by Ure, John
The emir had even sent for Wolff to enquire wistfully whether he was able to raise the dead, because he wished he could ‘awake Stoddart and Conolly’. He also sent to ask him – as a trap to see if he was genuine – the names of the grand viziers of England; Wolff told him the name of the prime minister – Sir Robert Peel – and a few other senior ministers; he was then sent for and told he was a liar, because Stoddart and Conolly had both independently given different names, notably that of Lord Melbourne. Wolff then tried to explain the democratic process by which prime ministers (grand viziers) were changed from time to time, but the emir persisted in imagining that Lord Melbourne and others had had their heads cut off by Queen Victoria. Constitutional monarchy was not a concept readily understood in Bokhara.
It was at this stage of his detention at Bokhara that Wolff became involved with a particularly unsavoury character called Abdul Samut Khan, a Persian known as the Nayeb, who was in command of the emir’s artillery and with whom Wolff had quarrelled some years before at Peshawar. The Nayeb played a cat and mouse game with Wolff, continually promising that he was about to be free to leave the city and at the same time continually demanding more letters of credit from Wolff. He claimed to have befriended Stoddart and Conolly, but Wolff was unconvinced, and when he told him so the Nayeb apparently confessed with relish that he had indeed been instrumental in the murder of the two Englishmen. At one point, the Nayeb even suggested to Wolff that if the British government promised him enough money he would invite the king (emir) to sit on a special throne and then blow him up. Wolff very properly replied that no British government would have any hand in such a scheme as they considered kings to be ‘the shadow of God’. At the same time, the pattern of royal favour followed by distrust and ever closer confinement was becoming all too reminiscent of the treatment of Stoddart. The only hope of his safe departure seemed to lie in the arrival of a Persian ambassador who pleaded his cause.
As the supervision of Wolff became ever more stringent, with the emir’s agents even sleeping in his room, the Persian ambassador thought it necessary to arrange for one of his own servants also to sleep in Wolff’s room ‘in order that he might not be assassinated’. Meanwhile, Wolff devised an ingenious method of communicating without these ever-present spies understanding what was going on. He invited various Jews to visit him and, although they were only allowed to converse in Persian, so that the emir’s agents knew everything that was being said, Wolff got permission to read aloud to his visitors from the scriptures in Hebrew, which they did not understand. Then – while pretending he was reading – he introduced questions and instructions to his listeners. The following day the same Jews (‘who are no fools, in whatever country they may be’, Wolff comments) returned and, in a reading tone of voice, explained to him: ‘The King of this country is not by far so wicked a scoundrel as that horrid Persian [the Nayeb] outside the town, who was the instigator of the murder of your countrymen. Ephraim, a Jew, who came here to assist your countrymen, when that villain informed the King of it, was beheaded. And, Wolff, be on your guard!’ Conversations of this sort went on in secret for some three months.
All the time the outlook was getting worse. At one point the emir sent a peremptory demand to Wolff that he should immediately renounce his Christian faith. Wolf replied ‘Never! Never! Never!’, and when it was suggested to him that he should couch his answer in more polite terms he merely said, in that case, ‘No! No! No!’. A few hours after this exchange of messages, the state executioner was sent to see Wolff and told him that he was going to suffer the same fate as Stoddart and Conolly. Wolff wrote a farewell message to his wife on the fly sheet of his bible, which read ‘My dearest Georgiana, I have loved you unto death. Your affectionate husband, J. Wolff’. He then threw away the opium he had always carried with him ‘so that in case his throat was cut he might not feel the pain’ – apparently resolving to spare himself nothing in his martyrdom.
But rescue was at hand. The Persian ambassador delivered a letter from the shah, which persuaded the emir to make a present to him of Wolff. The snag was that the intermediary to effect his release was none other than the scoundrelly Nayeb, who promptly demanded a ransom fee of 3,000 ducats, and insisted on him writing an IOU on the spot. Wolff responded by writing in English: ‘In the garden of the infamous Abdul Samut Khan [the Nayeb], surrounded by his banditti, and compelled by him, I write that he forced from me a note of hand for six thousand tillahs. Joseph Wolff, Prisoner.’
