Lewis and Richard Potter, might be heading west and should be apprehended if possible. ‘I concluded these men were probably the individuals alluded to in that document,’ wrote Harlan.

Eager to see if his hunch was right, Harlan hastened to Ahmadpur. After a two-day march the troop pitched camp on the outskirts of the town, where Harlan was welcomed by ‘a person of grave deportment’ who turned out to be the nawab’s vizier, Yacoob Ally Khan. The vizier explained that his master would be returning shortly from a hunting trip, and after numerous ‘messages of congratulations, tinged with inflated protestations of service’ he handed over a large, dead antelope which he explained had been killed by the nawab himself. It was agreed that an interview would take place in five days’ time. Harlan wondered whether the nawab was really away hunting, or merely stalling. Taking advantage of the delay, he despatched a messenger to the two sickly Europeans lodged in the town, inviting them to his camp and offering to provide them with medical treatment.

The two white men were indeed the deserters Lewis and Potter, who had changed their names respectively to Charles Masson and, somewhat unimaginatively, John Brown – names by which they would be known for the rest of their lives. Masson was no ordinary soldier. An educated and cultured man, a fluent French speaker and classicist with a passion for archaeology and chronic wanderlust, over the next thirteen years he would excavate early Buddhist sites and amass a vast collection of ancient coins in Baluchistan, the Punjab and Afghanistan, in a solitary quest as impressive as it was eccentric. This nomadic scholar would eventually become one of the foremost antiquarians of Central Asia; but at the time he encountered Harlan he was merely a deserter, an outcast who faced the death penalty if caught by the British.

The path which had led Masson to a desert on the edge of India was as circuitous as that of Harlan himself. Indeed, their past histories and present passions were oddly similar. In 1822, at the age of twenty-one, London-born Masson, then James Lewis, had enlisted in the Company’s army and sailed for Bengal, looking for adventure. But after five years’ service in the artillery, when his regiment was stationed near Agra, he and a comrade, Richard Potter, decided they had had enough of soldiering. Unlike Harlan, they did not wait for permission to quit the ranks or purchase their discharges, but simply set off on foot, heading west. Masson’s biographer speculates that ‘as it is certain that he had already studied with some thoroughness the routes of Alexander the Great on his Persian and Indian campaigns, he may have had at the back of his mind a desire to explore Afghanistan’. Potter’s aspirations were less elevated, and his past far hazier. He appears to have deserted with the intention of entering the service of one or other of the native princes offering better pay and the possibility of swift advancement.

The two former artillerymen were very different characters. Masson was highly intelligent, and became capable of enduring astonishing hardships as he trudged, often barefoot and in rags, from one corner of Central Asia to the other. But he could also be quixotic and ill-tempered, dismissive of those he considered inferiors, overly free with his criticisms and often petulant. He made close friendships with Afghans, Sikhs and Persians, but some of his fellow Europeans found him priggish, cold and impenetrable. Potter, or Brown as he became, was by contrast steady and unimaginative, a gentle soul with neither Masson’s arrogance nor his resilience.

In his memoirs, written when he had acquired respectability and an official pardon, Masson makes no reference to his desertion, noting merely that ‘having traversed the Rajput States of Shekhawati, and the Kingdom of Bikanir, I entered the desert frontiers of the Khan of Bahwalpur’. The journey, and the illnesses they picked up en route, had almost killed them both. The nawab had provided sustenance but showed no eagerness to employ these two diseased and disreputable-looking Europeans, and the deserters were facing a grim choice between pushing on into the unknown or returning to face the rough justice of British India, when Harlan came to their aid.

