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

town, inviting them to his camp and offering to provide them with medical treatment.

      The two white men were indeed the deserters Lewis and Potter, who had changed their names respectively to Charles Masson and, somewhat unimaginatively, John Brown – names by which they would be known for the rest of their lives. Masson was no ordinary soldier. An educated and cultured man, a fluent French speaker and classicist with a passion for archaeology and chronic wanderlust, over the next thirteen years he would excavate early Buddhist sites and amass a vast collection of ancient coins in Baluchistan, the Punjab and Afghanistan, in a solitary quest as impressive as it was eccentric. This nomadic scholar would eventually become one of the foremost antiquarians of Central Asia; but at the time he encountered Harlan he was merely a deserter, an outcast who faced the death penalty if caught by the British.

      The path which had led Masson to a desert on the edge of India was as circuitous as that of Harlan himself. Indeed, their past histories and present passions were oddly similar. In 1822, at the age of twenty-one, London-born Masson, then James Lewis, had enlisted in the Company’s army and sailed for Bengal, looking for adventure. But after five years’ service in the artillery, when his regiment was stationed near Agra, he and a comrade, Richard Potter, decided they had had enough of soldiering. Unlike Harlan, they did not wait for permission to quit the ranks or purchase their discharges, but simply set off on foot, heading west. Masson’s biographer speculates that ‘as it is certain that he had already studied with some thoroughness the routes of Alexander the Great on his Persian and Indian campaigns, he may have had at the back of his mind a desire to explore Afghanistan’. Potter’s aspirations were less elevated, and his past far hazier. He appears to have deserted with the intention of entering the service of one or other of the native princes offering better pay and the possibility of swift advancement.

      The two former artillerymen were very different characters. Masson was highly intelligent, and became capable of enduring astonishing hardships as he trudged, often barefoot and in rags, from one corner of Central Asia to the other. But he could also be quixotic and ill-tempered, dismissive of those he considered inferiors, overly free with his criticisms and often petulant. He made close friendships with Afghans, Sikhs and Persians, but some of his fellow Europeans found him priggish, cold and impenetrable. Potter, or Brown as he became, was by contrast steady and unimaginative, a gentle soul with neither Masson’s arrogance nor his resilience.

      In his memoirs, written when he had acquired respectability and an official pardon, Masson makes no reference to his desertion, noting merely that ‘having traversed the Rajput States of Shekhawati, and the Kingdom of Bikanir, I entered the desert frontiers of the Khan of Bahwalpur’. The journey, and the illnesses they picked up en route, had almost killed them both. The nawab had provided sustenance but showed no eagerness to employ these two diseased and disreputable-looking Europeans, and the deserters were facing a grim choice between pushing on into the unknown or returning to face the rough justice of British India, when Harlan came to their aid.

      Two days after Harlan’s arrival in Ahmadpur, a man appeared at the door of his tent, clad ‘in the dress of a native with his head shorn in the Indo-Muhammadan style’. Harlan studied the tattered figure before him with amused interest. ‘The light and straggling hair upon the upper lip in conjunction with the blue eyes at once revealed the true nativity of his caste. I addressed him without hesitation as a European deserter from the Horse Artillery at Mut’hra, of whom I had already read a description at Loodiana.’ Charles Masson attempted a bluff, ‘asserting that he belonged to Bombay and was merely travelling for amusement in this direction with the intention of proceeding home over land’. The performance was undermined by Masson’s demeanour, for he was visibly petrified, convinced that Harlan was a Company officer about to arrest him. ‘Perceiving his extremely uncomfortable position by the tremor of his voice and personal demonstrations of alarm, I quieted his terror with the assurance that I was not an Englishman and had no connection with the British government and consequently neither interest nor duty could induce me to betray him now or hereafter.’ A relieved Masson gave up the pretence and admitted that he and his ‘chum’, who was too weak to walk, were indeed fugitives from the British army. He himself had suffered from fever but had now recovered, and was desperate to get away from Bahawalpur.

      Recognising a kindred spirit, Harlan made Masson an offer, even though by aiding deserters he was putting his own tenuous relationship with the British in jeopardy. He provided him and Potter with medicines and promised them horses and subsistence if they agreed to accompany him to Kabul. Masson accepted with alacrity and gratitude, and the following day the two Englishmen were installed as Harlan’s mounted orderlies. They had retained their artillery uniforms and broadswords, and Harlan remarked to himself that the addition of two officers in Western dress would add to the military panache of the outfit. Moreover, he believed he now had companions he could trust. ‘I reflected that I should be provided with at least two confidential retainers of interests identical with my own in case of personal danger arising from my peculiarly insulated situation.’

      Harlan and Masson swiftly discovered their shared interests, and the American was delighted to have some educated company after so many weeks with no one to talk to (or rather, listen to) but Gul Khan. Masson and Brown decided that a pretence of American citizenship would offer additional protection against exposure as deserters, and they studied Harlan closely to pick up the manners of the New World. Masson would henceforth claim to be from Kentucky, a deception so successful that long after his death he was still being described, quite erroneously, as an American. The two Englishmen would play important roles in Harlan’s life: one would become his friend, stand by him in bad times, and then vanish into obscurity; the other would become his enemy, blacken his name at every opportunity, and become more famous than Harlan ever did.

       4 THE YOUNG ALEXANDER

      The long-awaited meeting with Bahawal Khan would require all the pomp and dignity Harlan could muster. In his opinion, at least, this was considerable. ‘All my military retainers, now amounting to about one hundred armed men, were drawn up before the gateway,’ he wrote with pride of this ‘military pageant’. Harlan, mounted on Flora and wearing his Company uniform, took his place at the head of the troops, flanked by Masson and Brown. ‘I mounted, the bugle sounded, arms were presented,’ and with jangling spurs and clanking muskets, and some appreciative shouting from spectators, the American and his private army set off to meet the prince. Amirullah led the way on foot, carrying the silver mace like a club, while Gul Khan followed with the rest of the troops: first the sepoys, marching in time, then the Rohillahs, with rather less discipline, and finally a score of what Harlan euphemistically called ‘irregulars’ who did not march at all, but clattered along behind in a disorganised and enthusiastic mob.

      Bahawal Khan was not going to be out-pomped, and had put on his own show of military force, assembling ‘his elite battalion of Seapoys armed in the European fashion and dressed in red jackets’. At least a thousand of these troops lined both sides of the town’s main street, and as the cortege passed, each saluted by putting his right hand in front of his forehead – a gesture which, Harlan observed, ‘appears extremely awkward with shouldered arms’. Behind the uniformed ranks milled an array of ‘irregular cavalry and dismounted cavaliers’, while the terraces of the houses on either side were packed with spectators craning for a look at the feringhee and his soldiers.

      The nawab had set up a large pavilion about ten yards square in the middle of the town to receive his guest, but ‘so settled were his apprehensions of violence or sinister design’ that he had packed it with his own guards, leaving little room for the visitors. Harlan strode confidently into the enclosure in his most grand manner, and was unceremoniously mobbed. ‘The moment I entered, the Nawab’s confidential servants, armed to the teeth with every variety of weapons – spears, matchlocks, pistols, blunderbusses, swords, daggers, shields au bras – pressed around me and rather bore me up to the seat near the Nawab scarcely admitting the use