Sabres on the Steppes Page 13

  The party then moved forward by a path that led from the river bank through the forest of reeds. There was an eerie silence which made them fear they were indeed walking into an ambush. But Longworth was impressed by the orderly way in which they steadily advanced for two miles into Russian territory. Then, quite suddenly, the path they were following changed direction and it became clear they were riding into a trap: a narrow causeway led to a battery of Russian guns guarded by infantry and Cossacks. To charge down this only open way would be to charge to almost certain death: it was a Light-Brigade-at-Balaclava situation twenty years before that event.

  The raiding party came to a standstill and the chiefs conferred. Most felt there was no alternative but to retreat. The Wolf, on the other hand, asked what they were stopping for: had they not come to attack the enemy, and there was the enemy in front of them! The question was resolved by the appearance of a chief called Pakako; he was renowned for his courage and also for his ferocious looks (he wore his full-length sheepskin coat inside-out which made him look like a wild animal). ‘Waving his standard high over his head, he broke with a scornful yell from the council, and, followed helter-skelter by the Deli-Kans [mounted tribesmen], dashed up the avenue’. Close behind him were both Longworth and Nadir Bey ‘being curious to see how this mad career would terminate’. But halfway towards the Russian guns, their horses became bogged down in heavy mud and while they were floundering another chief – also a man whose courage was beyond question – caught up with them and said if they could not get through the mud and reeds they must turn back. ‘We will try, however’, he added, and plunged ahead among the reeds, sinking up to his stirrups in the bog. There was nothing for it but to give up, retrace their steps to the river and retire to join their more cautious brethren on the southern bank.

  No comparable adventure was to occur again. Nadir Bey decided to leave just as soon as he could arrange a passage to Constantinople. Longworth records that his companion’s ‘gallantry and proficiency in the exercises martial and equestrian’ had greatly endeared him to young people of both sexes in Circassia. He managed to get a ship to take him from the blockaded coast to Trebizond in Turkey, where the Russian consul persuaded the local Pasha to impound the ship; but Nadir Bey (always willing and able to do the generous thing) paid an indemnity which secured its release. Mr Bell too disappeared from the scene; he went south in connection with some trading deal and was not able to rejoin Longworth before the latter fell sick with ague. Disappointingly for Longworth, it was while he was on his sick bed that the Circassians mounted a successful assault on one of the Russian forts close to Anapa in the north. They had seized the opportunity by repulsing a Russian sortie in quest of plunder, and then attacking the fort from which they had emerged, scaling the walls and either killing or capturing the entire garrison. The tribesmen themselves lost twelve men. This was exactly the sort of escapade in which both Longworth and Nadir Bey had so long sought to be involved.

  After the disappointment of missing this action, Longworth felt at last that it was time too for him to return home. He was exasperated that even now, whenever something happened to arouse apprehensions that intelligence had been passed to the Russians – as it did when a Russian fleet of twenty-seven sails appeared off the coast – the finger of suspicion always pointed towards him. On this last occasion, suspicions were once more allayed, this time by one of the chiefs, revealing that the Russians had in fact offered him a large bribe – two haversacks full of gold – if he would ‘either betray me into their hands, or make away with me privately’.

  Leaving was never going to be easy, but Longworth was fortunate in that a Turkish ship had been forced to run ashore near the Russian fort of Anapa and had managed, with the help of oarsmen, to sneak a little further up the coast to be ‘hastily dragged on shore, and so completely disguised by the number of boughs attached to her mast and rigging, as to present only the appearance of a tree’. The ship was now only waiting for a north-westerly wind to slip away and evade the blockade by night. They agreed to take Longworth with them, and he started saying his farewells. His friends declared that he had been so long among them – in fact it had been over a year – that they had begun to consider him as one of them.

