Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, London merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth I for permission and support to trade in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Despite losing ships, the merchant adventurers persisted with their plans, and on the last day of 1600 the Queen granted a royal charter to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies’. Convoys of merchant ships made huge profits for the merchants and their aristocratic backers who were able to establish sprawling country estates on the proceeds of their profits. The company became known as the East India Company and also as the Honourable or British East India Company and informally as the John Company, after merchant and ship owner Sir John Watts, one of the company’s founders who was elected its governor in April 1601.
The East India Company expanded to account for half the world’s trade in basic commodities, such as silk, cotton, indigo dye, tea, opium and saltpetre, used in the manufacture of gunpowder, after seeing off the Portuguese, Dutch and finally the French. During the first 100 years it was primarily a trading company with the governors reluctant to spend profits building an empire. However, with the establishment of trading posts, the defeat of a Mughal viceroy in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey in Benghal, and with the general decline of the Mughal empire in India, the company expanded the territory it controlled.
By 1803 the East India Company had built up a private army of more than a quarter of a million troops which at the time was twice the size of the British Army. The company increasingly took over administration for the territories it had moved into until the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The following year the Government of India Act passed through parliament enabling the British Crown to take direct control of Indian affairs. The British involvement in India moved on a stage into the British Raj.
Commerce, the defence of empire, as well as missionary zeal, helped people to overcome fears of the snowy ranges. Servants of the East India Company were sent north to unravel the complexities of the geography so that trading routes might be established through the mountain barrier to the fabled cities on the silk route. Increasingly the East India Company and the British Government sought information about the topography as well as the inhabitants of the mountainous North-West Frontier so as to be prepared for incursions by Russian and even French aggressors.
In 1798, 40,000 French troops sailed from Toulon and Marseille for Egypt in preparation to take back India from the British. The governor general of India, Lord Wellesley, used this opportunity to embark upon a ‘forward policy’ by taking control of most of India except Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir, all of which remained independent kingdoms. This was a remarkable achievement in his seven years tenure as governor general. However, by then Nelson had destroyed all but two vessels of the French fleet lying off the coast of Egypt.
Despite this setback Napoleon kept alive the possibility of driving the British out of India and creating a French empire in the east. In 1807, full of confidence from recent victories in Europe, he suggested to Tsar Alexander I of Russia that the French and the Russians should combine to attack India from the north. Napoleon was prepared to contribute 50,000 troops. The East India Company and the British Government had heard many rumours about Russian designs on India which had largely been discounted due to the distances involved and the harsh terrain that would have to be crossed, but now, with the support of a military genius, the company was galvanised into action.
Napoleon’s adventures in Egypt suddenly alerted the British to the vulnerability of their Indian empire and how important it was to steer Persia and Afghanistan away from having any dealings with the French or the Russians. Napoleon had set the foreign policy agenda where India was concerned for the next 150 years.
The most likely route the French and Russian invasion would take was in the footsteps of Alexander, overland through Persia and into Afghanistan or Baluchistan. Overtures were therefore made to the shah of Persia who eventually came firmly under British influence thanks to Captain John Malcolm, a native of Eskdale in Dumfriesshire. This young soldier from the Borders was by 1810 more knowledgeable of Persia than any other Briton. Part of the arrangement made with the shah for his support of Britain was that the British would help train his army in modern warfare. Malcolm, who had by now been promoted to major general, came with a small group of highly trained officers to not only instruct the Persian army but also to check out and report back on the geography of Persia from a military perspective.
The next step was more hazardous, requiring secret incursions into other more hostile states to the north and south of Persia. All this is well written up in Peter Hopkirk’s book The Great Game. There the reader will know of the valiant efforts during 1810 of Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Henry Pottinger of the 5th Bombay Native Infantry. Both young men, barely in their twenties, were tasked to go where no European had gone before, through challenging terrain forever at the mercy of fickle and hostile tribal chiefs.
They had parted company in Nushki in Baluchistan to widen the scope of their reconnaissance; Charles Christie eventually entered Herat, western Afghanistan. He was only the second European to venture into this important town, strategically placed on the historic east–west route connecting Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan with the Indus valley. Pottinger travelled further west and eventually after three months, and more than 2,250 miles later, they were both together in Isfahan. They could now finally relax in friendly Persia, being out of danger from hostile tribesmen, and write up reports that proved to be invaluable to the British defence of India from the west. They had managed to evade capture by disguising themselves variously as holy men or as Tatar horse dealers. Such men, so resourceful and able to think on their feet, were the backbone of empire at this time, with more to follow in their footsteps.