Two days after Harlan’s arrival in Ahmadpur, a man appeared at the door of his tent, clad ‘in the dress of a native with his head shorn in the Indo-Muhammadan style’. Harlan studied the tattered figure before him with amused interest. ‘The light and straggling hair upon the upper lip in conjunction with the blue eyes at once revealed the true nativity of his caste. I addressed him without hesitation as a European deserter from the Horse Artillery at Mut’hra, of whom I had already read a description at Loodiana.’ Charles Masson attempted a bluff, ‘asserting that he belonged to Bombay and was merely travelling for amusement in this direction with the intention of proceeding home over land’. The performance was undermined by Masson’s demeanour, for he was visibly petrified, convinced that Harlan was a Company officer about to arrest him. ‘Perceiving his extremely uncomfortable position by the tremor of his voice and personal demonstrations of alarm, I quieted his terror with the assurance that I was not an Englishman and had no connection with the British government and consequently neither interest nor duty could induce me to betray him now or hereafter.’ A relieved Masson gave up the pretence and admitted that he and his ‘chum’, who was too weak to walk, were indeed fugitives from the British army. He himself had suffered from fever but had now recovered, and was desperate to get away from Bahawalpur.

Recognising a kindred spirit, Harlan made Masson an offer, even though by aiding deserters he was putting his own tenuous relationship with the British in jeopardy. He provided him and Potter with medicines and promised them horses and subsistence if they agreed to accompany him to Kabul. Masson accepted with alacrity and gratitude, and the following day the two Englishmen were installed as Harlan’s mounted orderlies. They had retained their artillery uniforms and broadswords, and Harlan remarked to himself that the addition of two officers in Western dress would add to the military panache of the outfit. Moreover, he believed he now had companions he could trust. ‘I reflected that I should be provided with at least two confidential retainers of interests identical with my own in case of personal danger arising from my peculiarly insulated situation.’

Harlan and Masson swiftly discovered their shared interests, and the American was delighted to have some educated company after so many weeks with no one to talk to (or rather, listen to) but Gul Khan. Masson and Brown decided that a pretence of American citizenship would offer additional protection against exposure as deserters, and they studied Harlan closely to pick up the manners of the New World. Masson would henceforth claim to be from Kentucky, a deception so successful that long after his death he was still being described, quite erroneously, as an American. The two Englishmen would play important roles in Harlan’s life: one would become his friend, stand by him in bad times, and then vanish into obscurity; the other would become his enemy, blacken his name at every opportunity, and become more famous than Harlan ever did.

4 THE YOUNG ALEXANDER (#ulink_69408771-edde-509f-8282-c93153a01b79)

The long-awaited meeting with Bahawal Khan would require all the pomp and dignity Harlan could muster. In his opinion, at least, this was considerable. ‘All my military retainers, now amounting to about one hundred armed men, were drawn up before the gateway,’ he wrote with pride of this ‘military pageant’. Harlan, mounted on Flora and wearing his Company uniform, took his place at the head of the troops, flanked by Masson and Brown. ‘I mounted, the bugle sounded, arms were presented,’ and with jangling spurs and clanking muskets, and some appreciative shouting from spectators, the American and his private army set off to meet the prince. Amirullah led the way on foot, carrying the silver mace like a club, while Gul Khan followed with the rest of the troops: first the sepoys, marching in time, then the Rohillahs, with rather less discipline, and finally a score of what Harlan euphemistically called ‘irregulars’ who did not march at all, but clattered along behind in a disorganised and enthusiastic mob.

Bahawal Khan was not going to be out-pomped, and had put on his own show of military force, assembling ‘his elite battalion of Seapoys armed in the European fashion and dressed in red jackets’. At least a thousand of these troops lined both sides of the town’s main street, and as the cortege passed, each saluted by putting his right hand in front of his forehead – a gesture which, Harlan observed, ‘appears extremely awkward with shouldered arms’. Behind the uniformed ranks milled an array of ‘irregular cavalry and dismounted cavaliers’, while the terraces of the houses on either side were packed with spectators craning for a look at the feringhee and his soldiers.

The nawab had set up a large pavilion about ten yards square in the middle of the town to receive his guest, but ‘so settled were his apprehensions of violence or sinister design’ that he had packed it with his own guards, leaving little room for the visitors. Harlan strode confidently into the enclosure in his most grand manner, and was unceremoniously mobbed. ‘The moment I entered, the Nawab’s confidential servants, armed to the teeth with every variety of weapons – spears, matchlocks, pistols, blunderbusses, swords, daggers, shields au bras – pressed around me and rather bore me up to the seat near the Nawab scarcely admitting the use of my legs!’

