Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  Meanwhile, Moorcroft’s alarming experience of revolutionary France had left him with a deep suspicion of Napoleon’s intentions. At first he, like those others who had sent Christie into Baluchistan, thought that Napoleon and Tsar Alexander might jointly invade British India; then (after Napoleon had broken with Alexander and invaded Russia) he thought that a French army in Russia would be ‘so much nearer Hindoostan than at any former period’ that it might tempt Napoleon to invade alone; later still (when Napoleon had been forced to retreat from Russia, and Moorcroft was back from his second expedition to Nepal) he still saw the tsar as an ongoing threat to India, despite the fact that the tsar was officially a friend and ally of England. In harbouring these fears he was ahead of his time; the Great Game had not been declared. As a result, no one in London or Calcutta was inclined to listen to his gloomy warnings.

  While he was having these anxious premonitions about Russian intentions, his well-paid but routine administrative job at the Pusa stud farm was proving ever more frustrating. His disagreements with the board of directors might have led to the termination of his appointment had it not been for the outbreak of the Gurkha wars, which focused attention on the need for improved cavalry horses. The new governor-general, Lord Hastings, was himself a former soldier and more sympathetic than his predecessor towards Moorcroft’s ambitions to improve the bloodstock line.

  In 1819 it was Lord Hastings who finally was ‘pleased to grant leave [to Moorcroft] to proceed towards the North Western parts of Asia, for the purpose of there procuring horses to improve the breed [. . .] for military use’. This was the message that Moorcroft had been waiting for ever since his return from Nepal in 1812, and which it had seemed might never be forthcoming. He also managed to get consent to taking goods for barter (rather than bills of exchange or gold bullion) to pay for the horses; he saw this as a means to set up the framework for future trade between India and her northern neighbours. This was part of his personal agenda, rather than his brief from the government or the company, and it was to cause serious trouble.

  Moorcroft made the most of his licence to take goods for barter, taking strings of pearls for ‘everyday currency’. For one stage of the journey alone he required six elephants and forty camels to carry all his merchandise and kit, the latter including his personal tent, rugs, writing desk and brass bedstead. Now aged over fifty, well beyond the age of most European travellers on the sub-continent in that era, he had no intention of being unnecessarily uncomfortable. At times his party numbered as many as three hundred, but there was a continual and insidious dwindling of personnel as the less robust defected and sought to return to the relative comfort of life on the plains. His staunch companion throughout however was George Trebeck, the nineteen-year-old son of one of his London friends from the Westminster Volunteer Cavalry. A doctor and a Persian secretary were among the other members of the team, as well as fourteen Gurkha soldiers who made up his official escort and who were paid from public funds.

  His documentation consisted of letters of introduction in Persian, Russian, Chinese and English, all impressively embossed with the East India Company’s seal and explaining his equestrian mission. What he did not have, and would never have been given, was any warrant to negotiate trade or other treaties on behalf of the government of India. Nor could his credentials from the company be expected to carry any weight beyond the confines of the company’s extensive territories; and that was where Moorcroft was heading. He would be on his own, far beyond the protective reach of the Raj.

  Bokhara was Moorcroft’s ultimate aim, but he chose a circuitous route to get there. He decided to follow the traditional caravan trail, across what is now dubbed the Karakoram highway, north-eastwards into Chinese Turkistan. From there he planned to approach Bokhara from the east, across the Pamirs. Ostensibly the reason for selecting this very roundabout approach was that it avoided the dangers of hostile regions such as the Punjab, Peshawar and Afghanistan which contained extremist Moslem rulers who were notoriously unfriendly to the very rare European visitors who ventured into their domains. Privately, Moorcroft reckoned that since his preferred route lay through Ladakh there might be opportunities during his stay there to use the territory as a bridge for trade between China and India. This might open up a whole commercial dimension that would replace Russian goods with British or Indian ones throughout a great tranche of Central Asia. The factories of Birmingham and Calcutta, as well as the stables of the East India Company, would profit from his personal interpretation of the objectives of his mission.

