14

Guarding the Frontiers

VICEROYS, CURZON BELIEVED, tended to be puppets in the hands of their military advisers. Initially ignorant both of India and of military matters, they were confronted on arrival by an array of generals and made to dance to the bombastic tunes of the army. The new Viceroy quickly broke this tradition. On finding the Government of India committed to an expensive programme of fortifying the Khyber and other passes, he promptly cancelled it. As he told Selborne, he had the advantage of knowing the frontier from his earlier travels and he understood what he was talking about.1 Rather than allow the army to follow its own agenda, he was determined that from the beginning it would be controlled by himself and his Council.

India’s armed strength was numerically unimpressive. There were about 200,000 troops to defend and preserve order in an empire of some three hundred million people stretching from the borders of Persia to the frontiers of Siam. Only a third of them belonged to British regiments, which meant that the ratio of the native population to white soldiers was thus about 5,000 to 1. The remainder comprised the Indian Army, a recent amalgamation of the armies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, which consisted of native regiments commanded by British officers. Before the Mutiny the proportion of Indian soldiers to white troops had been much higher. Most of the victories that had made Britain’s empire in India, the battles of Clive, Arthur Wellesley and others against Indian or Franco-Indian troops, had been won by small, outnumbered forces consisting mainly of native soldiers with British officers.

The calibre of Britain’s armies at the end of the nineteenth century was not high at home or abroad. Lord Salisbury was puzzled by the poor performance of officers in the Boer War and wondered whether Britain might not have done better with an army of Red Indians.2 Curzon thought the military suffered from lack of brains and lack of discipline: the navy was better, he told Selborne, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1900, because some sailors were intelligent and nearly all of them understood discipline.3 In action, the Viceroy admitted, British soldiers in India knew their business and acted like men; their fighting capacity and speed of mobilization compared with the best anywhere. But placed in an office and required to work out a reform or plan a strategy, they seemed to be ‘incurable bunglers’.4 Two of the Lieutenant-Generals struck him as ‘very second-rate performers’ while most of the other senior officers appeared to be very worthy, very brave and very stupid. They treated battles, he told Brodrick, like a game of football. Few of them read or studied or knew anything about military science, and their undoubted courage would be of little use when they were being picked off by an enemy three miles away.5

The army was administered by the Commander-in-Chief at Army Headquarters, who was the executive head, and the Military Department, which was under a Major-General on the Viceroy’s Council. Curzon accepted the need for the department, which was responsible for transport, supplies and other administrative matters, but initially thought it the most incompetent of those in the Government. It was so overawed by the generals at Army Headquarters that it acquiesced in almost all their suggestions and authorized large sums of expenditure which Curzon considered unjustifiable. One of the functions of the Military Member – to be a second adviser to the Viceroy on army matters – was thus inoperable. General Collen, who held the post from 1896 to 1901, was in Curzon’s eyes an officer ‘mentally composed of India-rubber’ who had learned the lesson of subordination so well that he seldom questioned a proposal from the Commander-in-Chief. This abrogation of responsibility was accompanied by administrative chaos, so that a file sent to the Military Department was apt to remain there for weeks. Not that much happened to it in the meantime because the officers wrote so badly that Curzon refused to allow them to compose their department’s despatches. The entire official correspondence on the defence of India, he told Hamilton in 1902, had been written by himself, because it was quicker to produce his own drafts than to correct theirs.6

Wherever he looked, he found jobbery, waste and mismanagement, officers putting their own men in billets, engineers building expensive forts in pointless places, a wheat-eating regiment stationed in a rice-growing area where the wheat had to be imported at great cost. ‘Oh, these soldiers!’ he complained. ‘Badly indeed would they fare if I were counsel against them at the Day of Judgment.’7 As in other fields, he quickly encouraged a series of reforms, rearming the regiments, improving the transport system, providing for a greater degree of self-sufficiency in weapons and ammunition.8 But he understood that the army was one area where he could not do everything himself and where he needed a vigorous Commander-in-Chief to co-operate with him in the task of reform. There was in his eyes only one suitable candidate. The army required new blood, he told Hamilton at the beginning of 1900, and when the present chief died or was invalided out, it needed Lord Kitchener to pull things together. Three years later, after the hero of Omdurman had been diverted to South Africa, it got him.