Gul Khan managed to squeeze in behind Harlan’s chair, ready to act as interpreter. Harlan studied Bahawal Khan closely: ‘He was a young man, apparently about twenty five years old, of middle stature and delicate form.’ The ‘unassuming deportment’ and ‘subdued bearing’ of the chief, who welcomed the visitor while ‘scarcely raising his eyes from the ground’, masked a man who was canny, ruthless and convinced that this tall stranger had come to depose or kill him.

Harlan beckoned Amirullah forward and presented the prince with a pair of valuable English pistols. Bahawal Khan examined the gift with undisguised admiration, remarking on the craftsmanship. The ice broken, Harlan instructed Gul Khan to tell the prince that he had ‘a confidential communication for the Nawab’s private ear’. Reassured that he was not about to be assassinated, the nawab ordered his bodyguards to draw back, and Harlan broached the subject of his mission, asking what treatment Shah Shujah might expect when he passed through his jurisdiction. The nawab’s reply was cautious: his house had always been faithful to the ex-king, he said, but then pointedly added that his country was a poor one. The hint was clear: if Shah Shujah wanted to be restored, he would have to pay for it. As Harlan rose to depart, the nawab’s vizier moved forward, bearing in his arms an exquisite tribal outfit which included a turban of gold brocade. This was a ‘dress of honour’, the first of many that would be presented to him over the coming years, a formal gift that, as Harlan elegantly put it, formed part of a ‘system of diplomatic language throughout the east’. With elaborate expressions of mutual regard, the meeting ended and Harlan rode back to his encampment, convinced that his first diplomatic foray on behalf of the exiled king had been a resounding success.

On 10 December Harlan and his troops marched out of Ahmadpur, leaving the Sutlej and heading west across country towards the river Indus. Harlan was in pensive mood, and with every step towards Afghanistan his past life seemed to grow more distant and irretrievable. ‘Heretofore I had not thoroughly divested myself of the familiar feeling one cherishes for the gradually receding associations of departing relations,’ he wrote, in an oblique reference to Eliza Swaim. The pain of that episode was slowly ebbing, for Harlan had little time for emotional reflection. ‘These scenes, a strange country, an unknown people and these objects in varied and diurnal recurrence filled up the tablets of observation.’ Finally, he was on the trail of Alexander the Great. ‘My mind was now full with the contemplation of the past,’ he wrote. ‘I was about to enter the country and become familiar with objects which have been made conspicuous to the world as the arena and subject of Alexander’s exploits.’

In these deserts, in 325 BC, Alexander had battled the warlike Indian tribe of the Malloi. Besieging the fortress of Multan to the north, the great Macedonian general had led the charge, receiving an arrow in the chest that nearly killed him. While his troops slaughtered the inhabitants of Multan, the wounded Alexander was carried away on the shield of Achilles. An attendant quoted Homer: ‘The man of action is the debtor to suffering and pain.’ Harlan would have reason to recall the motto of Achilles.

With Masson, whose classical knowledge was equal to his own, Harlan eagerly discussed possible links between the names of the villages they passed and the places alluded to by Plutarch and Quintus Curtius. ‘All the evidence to confirm the fact of Alexander’s invasion is to be found in numismatology and etymological inferences,’ observed Harlan, noting with regret that ‘the devastations of two thousand years have not, I believe, left a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’. The ferocious warrior tribes that had once opposed Alexander’s troops were now ‘a population oppressed with poverty’. They ran away as the troops approached, or peered out furtively from behind the walls of crumbling mud huts.

