Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (13 page)

The second expedition was a much more cunning and elaborate operation. This was to head in the opposite direction and gather information about the Indus, which Ellenborough believed could be made into the principal British transport route into Central Asia, just as the Ganges had earlier opened up the heart of Hindustan to British commerce.

Ellenborough, like many utilitarians of his generation, believed profoundly in the civilising nature of trade and commerce: ‘not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community’.
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British manufactures he imagined as the first line of defence against Russian advances – Scottish tweed and bundles of Manchester cottons would assist in transmitting enlightenment from Albion, and somehow stiffen Afghan resolve to resist the Tsarist tyranny of St Petersburg. He therefore proposed to send a boat up the Indus manned by a team of disguised draughtsmen, cartographers and naval and military surveyors. They would accurately map the river’s banks, plumb its depth and test the practicality of sending British steamers upstream. In this way he hoped to bring about the beginning of the British conquest of Central Asian trade. In order to disguise its true purpose, however, the raft would be given a cover, and officially said to be carrying diplomatic presents for Ranjit Singh deemed too delicate to send by road.

Given the Maharajah’s almost obsessive love of fine horses, Ellenborough agreed to the ruse of sending out from Suffolk a team of huge English dray horses, a breed never before seen in India. A heavy gilt English carriage was later added to the gifts, just in case Ranjit Singh ordered the carthorses to be sent by road. Later it was agreed to extend the expedition so that a British intelligence officer disguised ‘in the character of a merchant’ would pass on through Afghanistan to Bukhara, to assess the possibilities of ‘introducing English manufactures into Central Asia’. This officer was of course to take covert notes and make maps as he went, to test the degree of Russian influence in the Central Asian oasis towns, and to report on the ease with which a troop of Cossacks might sweep past the Oxus into Afghanistan, and hence down into India.
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Ellenborough’s first choice for an ‘able and discreet officer’ to lead the expedition had been William Fraser’s brother, the artist, writer and spy James Baillie Fraser, who had travelled extensively in Persia a decade earlier, had made friends with the Shah and spoke perfect Persian.
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But Fraser was busy at that moment trying to save his family estates in Inverness – he had got into debt building a massive extension of his house in order to have the Persian princes to stay. So Ellenborough settled instead on an unknown but ambitious twenty-five-year-old linguist and Pottinger protégé who had just won a prize for producing the first new map of the mouth of the Indus since Alexander Dalrymple’s celebrated chart of 1783.

The name of this young officer was Alexander Burnes.

In the summer of 1830, five dapple-grey Suffolk carthorses arrived at the docks of Bombay after a voyage of six months; one of the original six, a mare, had died at sea. A fortnight later, after recovering their strength grazing on the green meadows of Malabar Hill, they were packed off again, this time towards the Indus estuary, accompanied by the large gilt carriage.

Waiting for permission to land, the ships were tossed about by gales, dismasting two of the boats and splitting the sails of a third, the one in which Burnes was sailing. The horses, now used to life on the waves, seem to have taken it in their ample stride; but the carriage was badly damaged by seawater and was never quite the same again.
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Twice the expedition set off, only to be obliged to return after the Amirs of Sindh refused permission for the boats to travel any further.

The necessary permissions were finally received on 4 March 1831, after Ranjit Singh was induced to make various unpleasant threats to the Amirs. From this point the expedition made slow progress upstream for the 700 miles to Lahore. Burnes ducked potshots from the banks, while making detailed jottings on the landscape, peoples and politics of the country they were drifting past. Meanwhile his companions discreetly took soundings and bearings, measuring the flow of the river and preparing detailed maps and flow charts. The Indus proved unexpectedly shallow and Ellenborough’s ideas of introducing steamers on the Ganges model was quickly shown to be implausible. But the expedition proved that the River Indus was navigable as far as Lahore in flat-bottomed boats. Barges would be able to take British manufactures as far as the Sikh capital, where they could be unloaded on the banks of the Ravi, and hence carried over the passes to Afghanistan and Central Asia on foot. The only obstacles were political.