  On the first stages of his journey to Ladakh, Moorcroft describes in his journals some of the natural hazards of the route. One district was so infested with tigers that the locals had developed their own special tiger trap: ‘a small chamber of loose, heavy stones, with a sliding door at one end, and a loophole at the other [. . .] a rope passes over the roof of the hut and is tied to the neck of a goat [. . .] when the tiger attempts to carry off the goat [. . .] the door falling down secures the tiger [. . .] the animal is then shot through the loophole’. Wolves were also a local hazard, and the Persian secretary inadvertently disturbed a pack with ‘long, lank bodies and bushy tails’ that were in the process of pulling down a large deer. Even after the deer had been killed they continued to prowl around Moorcroft’s party until ‘finally dispersed with several shots’.1

  There were other less natural hazards too. Moorcroft was so incensed by finding two young widows – the elder no more than fourteen years old – being burnt on their husbands’ funeral pyres, that he intervened at some risk to himself to prevent it happening ‘for a while at least’. Even before he set out on his travels he was aware of the dangers and wrote to a friend saying that he must ‘push the adventure to its end’; little did he know how much these dangers were to escalate before he reached his destination.

  By December 1820, he had already revised his route. He had left it too late to cross the mountain ranges that lay between him and Leh (the capital of Ladakh), so he needed to divert westwards and enter the Punjab – the kingdom of the fearsome Raja Ranjit Singh who he worried would delay and detain him, or worse. They were now in territory where no Europeans had ventured before and where the small Gurkha escort was liable to be interpreted by the locals as the precursor of a vast invasion force. He had hoped to just cut across a corner of the Punjab and be on his way northwards, but it was not to be: Ranjit Singh’s troops stopped him and refused to allow him to proceed without the explicit permission of the raja. The only way to obtain this was for Moorcroft to divert from his route and go alone to Lahore to face the raja in person and seek his approval.

  Having set off on this diversion, he was further irritated by being held up for a month in great heat and discomfort – his tent was downwind of the local sewers – while permission to proceed to Lahore (permission to seek permission) was sought. Characteristically, Moorcroft passed the time by employing his medical skills to the advantage of the local population. On another occasion he managed to visit one of the raja’s stud farms, and found that the stallions were only ever allowed out of their stables to cover mares, and consequently were so under-exercised and irritable that he was tempted to deploy his knowledge and advice in that direction too.

  When he finally arrived at Lahore, Ranjit Singh extended a cordial welcome and invited him to an early audience. Seated on a golden throne, the raja motioned Moorcroft to a silver chair. The short, stout, one-eyed raja paraded his horses and his artillery for Moorcroft’s entertainment and accepted presents of pistols (always a favourite gift); soon however it became clear his main interest in Moorcroft was to obtain medical advice for his own flagging sexual energy. Moorcroft prescribed a mixture of sensible suggestions and placebos. Having trusted Moorcroft with his most intimate medical problems, the raja also trusted him to explore Lahore in his own way and his own time; Moorcroft took the opportunity to spy out the defences of the city, although he felt he was abusing his host’s hospitality by so doing and recorded
that he was indulging in ‘more [. . .] espionage than is perfectly agreeable to my feelings’.

  With all these consultations and activities, it was May before Moorcroft managed to leave Lahore and rejoin his own party, but he had succeeded in his objective. He returned with written consent to proceed towards Ladakh and, if necessary, to transit Kashmir on his way eastwards from Ladakh towards Bokhara. He accurately (and privately) forecast that when Ranjit Singh died the British would succeed in annexing the Punjab – a necessary step in his opinion to preclude a Russian advance in that direction. What he did not forecast was that, by the time he needed to take up Ranjit Singh’s agreement to his passing through Kashmir, he would have taken other actions that were likely to upset the raja.

  This was all some way ahead. For the moment it was he who was furious with Ranjit Singh, who had called him back to Lahore on the pretext that his son was ill when in fact it was the raja himself who was worried once more about his health; this ploy on top of the earlier obfuscation had altogether delayed Moorcroft for four months. His journey on to Leh – the capital of Ladakh – took from June to September 1820; he thought he was the first European ever to reach this highest inhabited country in the world (although it is now believed that two Jesuit priests may have done so more than a century earlier). Certainly the inhabitants were as intrigued with Moorcroft and his party as the visitors were with these smiling hill people. But even as he processed through the narrow streets and scrutinized the crowds of curious bystanders who had turned out to see him, Moorcroft was noting that among their number were traders with Chinese features from north of the Karakoram range, and others with more Semitic features from Kashmir to the west and from points further south.