Enforcement of discipline in the army was one of Curzon’s fixations. He and Collen agreed that British soldiers were overpaid in a country where the cost of living was much cheaper than in England. As most of them were unmarried, they could afford both prostitutes and liquor. Evening excursions into the bazaar after an idle and sweltering day in the barracks frequently led to trouble. In the vast majority of clashes with Indians, Curzon declared, ‘the cause of the mischief is that the English soldiers are either after a woman or are drunk’.9 Even the most distinguished Commanders-in-Chief were unable to deal with the problem intelligently. Lord Roberts urged soldiers to join the Army Temperance Association and, under the influence of his wife, ordered the closure of the cantonment brothels where Indian women, subjected to medical inspection, were reserved for white soldiers. Lady Roberts’s purity campaign led directly, in the words of Lord Elgin, to ‘even more deplorable evils … an increase in unnatural crimes’ and, for those tempted to the bazaars, a lot more venereal disease. In 1895, two years after Roberts left India, more than a quarter of the British army there was being treated for syphilis.10 Although the number dropped steadily during Curzon’s years, largely because the military brothels had been discreetly reopened, Kitchener was sufficiently alarmed to warn soldiers that those infected in India would suffer ‘cantankerous and stinking ulcerations’ and that their noses would rot and fall off. The general, who does not appear to have been much troubled by sexual desires himself, could think of nothing better than to exhort his men to use self-control, to take a lot of outside exercise and to imagine the reactions of their mothers on learning that they had the disease.11

Curzon did at least have one practical idea. Realizing that army barracks in hot weather were stifling and unbearable places which encouraged soldiers to spend as much time as possible outside them, he insisted on the installation of electric fans. But he was unyielding on the question of indiscipline. General Sir Power Palmer, the second of the three army commanders to serve under him, admitted that the British soldier was ‘a rough specimen of humanity’, but he felt senior officials in the cool of Simla should remember how terrible life was in the scorching plains when everything was an irritant; indeed, the C-in-C was surprised there was not more ‘violence to the irritating native, who becomes more irritating the more he thinks he can score off the soldier’.12 Curzon was not impressed by this defence. Four or five Indians were killed on average each year by soldiers, sometimes by accident during shooting expeditions, more often in brawls. It was not by any standards a high number, but each death infuriated the Viceroy. In one incident, he told Hamilton, four soldiers had gone shooting ‘as usual without passes, without an interpreter’ and in violation of the rules. They then ‘shot, as usual, a peacock, had the usual row with the villagers, in the course of which their guns went off, as usual by accident, and as usual killed two natives’; at the subsequent trial ‘the prisoners were, as usual, acquitted and released’. A case like this ate into his ‘very soul’. ‘That such gross outrages should occur in the first place in a country under British rule; and then that everybody … should conspire to screen the guilty is, in my judgment, a black and permanent blot upon the British name.’ He vowed ‘to efface the stain’ during his time.13

Arguing that the British soldier should be regarded as a source of protection rather than alarm by Indians, Curzon concluded that the issue of shooting passes must be limited. The decision immediately reduced the number of collisions between soldiers and natives by more than three-quarters.14 The Viceroy’s inflexibility on matters of justice also led to a reduction in drunken brawling and at the same time increased his unpopularity among the military. Soldiers complained that ‘the scum of the bazaars’ could now insult them with impunity. They were being ‘cheeked’, reported Ampthill to Godley, by ‘the lowest class of Natives in an intolerable way’, and, when they threatened ‘to chastise an insolent native, the latter frequently threatens to “tell the Lord Sahib”’.15

