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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