  This was undoubtedly a significant crossroad of caravan routes across Central Asia, and Moorcroft was already thinking about how this traffic route could be harnessed for the transport of British and Indian goods to new markets before the Russians. He was once again allowing goat’s-wool shawls and Sheffield cutlery to interfere with his thoughts about Turkoman bloodstock and Arab stallions.

  Moorcroft had hoped to press on northwards to Yarkand in Chinese Turkistan, but a number of reasons held him back: there was no invitation from the Chinese; it was too late in the year to face the ice and snow on the Karakoram passes;2 and – possibly most decisive of all – he had run out of cash and credit. It said something about his diminishing credibility in India that Sir David Ochterlony, the government resident in Delhi to whom he appealed for an advance of funds against securities, prevaricated and failed to help.

  But Moorcroft certainly did not waste time during his unwelcome delay at Leh. As usual, he dispensed medical help to those in need. He also was not impervious to the charms of the local girls, and a French visitor some ten years later remarked that ‘Mr Moorcroft did not set an example of European continence here [. . .] his principle occupation was making love’. But more significant was his main self-imposed task. In this he set about doing something far beyond the reach of his brief or his powers: he set in train a commercial treaty between Ladakh and British India which was designed to implement his ambitions to establish a trade route through Leh to allow British goods to penetrate into China and Central Asia.

  Despite fierce opposition at first from the Kashmiri and Tibetan merchants, Moorcroft managed to secure such an agreement on 4 May 1821, not only for British goods to enter Ladakh, but for them to be charged a much reduced customs duty and – if possible – enter the region without the necessity of passing through Ranjit Singh’s Punjab. With considerable satisfaction, Moorcroft sealed the agreement with his personal signet ring ‘on behalf of the British merchants of Calcutta’, a vague body of which he was in no way the appointed representative. It was now up to the British government to give effect to his agreement; he stated the position in words that showed his feelings: ‘Whether they [the people of Ladakh] shall be clothed with the broadcloth of Russia or of England [. . .] whether they shall be provided with implements of iron and steel, with hardware of every description, from Petersburg or Birmingham [. . .] is entirely in the decision of the government of British India’. He went on to characterize the attitude of his own government towards trade with Central Asia as one of ‘misplaced squeamishness and unnecessary timidity’.

  Moorcroft’s commercial zeal was driven by his long-standing apprehensions about Russian military as well as commercial intentions in Central Asia. Never was this more the case than in Ladakh. Here he discovered a tsarist agent – now called Rafailov but originally of Jewish and Persian extraction – had been visiting regularly to exchange Russian manufactured goods for goat’s-wool shawls, and possibly for the secrets of making the latter and for the chance of exporting goats for breeding in Russia. Rafailov had been much more than a merchant: he had been in the pay of the tsar’s Foreign Ministry and received a medal and gold chain from the tsar for his services; he also carried rich gifts – emeralds and rubies – as well as letters from the tsar to the rulers of Ladakh and the Punjab. It transpired he had had a Cossack escort for much of his journey (no doubt necessary because of the gem stones in his baggage), just as Moorcroft had had a Gurkha escort.

  Moorcroft much hoped to meet Rafailov and saw him as a fellow spirit as well as an opponent and admired ‘his intelligence and enterprise’. He thought Rafailov might well have pioneered a route by a hitherto-unknown pass through the Karakorams which would bring the thrusting Cossacks much closer to India than had previously been realized and feared. Chinese Turkistan as well as Ladakh might become Russian dependencies.