Crossing the Sutlej south of Ahmadpur, Harlan used his compass to set the march in a north-westerly direction, hoping to cross the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Alexander’s time, about seventy miles downriver from Multan. ‘Our march lay through high grass and the country was overgrown with vast forests of tamarisk,’ wrote Harlan. The soil was covered with an ‘efflorescent soda, resembling snow’. The Jhelum marked the westernmost frontier of Bahawal Khan’s lands, and there Harlan dismissed the nawab’s guide. ‘For the remainder of my route to Derah Ghazee Khan, I was left to my own resources, and [the] assistance of guides procured from the villages in our line of march.’

The land teemed with wild game. On the eastern bank of the river the mud had been churned up, with tracks suggesting a recent fight between a tiger and a buffalo. ‘Wild boar, Mooltaun lions and tigers abound,’ Harlan recorded. The wildlife seemed more plentiful, or at least more visible, than the population. Word of the approaching troops had preceded them, and ‘the few miserable mud huts or wagwams of nomadic shepherds were often found deserted’. The people had fled, Harlan reflected, fearing ‘the rough treatment which poverty usually receives at the hands of an inconsiderate soldiery, especially those constituting a foreign army’. Successive armies, from Alexander on, had passed through, looting and destroying; nothing in the appearance of Harlan’s troop betrayed the fact that its leader was an invader of a very different stamp.

Five days after crossing the Jhelum, Harlan caught his first glimpse of the Indus, the mighty river that flows from deep in the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, so vast that its Sanskrit name, Sindhu, means the ocean itself. The Greeks called it Sinthus, which became Indus, from which India derives its name. Harlan was elated. The Indus valley had seen a flourishing of early civilisation, Aryans, Buddhists, Mauryans, Scythians and Kushans. For Harlan, the waters of the Indus with their backdrop of towering hills spoke of Alexander’s empire. ‘To look for the first time upon the furthest stream that had borne upon its surface the world’s victor two thousand years ago. To gaze upon the landscape he had viewed. To tread upon the earth where Alexander bled. To stand upon that spot where the wounded hero knelt exhausted when pierced by the arrows of the barbarians.’ The river marked the furthest boundary of India, the edge of the unknown. When Elphinstone got here in 1809, he had found that even the local tribes were uncertain what lay beyond. ‘All we could learn was, that beyond the hills was something wild, strange, and new, which we might hope one day to explore.’ Charles Masson was also moved by the sight of the Indus, reflecting, like Harlan, ‘on the people and scenes I was about to leave behind, and on the unknown lands and races the passage of the river would open’.

Here a new hazard presented itself, for the river was bordered by plains of quicksand, indistinguishable from dry land, which could swallow a horse or a man in moments. Harlan ordered the troops to form a single file and follow a high narrow path snaking towards the river through the sands and high reeds. ‘A step upon either side would be attended with disaster,’ he reflected, wishing he had a sure-footed elephant under him rather than the skittery and nervous Flora: ‘When an elephant falls into a difficulty of this nature, he instantly throws himself upon one side and lies perfectly still. His great breadth and quietness will save him from sinking. His keeper throws him boughs of trees and reeds or bundles of jungle grass. These he takes with his trunk and places them under his body by rolling over upon them, thus forming a bridge towards the solid ground.’ The river itself was yet more treacherous, fast-flowing, infested with crocodiles and crossed by a narrow submerged ford with yet more quicksand on either side. After several tense hours the men, horses and camels had successfully reached the opposite bank, where Harlan found a large and malodorous reminder of how lucky they had been to cross without loss of life. There lay ‘an immense dead crockodile, about sixteen feet long and about six feet around the thickest part of its body’.

Soon they were marching through a land still more savage than Bahawalpur, where even the merchant caravans seldom penetrated. ‘The communities bordering the shores of the Indus are nearly altogether predatory [and] semi-barbarous,’ wrote Harlan. Marching with the Indus to his right, he led his army upriver, finally reaching the town of Dera Ghazi Khan on Christmas Day 1827. The sight of the settlement, surrounded by date groves and gardens, lifted the spirits of the troops. That night Harlan and the two Englishmen shared a nutritious Christmas dinner composed of the fruits of Kabul.

