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

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      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’.

      Perhaps Gul Khan was right, Harlan pondered: ‘Caution is creditable where desperation does not marshal our designs. Those who have no other hope may be justly desperate: To win or lose, to sink or swim as fortune may approve, death or victory.’ This was not yet the moment for a desperate gamble. Even so, Gul Khan’s spinelessness was not encouraging. The Rohillah from Tak was handed a thousand rupees, an advance against the five thousand payable if the mutiny was successful, and instructed to return to the fortress. While he organised the mutiny, Harlan would slowly advance on Tak and lead, if necessary, an assault in support of the mutineers.

      The following day, after stocking up on powder and lead shot at the town bazaar, Harlan led his men out of Dera and set out for Tak, ‘still holding the Indus on my right within a convenient distance to secure a retreat in case of adverse results in the audacious enterprise’. He was not leaving Dera a moment too soon, for strange stories were circulating, and the nawab’s behaviour had become increasingly unfriendly. ‘He had been informed that I possessed a wonderful missile of violence which could be thrown into the area of a fort by the hand where its explosion would cause the death of the garrison and blow down the walls in an instant.’ In addition to this magical hand-grenade, the feringhee was said to possess other weapons of mass destruction, including a rapid-assembly cannon whose parts could be put together at a moment’s notice. Even more worrying, from the nawab’s point of view, there was a rumour that Shah Shujah himself was hiding inside one of Harlan’s trunks. The gossip was patently absurd, but it was enough to convince the already nervous nawab that Harlan represented a serious threat to his own security.

      Fourteen miles out of Dera, Harlan made camp in the ruins of an ancient fortress known as Kafir Qila, or Fort of the Infidel, to await word on the progress of the mutiny. From the low hill the plain stretched away to mountains, the dense jungle of dwarf tamarisk broken here and there by patches of cultivation. Herds of camels and goats browsed among the thorn trees, and small plumes of white smoke rose quietly into the still air from the fires of unseen herdsmen. In this landscape, unchanged for centuries, Harlan reflected that his tented encampment made an improbable tribute to American endeavour.

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