As late as 1829, Lord Ellenborough, the president of the East India Company Board of Control, suggested, according to Charles Masson, the army deserter who became a government spy in Kabul, ‘We ought to have “information”. The first, second and third thing a government always ought to have is information.’ To this end there were fifteen confirmed Europeans on fact-finding missions into Afghanistan before the first Afghan War of 1839. One of the most effective of these agents was Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) who was in 1809 the first envoy to the court of Kabul.
By 1815 he had published, in two volumes, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, which, apart from a huge amount of detail covering the social and economic life of the people, also included a map of ‘Caubul On A Reduced Scale Shewing Its Relative Situation To The Neighbouring Countries’. The map featured ‘The Kurrakooram’ and the ‘Hemalleh’ as well as the major river systems of the area showing the Indus flowing through Kashmir. This was the first detailed map of the north-west Indian subcontinent. The map was of considerable use to future travellers and the book their bible for the next fifty years.
Elphinstone was born in Dumbarton and after an education at the Edinburgh Royal High School, joined the civil service of the East India Company arriving in Calcutta in 1796. He not only distinguished himself collecting information in Afghanistan but also impressed his superiors, including Wellesley, for having a natural aptitude for soldiering. He became governor of Bombay where he put his energy and negotiating skills into establishing education for Indians at a time when educating ‘natives’ was held in horror back in Britain. Elphinstone College, which he established in 1856, is a fitting legacy to his philanthropic endeavours. Another legacy was to have built the first bungalow on the Malabar Hill of Bombay. It quickly became, and remains, the upmarket residential area of the city where the former editor of the Himalayan Journal and secretary of the Himalayan Club lives.
The Franco-Russian attack never took place since France set about Russia and lost an army during the retreat in midwinter from a burnt-out Moscow. The Russians, emboldened by their success in reducing La Grande Armée from 400,000 to 9,000, again turned their attentions towards the East and the Indian subcontinent.
The springs to adventure might be narrowed down to man’s propensity for being inquisitive but also acquisitive. It was Cicero in the first century BC who observed ‘What has always fascinated man the most is the unknown’. This fascination surely must underlie one of the main reasons men left hearth and home to face unimaginable hardship and frustrations, sometimes over many years, journeying through the Karakoram and surrounding mountain ranges. Ostensibly, they may well have gone as geographers opening up routes for trade or defence, but they were also smitten with the addiction to the uncertainties of the unknown.
During the first half of the nineteenth century several brave and resourceful Europeans arrived on the scene, including William Moorcroft (1767–1825). To all outward appearances he explored the Karakoram and beyond out of commercial interest. He became obsessed with opening up trade with Central Asia between Yarkand and the Caspian Sea to ensure the protection of British India in depth by creating trading posts throughout the region. John Keay in When Men & Mountains Meet (1977) summed up his vision as ‘bringing prosperity and order whilst making of the region an outer rampart in the landward defences of India’.
Moorcroft was from Ormskirk in Lancashire and became a veterinary surgeon later employed by the East India Company in Bengal. During his time in India and Central Asia Moorcroft successfully investigated opportunities to develop a trade in wool with Tibet. In doing so he introduced wool from Tibetan goats that could be made into fine pashmina shawls. He is also credited with discovering the true source of the Indus and Sutlej and was thus able to prove they were quite separate from the Ganges river systems. Moorcroft also plotted on his map the Yarkand River and showed for the first time that it rises on the north flank of the Karakoram mountains. He was the first Englishman into Leh from where he made incursions into the Karakoram exploring the Nubra Valley at the eastern end of the range. He was regarded by his contemporaries, and later by Kenneth Mason, as one of the most important explorers of the region and, like so many, his life ended tragically still in harness in the service of the company.
From 1819 to 1825 Moorcroft travelled into Ladakh, Kashmir, Baltistan and Afghanistan where he eventually died in mysterious circumstances, possibly from a fever. However, his travelling companions, George Guthrie, George Trebeck and Moorcroft’s regular interpreter, perished at the same time also from unknown causes suggesting they may well have been murdered for their possessions or, as rumour would have it at the time, poisoned by Russian agents. Fortunately, Moorcroft’s papers were discovered and published in 1841, including a map, drawn up with the aid of a sketch made by George Trebeck.