Dera Ghazi Khan came under the ever-expanding dominion of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, but until recently it had been part of Afghanistan, ruled over by an Afghan governor, the most recent of whom was Nawab Jubber Khan, half-brother of Dost Mohammed Khan, amir of Kabul. The locals ‘affectionately remembered Jubber Khan, extolling his liberality and humanity’. Harlan would soon come to know the nawab’s liberality more intimately.

‘A vast distance intervened between our position and the frontier of British India,’ wrote Harlan, in expansive vein. ‘We were in a community far beyond the control of European influence and I felt myself fairly launched upon the sea of adventure with self reliance alone for my guide.’ Self-reliance, and Alexander the Great. Harlan’s study of ‘the system by which Alexander the Great conquered, civilised and maintained possession of Persia, Scythia, Bactria and India’ had led him to conclude that the key to imperial success lay in establishing a linked chain of military bases, each located in a natural defensive position. ‘The genius displayed by Alexander in the selection of sites for this purpose’, he wrote, had made him ‘the unrivalled architect of empires’. If Harlan were now to conquer Afghanistan, he would need to do the same, and establish a fortified outpost on the Afghan frontier on the Alexandrine model, somewhere between the Indus to the east and the mountains to the west. Ranjit Singh held sway over Dera Ghazi Khan, but in the countryside, where there was no centralised government of any sort, various petty tribal chieftains vied for supremacy among themselves, in the traditional bloodthirsty manner. These clan chiefs included several secret supporters of Shah Shujah, Harlan wrote, ‘some from hereditary respect, some as antagonists to the aspiring and increasing power of the Siks’.

West of Dera Ismail Khan, the next large town up the Indus, lay the bastion of Tak, or Takht-I-Sulaiman as it is known today. ‘On the skirt of the mountains, there was an ancient fortress which commanded one of the passes from the upper region of the valley of the Indus. The fortress was situated on a ridge of the rocky ledge of mountains extending some distance into the river and might have made an impregnable stronghold.’ Harlan had heard of the place before setting out from Ludhiana; indeed, he had blithely informed Captain Wade that he intended to take possession of it. Charles Masson was sent ahead to reconnoitre. Tak, he reported, was a formidable fort, ‘the most massive piece of defensive erection I have seen in these parts’, with high, mud-brick walls, a deep trench, and at least a dozen pieces of artillery emplaced at the towers on each of its corners. It would make an ideal outpost. There was only one problem: it already had a chief, by the name of Sirwa Khan, a self-made warlord with a reputation for extreme brutality and paranoia, who was said to be constantly adding additional defences because ‘a faquir predicted to him that the duration of his rule and prosperity depend upon his never ceasing to build’. Harlan’s mind was made up: ‘The fortress of Tak was deemed in every respect a favourable position for our purposes.’ Most of Sirwa Khan’s forces were not local warriors, but Rohillahs, the same tribe as Gul Khan. Harlan’s lieutenant was instructed to make contact with his fellow mercenaries and find out if they would care to desert, for a consideration. Harlan felt no compunction in attempting to bribe the Rohillahs, since ‘their profession as military adventurers left them perfectly free to choose their leader amongst the highest bidders’. From among his own Rohillahs Gul Khan produced a man who had once been part of the garrison at Tak; this ‘secret messenger was accordingly dispatched to the head of the Rohillah garrison of Tak, with private instructions to tamper with his late comrades if he found their leader accessible to our design’.

Sirwa Khan, Harlan reasoned, held his fort only by virtue of force, and by force, or bribery, he might therefore be legitimately deprived of it. Alexander, after all, had not hesitated to subdue and subvert local chiefs in building his empire. ‘The strong fortress of Tak,’ Harlan wrote, is ‘one of those many retreats and fastnesses which the feudal system has made an essential construction for the safeguard of fortuitous power. Its possessor portrayed in his precautions the precarious nature of authority where might governs right by tyranny.’

While awaiting word from Tak, Harlan was visited by an Afghan noble, a member of the Saddozai clan and a relative of Shah Shujah. This fellow claimed to have been in service with Gul Khan, and described the Rohillah as a turncoat of the worst sort, who had had his hand cut off for treason. Harlan put the story down to malice.