Curbing the army’s natural inclination to fight battles was another problem. The Viceroy was frequently requested to sanction expeditions or punitive raids against allegedly marauding tribes across the border. Sometimes these were necessary, he found, particularly on the north-west frontier, but more often they were an excuse for a ‘scrap’, a relief from boredom, a chance for soldiers to win medals and promotion. Curzon regarded these as futile, costly and often unjust. During his first year he was persuaded to allow an expedition on the north-eastern frontier against the Bebejiya Mishmis, described as a ‘fierce race of cannibals, a very savage, blood-thirsty and dangerous race’ which deserved punishment for killing three people, kidnapping three children and stealing three guns earlier in the year, as well as for killing three policemen as far back as 1893. Although the political officer on the spot thought adequate chastisement could be achieved with a force of sixty military policemen, Curzon was induced to authorize a mixed force of 400 soldiers and police which the army subsequently multiplied to 1,200. The cold (it was midwinter), the problems of the terrain, and the need to climb quickly over a high pass forced the commander to reduce the numbers to 127. These eventually arrived at their destination to find that the Mishmis were not cannibals at all but ‘on the whole a well behaved and inoffensive tribe, very desirous of being on friendly terms with us’. The children were recovered with one of the guns, but no one responsible for the murders was arrested, and two innocent captives were soon released. The military authorities claimed the expedition had been a success. Curzon minuted drily that the results did not appear to justify the loss of thirty-four coolies, who had died from exposure on the pass, or the enormous expense of the expedition, most of it wasted on assembling a force ten times larger than that actually employed.16 The ‘almost criminal blundering’ of the affair persuaded him to veto a number of similar expeditions, particularly those suggested in Burma by Fryer, a man Curzon described as combining administrative apathy with ‘the most daring and martial opinions with regard to frontier politics and warfare’.17

In the spring of 1900 the Viceroy was travelling up the frontier in Baluchistan, ‘inspecting, examining, questioning, interviewing everywhere’. He held a durbar for local chiefs at Quetta (‘an old haunt of mine’) where he had been five years earlier, after his journey to Kabul, and which he had visited for the first time seven years before that on his journey round the world. He was never so happy, he told Brodrick, as when he was on the frontier, because he knew the tribesmen and how to handle them. ‘They are brave as lions, wild as cats, docile as children. You have to be very frank, very conciliatory, very firm, very generous, very fearless’. It was with delight as well as pride that he received the homage of these ‘magnificent Samsons, gigantic, bearded, instinct with loyalty, often stained with crime’.18

His tour convinced him that India’s defence policy on the frontier was seriously flawed. Thousands of troops were cantoned in forts in the protected tribal areas lying between the frontier with Afghanistan (the ‘Durand Line’) and the administrative border of British India. Lacking communications and easily isolated, they were at the same time a provocation to the tribes and a liability to India. Curzon had ‘a strong a priori distrust of military schemes for great defensive posts and forts on and across the border’, which often required garrisons of half a regiment to defend them.19 Refusing therefore to sanction further proposals for costly fortifications in tribal territory, he adopted the novel policy of withdrawing regular troops from advanced positions and concentrating them in the rear, while employing tribal forces recruited by British officers to police the tribal country themselves. His way of managing the Pathan tribesman, he told General Chamberlain, was one of

getting to understand him, and getting him to understand you; to leave him alone where his country is not wanted for purposes of Indian defence; where it is, to enlist and employ him in looking after his own country, and after the roads and passes which it is necessary for us to keep open; to pay him and humour him when he behaves, but to lay him out flat when he does not.20

Curzon realized that the frontier needed not only a new policy but also a new administration. The mountainous area between Baluchistan and Kashmir was under the control of the Punjab Government, celebrated in mid-century for its outstanding administrators but by 1900 widely regarded as an unimpressive ruling body. On frontier matters Curzon considered it an instrument of obstruction and procrastination, its officials largely ignorant of the tribes and ill-equipped to handle them. The five previous Lieutenant-Governors, he pointed out, had spent an average of only four months on the frontier in careers which at the time of their appointments had totalled 151 years. Such inexperience, shared by their chief secretaries and other officials, led to indecisiveness and delays in an area which above all others required prompt action.21

Lord George Hamilton, who agreed that the Punjab officers carried out their border duties in a wooden and unintelligent manner, had once suggested placing frontier commissioners directly under the Government of India. But Curzon pressed for a new province to be created by detaching the frontier districts of the Punjab and uniting them with adjoining tribal areas between the administrative border and the Durand Line. The severance was logical not merely for political and geographical reasons. The trans-Indus tracts had little in common with the Punjab, ethnic and linguistic differences separating the Pathan tribesmen from the inhabitants of the plains.22 Curzon’s proposals were supported without dissent by his Council and were accepted by Hamilton and the India Office. In November 1901, on the King’s birthday, the North-West Frontier Province came into being.fn1

As so often in Curzon’s life, the right thing had been done in a tactless manner. No one outside the Punjab Government seriously disputed the merits of the reform, but it was easy to take exception to the way it was achieved. The officials naturally resented the publication of their failings in a viceregal minute, especially the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Mackworth Young, who protested that he had not been consulted about the formation of a new administration in territory which he had ‘received a commission from Her Majesty to administer’.23 Curzon pointed out that Young’s views on the subject were on record and argued that no one engaged in framing a scheme needs to ask advice from those known to oppose it.24 Hamilton agreed with the Viceroy, but the aggrieved Young, encouraged by his wife, decided to publicize the controversy at Simla.