  Lookouts were posted on the hilltops and, when the coast seemed clear of Russian warships, the vessel was stripped of its leafy covering and dragged, with the help of rollers and pulleys, across the beach. Just as Longworth had ruminated on the voyage out about the classical legacy of these waters, so now he meditated about the inextinguishable liberties of the natives of the Caucasus. Once again, more practical matters intervened: a Russian ship had been spotted, and Longworth himself climbed up the rigging to find it was not one warship but two. An eight-hour chase followed and when eventually they shook off their pursuers, Longworth – who was by now playing an active part in running the ship – discovered that the captain’s compass was not working: they had no idea in what direction they were sailing. This would not have mattered so much if the Black Sea had been encircled by friendly ports, but the opposite was now the case. To make matters worse, they became becalmed and fresh water supplies were running out. While the crew were gloomily speculating on their likely fate, an unidentified vessel passed in the darkness within a cable’s length of them. Then, at dawn, a familiar coastline hove in sight and Longworth was put ashore very close to the point from which he had set off a year before. A small boat took him along the north coast of Turkey to Trebizond where he was welcomed at the British consulate. His adventures were over.

  Back in Constantinople, Longworth was encouraged by his friends to write his two-volume report of his year among the Circassians, on which the above account is largely based. With the withdrawal from the region of himself, Mr Bell and Mr Knight (Nadir Bey), the Circassians decided that there was no immediate prospect of the Russian invasion being discontinued or reversed as a result of diplomatic pressure from England, and it was therefore necessary for them to take matters into their own hands, disregarding the more cautious advice that had been given them by Lord Ponsonby.

  So – somewhat ironically – it came about that, no sooner had Longworth withdrawn from the scene than they started to undertake a whole series of attacks on the Russians, just the sort of operations in which Longworth had been longing to participate while he had been there. The fort at Shapsine, which he and Mr Knight had reconnoitred earlier at some peril to themselves, was now made the subject of a full-scale attack; the Wolf had collected together some 7,000 men and – after placing a cordon round the fort to intercept any escapees – had made an advance through the forests under cover of darkness and then made a dawn attack, storming the walls and killing over 2,000 of the Russian garrison and hangers-on, and capturing the remaining 500. The Circassians lost 350 killed themselves. Perhaps Longworth and Knight, had they been there leading the attackers from the front as was their wont, might have been numbered among the casualties. As it was, they lived to tell a tale which was to cause no small ripples of disquiet in London and St Petersburg, but was to be an inspiration to other adventurers.

  Chapter 7

  Joseph Wolff: The Crazy Cleric

  ‘Madness need not be all breakdown.

  It may also be break-through.’

  – R. D. Laing (1927–89)

  Wolff said: ‘What humbug is that? You cannot dare to put me to death. You will be putting to death a guest.’

  The mullahs of Doab [in Afghanistan] replied: ‘The Koran decides so.’

  Wolff said, ‘It is a lie. The Koran says on the contrary that a guest should be respected even if he is an infidel.’

  The mullahs replied: ‘Then you must purchase your blood with all you have.’

  And thus Wolff had to surrender everything . . . naked like Adam and Eve and without even an apron of leaves to dress himself in he continued his journey.

  This is the Reverend Joseph Wolff’s own account of one of his many curious and alarming adventures as he crossed and re-c
rossed Central Asia between 1830 and 1844. He was someone who courted trouble from an early age. Born in 1795 in Bavaria, the son of a rabbi, he had early in life rebelled against the teaching of his Jewish faith in the face of violent opposition from his family (an aunt threw the fire irons at him when she heard of his blasphemous intentions). Between the age of seven and seventeen he developed a reputation as a disputatious convert to Christianity. Having explored the doctrines of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, he initially threw in his lot with the Church of Rome, and after being expelled from a succession of academic institutions in Germany, he arrived in Rome and became a theological student in the Vatican. But he remained as contentious as ever, denying the supreme authority of the Pope and finally obliging the Inquisition to expel him from the Holy City as he had been expelled elsewhere so many times before.