Meanwhile his convoy was growing, with the addition of a group of Afghan pilgrims returning from Mecca to Peshawar who asked if they could join them on the march north for protection. Harlan was impressed by the resilience of these humble Muslims, whose resolute piety seemed reminiscent of his own Quaker faith. He did not have the heart to turn them away.

With pilgrims in tow, the army made its way through ‘flat country densely covered with camels, grazing in great herds upon the everlasting tamarisk’, guarded by a lone herdsman armed with a matchlock, sword and shield. Harlan was fascinated by these ungainly but hardy beasts, and he began to take copious notes of their habits and peculiarities, their food, character, milk, speed, voice and gait. The camel might be mocked as a horse designed by committee, but the committee had done its research and this peculiar animal was ideally adapted to its world. Harlan described it in his own intimate, inimitable style:

The camel is a great eater of fresh forage, with which he swells himself out thoroughly. He browses throughout the day, resting during the noon heat, and ruminates immediately after he ceases to feed. His forage sometimes ferments upon the stomach when his eructations become disgustingly offensive. When his food is digested he has a habit of gritting his teeth. Nothing can be more vociferous than the camel in his intercourse with man; he never allows his person to be touched either to load or unload without roaring louder and not unlike a tiger. The simultaneous preparations of the camp followers when about to march with the roaring camels creates a tremendous uproar and noise that rouses all the camp however desirous one may be to indulge undisturbed in the sweet luxury of a matin slumber. The horse is an excellent carrying beast but the camel less costly, more hardy, surer, is better adapted to the poor man, and his slow methodical gait is congenial to his driver’s indolent habits. His great strength and a rude diet make him an invaluable auxiliary. He is a hard working creature and when in health a faithful attendant, but he has a delicate temperament. The camel is perfectly docile in his temper and of admirable tractability. His gait is patient, moving both feet at the same, and will go at his utmost speed one hundred miles daily in consecutive marches with proper periods of rest and food. Camel milk is nutritious and used with avidity by the tribes who have access to it. They say the matrons amongst the Arabs who are anxious for their daughters to appear attractive in the eyes of an intended husband cause the affianced bride to drink freely and profusely of it until the victim rapidly increasing in obesity becomes grossly fat. In that state, the lady is an object of admiration.

Over the years Harlan would assemble an immense dossier on camel behaviour. Afghan camels, like the fruits of Kabul, would become a fixation.

A march of three days brought the troop to Surgur, the fiefdom of one Asad Khan, who duly appeared with food and forage in abundance as the men were making camp. Asad Khan was a striking figure in full tribal regalia, a great beard reaching to his waist and a long talwar thrust in his belt. This was the first Afghan chief Harlan had met, and he was struck that his ferocious-looking visitor made no demands in return for his generosity except ‘a request for medicine modestly proffered’. Hitherto the army had encountered only the tribes of the Indus valley, but now Harlan was entering the country of the Pathans, the frontier tribe ruled by an uncompromising code of personal honour valuing hospitality and revenge above all else. Winston Churchill, who encountered the Pathans in 1897 as a twenty-two-year-old soldier, wrote: ‘The Pathan tribes are always engaged in public or private war. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.’ Pukhtunwali, the way of the Pathans, was strict and uncompromising: anyone seeking asylum or hospitality, even an enemy, should be welcomed, and any injury or insult, or offence to a Pathan’s personal honour, should be met with retaliation. In time, Harlan would adopt much of the code as his own.

