Sabres on the Steppes Read online

  Spencer quickly became aware of the problem of communicating with his hosts; their own language was ‘without the slightest affinity to any other on the face of the earth’, and Spencer’s own knowledge of Turkish was both limited and of limited value. But one thing he could do was to adopt the local costume: a lamb’s-wool turban and a massive cloak protected him from sun and rain and made him more acceptable. He was escorted through dramatically wild scenery and noted that the highlanders’ huts were concealed from view by dense foliage as effectively as his ship had been: these hills could at any moment become a war zone, and camouflage was everywhere necessary. To add to the dangers of precipices and ravines, there was visible evidence of wolves, bears and jackals (which were later to keep him awake at night) and reports of occasional visits from tigers.

  When he reached the tented residence of the principal local khan, his sword, rifle and ammunition were all taken from him and hung on the walls – only his poniard was left tucked into his belt as this was considered part of his natural clothing and never to be discarded. Because the Turkish sea captain who had transported him to the Caucasus was well known in the region as a reliable source of salt, gunpowder and other necessities, Spencer was accepted as a friendly – if somewhat mysterious – visitor. He also had a letter of recommendation to some of the more powerful chiefs. But none of this saved him from intermittent suspicion – especially if he were spotted writing in his notebook or sketching. Such behaviour immediately raised doubts as to whether he might not, after all, be a Russian spy. A meeting of the elders was convened to consider whether he was someone who could be trusted ‘to journey any further through the land’.

  At this point, Spencer began to regret that he had followed the advice given to him and claimed to be a citizen of Genoa rather than truthfully admitting to being an Englishman. He found the Circassians did not now seem to know anything of Genoa and ‘entertained no respect for any other nation or people under heaven except the Turks and the English’. Nor did they understand his motives for coming to the Caucasus: why should a stranger have any interest in their customs and manners unless he had some sinister purpose in mind? The elders examined all his papers and these – amid growing alarm – were declared to be written in Russian; however, when some Russian prisoners were produced to translate them, they confirmed this was not the case. He was allowed to proceed – under escort – further into the interior to meet an even more influential chief who was a local prince.

  Genoese nationality might have proved to be a broken reed, but his claim to be a medic was a more useful subterfuge. Everywhere people brought their ailments to him, and as the natives were mostly of healthy constitutions and had had no previous exposure to medication, even the smallest doses of the most basic remedies effected ‘instantaneous and decided improvement’.

  When he reached the mountain prince’s lair he was impressed with its strategic situation and defences. It was at the summit of a formidable hill and surrounded by rocks; three sides were quite inaccessible and the fourth could only be entered by a gorge so narrow that only two horsemen could ride abreast. From this lookout, the prince could plan ambushes of the Russian garrisons when they emerged from the fortresses whose access passes he overlooked. He could also send signals to other insurgent outposts by lighting bonfires on his hilltop. The prince had about a thousand warriors under his command, and – although the strength of the Russian garrisons in the region amounted to over fifteen times their number – hardly a day went by without some skirmish in which the tribesmen usually came off best. Not only did he deter the Russians from making sorties, but he also hindered their efforts to consolidate their fortifications. Just as Spencer waxed lyrical about the beauties of the Caucasian mountain scenery, so now that he had encountered a fighting prince at his mountain redoubt, he waxed equally lyrical about the martial qualities of the hill tribesmen. Their equestrian skills are said to outshine those of Western circus performers; their chivalry results in single combats with Cossacks; their indefatigable spirit means that none are ever captured unless already so badly wounded that they can resist no longer; their patience is such that they can lie in ambush for days or creep like snakes in the grass to overpower a sentry; in short, during his stay in the prince’s camp he witnessed exploits that were straight from ‘the pages of romance’. This was a visitor who had fallen totally under the spell of his hosts.

  Hardly surprisingly in these circumstances, Spencer could not resist invitations to take part in some of the prince’s ‘reconnoitring’ expeditions. Such exploits were ‘too daring not to be attended with considerable danger’, and he describes in his letters one such when they became surrounded by an overwhelming force of Cossacks who had hidden themselves in the long reeds and sedges along the banks of the river. Fortunately for Spencer, the prince’s clansmen had been keeping a vigilant eye on the operation from a distance, and as soon as they saw the trouble that the reconnaissance party were in, they flew to their assistance. Even as it was, Spencer’s party suffered several casualties and lost three horses. He himself was hit by a bullet and only avoided a fatal injury by being protected by one of the cartridge belts he had slung across his body: ‘the pistol-shot completely shattered one of the metal tubes filled with bullets, leaving no other bad effects than a slight contusion’. He had proved himself in action.

  But the most worrying aspect of this whole incident was that he thought the Cossack trap had been laid specifically to capture him. If they were going to such pains to seize a Genoese visitor, how much more so – he reckoned – would they have been anxious to apprehend a rogue Englishman! He reported his suspicions to the prince on his return, and these might well have been discounted by his hosts as evidence of his own self-importance had it not been for the fact that – when a strict watch for traitors was set up – the clansmen caught a self-styled Pole who had previously deserted to the insurgents returning from the Russian camp. The deserter had clearly been passing information about the stranger who had come among the tribesmen. Spencer comments in his letters that such traitors were almost never native Caucasians, unless they were Armenian merchants – ‘a sordid race [he comments with traditional prejudice] who would at any time sacrifice honour and probity for gold’. This was not the first so-called Pole to turn out to be a Russian double agent.