  Eventually, in 1819, he came to England where his perversity was regarded as endearingly eccentric, and where he found both a wealthy patron who could help him – in the form of Henry Drummond – and a church that was broad enough to accommodate his peculiarly personal theological views. After further oriental studies at Cambridge, he toured the Middle East trying to convert Jewish communities to Christianity, and then returned to England where – somewhat surprisingly – he successfully courted and married the aristocratic and well-connected Lady Georgiana Walpole. They visited Jerusalem and other places together, and then, in 1830, Wolff resolved to go off on his own to Central Asia in search of the lost tribes of Israel. So started the first of Wolff’s two memorable trips to Bokhara.

  At first sight, he may not have seemed to be a very convincing British adventurer confronting tsarist Russia. But by now this cosmopolitan character of Jewish origin had become a naturalized British subject and no one could deny that he was an adventurer. He was also confronting tsarist Russia by the mere act of travelling – at immense personal risk – along the fringes of the Russian empire; this was already a region in which Russian influence in all matters commercial and political was largely unchallenged. This was made explicitly clear to him on his first visit to Bokhara: the emir told him at an early encounter ‘we wish you to know we are great friends now with Russia, and they give us, in all respects, every assistance in their power’. Wolff comments in his memoirs that ‘it is worthy of note that they have in Bokhara introduced the hours of day, as in Russia, from 1 to 12’. While there, Wolff met many of the principal citizens and he recorded that ‘they were all acquainted with Russia [. . .] their merchants go chiefly to Makariev, Astrakhan and Saratoff in Russia’.

  There was another way too in which Wolff, who was always primarily on a religious rather than a political mission, distanced himself from the influence of tsarist Russia, and this was in doctrinal matters: although by now he was an Anglican missionary, he had experience with the Catholic and Jewish faiths and spent much of his time trying to persuade the followers of Islam that he understood their misguided beliefs, but – although he sometimes preached in front of Orthodox Christians – he had no such links or sympathies with the Russian Orthodox church.

  It is also significant that those whom he encountered in his travels assumed that he was anxious to champion British interests at the expense of Russia. The ruler of the Punjab went so far as to say to him ‘Now, we come nigh unto God, by making an alliance with England in order to keep out the Russians from India’; even to Wolff this must have seemed a slight over-simplification of the way to heaven, but he did not contradict it. Wolff’s heart was with God rather than with the viceroy of India, but he was always conscious of travelling as an Englishman in a regrettably Russian-dominated sphere, and of the need to try to redress this balance.

  Wolff’s first journey to Bokhara, to find and convert the lost tribes of Israel, really started at Constantinople. He had dined there with Sir Robert Gordon, the British representative, who procured letters of introduction for him from the Turkish sultan, and who (according to Wolff, one not given to modesty) ‘never had a more pleasant evening than in his conversation with him [Wolff ]’. He hired a Tartar guide and set off on horseback, requesting ‘an old decrepit horse – the only sort he dared to mount’. When he reached Tehran he dined with the British Ambassador and collected more letters of introduction, this time from the shah of Persia to the chiefs of Khorasan through whose turbulent country he would need to travel.

  The introductions would have reassured him more, had not one of the ambassador’s guests said to him over dinner ‘Now you have got all the letters; but, in spite of them, we shall hear, two months hence, the sad tidings that Joseph Wolff has been made a slave in Khorassan by the Turcomauns [sic], and sold for sixty shay’.1 And these gloomy prognoses were to continue: some visiting Afghans forecast that if he survived Khorasan, he would fall victim to the Turkomans at Sarakh or Merv and, if he did by some miracle reach Bokhara, he would either be held there indefinitely or killed ‘as they killed Moorcroft’ (who appeared to have become part of the unsavoury legend of Bokhara). Besides which, the Afghans added, ‘You have physical impediments, because you are short-sighted, and do not see when robbers are coming’. This last point was to prove all too accurate.