  It was therefore a considerable shock when he learnt that Rafailov had died or been killed – accidentally or otherwise (his death had been enigmatically described as ‘sudden and violent’) – when crossing the Karakorams in 1821. When Moorcroft managed to get a sight of some of the letters that Rafailov had been carrying on his last and fatal journey, he found Count Nesselrode (the tsar’s foreign minister) had been trying to persuade the rajas of Ladakh and the Punjab to send envoys to St Petersburg at the expense of the Russian government. This was no innocent ‘box wallah’, any more than Moorcroft was an innocent vet. Rafailov and Moorcroft were both playing a lethal game, as the latter was also to discover all too soon.

  Not only was Moorcroft running out of funds and embarking on commercial agreements beyond his competence, he also started meddling in political affairs. He approached the ruler of Ladakh and suggested that he should seek British protection against possible incursions either from the Punjab (Lahore) or from Russia, and he additionally wrote to Ranjit Singh in Lahore, in effect warning him off meddling in Ladakh’s affairs. Such advice – unauthorized and provocative as it was – was bound to offend Ranjit Singh, and undo whatever goodwill Moorcroft had earlier gained by his medical attentions to that ruler and his subjects. This was not without risks to Moorcroft himself, since he might well have to travel on through Kashmir and other territories under Ranjit Singh’s sway; no wonder he recorded that his rash action ‘might introduce me to one of the oubliettes [prisons where the key had been thrown away] of Lahore, if not a more summary recompense’.

  And it soon seemed that the latter – a summary recompense in the form of an assassination attempt – might indeed be his fate. But in the event the first such attempt was made against his companion – George Trebeck – who was shot at in the early hours of the morning as he was working at his desk; fortunately for him, he had just moved from his chair or he would have been in the line of the bullet that was intended for him. Moorcroft also soon became the subject of attacks by three mysterious strangers. He shot at one of them at night with the pistol he now kept under his pillow, and ‘the next morning I saw only two of the strangers’. When the attempts to shoot him were abandoned, they were quickly replaced by attempts to poison him. Someone was certainly trying to administer a ‘summary recompense’, and the aggrieved Ranjit Singh, with his reputation for murdering those who stood in his way, seemed the most likely suspect.

&
nbsp; Whatever hand Ranjit Singh may or may not have had in these sinister happenings, there was one action he indisputably took against Moorcroft which did the latter much harm. He forwarded a copy of Moorcroft’s ill-advised letter to Sir David Ochterlony, the Delhi official who had already proved less than co-operative with Moorcroft’s requests for funds. Ochterlony predictably passed it on to the authorities in Calcutta where it was drawn to the attention of the governor-general himself. However well-disposed Lord Hastings may have earlier been to Moorcroft’s travels, this gross interference in matters altogether outside his remit drew down an immediate expression of ‘surprise and displeasure’. Lord Hastings did not pull his punches: ‘It strikes his Lordship in Council as being the height of indiscretion in you to address any letter to the Maha Raja [Ranjit Singh] upon such a subject [. . .] to interfere and tender unsolicited advice in matters wholly foreign to your situation is the least reprehensible feature of the case.’

  The governor-general went on to point out that Moorcroft’s letter could only be construed as a threat that British India would claim rights over Ladakh; he denied this was the case, and more importantly he pointed out that any such suggestion was bound to upset Ranjit Singh, who was a valued but by no means reliable ally of the British. At a stroke, Moorcroft had undone all the good work he had put into devising the commercial agreement with Ladakh. He had not only made an enemy of Ranjit Singh, he had lost the support and goodwill of his own masters in Calcutta. As he recorded: ‘The difficulties and dangers which subsequently beset my progress were mainly owing to the harsh, peremptory, and public manner in which discredit was affixed to my proceedings by the Resident of Delhi and the government of Bengal’. He was now on his own in every sense.

  While all these diplomatic dramas were unfolding in Ladakh, Lahore and Calcutta, Moorcroft had still been pursuing the idea of crossing the Karakorams to Yarkand and Chinese Turkistan. Despite the lack of an invitation, the rigours of the passes, and his lack of credit and cash, he was still listening carefully to all reports of the state of the passes through the Karakorams. They were not encouraging: the leader of one caravan who was a mullah known to Moorcroft had – on his second attempt – fallen behind the rest of the party. Moorcroft takes up the tale in his memoirs: