by Ure, John
Ranjit Singh said [. . .] ‘Do you teach that we should not be afraid of anything?’ Wolff said ‘Yes.’ [. . .] ‘Then why were you so afraid when you crossed the Indus over the suspension-bridge on an elephant?’ (for every word and movement of Wolff had been reported to the king). Wolff replied, ‘Here Your Majesty has certainly caught me; and all I can answer is, that I am weak, and I have daily need to pray that God will show His power in my weakness.’ Ranjit Singh said, ‘Now, I call this candour and uprightness; but answer me one thing. You say you travel about for the sake of religion; why, then, do you not preach to the English in Hindostan, who have no religion at all?’
The religion debate continued and it was at this point that Ranjit Singh made his remark about his coming ‘nigh unto God by making an alliance with England, in order to keep out the Russians from India’. Wolff had not only survived his ordeal, but done well. He went home to his lodgings with relief and cut off his beard to celebrate. After he left Amritsar, he was disturbed to be summoned back by Ranjit Singh, though apparently only for a further theological discussion. The moment the maharajah saw Wolff, he declared ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! Where have you left your beard?’ Wolff replied that he had left it where he had shaved, in the house of the maharajah’s general, to which the maharajah – who clearly really was fond of beards – responded, ‘I shall cut off his nose, the first day I see the fellow.’
Having eventually got away from Amritsar, it was not long before Wolff reached Ludhiana, then the northernmost frontier of British India. Here he was welcomed by a group of British officers and shouted out ‘I am safe! After so many trials and adventures, I am safe!’ For the first time for eighteen months, he now saw again a normal British life. He was invited to preach to the British community, and chose ‘visions’ as his theme. He recounted a vision he had himself had when St Paul had appeared and said to him ‘and now thou shalt also have a crown’. The sermon was obviously a success – or at least he thought it was – because he went to repeat the story of his vision when he reached Simla ‘to Lord William Bentinck in his drawing room [. . .] also all over India’. Wolff was invited to stay with the governor-general and his wife at Simla, and he recounts in detail the many conversations they had. He made the case for sending a British ambassador to Bokhara, but Lord William Bentinck said he would have to consider the effect this would have on relations with other neighbouring countries such as Persia and Russia. However, for most of his time in Simla, when he was not preaching, he was teased in a good-natured way by Lady William Bentinck and the governor-general’s staff: they had all concluded that though he was not ‘cracked’ (as they put it) he was something between a ragamuffin-explorer, a chaplain and a court jester.
Wolff continued his travels to Kashmir and then returned to India, visiting Delhi and most of the main cities of the subcontinent. Summing up his Asian travels in his memoirs, he stresses how many Jews he converted to Christianity (this had, after all, been the professed motive of his travels) and how he thought the British were losing credibility in Central Asia by appearing frightened of the Russian threat. Meanwhile, after returning briefly to Malta and re-meeting with his long-suffering wife, he was to set out on other travels – to Abyssinia, Arabia, Yemen, St Helena and even New York – before coming to rest with his wife in England in 1838. By now he was fully ordained and eligible to settle down in an English vicarage but, as his old friend Henry Drummond wrote to him, ‘you are as fit for a parish priest as I am for a dancing-master’. When eventually he accepted a curacy in Yorkshire, his predecessor preached a farewell sermon on the theme ‘After me ravening wolves will come to devour the flock’. But however remote and humble Wolff’s appointment, he was already – that rare phenomenon in Victorian England – a celebrity. The Archbishop of York paid him ‘the greatest attention’, and the Marquis of Anglesey (the famous cavalry commander who had lost his leg at Waterloo) invited him to dinner and insisted that the gentlemen followed the ladies promptly out after dinner ‘since we must not deprive the ladies of his [Wolff’s] interesting conversation’.