  As Wolff progressed further eastwards, and entered the dreaded Khorasan, he travelled in a caravan which included his own four hired camels, all loaded with bibles sent to him from Bombay for distribution on his route. As predicted, it was not long before shrieks from his fellow travellers alerted Wolff to the fact that something was wrong. When he enquired what the matter was, his companions said ‘Are you blind? Look there! There are Turkomans coming on horseback.’ When the marauders caught up with the caravan ‘to the surprise of all, they did not fire, nor make any attack’. Instead they asked where the caravan came from. Wolff promptly replied that they came from a certain part of Persia, knowing that there was an outbreak of plague there. When Wolff saw that this greatly alarmed them, he boldly approached them as if to embrace them, upon which they turned their horses round and rode off as fast as they could. His imaginative handling of the situation had more than made up for his short-sighted unawareness of the impending danger. On other occasions when danger threatened, he presented his opponents with a bible and started speaking volubly about religion, which (as he confesses in his book) ‘he always did on the slightest opportunity’.

  But his luck was not to last. When they set out from a village called Sangerd, Wolff – who was riding on ahead of his companions – suddenly heard firing from all sides and dreadful yelling and screaming. He resisted the temptation to ride on and save himself, returning instead to join his companions and found ‘his servant and all the rest were already tied to the horses’ tails of the banditti who surrounded them’. All the prisoners had already been stripped naked, and soon one of the robbers rode up to Wolff with a gun in his hand and demanded his money. They forced him to dismount and stripped him naked too, and tied him with a long rope to a horse’s tail, and a man with a whip came behind and flogged him. He notes in his memoirs: ‘Wolff prayed! – in such hours one learns to pray’. His prayers appeared to be answered, because when he boldly declared – in answer to questions about who he was – that ‘I am a follower of Jesus’, instead of further tormenting such an infidel, the robber chief gave orders for him to be untied and allowed to ride one of the horses. They even put a few rags around his body to restore his modesty.

  But his troubles were not over and soon they were speculating among themselves as to what price he might fetch in the local slave markets. When they searched his baggage and found the letters of introduction from the sultan and shah, they said, ‘Now this is a dangerous man; we see from his looks and from these letters that he is not a common man’. They concluded that if they held him there would be others coming to seek his release and that of the other captives; they would therefore do much better to kill him quickly and say that he had been taken away by Turkoman robbers. All this was said within Wolff’s hearing, so he immediately went up to them and said ‘Your reasoning is very
good [. . .] but you are too late’; he then went on to explain that he had written in the bibles he had sent to His Royal Highness Abbas Mirza, the commander of the Persian army, telling him: ‘In case these Bibles reach you without me, you may be convinced that I have been made a slave, with my servant, and fifteen muleteers, not by Turcomauns, but by your Highness’s subjects, the Kerahe [. . .] who wander about to make foray, against the orders of their chief.’

  The inscription then went on to ask Abbas Mirza to rescue Wolff and his companions from the Kerahe. As soon as his captors heard this, and had it confirmed by the other prisoners, ‘they became as pale as death’ as they feared retribution. Wolff took advantage of their disarray to start negotiating a price for their release, based on notes promising a ransom would be paid. But still his captors were nervous, and decided that, although it might be too dangerous to hold on to him or kill him outright, ‘a fatal accident’ could be arranged. Having noted that he was no horseman, they therefore put him on the wildest horse they had, with no saddle or bridle, and whipped the horse into a gallop over rough country. Somehow Wolff managed ‘to sit his horse like the colonel of a regiment’ and reached the gates of the next village intact.

  By good fortune, or divine intervention as Wolff would have interpreted it, the village in question had a large Jewish community whom he recognized as such and greeted in Hebrew with the words ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord Our God is One Lord’. They gave him shelter and comfort, but soon the Kerahe robbers caught up with him once again, this time shackling him to other slaves ‘in the most painful manner’. They still seemed determined to finish him off one way or another, and this time he was denied any food and thought he might be left to starve to death because ‘dead dogs tell no tales’.