Sabres on the Steppes Page 8

  But things came to a head over the question of support for the Circassians in their resistance to the Russian invasion of their Caucasian homelands. Urquhart took the unprecedented step of actually visiting the region in 1834 to get a first-hand impression of what was going on. He was in fact the first recorded English visitor to contact the highland tribesmen of Circassia, and he went entirely alone and without any official backing or authorization. Ostensibly his visit was a secret commercial mission ‘to collect what may be called statistical information’. In reality, it was a perilous undertaking, open to every sort of misunderstanding, and likely to provoke just the sort of row with Russia that Lord Palmerston was so anxious to avoid.

  Predictably, two things happened. Firstly, the Circassian chiefs were so encouraged by Urquhart’s presence that they begged him to become their leader both in council and in the field of military operations against the Russians. They called him ‘Daoud Bey’ (Prince David) and saw him as a David figure who could confront the Russian Goliath. More worryingly for the British government, they also saw him as an emissary of England and a living proof of British support for their cause.

  Secondly, Urquhart himself fell totally under the spell of the Circassian independent fighters. Here were a gallant, handsome people, defending their families, their homes and their flocks and herds against a bullying super-power. They were – it seemed to him – living a pure and simple life, founded on a long tradition of native craftsmanship and civil liberties; and furthermore they were doing this against the most romantic of backgrounds; wild mountainous scenery which a few decades earlier would have seemed daunting and austere, now – in the romantic era of Turner’s landscapes and Wordsworth’s poetry – seemed the very essence of all that was most worth struggling to preserve. He wrote passionately about what he had seen and heard: ‘Russia has never been able to conquer the Circassians of the Black Sea. Still in sight of the Russian fishers of Anapa [a Russian fort on the coast] peasant girls tend their flocks, and warriors meet in the open air in solemn deliberation’. He goes on to argue that because no other state had ever possessed Circassia, there was no legal validity in the argument that Russia had in the past ceded Circassia to Turkey and that – by subsequent treaty – Turkey had passed it back to Russia. This was a wholly spurious Russian justification for their territorial aggression.

  Despite Urquhart being an awkward misfit at the embassy in Constantinople, Lord Ponsonby fully supported his Circassian venture. He shared Urquhart’s indignation at the injustice being done to this small independent community and saw it as Britain’s role to champion the oppressed, and he offered to send Urquhart’s report of his trip as a dispatch to the Foreign Office in London. He warned that ‘if we do not take care, Russia will possess the Caucasus and all the power that that will give her’. Predictably, Lord Palmerston in London was less enthusiastic about Urquhart’s exploits and wrote to Ponsonby ‘expressing some alarm’ at Urquhart exciting the tribes to revolt. Ponsonby responded vigorously and replied to the foreign secretary:

  It is evident you have not attended to the facts [. . .] the Circassians could not be excited to revolt, because they were at the time, and had long been, in arms against Russia [. . .] there are 3 or 4 millions of people determined not to be transferred like herds of swine to the Russians, but resolved to assert their rights and liberty. I do not know the Englishman alive who would not, when asked, have given advice to such people how to act and render legitimate their virtuous, noble and just resistance to a yoke which Russia had no right to impose upon them. His [Urquhart’s] words nor his acts could not implicate His Majesty’s Government, and lastly, it is wholly a secret to everybody that he is employed at all by the British Government.

  Lord Ponsonby ended his letter by saying that he had heard from a Captain Lyon who joined Urquhart that, far from inciting the tribes, the latter had argued that they should act with caution and warned them against expecting any aid from any foreign power. It could not have been a more robust defence of Urquhart’s controversial mission.

  Stout-hearted as this defence was, it did not stifle some elements in Britain from continuing to complain that Urquhart’s exploit had ‘endangered the peace of Europe’. But Urquhart had an even more powerful ally than the ambassador in Constantinople: as long as King William IV was on the throne, he had a champion in the highest place of all.

