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

but equally brazen tactic: he would treat this Nadir Shah with complete contempt. ‘I refused to see him,’ he wrote, ‘replying to his earnest solicitude with the cool and phlegmatic indifference of a superior.’ Whenever Nadir’s mirza or envoy politely tried to arrange a meeting, the American replied, with feigned petulance: ‘I’m not in the vein.’ Nadir Shah was a man to be reckoned with in Bahawalpur, and Harlan’s lofty manner sent the envoy, despite being surrounded by thousands of hostile warriors, into a paroxysm of toadying. ‘With reverential respect and servile attitude, he said that his master was a great man, a very great man, no less a person than the dignified commander in chief of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s invincible army, the unconquered and exalted chief of chiefs, the cream of his contemporaries and the pillar of empire etc, etc.,’ wrote Harlan, who resolutely declined to be impressed and sent the mirza back with the message that he intended to march the next day. ‘I gave him to understand I acknowledged no superior and that my sword was my passport.’

      Apparently bowing to the inevitable, Nadir Shah sent a guide, a senior member of his entourage, to show the strangers the way, but no sooner had the army set off again than it became clear the man was deliberately trying to buy time by leading Harlan on ‘a devious line, sometimes to the right and at others to the left, like a ship in a headwind’. Once again, Harlan’s riposte was to place the guide in chains.

      Gul Khan made no secret of his belief that by chaining up the locals at every turn Harlan was inviting disaster, and contravening all the rules of Oriental diplomacy. ‘The old blear-eyed Rohillah rolled up his eyes in astonishment, exclaiming: “May God bring good in the future.”’ Nettled by his lieutenant’s negativity, Harlan demanded: ‘Wherefore is Gool Khan afraid of these ragged mendicants?’, and then immediately regretted it, for the question prompted a torrent of oratory from the one-armed soldier on the subject of his own bravery and the corresponding villainy of the local people. Exhausted by the tense march, and Gul Khan’s loquacity, Harlan ordered a halt near a small village. As soon as the tents were pitched he released the guide and sent him to collect supplies, and retired to rest. ‘The whole camp excepting a single sentry soon fell into a deep sleep solicited by unusual fatigue,’ he wrote, but less than an hour later Harlan awoke to find yet another crisis brewing. Outside his tent stood Gul Khan, looking more than usually glum. ‘It’ll be later before we get the forage, unless Your Highness is disposed to become responsible for the unoffending blood of our guide,’ he said gloomily.

      While Harlan had been asleep, the luckless guide had requested food at the nearby fortress, where he had promptly been taken prisoner. The commander of the fort, Gul Khan explained, was not only refusing to provide food and forage but threatening to cut off the guide’s head if the troops helped themselves. Harlan faced a dilemma. Seizing what he needed by force could lead to the death of an innocent man, and that, he reflected, would be ‘ungenerous and unbecoming a man of high sentiments’. A little of Shah Shujah’s money would surely bring the commander round. Sure enough, after some bargaining by Gul Khan, the guide was released and supplies provided. Grateful that the unpredictable feringhee had seen fit to prevent him being beheaded, the guide was now as helpful as he had previously been obstructive. Instead of pushing on quickly, it was agreed that the force would proceed slowly towards Bahawalpur and await a decision by the nawab.

      After three days of slow marching, a messenger from Bahawal Khan was conducted to Harlan’s tent. There he ceremoniously handed over a letter, written on the finest paper, embellished with gold leaf and tucked into a bag of gold brocade with a pair of the nawab’s oval seals attached, each three inches in diameter. The letter, in Persian, was addressed to: ‘His Highness the Saheban of exalted dignity’. Saheban is the plural of the honorific Sahib – ‘a term’, as Harlan observed, ‘applied to the Christians governing India’. The nawab had concluded that Harlan must be a British official, albeit a most eccentric one, and his letter ‘set forth in florid terms the Nawab’s regard and was profuse in the profession of friendship’. The chief of Bahawalpur looked forward to a meeting when Harlan reached Ahmadpur, his capital south of the Sutlej on the edge of the Cholistan desert, but in the meantime ‘the country, himself and his possessions were at my service’. Finally the nawab’s envoy handed over a gift that made Harlan’s hungry eyes light up. ‘A large quantity of the fresh fruits of Kabul were presented, such as delicious grapes packed in boxes upon layers of cotton, apples and pears of Samercand, cantaloupes, dried apricots, raisins and watermelons of the country.’ Harlan adored fresh fruit, and the crops of Kabul were fabled throughout Central Asia. This was the first time he had tasted them; in time, they would become an obsession.