Not everyone was pleased at the prospect of Wolff being able to leave Bokhara. One Afghan said that, if left to his own devices, he would have made away with Wolff with his javelin. When told that this would have been wrong as Wolff was a holy dervish, he replied: ‘I know these English dervishes. They go into a country, spy out mountains and valleys, seas and rivers; find out a convenient adit; and then go home, inform a gentleman there – a chief, who has the name of Company, who sends soldiers, and then takes a country’. The East India Company may not have been a person, but its reputation as a conqueror had spread throughout Central Asia.
Even one of his own servants – encouraged by the odious Nayeb – turned against him, telling him that he was going to be killed by the emir and demanding, with threats against his life, a present of 2,000 tillahs and a letter of recommendation to the British ambassador at Tehran. Wolff, who was normally long-suffering, lost his control at this and ‘took a stick and gave him such a beating as he never gave to anyone in his life’. He commented in his memoirs that it was just as well that the servant in question was a Sunni and not a Shia Muslim and so had no local friends to come to his help.
In the end, despite the machinations of the Nayeb and of his threatening servant, Wolff got the final consent of the emir for his departure, and also agreement that he should be accompanied by a potential Bokharan ambassador to the Queen of England. The emir declared that while Stoddart and Conolly had ‘excited the neighbouring countries to war against him’ (a completely false accusation), Wolff had proved himself ‘to be a man of understanding and knowledge’.
But his departure was not the end of his dangers: the malicious Nayeb had hired ten professional assassins to travel with the caravan on which Wolff was leaving and to murder him when they were well clear of Bokhara. The ambassador-designate heard of this plot, and summoned the caravan together and told them roundly that it was the duty of all true Muslims to protect the Englishman who was under his care. When they crossed the frontier into Persia, the suspected assassins were rounded up and this particular danger appeared to have passed. Wolff was also glad to reach a more ordered country than that of the ‘lawless tribes’ through whom he had been wending his way; he concluded from these experiences that ‘there cannot be worse despotism than the despotism of a mob [. . . he] would always prefer to live under one tyrant than under many!’
Wolff later learnt with some satisfaction that the nefarious Nayeb had subsequently got his just deserts: his intrigues had extended to plots against the emir who, on hearing of this, ‘did take an axe, and actually cut him in two with his own hands’. Much later and less happy was the news of the fate of the ambassador-designate; the latter was to prove unacceptable to Queen Victoria, who ‘would not receive the ambassador of an assassin’ [i.e. of one who had killed two of her officers]; so the unhappy man had no alternative than to return as a failure to Bokhara ‘where the King cut off his head’. With the realization of how much slaughter was still going on at the court of Bokhara, Wolff appreciated all the more his miraculous escape.
The last pages of his memoirs are given over to telling of his warm welcome by his wife and others on his return to England. He still suffered from some physical problems – a tape worm had to be removed – from his outlandish travels. He enjoyed the access to the great and good which his audacious and high-minded mission had won for him; he was lost in admiration on encountering Sir Walter Scott, ‘every one of whose writings he has since read aloud’; he spent nine days staying with Lord Tennyso
n, ‘and heard him read his songs’; he made the acquaintance of William Gladstone – and judged the political leader to be ‘a religious man of enlarged principles’; and so on. Once more, anecdotes of prelates and peers fill the pages of his book. But he eventually settled in an Anglican parish in the west country and lived for nearly another twenty years of long walks and cold baths.
