Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  Sabres on the Steppes

  By the same author:

  Cucumber Sandwiches in the Andes

  Prince Henry the Navigator

  The Trail of Tamerlane

  The Quest for Captain Morgan

  Trespassers on the Amazon

  The Royal Geographical Society’s History of World Exploration (Contributor)

  A Bird on the Wing: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Flight from Culloden Retraced

  Diplomatic Bag (Editor)

  The Cossacks

  In Search of Nomads

  The Seventy Great Journeys in History (Contributor)

  Pilgrimage: The Great Adventure of the Middle Ages

  The Great Explorers (Contributor)

  Shooting Leave: Spying Out Central Asia in the Great Game

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © John Ure, 2012

  Illustrations copyright © Toby Ward, 2012

  The right of John Ure to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84901-667-4

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-130-0

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ‘Something hidden. Go and find it.

  Go and look behind the Ranges –

  Something lost behind the Ranges.

  Lost and waiting for you. Go.’

  ‘Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.’

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

  For my grandson

  ARCHIE BERTRAM RAMSAY

  born into a tradition of adventure

  as this book goes to press.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Troublemakers On Troubled Frontiers

  1 Charles Christie: The Officer Who Put Honour Before Duty

  2 William Moorcroft: The Uncontrollable Stud Manager

  3 Arthur Conolly: The Soldier Who Exceeded His Orders

  4 David Urquhart and Edmund Spencer: The Aspiring Politician and His Disciple

  5 Alexander Gardner: The Loose Cannon

  6 James Longworth: The Intrepid Journalist

  7 Joseph Wolff: The Crazy Cleric

  8 James Stanislaus Bell: The Cautious Merchant Adventurer

  9 Arminius Vambery: The ‘English’ Dervish

  10 Edmund O’Donovan: The Frustrated War Correspondent

  11 Ney Elias: The Odd Man Out

  Epilogue: Why and Wherefore?

  Select Bibliography

  Maps

  Moorcroft’s route to Bokhara

  The Caucasus

  Acknowledgements

  Anyone writing about nineteenth-century adventurers is deeply grateful for the fact that so many of them wrote at length (two thick volumes was the norm) about their own exploits. This first-hand material – long gathering dust on remote library shelves – has been the primary source for most of my chapters. But others who have written in more recent decades about some of these long-forgotten figures – notably Peter Hopkirk, whose encouragement has been much appreciated – have helped to bring them into sharper focus; Garry Alder for instance has pointed out the inadequacies of William Moorcroft’s contemporary editor and has added much of his subsequent scholarly research to implement Moorcroft’s own memoirs. Sir Fitzroy Maclean, whose inspiration and companionship during travels in Central Asia I have acknowledged elsewhere, has written about some of the characters who are protagonists in this book, using some of the same sources, but he did so more than fifty years ago, from a different angle and with a different perspective.

  In obtaining access to my primary sources I am indebted to the staff of the British Library (where the India Office records are now housed), of the Royal Geographical Society library, and – more particularly – to Christopher Hurley and Gosia Lawik of the London Library.

  My friend and former diplomatic colleague Sir Leslie Fielding was kind enough to read an early draft of this book and offer most valuable comments, based on his earlier experience of the region, with the well-developed critical faculties one would expect from a former university vice-chancellor.

  Without the encouragement and constructive suggestions of Nick Robinson and Andreas Campomar (respectively chairman and editorial director of my publishers) this book would not have been embarked upon.

  Last, but by no means least, I am grateful for the enthusiastic support of Toby Ward, the distinguished portrait artist who found time to do the line drawings which illuminate the text of this book (as they did of my last book) despite his other pressing commissions.

  Introduction: Troublemakers

  On Troubled Frontiers

  ‘Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’

  – King George VI in 1940

  Relations between Britain and Russia have seldom been easy or relaxed. But there was a brief period after the Napoleonic wars when the two countries were not only allies but visibly friends. Tsar Alexander I – who had contributed so much to the downfall of Napoleon – was received in England with the acclaim due to a heroic partner. The hetman of the Cossacks was feted in Hyde Park. An era of detente appeared to be opening. But it was not to last.

  Only ten years after the battle of Waterloo, Alexander was succeeded by Tsar Nicholas I, an aggressive imperialist, known for his frightening ‘pewter gaze’, with plans for expanding Russia’s frontiers. In these plans the restless and independence-loving Islamic tribesmen of the Caucasus were to be subjugated and corralled within the tsar’s domains; the Black Sea was to be converted into a Russian-controlled lake with access to the trade of the Mediterranean. In addition there was to be a steady encroachment southwards into Central Asia, toppling one khanate and emirate after another in an inexorable advance towards the frontiers of British India. The Great Game had begun.