Lady Georgiana and her aristocratic background doubtless contributed to the acceptability of Wolff. Most people who knew Wolff at the time, or have written about him since, have expressed surprise at Lady Georgiana having ever agreed to marry him. She was by all accounts a good-looking woman of private means and exceptionally well connected, being the daughter of the Earl of Orford and descended from Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of the United Kingdom; he was short, fat, vain, argumentative, and with the manners and upbringing of a very different caste. It says something for her lack of prejudice that she could see the sterling qualities in him. Wolff himself, of course, always maintained that he was a success with the ladies, but more – one imagines – as a curiosity than as a suitor. His wife’s connections undoubtedly opened many doors to him in British diplomatic establishments on his travels. The marriage, though subject to long periods of absence, was a happy and loving one, and the formality of some (but not all) of his letters to her reflect more the conventions of the period than any lack of affection. They had a son, who became Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and had a distinguished diplomatic career. But now the marriage was about to undergo its most testing experience.
Quite suddenly in early 1843 this life of rural parish duties and high society invitations was brought to an unexpected close by a piece of news from Central Asia: Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly were reported to be in mortal danger – or possibly even already murdered – in Bokhara. Wolff immediately saw a role for himself in rescuing them, or at least discovering their fate. In this decision he was influenced by the fact that again and again in his chequered career of outlandish travel he had been rescued by military men when he was in extremis. In his memoirs he lists such occasions in three very long paragraphs, concluding: ‘Now I am going to Bokhara to try to pay back a debt of gratitude which I owe to British officers’. Lord Aberdeen (the foreign secretary) told Wolff that the government was privately convinced that Stoddart and Conolly had already been put to death, and that ‘they [the government] could not take on themselves the responsibility of sending Wolff on so dangerous a mission, as he would be exposed to a similar fate’. However, if Wolff was determined on going, Aberdeen said that the government would give him ‘every recommendation he could require’; he would, in fact, have moral but not practical support and could not claim to be representing Her Majesty’s Government. However, the lack of government funds was compensated for by the fact that various wealthy friends offered to finance the expedition; and Wolff, never one to suffer from reticence, took up the foreign secretary’s offer of ‘recommendations’ by requesting letters from the sultan of Turkey to the potentates along his route, and a personal introduction to the shah of Persia when he passed through that country.
He also managed to obtain a free passage on a British ship from Southampton, where he was seen off by Lady Georgiana, to Constantinople; he had hardly set sail before he was talking earnestly to the ship’s captain ‘about the coming of the Lord’, and noting that many of the other passengers, including ‘a fat Methodist woman’ were ‘canting and whining’ about everything. He himself was gratified to be greeted with respect by the governors of Gibraltar and Malta, and when he reached Athens was presented to the king and queen of Greece by the British ambassador. The king referred to his trip as ‘a great journey for a benevolent purpose’. When he reached Constantinople, the VIP treatment continued: Sir Stratford Canning, the British ambassador who was to play such an important part in the lead up to the Crimean War a few years later, invited him to dinner and to preach at the English chapel – possibly not expecting him to launch into a series of six major theological dissertations.
Lady Canning adopted a motherly attitude towards Wolff, sorting out his luggage and buying him flannel shirts to keep him from catching cold on the steppes of Central Asia. The Turkish foreign minister told Wolff, ‘I feel the highest regard for you, and, as proof of it, I offer you a pi
nch of snuff from my snuff-box.’ At a rather more practical level, the sultan gave him handwritten letters to the emirs of Bokhara, Khiva and Khokand, which Lady Canning sewed up for him in his coat so they should not get lost or stolen. Sir Stratford gave him a compass and telescope. Altogether, he set off not only heartened by universal messages of goodwill, but also provided with some useful introductions and equipment. His first stage was by sea along the Black Sea coast to Trebizond, and he was brought up with an emotional jolt on finding the signature of Arthur Conolly – who had taken the same route only a year or two before – in the passenger book.