  Spencer thought himself fortunate in being invited to accompany his prince to a gathering of tribal chiefs. When he arrived, he found each chief surrounded by a body of armed clansmen, all of them intent on military training of the most classical type: some were hurling javelins at a target; some were practising archery; some were learning to be dextrous with their poniards; some were wrestling or running; some were training their horses to swim across rivers; gunsmiths were repairing weapons and tiny children being taught to ride; the whole complex was one heaving mass of military activity. When it came to the assembly itself, the chiefs seated themselves under a grove of sacred trees and took it in turns to make emotive speeches, reviling the Russian invaders and pledging themselves to permanent resistance. Spencer was deeply moved by the whole procedure, and makes comparisons between the Caucasians’ stand against the Russians and the Swiss cantons’ stand against the powerful house of Hapsburg.

  After listening to the deliberations of the elders, Spencer allowed himself some speculation about the conduct of the war between the invaders and the clansmen. He thought that the main Russian fort in the interior – at Aboun – was more of a liability than an asset to them, since it was out of range of effective communication with either the Cossack bases along the northern banks of the Kuban river, or the Russian forts along the Black Sea coastline. The garrison of Aboun either languished starving behind their defences, or risked their lives by venturing out.

  Spencer was now taken on an overland trip north to the banks of the Kuban. Bivouacking among the thirteen-foot-high reeds along the river bank, he was kept awake all night by ‘the howling of dogs, wolves, and jackals [. . .] the chirping of myriad
s of reptiles and insects [. . .] and the momentary expectation of a visit from the Cossacks’. He found that, although the river itself rushed like a torrent, both Circassians and Cossacks frequently swam across it on horseback ‘to carry away everything within their reach – men, women, children and cattle’. To fail to do this was a sign of cowardice, and maidens would taunt their lovers with accusations of unmanliness if they failed to bring them a cow from across the river from time to time: ‘to spoil an enemy is the very perfection of virtue!’ he was told. This was less a formal war-zone front line than a border – like that between Scotland and England a century earlier, where reavers regularly raided across the frontier to rustle cattle and loot the homesteads.

  Spencer was also aware – from his time on Count Worrenzow’s yacht – that the official Russian hierarchy was not in sympathy with the Cossacks: they were viewed as rough soldiers of fortune who might be hired to do the Russians’ dirty work but who could not be trusted in the long term to remain loyal to the Romanovs. (Past events, such as Pugachev’s revolt in the eighteenth century, and future events such as their partial defection during the Revolution and the Second World War, were to prove such fears justified.) Spencer speculated that if the Cossacks were ever to break with the tsar and join the Circassian insurgency, then Russia would be in deep trouble and her Caucasian ambitions permanently thwarted.

  When he left the Kuban river and regained the coast, Spencer was made aware of just how narrow an escape he had had during the storm that obliged Count Worrenzow’s yacht to keep away from the rocky coastline. One of the other ships in the squadron – a naval corvette – had been obliged to seek shelter from the high winds in the little bay of Soutcha, which was occupied by the insurgents. When one of the latter saw the Russian vessel anchored offshore, he swam out through the heaving seas and managed to cut the cable between ship and anchor. As the corvette imperceptibly drifted towards the shore, she was boarded by a heavily armed band of Circassians who made the crew their prisoners and appropriated all the weapons on board – a valuable cache of Russian muskets – and then set fire to the corvette. So profitable had been this venture, that they posted lookouts along the shore to see if any of the Count’s other vessels were equally vulnerable. Spencer would have had a very different reception had he been captured on a Russian ship, rather than arriving independently on a Turkish ship a few months later with letters of introduction and gifts: the slave markets of the East would have beckoned.

  As he travelled around the country, Spencer was struck by many of the distinctive features of the countryside and its inhabitants. Everyone rode everywhere, and they were as deeply attached to their horses as the Arabs are reputed to be to theirs. Their steeds were not only handsome and fast, but also expert at scrambling up ‘craggy rocks and down steep glens’. Once broken in, the horses were never beaten or punished, but always encouraged to share the hardships and adventures of their masters: a horse would swim rapid rivers alongside its master, lie silently hidden in ambush positions, and even ‘submit without resistance to having his head adopted for a rest for a rifle’. Spencer was also impressed with the amount of wild game to be encountered: swans and geese haunted the rivers and marshes to such an extent that if any man had a rifle and ammunition ‘it was his own fault if he goes to bed without supper’. For those with more ambitious sporting or culinary requirements, wild boar and deer were everywhere to be found. But the country was not without its wildlife hazards: not only did jackals keep Spencer awake at night, but bears, wolves, vultures and eagles made the lives of the shepherds difficult; and tarantulas, scorpions and twenty-foot-long snakes had to be avoided in the rockier desert parts of the interior.