  So he continued to push his luck. In 1836, ostensibly to assert the right of free trade between Britain and the Caucasus, he arranged for a ship called the Vixen (which was owned by a firm of English merchants based in Constantinople and controlled by friends of his) to run the gauntlet of the Russian blockade, carrying a cargo of salt and other vital provisions. The Vixen safely made the voyage to the Circassian coast and had begun a lively trading activity with the local resistance forces when a Russian warship sailed into the bay where the Vixen was anchored and seized control of the ship. The Russians claimed that not only had the Vixen violated the blockade, but she had made her landfall on a part of the coast ‘occupied’ and ruled over by them. The owners of the ship requested the British government to intervene on their behalf to restore their confiscated property to them. Lord Palmerston, who as foreign secretary was responsible for handling any such representations, was less than helpful: he postponed any action until the British parliament had risen for its recession and then – when there was no pressure on him – did not in his turn press the Russian government about the matter. Furthermore, he was furious when he heard about Urquhart’s hand in the affair. This was for Palmerston the last straw; he had already taken against Ur-quhart’s independent and unauthorized activities; now he saw his way to dismiss him once and for all from the British diplomatic service. And alas for Urquhart, his protector was no longer to hand: King William IV had died a few months before the matter came to a political head and he had no reason to expect favours from the young Queen Victoria.

  Urquhart would later turn from diplomacy and adventure to politics and literature. On his return he toured the north of England making speeches attacking the government’s lack of support for those who resisted Russian expansion, and he eventually got himself elected to parliament and became an enduring thorn in the side of Lord Palmerston.

  All that was in the future. For the present – the remainder of the 1830s – there was no shortage of fellow adventurers to take up cudgels on behalf of the oppressed peoples of the Caucasus. Urquhart’s friends such as James Longworth (a correspondent of The Times) and James Bell (a merchant and part-owner of the Vixen) were to venture where he had blazed the trail. They too were to run the Russian blockade, to fraternize with the Circassian tribal leaders, to aid them in practical ways with weapons and advice, and even to risk their own lives by fighting alongside them in their struggle against the Russian occupying forces. Their stories are better documented than Urquhart’s, their adventures more dramatic, their accounts more sensational. But without Urquhart, without ‘Daoud Bey’, none of this would have happened.

  Even before Longworth and Bell had ventured onto Urquhart’s domain, a more mysterious figure was to appear on the scene in the person of Edmund Spencer. For someone who was to undertake daring adventures directed against Russian activities in the Caucasus, Edmund Spencer started his familiarity with the region in very odd circumstances. He was the guest not just of the Russians but of a pillar of the Russian establishment – Count Worrenzow, the governor-general of Southern Russia, which was deemed to include the disputed Caucasian region. He had met the count at Constantinople and been invited to join him in the summer of 1836 on his steam yacht, the Peter the Great, on a voyage around the Black Sea. Other guests included not only the British consul-general to Constantinople but a selection of very senior Russians including Count de Witt (commander-in-chief of the Russian cavalry), Prince Galitzin ‘and other princes whose names I never could pronounce or write’. This was to be a presentation of the Black Sea from the viewpoint of Russian imperial ambitions.

  Aft
er some ports of call in the Crimea, the voyage began to be seriously interesting for Spencer when they approached the coast of Circassia – the north-western shore of the Caucasus. Here they made landfall at the Russian fortress of Anapa. The count’s yacht and its escorting corvette were welcomed with a ‘deafening gun salute from the fort’, but Spencer could observe even from the deck that the hills behind the fort were alive with armed warriors who, at the approach of the vessels, galloped off in all directions to warn their compatriots that an armed body of men appeared about to land. A few sentinels were left behind on the hilltops to observe the movements of the Russian visitors.