Word of Harlan’s medical skill travelled ahead of him, and every morning a line of sick and injured people could now be found waiting silently outside his tent. ‘During my frequent halts, numbers of the people applied for medical aid, upon all of whom I conferred the benefit of my clinical experience,’ wrote Harlan, who never turned a patient away. Eye diseases, and particularly cataracts, were endemic. In some cases Harlan was able to restore the sight of cataract sufferers by means of a simple operation. ‘My fame in this particular department of surgery had been conveyed from one to another, until the miracle of curing blindness by the touch was accredited to me,’ he wrote with some embarrassment. His cataract operation was crude in the extreme, requiring only ‘a steel lancet, a copper needle similar to a bodkin’ and a steady hand. One such operation was particularly memorable:

An elderly woman came to me who had been totally blind many years. When I alluded to the precarious nature of remedial measures and told her the painful nature of the means by which she could hope for relief, she promptly replied, with a firmness of invincible decision: ‘Why should I fear? Am I not an Avghaun?’ The lens of the right eye was depressed, the patient refusing to have her head restrained. She remained unmoved as the point of the lancet penetrated the eye, and in a moment the light of day again illumed the vision that had been so long extinguished. I told her to look up, which she did, and with a calm and pious fervour she ejaculated her gratitude to Heaven. I desired to apply the usual dressings, consisting of a compress and bandage lightly bound, but she resisted and explained: ‘Let me first look upon the face of my deliverer to whom I owe a second creation.’ She prostrated herself before me with expressions of devout adoration whilst I endeavoured to proceed with the bandaging.

Having given instructions for her convalescence, Harlan told the delighted woman she should now go home.

This she would by no means agree to, insisting that I would ‘thrust the lancet into the other eye’. I found it impossible to satisfy her importunity without complying with her request as she repeated ‘I am an Avghaun. Proceed. I fear nothing.’ After the operation she rose up from the carpet upon which she had been seated, invoked endless blessings upon myself and posterity for seven generations, and suffered herself to be led away, repeating as she walked off with surprising self-confidence in her step and exultation in her voice: ‘God is great! Thanks and praise be to God, and blessing on the Christian!’

After a three-day pause the party resumed its progress up the west bank of the Indus towards Dera Ismail Khan, passing through a landscape of desert scrub, jungle and rocky outcrops. The few inhabitants seemed peaceable, but food and forage were becoming scarce. Harlan always offered to pay for what he needed, a gesture that puzzled the locals, who were more used to being pillaged than paid: ‘Their surprise at just treatment from one who had the power to exact submission gave proofs of the misery through which the poor here struggle against the oppressors of their race.’ To supplement the increasingly sparse diet Harlan resorted to his fowling piece, providing the pot with hare, partridges, doves and other birds. A crack shot, he had caught the British passion for hunting, the shikar, in India, and such forays provided opportunities to study the local flora, while killing some of its fauna.

Lean as a wolf, Harlan carried the privations lightly, and like Alexander he declined to eat when his men were hungry. ‘A man may fast throughout the day without much concern for his comfort. He may in some measure for a limited period dull the hungry edge of appetite with bare imagination of a feast,’ he wrote cheerfully, quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II. ‘One substantial meal in twenty-four hours taken about bedtime will supply the wants of life during that period.’ The men grumbled when there was not enough food to fill the dekshies for the evening meal, but Harlan was far more concerned that the animals should be properly fed, giving rice from his private store to the horses when there was no grain to be had.