Here, of course, use of the word ‘discover’ is in relative terms: it is not as in making discoveries in Antarctica where no one had ever been before; discoveries here invariably mean ‘seen for the first time by non-indigenous inhabitants’. The fact that Moorcroft spent years travelling as far as Bokhara in Uzbekistan looking for better stud horses to improve the bloodline of East India Company horses suggests that sheer curiosity to look around the next corner was a major motivating factor. In fact, he didn’t find any of the horses he was looking for in Bokhara but he did find considerable evidence of Russian penetration all along the Silk Road and to the north of the Karakoram.
In the book When Men & Mountains Meet the reader discovers that when Moorcroft first alerted the authorities in India of the Russian presence in the Trans Himalaya, the reaction of the East India Company and the British Government was lukewarm. They started to take far more interest in the mapping of the north-western end of the Himalaya and the Karakoram mountains only when it became ever-more evident the Russians had not only commercial aspirations, but also designs to make political capital in the Indian subcontinent.
Alexander Burnes (1805–1841) from Montrose in Scotland was the first major player in the Great Game who took up the baton from Moorcroft to march into the north-west highlands of the subcontinent and on into Afghanistan. Appropriately it was Burnes who, in 1832 on his way to Bokhara, found Moor croft’s grave on the outskirts of Balkh. Burnes, the first cousin of Robert Burns the poet, went out to India at the age of sixteen. He first joined the East India Company army, during which time he became fluent in Hindi, Urdu and Farsi and worked as an interpreter. He also developed a keen interest in the geography and history of north-west India.
In 1831 he managed to inveigle his way on to an expedition to explore the Indus. King William IV wished to give a present of five English dray horses to Ranjit Singh who had previously presented King William with fine Kashmiri shawls. The Sikhs, under their able ruler, Ranjit Singh, had built up a strong kingdom in the Punjab, following the downfall of the Mughals. Ranjit Singh managed to coexist with the British without serious problem.
The British had long since established friendly relations with Ranjit and, in fact, after he conquered Kashmir in 1817, he had allowed the British to explore Ladakh, Kashmir and Baltistan. However, the British were alarmed to hear that Ranjit was exploring the possibility of commercial contracts with the Russians and had sent an envoy to St Petersburg. Finally, after Ranjit Singh’s death, the British Government decided to follow Moorcroft’s advice to see if the Indus river was navigable not only for trade but also to move troops whenever it was necessary to keep order and the Russians at bay.
Lord Ellenborough was convinced that the Russian advance had to be stopped well before it poured into the Indus valley. The native population might well take advantage of such a conflict with the Russians within India as an opportunity to rebel against British domination. Without reli able maps Ellenborough knew any military campaign would be seriously handicapped.
He hit upon the idea to persuade the maharajah that the only reasonable way to deliver the horses to Lahore was not over 700 miles of difficult and baking hot countryside but by river boat. Burnes was chosen to lead the expedition as it was recognised that he had exceptional qualities. Already, at the age of twenty-five, he was not only fluent in three local languages but he also had an ear for dialect. He was slight of build but brimming with self-confidence and determination, and yet, at the same time, had a great deal of charm. He quickly rose through the ranks of the 1st Bombay Light Infantry to be transferred to the prestigious Indian Political Service. They sailed from Kutch in January 1831, together with five horses and a newly made gilded state coach built in Bombay.
William Dalrymple has written an excellent introduction to a recent edition of Burnes’s book, Travels into Bohkara (edited by Kathleen Hopkirk). Dalrymple notes the ‘five huge dapple-grey Suffolk dray horses being punted peacefully up river’ to the amazement of the Punjabis who though fanatical horsemen had never seen anything like ‘the little English elephants’ before. Burnes delivered the cargo to a very appreciative maharajah and details of the river and surroundings to Government of India intelligence. During the following years he continued journeying through Afghanistan, Bokhara and Persia as the eyes and ears of empire, all of which was written up in his book first published in 1835. It became an instant bestseller in England with 900 copies sold on the first day of publishing. He became something of a celebrity and, after his violent death, a national hero.
Such were his diplomatic skills that Burnes was sent on a political mission to Kabul to gather information on the mishmash of tribal loyalties and to offer not only facts, but also advice so that the Government of India could formulate an effective policy. Unfortunately, Burnes’ advice was overruled and the first Afghan War broke out in 1839 ending disastrously in 1842 with 4,500 British and Indian troops killed along with some 12,000 camp followers. During this period, with the 4,500 troops camped half an hour away, a mob attacked Burnes in his residence as they held him responsible for the British encroachment into their country.