Alexander Burnes, the man chosen to lead this mission, was a tough, high-spirited and resourceful young Highland Scot, the fourth son of the Provost of Montrose. He had a broad face, high forehead, deeply inset eyes and a quizzical set to his mouth which hinted at both his curious and enquiring nature and his sense of humour, something he shared with his cousin, the Scottish national poet Robbie Burns.
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At the Montrose Academy where he and his brothers had been educated, Burnes was remembered as the ‘foremost in bold adventures’ rather than for any scholarly achievements, though his classical education there kindled his obsession with Alexander the Great which first drew him to Afghanistan and the Indus.
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Shipped off to India with his elder brother James at the age of sixteen, he had now, at the age of only twenty-six, spent a decade in India and grown to be a confident speaker of Persian and Hindustani; he had also perfected a clear and lively prose style, and developed his earlier historical interests: his first publication – ‘On the Indus’, in the
Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society –
was more concerned with Hellenistic precedents than with present-day politics.

Like many others who would play the Great Game after him, it was Burnes’s quick intelligence and skill in languages that got him his swift promotion, and despite coming from a relatively modest background in a relatively remote part of Scotland, he rose faster in the ranks than any of his richer and better-connected contemporaries. He was also assisted by the recommendations of his talented brother James and the connections both brothers made through their prominence in the Freemasons.
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An angular, wiry and witty man of five foot nine, ‘spare and thin’, Burnes was ambitious and determined, and had a cool head in an emergency. His friends admired his imagination and his intellectual agility: one wrote that he was ‘sharp, quick and rapidly decisive, expressive and penetrating’. On this journey, he had ample opportunity to deploy both his intelligence and his wit, not least when he crossed the frontier to the Punjab and his lumbering carthorses caused a sensation among Ranjit Singh’s officials. ‘For the first time,’ wrote Burnes, ‘a dray horse was expected to gallop, canter and perform all the evolutions of the most agile animal.’

Burnes and his presents were received in great state in Lahore on 18 July 1831. A guard of cavalry and a regiment of infantry were sent to meet them. ‘The coach, which was a handsome vehicle, headed the procession,’ he recorded, ‘and in the rear of the dray horses we ourselves followed on elephants, with the officers of the maharajah. We passed close under the city walls and entered Lahore by the palace gate. The streets were lined with cavalry, artillery and infantry, all of which saluted as we passed. The concourse of people was immense; they had seated themselves on the balconies of houses, and preserved a most respectful silence.’ The British party was led across the outer courtyard of the old Mughal fort, and into the entrance of the arcaded marble reception room, the Diwan-i-Khas. ‘Whilst stooping to remove my shoes,’ Burnes wrote, ‘I suddenly found myself in the arms and tight embrace of a diminutive, old-looking man.’
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This was Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab himself. Leading Burnes by the hand, he brought him into the court where ‘all of us were seated on silver chairs, in front of his Highness’. It was now more than thirty years since Ranjit Singh had come to power, assisting Shah Zaman to save his cannon from the mud of the Jhelum, and thirteen years since Shah Shuja had fled Ranjit’s enforced hospitality through the city sewers. Since then, the Sikh leader had taken the opportunity presented by the Afghan civil war to absorb most of the lands of the Durrani Empire east of the Indus and build a remarkably rich, strong, centralised and well-governed Sikh state in its place. As well as training his remarkable army, Ranjit had also modernised his bureaucracy and ran a formidable intelligence network, whose reports were sometimes shared with Wade in Ludhiana.

The British generally got on well with Ranjit Singh, but they never forgot that his army was the last military force in India which could take on the Company on the field of battle: by the 1830s, the Company had stationed nearly half the Bengal army, totalling more than 39,000 troops, along the Punjab frontier.
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It was therefore extremely important that Burnes establish a good rapport with Ranjit.