The town was the summer capital of both the Punjab and the Government of India, an arrangement which had facilitated the formulation of frontier policy. But the creation of a new province made continued co-existence unnecessary, and Curzon planned to relieve Simla’s congestion by removing the provincial Government to another hill station in the Punjab. After hearing a rumour of the scheme, Young made the mistake of mentioning it during a speech at a masonic dinner, adding that, as his Government was no longer required to give advice on the frontier, ‘a hill station where the full glare of the Supreme Government might be softened by distance would possess some fascinations’ for himself and his officials.25 After that relations between the Viceroy and his subordinate deteriorated so much that the Bishop of Lahore was prevailed upon to mediate, and the Lieutenant-Governor was eventually persuaded to apologize. Unwilling to humiliate Young in public, Curzon refused to publish the apology, a magnanimous gesture which inspired no corresponding response. The situation was exacerbated by Lady Young, who Curzon believed had converted her husband, a ‘pious and rather narrow-minded missionary’, into a ‘vindictive partisan’ who plagued him day after day with letters of mingled protest and menace.26 She slandered the Viceroy in Simla society and then took umbrage when he refused invitations to her house. The affair rumbled on until the following year, with continual reiterations of Young’s grievance and rumours that on retirement he planned to sue Curzon for libel. The Viceroy was upset by the long and disagreeable dispute, but it does not seem to have occurred to him that it could have been avoided by an act of elementary courtesy at the outset.

Curzon’s policy led to a reduction both in the number of British troops on the frontier and in the amount of actions they were required to fight. Regular garrisons on the Khyber, the Samana and the Kurram were withdrawn and replaced by tribal levies known as the Khyber Rifles, the Samana Rifles and the Kurram Militia; 11,000 British troops were brought back behind the administrative border, and the 4,000 who remained in the tribal areas experienced little trouble. Apart from a few military sallies connected with a blockade of the intractable Mahsud Waziris, the once-turbulent frontier remained largely at peace during Curzon’s rule. The tribal levies were not quite so well behaved as the Viceroy claimed, and occasional disturbances, as his successor discovered, sometimes went unreported. But the degree of tranquillity was unprecedented and was reflected in the huge financial saving: whereas over £4.5 million had been spent on military manoeuvres on the frontier between 1894 and 1898, the total expenditure during Curzon’s longer rule amounted to £0.25 million. Lord Salisbury’s prediction – that the Viceroy’s frontier policy would give Britain an extra fifty years in India – proved inaccurate, but the new province, ably administered by two of Curzon’s protégés, Colonel Deane and later Colonel Roos-Keppel, remained largely at peace until after the First World War.27

On hearing of Curzon’s appointment to India, the Liberal politician Sir William Harcourt had begged him as ‘a personal favour’ not to make war on Russia during his lifetime.28 The joke encased the fear, widespread in England, that the Viceroy was an advocate of a ‘forward’ policy in Asia which might lead to a military confrontation with Tsarist forces. This was both a simplification and an exaggeration. Curzon had acquired the reputation mainly on account of his strenuous opposition to the evacuation of Chitral in 1895, but on no part of the frontier did he advocate an extension of Britain’s existing responsibilities. He wanted to stay put, being as opposed to a retreat to the line of the Indus as he was to a conquest of the tribes and the planting of garrisons among them. Anxious at all times to deter the army from embroilments, he waged no wars and sanctioned only one major expedition – the mission to Tibet – during his viceroyalty. The only real campaigns the army was required to fight were on imperial battlegrounds at the request of the British Government. During the Boxer rebellion nearly 20,000 Indian troops were sent to Peking, where they were the first force to enter the besieged Legations and where they rescued among others the British Minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, whose obituary had already appeared in The Times and for whom a memorial service had been arranged in St Paul’s Cathedral.29