Wolff was not like other British adventurers confronting tsarist Russia. No one could have accused him of being a warrior in the Great Game; his enemy was not the tsar but the Devil. He was prepared to accept hospitality from Russians and even to preach the gospel (his gospel) to them; but by his provocative activities he defied St Petersburg’s domination of the steppes and of the emirates in that no-man’s land between the tsar’s and the viceroy’s empires. His private-enterprise – indeed maverick – mission to rescue Stoddart and Conolly was promoted in a pamphlet that was highly critical of the former ineffectiveness of the British Foreign Office; he was not, as he sometimes supposed, some latter-day St Paul preaching at Ephesus, but neither was he some precursor of Lord Curzon speaking for the British Empire. He was to be remembered long after ‘the tumult and the shouting dies; the Captains and the Kings depart’. He was above all himself: a holy fool, with the tenacity of a Jew, the proselytizing fervour of a Victorian Christian, and the courage of an Englishman.
1. The value of one ‘shay’ was the twentieth part of a farthing.
2. For an account of Burnes’s epic journey, see the author’s book Shooting Leave (2009).
Chapter 8
James Stanislaus Bell: The Cautious Merchant Adventurer
‘A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong’
– Book of Ecclesiasticus
James Bell, a friend of David Urquhart and featuring in James Longworth’s account of travels in Circassia, owned and was in charge of the Vixen when she was captured by the Russians. His experiences mirrored and overlapped with Longworth’s, but show a different angle on the events. Having spent over two years in the region, he perceived the resistance movement in greater depth than any of his compatriots.
In the preface to his two-volume account of his experiences (Journal of Residence in Circassia during the years 1837, 1838 and 1839, published 1840) he explained how he had heard at first hand the stories of families reduced to misery by the Russian occupation, and how he ‘freely took part in the councils of the natives [. . .] counselling them as to the particular species of warfare which seemed best suited to the troops they could bring into the field, and most likely to defeat the tactics of their enemies’. He felt that his efforts entitled him to take some credit for the military successes of the partisans – the capture of almost all the Russian forts – which had started before he left. But unlike Longworth and Knight, he was careful to keep out of the conflict himself.
As with the other English adventurers, he had to run the gauntlet of the Russian blockade before he even got there. To increase their chances of out-sailing their pursuers, the Turkish crew threw overboard the heavy gun-carriage they were smuggling in, but declined to jettison their own commercial cargo. At one point the Turkish crew discussed ‘striking the sails in token of submission’, but one of the Circassians on board drew his dagger and threatened to stab the Turk if there were any more talk of surrender. Bell himself went below decks to prepare to ditch his more compromising possessions: barrels of gunpowder and letters revealing his intentions. He also took his turn at the oars. When finally they approached the coastline on which they planned to land, they were welcomed by hordes of natives running down the hills and across the beaches to help them land and show the pursuing Russian ship that the visitors were now ‘under their protection’. The Russian brig, after a few desultory shots, headed back to sea.
After he had joined up with the native resistance forces and eventually met with James Longworth, he too was much impressed with their leader Tougouse – the Wolf. They were presented with such useful gifts as ‘an excellent coat of chain mail [. . .] a lively white charger [. . .] and a sabre, the scabbard of which was embroidered with silver lace’. They heard tales of a recent raid across the Kuban river, when the melting snow had raised the waters so high that the raiders had to leave their powder and firearms on their own side of the river and go across armed only with their sabres. Even so, they had managed to scare the Russian soldiers, who were gathering in the harvest near their forts, so badly that the Russians fled back into the forts, leaving their scythes, ‘about two hundred of which the Circassians brought off in triumph’. Meanwhile there were the usual rumours of a British fleet – ‘twenty men-of-war and two steamers all bearing red flags’ – being about to come to the rescue of the insurgents; but as always, the rumours turned out to be false, and Bell found himself trying to persuade the highlanders to adopt a more effective method of observation and communication – beacons on the hilltops rather than the random discharge of musket fire, which all too often was misinterpreted.
