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

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 in the Asiatic Journal in 1826. The East India Company was happy to forget about its ill-fated and rebellious envoy, but John Palmer, a friend of the horse-vet and one of the most powerful merchants in Calcutta, was determined to get to the truth. From official documents, it appears that Palmer got wind of Harlan’s plans through Captain Wade, and commissioned him to find out exactly what had happened to Moorcroft, and if possible to retrieve his plundered property. One historian has estimated that Harlan was provided with between 50,000 and 60,000 rupees to retrieve Moorcroft’s effects, a very substantial addition to his war chest.

      The recruits to Harlan’s expanding army came in a variety of shapes and sizes: Muslims and Hindus, a number of Afghans, and even Akalis, Sikh fundamentalists who were among the most ferocious and least reliable of mercenaries, as apt to kill their commanders as the enemy. Dr McGregor was unimpressed with the quality of these troops, and Harlan himself was well aware that he was employing a band of cut-throats loyal to his money and little else. At some expense, therefore, he recruited a troop of twenty-four sepoys, native Indian soldiers who had served in the Bengal army on whom he could place some reliance. Another former Company soldier, ‘a faithful hindoo of the Brahmin caste’ by the name of Drigpal, was appointed jemadar, or native officer in command of the sepoys.

      By the autumn of 1827 Harlan had assembled about a hundred fighting men, and calculated that more could be impressed en route. ‘The time for my departure drew near,’ he wrote. ‘My camp was pitched in the vicinity of the cantonments, my followers were all entertained [employed] and the American flag before my tent door signalised the independence of the occupant.’

      He sent a message to Mullah Shakur, informing him that the army was ready to depart, and the American was summoned back to the king’s garden for another private meeting, at which plans of action and routes of travel were decided upon, and Shujah provided him with letters which might prove useful to him. The vizier also handed over a large sum of money in gold and silver coin, to defray Harlan’s expenses and, most important, for bribery once he reached Kabul. When this was added to the funds he had saved from his Company service and the fee for finding Moorcroft’s property, Harlan believed he now had sufficient funds to start a revolution.

      The date of departure was set for 7 November 1827, and as he prepared to strike camp, Harlan felt a twinge of melancholy. He was ambivalent about the British rulers of India, but he had made some close friends among them, admiring the sheer resilience and energy of men like Claude Wade. ‘A shadow of regret passed like a fleeting tide when I looked back upon the happy period of my residence in British India, and concern for the future began to crowd upon me in the anticipation of dangers unknown.’ Those dangers could hardly have been more extreme, for Harlan had set himself a series of monumental tasks: to unseat the incumbent ruler of a country famed for its savagery, at the behest of an exile with the habit of lopping off bits of his employees; to spy for the British (who would disown him completely if he was caught); and to find the property of a man who had probably been murdered by slave-dealing Uzbeks. In his spare time he intended to write a treatise on natural history.

      William Moorcroft had failed to return from the wilderness despite taking with him the Company’s official seal, a unit of heavily-armed Gurkhas, two light artillery pieces and two European companions. Harlan was now proposing to follow him, with only a motley group of mercenaries and a bag of gold, on a quest inviting disaster and an exceptionally messy death. And as an American, he had no imperial power to fall back on in case of difficulty. While his future appeared uncertain, and in all probability brief, he viewed the coming trials with almost morbid pleasure: ‘I had just stepped within the threshold of active life, was alone in the world, far removed from friends and home, inadequately acquainted with the language of the country I was about to visit, and surrounded by selfish and deceitful and irresponsible people in the persons of my domestics and guards – consisting of Avghauns, Hindus and Musslemen of India – with all the world in boundless prospect and none with whom to advise