The role of more than 13,000 British troops, sent from India to South Africa in September 1899, was still more critical. Curzon, who predicted that a war against the Boers would entail ‘a hideous carnage’ and hoped it could be averted, had offered to send a force even earlier, but George Wyndham, the Under-Secretary at the War Office, had assured him it would not be necessary. Soon afterwards the British Government became conscious of its military deficiencies and accepted the offer after all, although a further proposal to send Indian troops was rejected by Whitehall on the grounds that it would incite the entire Dutch population to rebellion. The British regiments embarked from Calcutta and Bombay with an efficiency which surprised the Viceroy and arrived in Natal in time to prevent its capture by General Joubert. Had it not been for Curzon, Milner wrote later, Boer flags would have been flying over Durban and Maritzburg by the end of October 1899.30 To the Viceroy the conflict seemed a doleful repetition of the American Civil War in which the North had been consistently defeated until it had ‘weeded out all the rotten generals who had made their way, in the long era of peace, to the top’.31 But he could at least derive some satisfaction from the performance of the troops from India, who outshone those from England. Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, sent a telegram to thank the Indian contingent for saving Natal. Arguably the rest of South Africa was saved as well, for it is doubtful whether Britain could have recovered if Natal had been added to the other disasters.

In Asia Curzon’s aim was not to extend the frontiers of empire in any direction but to strengthen Britain’s political position in all areas which bordered on India. He was happy to be surrounded by buffer states provided they remained genuinely independent of Russia and other European powers. ‘We don’t want [Kuwait],’ Godley told him, ‘but we don’t want anyone else to have it. That sounds rather bad, when it is baldly stated; but it is the true explanation of a good deal of our diplomacy.’32 Curzon agreed with the objective but believed that the policy, however negative it sounded, required more vigorous diplomacy than either the India Office or the Foreign Office were usually prepared to pursue. Year after year his letters home railed against the weakness, fatalism, inertia and, above all, non-existence of British policy. He believed that Asiatic rulers, like native chiefs, needed pressure as well as blandishment, and he was eager to exert it on the Shah of Persia, the Sultan of Muscat and the Emir of Afghanistan. Anxious to avoid alienating the Emir, Hamilton annoyed Curzon by refusing to let him send a strong letter to Kabul in 1899. Although the Viceroy admitted that correspondence with his old friend was ‘about as fruitless an occupation as throwing pebbles in the ocean’, he felt it was necessary to answer ‘an Oriental’s casuistry’ because otherwise ‘he thinks he has reduced you to silence’.33 His belief that he could handle the Emir was not shared, however, by the Government in London, and the firm policy he advocated towards Afghanistan did not prevail.fn2

By means of trade and the reduction of piracy, Britain had managed in the course of the nineteenth century to establish itself as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf. As no other power had any interests there, Curzon saw no need for concessions in the area, which came within the orbit of the Government of India. He wanted to make a British protectorate of Kuwait, as its ruler had requested, and was outraged when Salisbury desisted for fear of offending Germany. The Sermon on the Mount, he declared, was not relevant to international politics, and ‘turning the other cheek’ was the wrong way to deal with an ambitious power that had no connection with the Gulf.34 Similarly, he saw no necessity for placating the French at Muscat just because they were feeling sore about Fashoda. Salisbury’s fear of provoking the unpredictable ‘Krugers’ in the French Chamber should not be removed by agreeing to France’s demands for a coaling station in the Gulf. The French had no bona fide interests there, argued Curzon, and no more needed a station in Muscat than the British required one in Madagascar.35 Their only purpose, he told Salisbury, was to be able to assist Russian designs in the Gulf in return for Russian support at Bangkok and Tangier.36 Curzon’s approach was eventually adopted by Lord Lansdowne, who succeeded Salisbury as Foreign Secretary in 1900, with the result that the Germans did not gain a protectorate over Kuwait and the French did not acquire a coaling station.