The British Army, under the vacillating command of Major General William Elphinstone, left their decision to help Burnes too late. He and his brother Charles were hacked to pieces. A year later in 1842 all but a few of the Indian Army had been decimated on their retreat back towards the Indus valley. Traditionally, history has it that only the assistant surgeon, William Brydon, reached Jalalabad on 13 January 1842 to relate the slaughter. There were a number of sepoy survivors who had hidden in caves and managed to trickle back to the Indus valley. There were also hostages that were later released after a retaliatory attack on Kabul and into Bamian Province by General George Pollock and General William Nott.
The British policy makers either failed to realise or, more likely, chose to ignore that Afghanistan would always be more of a liability than a beneficial buffer state. Their spies had let their superiors know Afghanistan was not a stable, single entity with an overall central power structure. Readers of Rory Stewart’s journey off the beaten track across Afghanistan, will find in his book The Places In Between that to this day, as the title suggests, Afghanistan and its people are not as anywhere else.
It is the fate of the people born upon the ‘Roof of the World’ that their land was coveted and attacked from prehistory onwards. It is impossible not to admire the spirit of this country made up of mountain dynasties, all fiercely independent, consisting of mountain warriors up in the clouds, well versed in manipulating the invaders crowding their space. Yet the British, followed by the Russians and now the Americans, have moved in on the country forgetting the lessons of history, giving some credence to Marx’s observation that history repeats itself ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’.
The Great Game, as immortalised by Kipling in his novel Kim, was to prove a deadly game for many. The year after Burnes perished so did Captain Arthur Conolly who, according to Peter Hopkirk, was the first to coin the name ‘Great Game’. While trying to secure the release of his brother officer, Colonel Charles Stoddart, in June 1842, both Conolly and Studdart were beheaded under the orders of the Emir of Bokhara.
Godfrey Vigne (1801–1863) from Walthamstow, then in Essex, an Harrovian, barrister, county cricketer and considerable artist, travelled extensively between 1835 and 1838 throughout Kashmir and Ladakh. His family were wealthy merchants who supplied the East India Company with gunpowder. He became the first European to describe Nanga Parbat which he did after crossing the Gurais Pass in 1835 en route to Baltistan. He was quite smitten when ‘the stupendous peak of Diarmul, or Nungu Purbut, more than forty miles distant, in a straight line, but appearing to be much nearer, burst upon my sight’.
A week later after crossing the undulating Deosai Plateau he marched down into the Indus valley and became the first foreigner to enter Skardu. There are suggestions that the Macedonian Greeks had been in the region in 320 BC. Alexander himself did reach the valley of Swat, but whether or not his troops explored the valleys to the east as far as Skardu is open to question. The suggestion that they did is based on the town’s name possibly deriving from Iskandariya which is the Balti rendering of Alexander. A short distance upstream from Skardu there is the Indus ferry. The inflated buffalo and goat skin barges are known locally as ‘Alexander’s Barge’.
Vigne wrote of his travels in these mountain ranges in his classic Travels in Kashmir (1842). His writing portrays a man as interested in appreciating the mountains as a means to lift his spirits rather than just a physical challenge to pass through. By the late eighteenth century attitudes began to change towards the mountains; this change continued into the nineteenth century when Ruskin noted in his Modern Painters (1856) that ‘Mountain gloom gave way to mountain glory’. Vigne was not only one of the first to describe the mountains in romantic terms but also by 1838 he had established and then informed the Western world that the Karakoram was every bit as formidable as the Himalaya with huge glacier systems never before known or visited.
In 1835 he walked from Skardu up to the snout of the Chogolungma Glacier that is aligned parallel to the Hispar. Vigne wrote of the Basho river issuing from the glacier out of a cave in the ice cliff a hundred feet high and a quarter of a mile wide; it was ‘no insignificant brook, but a large and ready formed river’ roaring down its rocky bed towards the Shigar river and the Indus.
This first visit to Skardu by a foreigner was quickly followed by a second when, a few months later, the Scottish doctor and adventurer John Henderson entered Skardu in October 1835. He had followed the Indus down from Leh, dressed in native attire, all tattered and torn by the time he returned to Srinagar, where he was able to compare notes with Vigne.