One incident which Bell describes in detail illustrates the deviousness of both the insurgents and their Russian opponents. A small three-masted Russian vessel sent a boat ashore and explained to the Circassians on the beach that the crew had been living on nothing but black bread for the past five months and they wanted to buy or barter for meat and eggs. The Circassians replied that they could not give them these provisions until ‘they had got permission of the two Englishmen’, but if they cared to come ashore the next day they were sure they could provide what they wanted. The insurgents then laid a careful trap to ambush the Russians when they landed the following day. It was not quite careful enough: some of those lying in ambush fired too soon and the Russians withdrew in short order to their rowing boat, but not before the ambushers had managed to kill or wound all but one of the Russians on board. Bell was very upset by this incident: he had tried to intervene to stop his friends behaving in such a duplicitous and murderous way, but he had arrived too late to do so. However, he subsequently became convinced that the Russians too were playing tricks, and had just wanted an excuse to make contact with their opponents – probably to find out the whereabouts of the Englishmen. The discovery of poles and boards marking a path on the shore to where Bell was staying caused concern: extra sentries were posted.
It was not surprising that the Russians were disturbed by the presence of Longworth and Bell among the Circassians. Shortly after their meeting up together, they presented the insurgents with some 1,400 lbs of lead (for bullets) that they had brought into the country with them. About a third of this was divided among the warriors of the southern tribes, and the rest ‘divided with scrupulous impartiality’ among the inhabitants of other warring regions. But the casualties inflicted by all these bullets were insignificant – according to a captured Russian officer – beside the loss of personnel brought about by desertion, death and disease among the garrisons of the forts, where Bell was able to confirm from first-hand accounts that the conditions were appalling.
When he was invited to attend councils of the elders, Bell never missed an opportunity to emphasize that the tribesmen should take advantage of the low Russian morale to campaign more actively against them, and to encourage foreign support for their resistance. He said that ‘since they appeared to think our presence so beneficial, and promised to take more active measures shortly, we should comply with their request, and remain among them for the present’. Soon after this conference, Bell learnt that a Russian cavalry officer had deserted from Anapa because of ‘the degraded situation he found himself reduced to (on account of a duel with his colonel) and his despair of being able to improve it’; it was possibly this source who disclosed that ‘4,000 of that army are already hors de combat’. Some deserters described their treatment in Tsar Nicholas’s army as ‘worse than that of dogs in Europe’.
Bell’s urging to action seemed to bear some fruit. In September 1837 he reported in a letter home that ‘a very valiant nobleman crossed the Kuban a few days ago, with a small party who swam
the river during the night, towing after them a small boat containing their arms’. They were quickly surrounded by the enemy on the far side and their leader was fatally wounded before he could regain the southern bank. Bell was invited to his funeral – a very military affair – no doubt to remind him of how his promptings to action had been acted upon.
Meanwhile Bell’s own morale was not helped by the arrival of letters from England reporting ‘the disastrous decision come to by our government in regard of the capture of the Vixen’. It seemed to Bell that his own government had acquiesced in the Russian claim to have negotiated treaty rights over the Caucasus from the Ottoman Empire and was not intending to take any vigorous diplomatic action to obtain compensation for the seizure of the Vixen. This was a financial blow to Bell, but he felt even more bitter about the loss of ‘the spirit of honour which once animated [British] counsels’. He decided to say nothing about this to his Caucasian hosts, as he feared that news of the half-hearted attitude of his own country would discourage them.
This fear was however counter-balanced by an encounter with Nadir Bey, aka Mr Knight – brought to meet him by Longworth – who ‘seemed to travel for the excitement of adventure’ and to share their commitment to the cause of independence. To enhance the impact of Mr Knight’s arrival, and to dispel any fears that he might be a Russian spy, Longworth and Bell agreed that he should ‘assume the ambassadorial character’ which his hosts were so anxious to force on him; the fact that he brought the news of the death of King William IV gave some credence to his role as an official representative of England. Even more convincing was Nadir Bey’s appearance in the uniform of the Royal Company of Scottish Archers (the king’s bodyguard in Scotland) replete with an eagle-feathered hat.