  Spencer, who had hoped to go ashore himself at Anapa, was surprised that only the count and his immediate entourage were allowed to land there. It transpired that the garrison were ‘excessively unhealthy’. They were cooped up in a fort where the water supply was ‘brackish and unwholesome’, and when they needed to go out in search of fresh water from a nearby mountain rivulet, they needed to be escorted by ‘a park of artillery with lighted matches, as a defense against the determined hostility of the natives’. They had also recently suffered some disastrous military setbacks. These were attributed to reports that an English officer who had served in India was directing operations against the Russians, and that copies of a ‘proclamation from the King of England calling on the Circassians to defend their country’ were circulating freely. When some of the distinguished Russian guests on the count’s yacht heard these reports, they became decidedly cool towards Spencer, but Count Worrenzow himself took the view that these rumours were unfounded. He attributed them to Poles who had defected from the Russian army. After all, the count said, what would be the point of distributing seditious literature among a people who are ‘not only ignorant of every foreign language, but unable to read their own’?

  The count also told Spencer that while he had been ashore at Anapa he had received one of the Circassian princes – originally a Tartar from the Crimea and a fierce opponent of the Russians. The prince had come to the meeting ostensibly to seek ‘the assistance of the garrison in a love affair, as he was anxious to carry off the daughter of a neighbouring prince’. But the count had reckoned this was merely a pretext to visit the fort and spy out the nature of its defences. The Circassian prince had clearly been nervous that he himself might be kidnapped during the encounter, and his ‘squire’ (or attendant) had held a cocked pistol in his hand during the interview ‘ready to be discharged at the head of his excellency, in the event of any violence being offered to his master’. Mutual trust was clearly non-existent between the two parties.

  Spencer got a clearer idea of the extent of the Russian occupation when they went on to another fort some thirty miles further south down the coast. This had only just been captured by the Russians a few days before the arrival of the count’s yacht. He found that as well as regular Russian troops there were Kuban and Don Cossacks, brilliant in their Astrakhan hats and scarlet uniforms, and also a smattering of Life Guards officers ‘glittering with jewelled orders’ who had volunteered to come to the Caucasus for the summer campaigning. This was where the action was to be found and the glory won. But not all the aristocratic Russians were in such privileged circumstances: Spencer was introduced to one soldier of former social and literary distinction who had been involved in the Decembrist insurrection against Tsar Nicholas I and who had in consequence been dispatched to serve for twelve years in the ranks as a private soldier in the Crimea and the Caucasus (an alternative to exile in Siberia) to exculpate his sins. Spencer also met a very handsome and well-dressed Circassian prince who had defected to the Russians but who was under constant surveillance, because there had been a number of defectors who had received gifts and weapons from the Russians but who had ‘on the first opportunity [. . .] scampered off’ with a lot of valuable information about the Russian deployments.

  While the troops paraded for the benefit of the visiting commander-in-chief, while aides-de-camp were galloping round, bands were blaring out martial music, and the officers playing cards, there were also less happy signs of this military occupation: the surrounding hills were lit up by the light of blazing villages, recently torched by the invaders. Various officers confided to Spencer that it was the Russian intention to build or capture a whole series of such forts along the western (Black Sea) coast of Circassia, and thus to reinforce their blockade and cut off supplies sea-borne from Turkey to the mountain tribesmen. They also told him that the local tribesmen were ‘all robbers by profession’ and so treacherous that ‘they will not hesitate to slay with one hand, while the other is extended in friendship’. Spencer – who had already resolved to visit the region later under his own steam – could not help but be deeply apprehensive on hearing all these reports.

  In the meanwhile, Spencer sailed on with his Russian hosts to yet more strategically placed fortresses along the coast. Like many Englishmen encountering the region for the first time, he waxed lyrical about the beauties of the scenery: ‘surely any man possessed of the slightest spark of courage, who calls this beautiful land his home, would die to defend it’. Spencer admits to being under the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic vision of highland life.

  Everywhere they landed, he was struck with the contrast between the restricted life of the Russian garrisons in their ‘miserable little cabins’ and the free-ranging life of the gallant mountain chieftains galloping around in glittering armour in the encircling countryside. But the countryside too had its own sad sights: some villages had been completely laid waste or set on fire as reprisals against locals who had kidnapped Russian soldiers and sold them on into slavery in the markets of Turkey or Persia. Even the placing of sentries outside the forts was considered too dangerous, and dogs were let loose instead to raise the alarm if tribesmen approached the walls. And some of the forts were so overlooked by the surrounding hills that the Russians were not only shot at when they went out to gather water or supplies, but were picked off by sharpshooters even while they were within the forts themselves.