  Throughout the nineteenth century many young British adventurers were called to confront the spread of tsarist Russia into Central Asia and the Caucasus, considered as stepping stones on the road to British India. Many of these young travellers were there on the instructions, or at least with the encouragement, of the British government in England or the British governor-general in India. Some purported to be on leave when in fact they were fulfilling reconnaissance or espionage missions for their masters. The adventures of a number of these have been recounted in my book Shooting Leave: Spying Out Central Asia in the Great Game (2009).

  As I was researching material for that book, I became increasingly aware that there were others who were undertaking ventures just as daring and dashing without the approval or encouragement of the government. They were a very different and distinct collection of people: they were all acting on their own initiative, frequently ignoring or defying the injunctions of their superiors. Their motivation was varied, but they all had a deep mistrust of the expansionist intentions of Russia and a determination to risk their lives by befrien
ding local khans, emirs, chieftains and independence fighters who were inclined to resist this expansion.

  Only a few of them were regular officers in the British or Indian armies; more of them were soldiers of fortune, enterprising journalists or merchant adventurers who were prepared to lay their lives and reputations on the line in a cause they felt was as worthwhile as any approved venture – and certainly as hazardous. These characters are a maverick collection with little in common with each other except a taste for danger and a sense of purpose.

  Many of these were operating in Afghanistan or other parts of Central Asia, yet they were not restricted to that region. Some were in the Caucasus; others were in Persia, or on the frontiers of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. These were regions just as dramatic as the mountains and steppes of the Hindu Kush or the Pamirs. For these British pioneers, the legacy of Lord Byron’s exotic adventures (both in life and literature) and Wordsworth’s and Walter Scott’s raptures over wild scenery, meant that regions of the world that would have appeared dauntingly grim to earlier generations seemed only enticingly romantic.

  These imperial adventurers were not alone. Young Russian officers were also to be found in the same parts of the world. Just as to the British the north-west frontier of India was the natural stage for drama and adventure, so for the Russians it was more often the Caucasus that fulfilled this role. It was here that young tsarist guards and cavalry officers were sent when they were in disgrace – because of gambling debts, unsuitable love affairs or illegal duels – to retrieve their reputations and be restored to their former ranks by virtue of feats of bravery and leadership. It was here that Russian poets such as Pushkin and Lermonov, and novelists such as Tolstoy had had their earliest military experiences, and where they had fallen under the spell not only of the spectacular scenery – snow-capped mountains, raging torrents and narrow defiles giving way to sub-tropical valleys of vines, figs and lemons – but also under the spell of the Caucasian inhabitants who were and are a people of unusual beauty. Bold highlanders, bedecked in sabres, poniards and cartridge-belts under their fur hats and long silver-lace-trimmed cloaks, cut formidable figures, and their womenfolk – the Circassian maidens so sought after in the harems of Constantinople – were no less admired. This was for the Russians a backcloth as absorbing as the turbaned Pathan tribesmen and the rock-strewn Khyber Pass were for the British.

  The Russians had a long-standing tradition of expansion to the south. Tsar Peter the Great was reported to have said on his death bed in 1725 that his Cossacks would soon be watering their horses on the banks of the Indus. And while many regiments of Tsar Nicholas I’s army were locked in conflict with the Moslem independence fighter Imam Shamyl in the Caucasus throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century, there was also unremitting military activity in Central Asia, as Samarkand, Bokhara, Khiva, Khokand, Geok Tepe and Merv successively were either overrun or seduced into submission by the tsarist expansionists. The Russians never doubted their own superiority; as Anton Chekhov was to say, ‘The Lord God has given us vast forests, immense fields, wide horizons; surely we ought to be giants, living in a country such as this’.

  Britain was equally determined to protect the jewel in Queen Victoria’s imperial crown – India – while if possible avoiding a military confrontation with Russia. Although the two nations were at war with each other in the Crimea in the 1850s, no formal conflict took place in Central Asia. Instead, both imperial powers engaged in a ‘tournament of shadows’: their explorers and spies, arms traders and mercenaries, diplomats and dare-devils all pursued their national objectives and personal interests among the mountain passes, wind-swept deserts and corrupt courts of the rulers of the steppes. Because the action was so often left to amateurs, it seemed not inappropriate that this confrontation should be called the Great Game.

  In reading the multi-volumed accounts of so many Victorian travellers’ adventures, I was also struck by the relevance to the present time of many of their exploits and of the regions where they were enacted. The border regions of Afghanistan, Iran, Chechnya and Ossetia, which were so central to the nineteenth-century dramas, are still as much in the news today: ideologies as well as nationalities confront each other in these places. My protagonists were men who felt that their own country had something to give to the rest of the world – a sense of liberty and liberal values – in the same way as Western participants in current conflicts feel they have today. Just as Lord Byron earlier had been incensed by the subjugation of the Greeks by the Ottoman Empire, so characters such as David Urquhart and Charles Christie, Arthur Conolly and Edmund O’Donovan, and many others had a sense of mission to protect the liberty and independence of isolated communities who were threatened by the rolling advance of an authoritarian, bullying tsarist regime. They were struggling not only to protect British India, but also to protect the more abstract idea of British values. The same idealism could be said to be a factor in the activities in the region today.

  As I pursued these stories, I was struck by more parallels closer to home. When I was a diplomat many of the foreign correspondents and other journalists whom I had worked with and known were taking risks not just to get good stories for their newspapers, but also to expose incidents or policies that they felt were incompatible with their own standards and principles. They were exceeding their briefs as objective observers where they could rely upon the backing of their editorial bosses in London or New York, or upon the unquestioning support of local consular officers. One particular friend, having exposed what he saw as a hidden risk to peace and security, was murdered in circumstances that suggested assassination by a foreign intelligence service. Others were temporarily locked up in police stations or unceremoniously thrown out of the country. As a diplomat one could often learn much from such unconventional correspondents: they could reach out to those members of society – dissidents or troublemakers – who were usually not only off the diplomatic circuit but unreachable to those of us who had to play by the rules.

  These characters were in the tradition of the protagonists in my book. Whereas 150 years ago the reason for their outrage might have been an Asian slave market or an invading army burning villages, now it might be the inadvertent bombing of an innocent wedding party on the Afghan frontier, an improper interrogation technique, or a concealed outburst of racial cleansing.

  And it is not only among journalists that I have found echoes today of my nineteenth-century characters. As a sometimes-roving diplomat on the frontiers of the Soviet Union (as it then was), I encountered aspiring politicians of various nationalities who were ferreting out information that might force the hand of their own governments in directions they might otherwise have been reluctant to take. These would-be statesmen had a personal agenda. If they caused embarrassment at home, as David Urquhart did to Lord Palmerston in the 1840s, they did not greatly mind.

  There were also businessmen – merchant adventurers as I saw them – who were committed to finding or establishing markets in hitherto no-go areas. Now as then, it is frequently the case that trade does not so much follow the flag, as the flag follows trade: it is the entrepreneur who, having established a business link in an officially closed market, often opens the way to more formal inter-governmental relations – whether in Cuba or Libya, China or Kyrgyzstan. James Bell, with his elicit trading of gunpowder and salt on the war-torn fringes of the Russian empire in the 1830s, has his soul-mates today.

  So while Shooting Leave told the story of the good boys, the national heroes and role models of Victorian England, this book tells the murkier story of the bad boys – the ones who got out of line, who undertook missions risking embarrassment, who at best exceeded and at worst disregarded their instructions. Captain Christie – the son of the founder of the London auction house and a notable Great Game player – perhaps spoke for all of them when he tore up his orders and stayed to engage in combat with the Russians who were confronting the Persian troops he was training: ‘If I am to be court-marshalled’
[he is reputed to have said] ‘it should be for fighting and not for running away.’ He was not court-marshalled, but he was killed. I can think of officers I have known who would not only have said the same, but who would also have followed that path whatever the consequences.

  Chapter 1

  Charles Christie: The Officer Who Put

  Honour Before Duty

  ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’

  – Nathan Hale, prior to his execution in 1776

  On the morning of 1 November 1812, a small Russian foot patrol was carrying out a survey of the field of battle at Aslanduz on the banks of the Aras river, along the frontier between Russia and Persia in the Caucasus, and where – on the previous day and night – the tsar’s army had inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Persians under command of their crown prince. The battlefield was littered with bodies: it was reported that 10,000 Persians had fallen – many as a result of having fired on themselves in the confusion following a night attack – while Russian losses had been limited to some 150. While searching for any remaining Russian wounded, the patrol was surprised to stumble on a seriously wounded officer who was neither Russian nor Persian but – it transpired – an Englishman. He had been shot in the neck and, although weak from loss of blood and unable to raise himself from the ground, he had lashed out with his sabre at the Russian who was approaching him. He clearly had no intention of being taken prisoner alive.

  When the patrol reported back to their commander – General Kotliarevsky – that a live British soldier was still lying on the field and resisting capture, the general was astonished and infuriated. His country was not at war with Britain; quite the contrary: Napoleon’s alliance with the tsar had faltered and his Grande Armée had invaded Russia earlier in the year. Britain and Russia were now allies confronting France together. What could such a British officer be doing leading Persian troops against friendly Russia? The general issued orders that, at whatever risk to his own men, the maverick Englishman was to be disarmed and brought in for questioning. The order was easier issued than carried out and a party of Cossacks set off to bring him in. But the wounded Englishman not only had his sabre, he had his pistol and he was said to have killed six Cossacks before one of them finally disregarded the general’s orders and shot him dead where he lay. He was later buried on the spot where he had fallen. His name was Charles Christie.