Curzon’s views on foreign policy were remarkably consistent and he was fond of saying that there was hardly a word in his Russia and Central Asia with which he disagreed fifteen years later. No greater fallacy existed in politics, he believed – wrongly as it turned out – than the idea that Britain could come to an agreement with Russia over Asia. Leaving aside ‘the ingrained duplicity’ of Russian diplomacy, an agreement was impossible because no government, aware of its country’s geographical and strategic advantages over Britain, would ever set a limit on its expansion.37 As the Russians aimed one day to take the whole of Persia, there seemed little chance of persuading them to divide that country into spheres of interest. Their natural desire was to expand, which they would do unless thwarted – until they had taken Persia, reached the Gulf and established another point of pressure on India.38 Yet although Curzon believed these to be their objectives, he did not accept that their achievement was ordained, because a Russian army in southern Persia would be separated by nearly a thousand miles, much of it desert, from a Russian railway, while the Gulf ports could be defended and provisioned by the Royal Navy. He therefore rejected Godley’s view that a Russian advance to the Gulf was inevitable. If the Russians got there, he argued, it would be a result of British weakness rather than as a fulfilment of national destiny.39

In Curzon’s view Britain had not had a Persian policy for a hundred years. Successive governments had lived from hand to mouth, changing their minds, alternately cuddling and cuffing the Shah of the day, but never deciding the nature of British and Indian interests, the extent of imperial obligations, or the limit to which a Russian advance might be allowed to go.40 In September 1899 the Viceroy sent home a long and penetrating despatch containing a comprehensive analysis of Britain’s position in Persia. If, as he believed, the contending powers were unable to agree on the future of that country, he urged the Government to state unequivocally that further Russian encroachments in the north of Persia would lead to corresponding moves in the south. Britain, he later told Selborne, should not fear a conflict with Russia on land or sea in any part of the globe.41 As for the Persians, there was no point competing in oriental diplomacy with them, because the occasional ‘show of the boot’ was likely to be more effective. He urged, however, the offer of a generous financial loan to Tehran, and was dismayed when Russia was allowed to outbid the richest country in the world.

The despatch on Persian policy arrived in London in the early weeks of the Boer War and was ignored. Six months later Curzon sent a reminder which again went unanswered. After ten months the Government replied that, in view of Russia’s capacity to annex northern Persia, it would be futile for Britain to commit herself to the country’s independence. Britain was equally powerless, it was claimed, to prevent other countries establishing their influence in the Gulf. In August 1900 Salisbury warned Curzon that Britain’s fighting power in Persia must be confined to the coast because any war in the rest of the country would swallow up two or three times as much income tax as the fighting in the Transvaal. In a subsequent letter the Prime Minister admitted that sooner or later Tehran would become a virtual protectorate of Russia and that there was nothing Britain could do about it.42 Reading these and similarly pessimistic views invariably depressed the Viceroy. Sometimes, he confessed to Hamilton, ‘the heart goes out of me as regards the future of our dominions in Asia, and I … say to myself, “Is it worthwhile struggling on when our own people and their leaders are themselves engaged in tracing the handwriting on the wall?”’43

In 1902 Curzon’s perennial complaint that Britain had ‘no glimmering of a policy’ in Persia paid off. Riled by the Viceroy’s ‘rather querulous language’ employed when commenting on Persian affairs, Lansdowne decided to write a despatch bringing together the various strands of the Government’s position.44 The Foreign Secretary claimed that these had always been part of British policy towards Persia. But Curzon was delighted to find that the despatch was ‘almost the transcript of a private letter’ he had sent Lansdowne after being invited to state the policy he himself would pursue.45 The British Minister in Tehran was instructed to tell the Grand Vizier that Britain supported the independence and integrity of Persia but held such interests in the south of the country that she could not accept the rivalry of another power there. Russia’s ‘superior interest’ in the north was accepted, but the Persian Government had to understand that Britain would not allow her to penetrate the south. A military or naval station in the Persian Gulf would be regarded as a threat to India and would not be tolerated. Although the despatch did not put an end to Anglo-Russian rivalry in Persia, the Tsarist Government at last now knew how far it could go without risking a war.

In the summer of 1903 Lansdowne accepted another of Curzon’s urgings by proclaiming in the House of Lords a sort of Monroe Doctrine for the Persian Gulf. If any other power, he declared, established a naval base or fortified port in that sea, Britain would regard it as a very grave menace to her interests and would resist with all the means at her disposal.46 Again the Viceroy was delighted by this unusually bold assertion of British dominance. Apart from anything else, it opened the way for his most celebrated imperial progress, a long-cherished, majestic, flag-waving tour of the Gulf.