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

earliest years, save that they were noisy, joyful and scholarly, for the Quaker education system was excellent. Josiah read widely and voraciously: Shakespeare and Burke, Pliny and Plato, histories and romances, poetry and politics, treatises on natural history, physics, and chemistry.

      Josiah was just thirteen when his mother died, worn out by childbirth. Sarah bequeathed an estate of $2,000 to her three daughters, but left nothing to her seven sons, who were expected to make their own fortunes – which they did in ways that show Josiah was not the only Harlan anxious to explore the world beyond Chester County. Charles departed for South America as soon as he was old enough to leave home, and was never seen again; James went to sea and died aboard an English man-of-war at the age of twenty-seven; and Richard wandered the East before becoming a celebrated anatomist (his hobby was studying human crania, and he finally amassed 275 of them, the largest collection in America). While the sons of the family were off collecting crowns of gold and bone and dying in exotic locations, the daughters remained at home: all three of Josiah’s sisters would die spinsters in Chester County.

      Motherless, Josiah Harlan plunged deeper into a world of imagination and learning. At the age of fifteen, one contemporary recorded, he ‘amused himself with reading medical books and the history of Plutarch, as also the inspired Prophets’. A natural linguist, he read Latin and Greek, and spoke French fluently. He could put his mind and hand to anything, whether or not the results were worth it: his poetry was poor, and his watercolours were worse. Botany became a passion, and his writings overflow with observations on plants and flowers, wild and cultivated. His prose style, particularly at moments of emotion or elation, tended towards the flowery.

      Above all, he steeped himself in Greek and Roman history. Many years later, an educated traveller who came across Harlan in the wilds of the Punjab found him immersed in classical literature, ‘in the which study I found him wonderfully well versed’. Harlan’s obsession with Alexander the Great dates from his earliest boyhood. He could recite long passages from Plutarch’s The Age of Alexander, and he carried a copy of The History of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus throughout his travels. Alexander’s conquests in Persia, Afghanistan and India, were an inspiration to the young man growing up among the placid green fields of Pennsylvania, and he idealised the Macedonian conqueror: ‘In seven years Alexander performed feats that have consecrated his memory amongst the benefactors of mankind, and impressed the stamp of civilization on the face of the known world,’ he wrote. Harlan would follow Alexander to the uncharted corners of Afghanistan, and back again.

      A young American in a young America, Josiah Harlan was impatient, ambitious and utterly convinced of his own abilities: some considered him arrogant, others thought him charming; no one ever found him boring. By the age of eighteen he was over six feet tall, a striking, muscular, raw-boned and handsome young man with a long face, high forehead and somewhat unsettling dark hazel eyes. He might have been the embodiment of a growing nation in young adulthood, as described by Henry Adams: ‘Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man.’

      Harlan grew up in the America of Thomas Jefferson, a place of infinite space and possibility. Explorers like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had started to open up the western two thirds of North America, but vast areas of the globe remained undiscovered and unmapped: the interior of Africa, Australia, Antarctica and, somewhere beyond the borders of India, the mysteries of Central Asia and China. The very breadth of the American continent inspired faith in the potential of a world to be discovered. Walt Whitman rejoiced in the scale of the American horizon:

      

       My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,

       I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,

       I am afoot with my vision.

      Intrepid Americans were moving west in their thousands; young Harlan, however, shed the ballast of his childhood and headed east.

      Josiah’s wanderlust, and his growing interest in medicine, can be traced to the influence of his brother Richard. Three years older than Josiah, Richard had entered the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, and then travelled to Calcutta as a surgeon on an East India Company ship in 1816. After a year at sea he had returned to complete his medical degree, bringing back tales of his voyage and the sights and sounds of India. In the spring of 1820 Joshua Harlan arranged a job for Josiah as ‘supercargo’, the officer in charge of sales, on a merchant ship bound for Calcutta and Canton.

      Before setting sail for the East, Josiah joined the secret fraternal order of Freemasons. Quite when or why he came to take the oath is unclear, but there was much in Freemasonry to attract a man of Harlan’s temperament: the emphasis on history (Freemasonry traces its origins to the stonemasons who built Solomon’s Temple), on masculine self-sufficiency and the exploration of ethical and philosophical issues. America’s Masonic lodges tended to draw freethinkers and rationalists, men of politics and action: a third of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, had been Masons. Joined by high ideals and a shared fealty to the lodge, Freemasons were expected to demonstrate the utmost tolerance while following a moral system clothed in ritual with allegorical symbols adopted from Christianity, the Crusaders of the Middle Ages and Islam. Like Rudyard Kipling, who would also join the organisation as a young man, Harlan ‘appreciated Freemasonry for its sense of brotherhood and its egalitarian attitude to diverse faiths and classes’.

      Harlan seldom discussed his religious beliefs, but his Quaker upbringing moulded him for life. Founded in England in the seventeenth century, the Quaker movement had taken deep root in America, with a credo that set its adherents apart from other Christians. Quakers – a name originally intended as an insult because they ‘tremble at the word of God’ – worship without paid priests or dogma, believing that God, or the Inner Light, is in everyone. All of human life is sacred. ‘Therefore we cannot learn war anymore,’ declares the Quaker testimony. ‘The Spirit of Christ which leads us into all truth will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the kingdoms of this world.’ Harlan was brought up in a spirit of religious egalitarianism: men and women were granted equal authority in meetings, Quakers declined to doff their hats to those of higher status, and as early as 1774 the Society of Friends prohibited Quakers from owning slaves. Quaker mysticism was directed towards social and political improvement rather than dry theological speculation. In the course of his life Harlan would move away from some Quaker tenets, most notably the prohibition on war, but the religion remained central to his character and beliefs, revealing itself in a hardy independence of thought, belief in sexual equality, deep-rooted opposition to slavery and a marked disinclination to bow and scrape to those who considered themselves his superiors.

      Harlan’s journey to the East would last thirteen months, taking him to China, India and then, with a full cargo of Eastern merchandise, back to Philadelphia. Enchanted by his first adventure on the high seas, he was preparing to set sail again in the summer of 1821 when he accidentally fell in love.

      Harlan never mentioned the name of his first love, whose memory he carried with him for the rest of his life. He refers to her obliquely in his writings, but he was too much of a gentleman ever to divulge her identity. Yet he bequeathed a clue. Among the handful of documents he left behind, sandwiched between a miniature watercolour and a recipe for Albany cakes, is a floral love poem in his own handwriting, entitled ‘Acrostick in explanation of the lines addressed to Miss Eliza S. on presenting a bouquet’.

      

       Each quickening pulse in Coreopsis speaks

       Lo at first sight my love for thee was mov’d

      Iris love’s messenger salutes those cheeks –

       Zephyrs! sweetly breathe where Alfers lov’d

       Althea says with passion I’m consumed