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

war of all against all, riven with feuds between interrelated warlords. As one commentator said: ‘Sovereignty was an exceedingly uncertain commodity. One moment the Amir of Kabul might be a potent monarch, in the next he might be an object of ridicule, an outcast whose life would be very precarious, if indeed it existed at all.’

      Elphinstone and others had painted what they knew of Afghanistan’s turbulent history in the most lurid colours, and Harlan marvelled at the duplicity of the various contenders, the bewildering rise and fall of the claimants. ‘Prince after prince in confused succession mounted the tottering throne,’ he wrote. ‘The prize was literally handed about like a shuttlecock. The king who in the battle may have dispatched a favourite son in the command of his army would probably before night find himself flying from his own troops.’

      Yet by 1826 a vague pattern of power had emerged from the bloody morass, with the rise of Dost Mohammed Khan as amir of Kabul, the nearest thing to an Afghan monarch. He was owed at least nominal allegiance by his restive brothers, and ruled by a volatile combination of dictatorship and oligarchy. As Harlan observed: ‘In the course of civil war distant provinces threw off their allegiance or were seized by neighbouring powers. The dominion of Cabulistan became contracted and reduced. The government was seized by an usurping dynasty and the royal family banished.’ Whatever Shah Shujah, lurking in Ludhiana, may have told Harlan about the man currently in power in Kabul, Dost Mohammed Khan was proving a tenacious and increasingly popular ruler. Even today, Afghans use the phrase: ‘Is Dost Mohammed dead, that there is no justice?’ He would not be easy to unseat. Shah Shujah and Dost Mohammed Khan, the old Saddozai pretender and the young Barakzai prince, would represent the opposing political poles of Harlan’s life for the next two decades.

      The chronic instability of Afghanistan had infected the surrounding regions. Harlan estimated that his six-hundred-mile route to Peshawar led through at least ‘four independent principalities, divided into many subordinate chieftainships, some as fiefs and others as tributaries to the above mentioned principalities’. None of these was remotely predictable, and any or all might be hostile. The region was also infested with bandits, and Harlan had to restrain his natural inclination to wander off alone in search of plants. The most immediate menace, however, came from his own troops; he had not been out of Ludhiana more than a few days before the first threat to his life.

      From among his Indian domestics Harlan had appointed a quartermaster, whose task was to travel ahead of the main body of troops to select that night’s campground and obtain supplies. Although Harlan chose the man he believed to be the most honest of his staff, he rapidly came to suspect that the quartermaster was buying cheap food and retaining a profit. ‘More than human patience and foresight are necessary for one to guard against the chicanery, deceit and falsehood of domestics in India,’ Harlan wrote in exasperation, a familiar complaint among colonists. Once Harlan had established his guilt, the quartermaster was promptly demoted. This should have been a routine matter, but it swiftly erupted into Harlan’s first major crisis when the former quartermaster appeared at his tent, determined on revenge and carrying a loaded and cocked musket. As Harlan emerged, the man aimed the weapon at his head. Harlan reacted instinctively. ‘To knock up the fellow’s musket and throw myself upon him and seize him by the throat was the act of a moment. He fell back and prostrate from the force with which I projected myself against him. The musket changed hands and he was now the victim with the weapon at his breast! He had not a word to utter or a struggle of resistance.’

      By disarming the mutineer, Harlan subdued a potentially wider revolt. ‘Had this fellow’s insolence been suffered with impunity, I should have been utterly at the mercy of my servants,’ he wrote. The rest of the entourage, expressing elaborate abhorrence at such behaviour, cheerfully offered to kill the miscreant on the spot to demonstrate their own fidelity. Harlan preferred clemency, and merely ordered the man to be manacled and placed under guard. At the next village he was handed into the custody of the local headman. Harlan remarked: ‘He was probably released immediately after I left.’

      The incident convinced Harlan that there was only one member of the party he could trust implicitly: ‘Amongst my followers there was one of low degree who held an elevated position in my regard and was certainly the most faithful, disinterested and by no means the least useful of the cortege.’ He was referring, of course, to his dog, Dash.

      Harlan was anxious to push on quickly, but the baggage animals flatly declined to be hurried. ‘The old camels especially cannot be made to move above one coss and a half per hour,’ he complained. A coss was the old unit of Indian measurement, which Harlan calculated at one mile and three quarters. Distance seemed to expand as the column trudged on through a landscape of desert fringed with jungle, and such measurements became almost meaningless, Harlan reflected. ‘The peasant whom you interrogate as to the distance of the next village will sometimes reply, “As far as the twice boiling of a pot of milk” [or] “As far as you can carry a leaf without [it] wilting.”’ The population was sparse, but the local tribespeople seemed reasonably well-fed, with a diet that included mutton from the fat-tailed sheep, goats’ meat, beef, fowl, eggs and butter. Harlan gorged on ‘the finest perch and a species of catfish peculiar to the Indus’, but noticed that locals seemed to regard fish as an inferior food. Finding grain and forage for the cattle was far more problematic. As a visiting dignitary he expected to be sustained with free supplies from the local chiefs, in accordance with the ancient traditions of hospitality. If they seemed unwilling to provide such necessities, Harlan believed he would be within his rights, according to local custom, in taking what he needed. The local chiefs had once lived under Afghan rule, but they were now unwilling subjects of the aggressively expanding Sikh empire; each paid tribute, either directly or through a superior, to Ranjit Singh. Since Harlan was assumed to be a representative of the great British power to the east, and therefore a potential counterweight to Sikh domination, he expected a cautious welcome from the native barony. ‘All who were opposed to the Lahore paramount – and the tributaries generally were – showed by their alacrity of service and obsequious bearing the candidness with which they desired to recognize in every Christian traveller a representative of an antagonist power.’ Harlan was only too happy to be mistaken for a British officer, and if the local rulers thought that by providing him with food and forage they were currying favour with the powers in India, that was just fine with him.

      Harlan’s attitude towards the local inhabitants, in common with most white men in India, was paternalistic, haughty and often dismissive, and a vein of cultural condescension runs through much of his early writing. Yet his outlook was similar to that of Thomas Jefferson himself, who maintained that the American Indians were noble savages who could be absorbed into the expanding American empire through education and religion. ‘I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman,’ wrote Jefferson in 1785. In the same way, Harlan regarded the various Indian, Sikh and Afghan tribesmen he would encounter over the next two decades as potential equals, held back not by any inherent racial inferiority but by physical circumstance and ignorance. He would immerse himself in the local ethnology, history and languages with all the enthusiasm that Jefferson devoted to his Indian studies. He might scorn the local customs as superstitious and barbaric, yet he observed them with fascination and described them with care. This openness of mind would develop over time, as his early distrust and disdain of native ways turned to understanding, and in many cases admiration. The colonist would eventually be colonised, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it.

      About seventy coss from Ludhiana, after two solid weeks of marching, Harlan’s troop entered the district of Mamdot, the dominion of Qutb ud-Din Khan, one of those chiefs who was eager to rid himself of the obligation to pay tribute to the Sikh maharajah. The men were pitching camp when an envoy appeared from Qutb, accompanied by a troop of horsemen, to welcome the supposed British envoy with an avalanche of compliments. ‘This was the first instance in which I had been received with the ostentation that marks the Oriental display of festive diplomacy,’ Harlan observed. The envoy explained that although Qutb himself was on a hunting trip, he had sent a message for the noble feringhee, to be delivered in person by his son. This, Harlan calculated, would be an excellent moment to make an impact on the locals, in the knowledge that the bush telegraph would swiftly pass on news of the arrival of a powerful foreign prince,