  Once Spencer’s party put to sea again, their ship also came under intermittent rifle fire and they had to ‘steer a course at greater distance from the shore’. Everywhere there was evidence that the Russian blockade was causing formerly prosperous trading stations – some of them starting points for long caravan routes – to close down, and in some cases to relocate to the Turkish coast.

  Eventually, Count Worrenzow’s steam yacht turned back to the Crimea, and Spencer meditated on the difference between what he had expected to find on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus and what he had observed. The native chiefs had conspicuously failed to come forward to greet the count, and instead they had found ‘a whole people in arms fighting for their independence’. Back in the Crimea, the Russian hospitality was warm and lavish; the palatial residences of the aristocracy were thrown open to Spencer, trips were arranged to Tartar sites such as Bakche Serai, the wine flowed and the gossip at card tables was as sophisticated as ever. But Spencer was no longer in sympathy with any of this. His emotions had been involved by his exposure to the romantic resistance movement of the Circassians. Now his mind was turning to how he could help these ‘champions of liberty’, how he could perhaps bring to them some evidence that they were not alone in their struggle, how he could bring them comfort if not supplies. His tourism was over; his real adventures were about to begin.

  After an arduous journey across the Crimean steppe, Spencer took a ship across the Black Sea to Trebizond and from there planned his escapade to the northern Caucasus – Circassia. His friends at Trebizond tried to dissuade him from going, pointing out what a dangerous enterprise it would be, not only because of the risk of being intercepted by Russian warships on the way there, but also because once he arrived there ‘the freebooting mountaineers would probably detain him, or sell him as a slave’.

  But Spencer was determined to go ahead with his plan, and the one concession he did make to the anxieties of his friends was to
assume a false nationality: ‘I waived, for the first time in my life, the proud privilege of my birthright as an Englishman’. The disguise he decided to adopt was that of a Genoese doctor; he had been told that the Circassians held the Genoese in high regard as former trading partners, and he rightly assumed that the guise of a doctor would open the prospect of a friendly reception.

  Without too much difficulty he found a Turkish brigantine bound for Circassia. This was no ordinary Turkish coaster. It was equipped with four ‘long swivel brass guns, at first stowed from observation’, and the cargo largely consisted of weapons and ammunition for the insurgents and – a universally marketable commodity – salt. The expected return merchandise in exchange for these goods was ‘a cargo of beautiful girls to replenish the harems of Constantinople’. The captain was a battle-scarred veteran, the crew was considerably larger than was necessary for the management of the ship and all of them were armed like pirates with pistols and poniards; this was clearly a serious gun-running operation.

  Predictably, having set sail, they soon found that they were pursued by a Russian brig. Spencer feared that if they were hit by a shot from the Russian vessel, his whole ship might explode, in view of all the powder and ammunition they were carrying. He also feared that if they were boarded and he was captured ‘although my visit was one entirely of curiosity, yet it might be misconstrued’; this was a considerable understatement – he would have indeed been in the direst trouble as an Englishman in disguise on an illegal ship loaded with arms for Russia’s enemies. But neither disaster happened. They outran the Russian brig and when, as a result of the chase, they found themselves on a coastline far from their destination and heavily occupied by Russian forces, they managed to set to sea again in weather that deterred any further pursuit.

  When they approached the shore, the captain of the Turkish ship ‘hoisted a signal well known to the Circassians’ and thousands of local tribesmen appeared from the forests as if from nowhere and rushed to greet them on the beach. After all the cautionary tales he had been told, Spencer was not a little nervous. ‘These were the people to whom I was now about to confide my safety: they had been represented to me as perfidious and cruel [. . .] I banished every distrustful thought, and, with a firm reliance on their good faith, landed’. The desirable cargo was rapidly unloaded, and the ship itself was ‘snugly concealed’ from view in a small river overhung with majestic trees.