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

of love confess’d beyond the tomb –

       Thy Captive made, Peach blossoms fernèd leaves

       Heliotropes blue violet and Tulip red

      Secure devotion love its declaration –

       Whilst ecstasy from fragrant Jess’mine’s bred –

       Ambrosia means love’s acceptation

       In Verbena, Daisy red, Cowslip and Mignonette

       Must sense and beauty, grace, divinity set.

      From Marigold – that’s cruelty! – abstain

       And Rose, fair lady, for it means disdain!

      This style of love poetry is now, mercifully, long out of fashion, but Harlan’s horticultural verse was the product of some expert pruning: reading the first letter of the first fourteen lines reveals the name ELIZABETH SWAIM.

      The Swaims were a large, well-to-do Philadelphia clan of Dutch origin. Early in 1822 Josiah Harlan and Elizabeth Swaim were engaged, although no formal announcement was made. Harlan again set sail for Canton, telling his fiancée that they would be married when he returned home the following spring.

      Eliza Swaim seems to have had second thoughts from the moment the ship left port, but for months, as Harlan slowly sailed east, he remained unaware that she had jilted him. Not until Richard’s letter caught up with him in Calcutta did he discover that Eliza had not only broken off their engagement, but was now married. A decade later, Harlan was still angrily denouncing the woman who had ‘played him false’. When Joseph Wolff, an itinerant missionary, met him for the first time in 1832, Harlan unburdened himself: ‘He fell in love with a young lady who promised to marry him,’ Wolff noted in his journal. ‘He sailed again to Calcutta; but hearing that his betrothed lady had married someone else, he determined never again to return to America.’ He would stick to his vow for nearly two decades. But he would keep the love poem to ‘Eliza S.’ until he died, alongside a second floral poem, written after he had received the devastating news, as bitter as the first was adoring.

      

       How sweet that rose, in form how fair

       And how its fragrance scents the air

       With dew o’erspread as early morn

       I grasped it, but I grasped a thorn.

       How strange thought I so fair a flower,

       Fit ornament for Lady’s bower,

       Emblem of love in beauty’s form,

       Should in its breast conceal a thorn.

      Harlan embraced his own loneliness. Henceforth, the word ‘solitude’ appears often in his writings. He had reached out and grasped a thorn; he would never clasp love in the same way again. The broken engagement was a moment of defining pain for Josiah, but Elizabeth Swaim had also set him free. Cutting himself off from home and family, determined never to return, he now plunged off in search of a different sort of romance, seeking adventure, excitement and fortune, caring nothing for his own safety or comfort.

      Emotionally cast adrift in Calcutta, Harlan learned that the British were preparing to go to war against Burma and needed medical officers for the campaign. The jungles of Burma seemed an adequate distance from Pennsylvania, and so, following his brother’s example, Harlan signed up as a surgeon with the East India Company. That he did so in order to escape the mortifying memory of Eliza Swaim is apparent from a reference in his unpublished manuscript. ‘Gazing through a long window of twenty years’, he wondered what would have happened ‘if, in place of entering the service for the Burma War in the year 1824, I had then relinquished the truant disposition of erratic motives and taken a congenial position in the midst of my native community and quietly fallen into the systematic routine of ordinary life – if I had sailed for Philadelphia instead of Rangoon or had I listened to the dictates of prudence, which accorded with the calculations of modest and unambitious views, and not a personal incident that occurred during my absence from home’. This ‘personal incident’ would lead Harlan into a life worthy of fiction – which in time it would become. From now on he began to fashion his self-plotted saga, acutely aware of his role as the protagonist, narrator and author of his own story. ‘It is from amongst such incidents and in such a life that novelists have sought for subject matter,’ he wrote. ‘In those regions, which are to me the land of realities, have the lovers of romance delighted to wander and repose and dream of fictions less strange than realizations of the undaunted and energetic enterprise of reckless youth.’

      Calcutta, where Harlan now abandoned ship, was the seat of British rule in India, the capital city of the Honourable East India Company. The ‘Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’, ‘the Company’, as it was universally known, was an extraordinary outgrowth of British history, an alliance of government and private commerce on an imperial scale, and the precursor of the British Raj. Chartered under Elizabeth I, by the early nineteenth century the Company could wage war, mint currency, raise armies, build roads, make or break princes and exercised virtual sovereignty over India. Twenty years before Harlan’s arrival, the Company’s Governor General had become a government appointment, serving the shareholders while simultaneously acting in Britain’s national interests. The Company was thus part commercial and part political, ruling an immense area through alliances with semi-independent local monarchs, and controlling half the world’s trade. This was ‘the strangest of all governments, designed for the strangest of all empires’, in Lord Macaulay’s words. Only in 1858, in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, would the British crown take formal control of the subcontinent.

      Service with the East India Company promised adventure and advancement, and potential wealth. More immediately, for Harlan, it offered distance from Eliza Swaim, and a paid job as a military surgeon. That he had never actually studied medicine was not, at least in his own mind, an impediment. Years later he would claim that he ‘had in his early life studied surgery’, but what medical knowledge he possessed appears to have been entirely self-taught. A medical textbook was a part of every educated traveller’s baggage, and before his first voyage to Canton, Harlan had ‘taken a few of his brother’s medical books with him and then decided to use their contents in treating persons other than himself’. The rough life aboard a merchant vessel had presented opportunities to observe and treat a variety of ailments and injuries. In July 1824, with no qualifications whatever, relying on an alloy of brass neck and steely self-confidence, Harlan ‘presented himself for examination at the medical board, and was appointed surgeon at the Calcutta general hospital’. Calcutta was one of the most unhealthy places on earth, and with war looming in Burma, surgeons, however novice, were in hot demand.

      For decades the expansionist Burmese had been steadily advancing along the eastern frontier of the Company’s dominion, conquering first Assam and then Shahpuri Island near Chittagong, a Company possession. Fearing an attack on Bengal itself, the British now responded in force with a seaborne army of some 11,000 men. On 11 May 1824, using a steamship in war for the first time, British forces invaded and captured Rangoon, but with Burmese resistance hardening, Calcutta ordered up fresh troops. Harlan had been on the payroll for just a few months when, to his intense satisfaction, he was transferred to the Artillery of Dum-Dum and ordered to the battlefield; if he had any qualms about violating the Quaker rules on pacifism, they were suppressed. The voyage to Rangoon by boat took more than a fortnight. Harlan was deeply impressed by the resilience of the native troops. ‘The Hindu valet de chambre who accompanied me consumed nothing but parched grain, a leguminous seed resembling the pea, during the fifteen days he was on board the vessel.’ Arriving in Rangoon in January 1825, Harlan was appointed ‘officiating assistant surgeon and attached to Colonel George Pollock’s Bengal Artillery’.

      The British defeated