Finally the tired troops struggled into Dera Ismail Khan, a trading post on the upper Indus, inhabited mainly by Baluchis. The town had been conquered by Baluchi chiefs in the sixteenth century and now came under the rule of Ranjit Singh. Standing out from the Baluchis and Sikhs were numerous Afghan traders from the mountains, ‘large, and boney men, with long, coarse hair, loose turbans, and sheepskin cloaks: plain, and rough, but pleasing in their manners’. There was another exotic species in Dera Ismail Khan that was far harder to pick out from the crowd: the ‘news-writers’, creatures peculiar to imperial India, who combined the roles of gossip, journalist, undercover agent and spy. Native news-writers gathered information, usually of a political nature, and secretly sold it to whoever would pay them. Captain Wade and Ranjit Singh both deployed networks of newswriters to tell them whose star was rising and whose was falling, who had murdered whom, the blood feuds, plots and dynastic marriages that formed the convoluted politics of the region. Such unofficial reports were invaluable, although often wildly inaccurate. As Harlan observed: ‘These people are employed to furnish the daily report of occurrences and form a numerous body in the service of chiefs and princes who require to be informed of their neighbours’ designs. By means of bribery they gain access to the most direct springs of action, one or more of them being always stationed as spies upon the actions of every leader or man of note.’ Harlan now became aware, probably through a rival newswriter, that he was under surveillance, his movements being reported back to Ranjit Singh in Lahore. ‘One of these worthies, I had good reason to believe, had followed in the rear of my march from the day I left Loodianah and was still secretly engaged in this clandestine employment.’ This unnamed spy was about to make Harlan’s life very difficult indeed. Ranjit Singh, the Prince of the Punjab and Shah Shujah’s onetime jailer, appears to have been aware of Harlan’s plans to restore Shujah from the moment he left British-controlled India. Ranjit detested Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler in Kabul, but equally he had no desire to see the exiled king return to power. He had therefore sent instructions to the various princes along Harlan’s route, who held their territories as fiefdoms of the Sikh potentate, to treat the American with extreme care but to give no encouragement to any plan for the restoration of Shujah. He had also told his feudal underlings that the feringhee should not be permitted to remain ‘anywhere within their territories for a longer period than the ordinary necessities of an amateur traveller might suggest’.

This had placed the nawab of Dera Ismail Khan in a most uncomfortable position. The nawab was a Saddozai, a cousin of Shah Shujah himself, and thus favourable to the restoration of the exiled king. Like other chiefs, he chafed under Sikh domination. But equally he was anxious not to antagonise Ranjit Singh, who would welcome an excuse to oust him and annex Dera Ismail Khan. The nawab’s messenger duly appeared before Harlan with a gift of three hundred rupees to explain, delicately, that while the visitor was most welcome, it would be altogether better if he left quickly. Harlan tried to reassure the nawab’s envoy that he would soon be travelling on to Peshawar, but at this the man looked doubtful. There were, he explained, only three ways to get past the exceptionally hostile Afghan tribes between Dera and Peshawar: bribery, violence or stealth. ‘The road to Peshawar would be unpassable through the mountain tribes by any party which was too numerous for disguise,’ he explained, ‘whilst our force was not sufficient to effect a passage by arms.’ One might try to buy a way through, he added, but the mountain tribes were treacherous and cruel, and likely to assume that if a traveller was rich enough to pay a bribe, then he was certainly worth robbing.

Idly, the man observed that the Rohillah garrison at Tak had mutinied for lack of pay. If Harlan had money, he might enlist these men as a guard against the mountain tribes. Harlan was astonished. ‘This was the first intimation I had received of the movements of my agents at Tak,’ he wrote. Did the nawab know that the mutiny had been instigated by Harlan himself? Was this some sort of ploy? Harlan carefully cross-examined his informant, but concluded that he had no suspicions as to the true cause of the mutiny.

That night, the Rohillah commander from Tak presented himself in person. Dusty and bedraggled from the thirty-mile ride, he saluted and declared, in Harlan’s words, that he and his three hundred men were ‘mad with the prospect of entering my service’. Subsequent questioning, however, revealed that the mutiny was still at the negotiating stage. If Harlan would send his sepoys, the Rohillah told him, the fortress could be taken with ease. For the first time Harlan began to have misgivings. How did this fellow expect a handful of men to accomplish a result that was beyond his three hundred Rohillahs? Even more worrying was the demeanour of Gul Khan. Harlan summoned the scarred old fighter to a private council of war, but found him distinctly unwarlike. Was this not the moment to launch a full-scale assault on the fortress, Harlan asked. Gul Khan looked at his feet. Perhaps Gul Khan might care to go to Tak and coordinate the mutiny in person? Once more, Gul Khan demurred: he would not be able to live with himself, he said, ‘if any misfortune happened to Saheb’. The Rohillahs could not be relied on, added the old mercenary, and Tak was miles away, ‘near the mountains which are inhabited by spirits and demons’.