Now his second dangerous overland journey to Bokhara was beginning in earnest. Wolff was soon crossing through eastern Turkey and into Persia in mid-winter, with snow so deep that the horses could scarcely wade through it. His escort and introductions ensured him shelter along the way, and Lady Canning’s flannels kept him from freezing. He was now traversing the same country that he had crossed more than a decade before when he had been captured, stripped and chained up, before being rescued by the Persian officer – Mohammed Khan Kerahe – who, after liberating him, had then pocketed all the money that had been taken from Wolff by his assailants. By a strange quirk of fate, he was taken to see this same man, who was now himself chained up and in prison, having earlier fallen out with Abbas Mirza. Mohammed Khan said to Wolff, ‘That time you saw me as a great man, now you see me a little man [. . .] one must have patience in this world.’ Wolff noted in his memoirs that he thought his former saviour ‘showed far greater [strength of ] mind in his prison than Napoleon I did while in exile upon the island of St Helena’.
When he reached Tehran, Wolff was well received by the British envoy who told him that, from all the reports he had heard, ‘he, in his own mind, had not the slightest doubt that both [Stoddart and Conolly] had been killed’. Although privately Wolff had reached the same conclusion, he felt that he could not turn about and go home at this point, or people would think ‘that the whole of his attempt to go to Bokhara had been a piece of humbug, and was the work of a braggart’. He therefore kept quiet about his private opinion. Later, he donned his full canonicals, ‘his doctor’s hood over his gown’ and was taken by the ambassador to an audience with the shah, who said he admired Wolff’s ‘philanthropy’, and the conversation went so well that ‘Wolff actually forgot himself and interrupted His Majesty while he was talking’. At this, the ambassador ‘gave him a push’ to shut him up; Wolff could never be relied upon to behave diplomatically.
Wolff was distinctly nervous about the next stage of his journey, through Khorasan. It was here that on his previous trip ‘they stripped me, and tied me to the horse’s tail [. . .] put me in a dungeon [. . .] and offered me for sale for £2. 10s.’ He was afraid that he would ‘again meet with dreadful hindrances in that horrible country’. But in the event, he found things much changed for the better in Khorasan. Whereas when he first went there ‘the name of Englishman was scarcely known [. . .] now, the name of an Englishman was actually a passport’. He attributed this change to the First Afghan War which, although it started so badly with the massacre of General Elphinstone’s army, had ended with the British reoccupying Kabul in late 1842 and establishing a mastery (albeit short-lived) of the region; a year later, when Wolff was passing through the region, British prestige was therefore on a high; he could get as much money as he wanted on credit.
When he arrived at Meshed (the capital of Khorasan) he was disturbed to find that all the surviving Jewish community had not become Christians, as he hoped they would, but had adopted the faith of Islam; this had followed a massacre of Jews, resulting from one of them having killed a dog in a manner that was considered ‘in derision of Islam’. The local governor was concerned on hearing he was heading for Bokhara, where he said the Marwee tribe were very plentiful and were ‘the worst of people but very rich, and of great influence with the King of Bokhara’. The governor said the best tactic was to take an escort of ‘nine rascals of the Marwee tribe [. . .] and if they don’t behave well, I will burn their wives and children who remain in my hands’. It was not a statement which had any great appeal to the Christian-principled Wolff, but he concluded that he was in the governor’s hands and had better go along with his proposal of providing the nine rascals.
From Meshed, he pressed on through Sarakhs to Merv, where the khan assured him that he knew all about Stoddart and Conolly and they were certainly dead. The khan said he personally did not dare to go to Bokhara because the emir ‘had lost all fear of God [Allah]’. Various eminent Jews in Merv also came forward and told Wolff all about Stoddart’s arrogant behaviour in Bokhara and of their conviction that he and Conolly had been executed; they gave graphic details of how Stoddart had retracted his conversion to Islam and of how Conolly had said, ‘I am a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ – here is my head!’; they told Wolff there was nothing more to be discovered and begged him not to go there. But Wolff was adamant: ‘I must ascertain all the circumstances of their death, and to Bokhara I will go’, he said.
As he got nearer to Bokhara, things did not get better. The governor of Karakol – which was within the jurisdiction of the Emir of Bokhara and only some thirty miles from the capital – told Wolff – ‘The moment you see horsemen come out from Bokhara, you will observe that some come with baskets; these baskets will contain bandages with which you will be blindfolded, and chains with which you will be chained, and knives with which you will be slaughtered.’ And sure enough, as predicted, when he approached the city some horsemen with baskets were seen approaching and calling out ‘Art thou Joseph Wolff ?’ At this, his servants dropped back, pretending they had nothing to do with him. But when the horsemen caught up with him, they opened their baskets and, instead of chains and knives, they turned out to be full of pomegranates, melons, cherries and roasted horse-flesh – all presents from the emir. On seeing this, his servants rejoined him, one of them declaring, ‘I am Wolff’s servant; I must have a share of that.’ His servants then started telling the chamberlain who had been sent out to meet Wolff that the latter was a person of immense importance: ‘The Grand Vizier of England never sits down in his presence’, and so on. Wolff sensibly told his people ‘not to tell lies, and that on arrival in Bokhara he would speak for himself’.
It was April 1844 when Wolff entered the holy city for the second time, and the streets were lined with crowds shouting messages of welcome. The master of ceremonies asked Wolff if he would submit to the usual etiquette when presented to the emir and would bow and say ‘Asylum of the world! Peace to the King!’ three times. Wolff replied that there was no problem: he was ready to say this thirty times. So he was granted an audience the following day, and, dressed in his usual full canonicals and shovel hat, carried out the appropriate rituals. The emir then invited him to come closer, so that he could have a better look at him. Having done so, the emir declared: ‘Thou eccentric man! Thou star with a tail! Neither like a Jew, nor a Christian, nor a Hindoo, nor like a Russian, nor like an Uzbeck [. . .]’
He went on to explain that he had indeed executed Stoddart and Conolly: Stoddart had not paid him proper respect, and ‘Conolly had had a long nose (i.e. was very proud)’. The emir claimed that when he had told Conolly that ‘you Englishmen come into a country in a stealthy manner, and take it’, Conolly had replied that they did not come in stealthy manner but went in openly as they had done at Kabul. Wolff responded by saying that neither Stoddart nor Conolly had probably understood the customs and etiquette of Bokhara, and their mistakes were unintentional. While all this polite badinage and pantomime was going on, Wolff reminded himself of the true nature of the man he was talking to, of how he had murdered his brothers and his father as well as anyone who had seemed the remotest threat to him, and how he had made free with the wives of his citizens and disregarded all the injunctions not only of Christendom but of Islam too. Though relations had opened reasonably well for him, Wolff did not underestimate the danger in which he still stood.
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When later he had an audience with the minister for foreign affairs, Wolff tried to persuade him that it would be a mistake to make an enemy of England, a world power which ruled over India, and that there was a real risk that his countrymen would demand war with Bokhara if more Englishmen were killed. The minister responded by asking how far England was from Bokhara. At this point his rascally Marwee guide from Merv unhelpfully piped up and said that England was ‘six months away’, and therefore no real threat. Wolff corrected this impression, and was then asked what was the real purpose of his journey. He explained that he had come to find out the fate of ‘his friends’ Stoddart and Conolly and, if they were dead (the emir had already admitted as much), to request that an ambassador should be sent back with him to repair relations between England and Bokhara. Wolff calculated that if he did not offer some prospect of reconciliation, then he might well share Conolly’s fate; also, he thought a Bokharan companion on his return journey would greatly ease the process both of getting away and of crossing Central Asia. He also had an audience with the grand vizier, who asked him what his red academic hood signified, and he rather provocatively replied ‘the red colour indicated Wolff was ready to die for his faith’.
After all these meetings, Wolff found that, far from things being easier, his condition became more confined. He was not allowed out of his quarters, and he was watched day and night by the royal chamberlains. The emir was obviously puzzled and unconvinced about his motives, and Wolff was subsequently told that when he had left the emir the latter had said: ‘I have in my empire two hundred thousand slaves, and no soul ever came from Persia to ask after any one of them: and here I have killed a few Englishmen, and Joseph Wolff comes with a Bible in his hand, and enters my capital without a sword, and without a gun, and demands those two Englishmen!’