      The evidence of the nawab’s friendly intentions was a relief to all, not least the guide who had so nearly been decapitated. Harlan sent him on his way with a handful of rupees, ‘as a reward, and to solace his feelings for the cavalier regard bestowed upon him’. After days of wondering whether he and his men would be massacred, Harlan was thoroughly enjoying his new incarnation as the honoured guest of the nawab, who had given orders that the newcomers should be provided with every necessity. Another march of three days brought them to the town of Bahawalpur, which had been the province’s capital before Bahawal Khan had moved his court to Ahmadpur, thirty miles to the south. Bahawalpur was a substantial town ‘about four miles in circumference, with gardens of mangoe trees within the walls [and] houses of unburnt bricks’. Here Harlan received another gold-leafed missive from the nawab, even more polite than the last, ‘conveying his impatience to be exalted by an interview’. Harlan declined to be rushed, calculating that the longer he took to get to Ahmadpur, the keener Bahawal Khan would be to pay his respects to the haughty feringhee chief. A terse message was sent back, declaring that Harlan was suffering from ‘a phlegmon’, a skin inflammation, and would not reach Ahmadpur for at least ten days.

      While encamped at Bahawalpur, Harlan made a point of staying inside his tent, thus ensuring the cultivation of his own mystery. ‘A crowd assembled daily from the town to get a view of the stranger,’ and wild rumours about the tall, bearded foreigner spread rapidly. It was even claimed that he was none other than ‘the ex-king Shujah Ul Moolk travelling under the incognito of a Saheb from Ludhiana’. The story, put about by Gul Khan, that Harlan was ‘merely an amateur traveller’ met with blank incredulity from Bahawal Khan’s envoys: ‘What could have attracted an amateur traveller to an insignificant, worthless, poverty-stricken country like this region of Bhawulpore that yielded nothing but sand and thorns?’ they demanded. ‘An amateur traveller would have passed on with the rapidity of a flowing stream.’

      The locals seemed more inquisitive than threatening; which was just as well, Harlan reflected, since he was now several hundred miles from the nearest English outpost. If relations turned nasty, there was nowhere to flee. Only one Westerner had come this way before and lived to record the fact. ‘The Honourable Mount Stewart Elphinstone passed through Bhawulpore about twenty years before my transit on an embassy to the king of Cabul,’ Harlan recorded proudly, ‘but with this exception no Christian of note had been known to appear in the territory.’ He was therefore astonished, and a little piqued, to learn from an excited Gul Khan just hours before leaving Bahawalpur that he was not the only feringhee in the vicinity. A few weeks earlier, the locals reported, two ragged white men had staggered into Ahmadpur, claiming to be European soldiers and offering their military services to the nawab. Both were said to be stricken by chronic fever. Harlan now recalled that before he left Ludhiana Wade had shown him a message from Calcutta, warning that two deserters from the Company artillery, named James Lewis and Richard Potter, might be heading west and should be apprehended if possible. ‘I concluded these men were probably the individuals alluded to in that document,’ wrote Harlan.

      Eager to see if his hunch was right, Harlan hastened to Ahmadpur. After a two-day march the troop pitched camp on the outskirts of the town, where Harlan was welcomed by ‘a person of grave deportment’ who turned out to be the nawab’s vizier, Yacoob Ally Khan. The vizier explained that his master would be returning shortly from a hunting trip, and after numerous ‘messages of congratulations, tinged with inflated protestations of service’ he handed over a large, dead antelope which he explained had been killed by the nawab himself. It was agreed that an interview would take place in five days’ time. Harlan wondered whether the nawab was really away hunting, or merely stalling.