The French traveller Victor Jacquemont penned a revealing portrait of the Maharajah just a couple of months before Burnes arrived in Lahore. He depicted Ranjit Singh as a clever and charming rogue – as disreputable in his private habits as he was admirable in his public ones. ‘Ranjit Singh is an old fox,’ he wrote, ‘compared with whom the wiliest of our diplomats is a mere innocent . . .’ Jacquemont reported a number of encounters with the Maharajah: ‘His conversation is a nightmare. He is almost the first inquisitive Indian I have seen, but his curiosity makes up for the apathy of the whole nation. He asked me a hundred thousand questions about India, the English, Europe, Bonaparte, the world in general and the other one, hell and paradise, the soul, God, the devil, and a thousand things beside . . .’ Ranjit Singh regretted that women ‘no longer give him any more pleasure than the flowers in his garden’.

To show me what good reason he had for his distress, yesterday in the midst of his whole court – that is to say in the open country, on a beautiful Persian carpet where we were squatting surrounded by a few thousand soldiers – lo and behold, the old roué sent for five young girls from his seraglio, ordered them to sit down in front of me, and smilingly asked what I thought of them. I said in all sincerity that I thought them very pretty, which was not a tenth what I really thought . . .

Jacquemont also noted that the Maharajah ‘has a passion for horses which is almost a mania; he has waged the most costly and bloody wars for the purpose of seizing a horse in some neighbouring state which they had refused to sell or give to him . . . He is also a shameless rogue who flaunts his vices as Henri III did in our country . . . Ranjit has frequently exhibited himself to his good people of Lahore with a Moslem public woman, indulging in the least innocent of sports with her on the back of an elephant . . .’
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Burnes was just as taken with Ranjit Singh as Jacquemont had been, and the two quickly became firm friends: ‘Nothing could exceed the affability of the Maharajah,’ he wrote. ‘He kept up an uninterrupted flow of conversation for the hour and a half which the interview lasted: he enquired particularly about the depth of water in the Indus and the possibility of navigating it.’ The dray horses and the carriage were then inspected: ‘The sight of the horses excited his utmost wonder; their size and colour pleased him: he said they were little elephants, and as they passed singly before him, he called out to the different sardars and officers, who joined in his admiration.’
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Indeed such was Ranjit’s pleasure in his gifts, and Lord Ellenborough’s letter which accompanied them, that he ordered an unprecedented artillery salute of sixty guns, each firing twenty-one times, so that the people of Lahore would be in no doubt as to his enthusiasm for his new English alliance.

For two months, Ranjit laid on a round of entertainments for Burnes. Dancing girls performed, troops were manoeuvred, deer were hunted, monuments were visited and banquets were thrown. Burnes even tried some of Ranjit’s home-made hell-brew, a fiery distillation of raw spirit, crushed pearls, musk, opium, gravy and spices, two glasses of which was normally enough to knock out the most hardened British drinker, but which Ranjit recommended to Burnes as a cure for his dysentery. Burnes and Ranjit, the Scot and the Sikh, found themselves bonding over a shared taste for fire-water. ‘Runjeet Singh is, in every respect, an extraordinary character,’ wrote Burnes. ‘I have heard his French officers observe that he has no equal from Constantinople to India.’
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At their final dinner, Ranjit agreed to show Burnes the Koh-i-Nur. ‘Nothing’, wrote Burnes, ‘can be imagined more superb than this stone; it is of the finest water, about half the size of an egg. Its weight amounts to 3½ rupees, and if such a jewel is to be valued, I am informed it is worth 3½ millions of money.’
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Ranjit then presented Burnes with two richly caparisoned horses, dressed in costly Kashmiri shawls, their necks adorned with necklaces of agate and with heron plumes rising from between their ears. While Burnes thanked Ranjit for the present, one of the dray horses was paraded for a final inspection, now decked in cloth of gold and saddled with an elephant’s howdah.
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