an Afghan potentate in his own right.
Even Shah Shujah’s poise appears to have been temporarily undermined by this presumptuous suggestion, and instead of replying directly, the exiled king began extolling the splendours of Kabul, its music, its gardens, its trees laden with luscious fruit. ‘Kabul is called the Crown of the Air,’ he declared. ‘I pray for the possession of those pleasures which my native country alone can afford.’
Then he fell into a reverie, and for several minutes nothing was said. Finally he fixed his visitor with a beady stare, and spoke: ‘Should success attend your measures, I am ready to relinquish all political power into your hands and claim only for myself the summer and winter residences, with the fruits of Kabul and Kandahar. Heaven grant we may enjoy together the revival of those sweetly varied and luxurious hours which daily haunt my imagination and in unison participate in possession of an inheritance which fate at this moment denies to me.’
The interview was over. Harlan bowed and backed out of the royal presence. His encounter with this pining potentate had moved him. ‘My feelings warmed into deep sympathy for the exiled monarch and I took leave of His Majesty with the confirmed determination of devoting myself to his service.’ Harlan was elated by the pure romance of his imagined mission, and the opportunity to invent himself as the liberator of a country oppressed by tyranny. Of course he only had Shujah’s word for this, but that was enough: ‘I saw him [as] an exiled and legitimate monarch, the victim of treasonable practices, popular in the regard of his subjects, opposed by a combination of feudal chiefs against the hereditary ruler [they] had driven into banishment.’
Harlan eventually came to see the Old Pretender in a very different light, and would conclude that ‘In his true colours he was unparalleled in infamous debauchery.’ The mutilated mullah who now led him away was warning enough that he was dealing with a most unpredictable man. Ears or no, Mullah Shakur had been listening intently throughout the interview, and as they walked back down the avenue of fruit trees the scarred old warrior-divine instructed Harlan to begin military preparations while awaiting Shujah’s decision on the timing of his quest. At the wicket gate Harlan bade farewell to the vizier and the two men parted, as Harlan wrote, ‘he to revalue with His Majesty the probabilities of success which my proposals encouraged, and I to devise additional and appropriate measures for the prosecution of castle building’.
To build castles Harlan needed troops. With impressive hubris he ordered a Ludhiana tailor to sew him an American flag, ran it up a makeshift flagpole on the edge of town and, without any authority to do so, began recruiting an army under the stars and stripes. There were plenty of native mercenaries knocking about the border station looking for work and adventure, and word soon spread that the feringhee was prepared to pay good money for fighting men. Local Europeans were convinced that this peculiar American planned to carve out his own kingdom, as George Thomas had done a generation earlier, an impression he did nothing to dispel. William McGregor, an English doctor posted in Ludhiana, wrote that Harlan ‘started out with the intention of subduing all the countries across the Sutlej’, noting that he had ‘hoisted the American flag at Loodhiana, and collected a rabble’. Joseph Wolff, the wandering missionary, recorded that Harlan had left British India intending ‘to make himself king of Afghanistan’.
Harlan had little choice but to confide in Captain Wade, and told the Englishman that Shujah had invested him with ‘the powers of a secret agent, in which he was commissioned and stimulated to revolutionize Avghanistan in favor of the “true King”’. Indeed, the British agent, with his wide network of informers, was probably aware of what Harlan was up to from the moment he entered Shujah’s pleasure garden. Wade, maintaining British neutrality, did not overtly encourage the scheme, while indicating that any information Harlan cared to relay about the Afghan situation would be received with great interest – unofficially, of course. The British official wrote to Calcutta: ‘Dr Harlan proposed to communicate his progress to me as opportunities might offer, and should his communications contain anything of interest to the government, I shall consider it my duty to report.’
Wade had another, more specific task for the young American: to determine what had happened to the last white man to reach Kabul, an explorer who had set off into the wilderness four years earlier, and never come back. The fate of William Moorcroft, horse doctor, pioneer and British spy, was and remains one of the great mysteries of the period.
An English veterinary surgeon employed by the Company as superintendent of its stud, Moorcroft had become convinced that in the wilds of Tartary, beyond the fabled Hindu Kush, were horses of such strength and beauty that they would transform the bloodstock of the Company’s cavalry. He would make three extraordinary journeys in search of the legendary Turcoman steeds, the last of which would take him to the Punjab, Ladakh, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Bokhara, and kill him.
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