  The Russian blockade of the Circassian Black Sea coastline had one bizarre effect which came to the attention of Spencer. Although the mountain tribesmen valued their liberty above all, this did not discourage them from selling their daughters and sisters to the highest bidder. Sometimes such a bidder would be a local chieftain, but more often it would be the owner of a harem in Constantinople or elsewhere in the Ottoman or Persian empires. The comfort and luxury of such harems was such that often the girls themselves would be only too anxious to embark on a voyage that would result in their ending up in such an institution: ‘the fair lady who has spent her youth in the harems of a rich Persian or Turk, on returning to her native country, decked in all her finery, never fails to create in the minds of her young friends a desire to follow her example’. But with the Russian blockade impeding all sea passage from the Caucasus to the Porte, the market forces were not able to function properly; while Spencer was there the price of an attractive Circassian maiden fell from a hundred cows to twenty-five, ‘which is lamented over by those parents who may have a household of girls, with the same despair that a merchant mourns over a warehouse full of unsold goods’.

  Unlike later travellers such as Longworth and others, Spencer does not relate just how he managed to get safely away from the Caucasus. His lack of specifics about this and one or two other aspects of his Caucasian adventures led some of his more sceptical contemporaries to question whether he had ever really returned to Circassia after his comfortable coastal cruise with Count Worrenzow. Such scepticism seems hardly justified: he would have to have had a very remarkable imagination indeed to invent all his detailed adventures and his vivid impressions.

  Spencer devotes his final letters to rhapsodizing about the Circassians and their way of life. Not only, he concludes, are they physically the most beautiful people on earth, but they are generous to the poor, considerate to the elderly, gallant towards the ladies (this seems to him entirely compatible with selling daughters and sisters into opulent harems), given to healthy vegetarian diets, and brave to the point of exemplary heroism in defence of their liberties and independence. He argues forcefully against the Russian claim to have negotiated from the Turks a right to occupy the Caucasus, since it never was within the gift of the Ottoman Empire in the first place. He calculates that the dozen or so tribes of Circassia are, between them, capable of putting some 200,000 warriors into the field against the Russian invaders, largely because no one is too old or too young to take up arms. This is a cause – he declares – which all true Englishmen should support!

  Chapter 5

  Alexander Gardner: The Loose Cannon

  ‘Life is a gamble at terrible odds – if it were a bet, you wouldn’t take it.’

  – Tom Stoppard (1937–)

  There have been many explorers, travellers and scholars who have doubted the truth of every word written by Colonel Alexander Gardner, of the Maharaja of the Punjab’s artillery. Indeed there have been some who even doubted his very existence: to them he was a phantom figure like Sir John Mandeville, whose spurious account of his fourteenth-century travels was only discredited after his own time. There are those who believe that he was a deserter from the British army and therefore set about creating a false personality for himself to cover his tracks. The weight of evidence however suggests that, although he may have been more than usually given to exaggeration and embroidery of the facts, he was in fact a remarkable – if disreputable – adventurer, who explored more by force of circumstances than by design (he was frequently in flight from some violent and questionable exploit) many of the remotest corners of Central Asia and the north-west frontier region of the British Raj. In addition, he was a war lord who would have been more at home as a condottiere in Renaissance Italy than as a British officer in the early nineteenth century.

  Gardner’s own account of his origins places his birth in 1785 ‘on the shore of Lake Superior which is nearest to the source of the Mississippi’. His father was a doctor who came from Scotland as a first-generation immigrant to British colonial America, and took an active part in the struggle for independence. The young Alexander Gardner started his travels early in life; the family moved to Mexico, and while his father practised medicine the young boy was taught Greek and Latin at a Jesuit school. As an Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americ
an, he felt lonely among the Spanish Catholic community in which he was brought up, and he spent much time reading stories of adventures among the American Indians in the Wild West. He later was to write that ‘from this early period in my life the notion of being a traveller and adventurer, and of somehow and somewhere carving out a career for myself, was the maggot in my brain’. After Mexico, Gardner spent several years in Ireland where, for some unexplained reason, he acquired a knowledge of gunnery, which was to be significant in his later career. In 1812, at the age of twenty-five, he returned to America, but found that there was little to hold him there as his father had died. He then resolved on embarking on the career of adventure to which he had always aspired.

  His first thought was to seek employment in Russia, where his elder brother had been engaged as an engineer in Astrakhan, and after some circuitous travels he arrived and lived with his sibling while he studied mineralogy in the hope of being employed in a supervisory role in the government-controlled Russian mines. Promises were made of a good job once his studies were completed, but again ill fortune dogged his steps: his brother was killed in a fall from a horse, and the Russian authorities promptly reneged on their undertakings. His brother’s house was seized by creditors and his Russian contacts were not only unhelpful but discourteous and unsympathetic. He was left homeless and jobless. For a year he tried to sort out his brother’s affairs, at the end of which time he was so disillusioned with all things Russian that he had no desire to live and work there. Instead he resolved to devote his itinerant energies to undermining Russian ambitions in Central Asia.