by Ure, John
When eventually Bell got a message that the weather and absence of blockading ships made it possible to get away, it was a frantic rush to collect his kit, check the coastline from the lookout point, and ride down to the creek before sunset: ‘the bustle was mingled up with embracings, protestations of friendship, last speeches and injunctions’. And when they did get out to sea after all the favourable wind petered out and they twice had to resort to the oars to distance themselves from intercepting vessels. All this was compensated for by a sun-lit glimpse of Mount Elbruz (revealing the cleft in its summit allegedly made by the keel of Noah’s ark); Bell reflected in self-congratulatory mood ‘the guardian spirit of the land has thus deigned to reward my humble endeavours for its benefit’.
Even when they reached the Turkish coast, their troubles were not over. They were told they would have to stand off shore for eighteen days of quarantine, and some of the Circassians on board – hungry, cold and fearing Russian boarding parties – threatened to make a forced landing and ‘rather to perish sabre in hand than submit to such treatment’. Bell managed to calm them until he had sent a message ashore and arranged for them to be allowed to proceed on to Sinop; even there, the Russian consul (there was still no British representation) managed to delay their landing for a further four days. And lest he should be in any doubt about the nature of the risks that he had been running, Bell was confronted ashore by reports that orders had been issued to the commanders of all the Russian ships involved in the blockade to the effect that whatever ship captured Bell ‘should immediately hang me’ on the orders of the tsar himself. Bell used all his influence, that an Englishman commanded as of right, to settle old scores and protect his shipmates: he wrote to the local pasha pointing out that the obstructive Russian consul was in fact ‘a servant who had been turned out of the establishment of an English gentleman for disreputable conduct’ and that such an appointment was an insult to the pasha and to his sultan. He also secured the release of the captain of his vessel who had been arrested – again after Russian pressure – for running the blockade.
James Stanislaus Bell was an unlikely player in the Great Game: a civilian, an unauthorized agent, and a cautious character. Bell was no warrior. But he was a merchant adventurer who – in the wider interest of British trade with Turkey and the Caucasus as well as in his own purely personal interests – had firstly been prepared to suffer the loss of his ship the Vixen to try to force the British government’s hand, and then had been prepared to live for nearly three years among the warlike guerrilla tribes of Circassia and do all in his power to encourage the tribal leaders to pursue their independence struggle against the tsar’s occupying army.
He did not hazard himself in the front line as some of his compatriots did, but he was a source not only of encouragement and advice, but also of practical supplies of powder, shot and medicine. And he did all this not only without any prompting from home, but rather in the face of his own government’s (Lord Palmerston’s) disinclination to upset the court in St Petersburg – the court of a former ally and an emerging European power. But Bell, although by profession and inclination a merchant rather than a warrior, was not unaware of the political and military threat from Russia not only to British trade with Persia, Turkey and other eastern markets, but also to the security of the frontiers of British India. In the concluding pages of his published letters home, he declares ‘the Muscovite is in full career for Herat [the Afghan city viewed as the gateway to India] . . . having secured a clear field for this enterprise by destroying our influence in Persia’.
Chapter 9
Arminius Vambery: The ‘English’ Dervish
‘Sir, so you had a good walk across Central Asia.’
– Lord Palmerston to Arminius Vambery in 1864
‘In the name of Allah, I swear you are an Englishman!’
So spoke the sixteen-year-old prince-governor of Herat, pointing an accusing finger at a newly arrived and somewhat pale-skinned dervish pilgrim from Turkey known as hadji Reshid. It was a serious accusation. The year was 1863 and no European had been bold or rash enough to visit this Central Asian oasis within living memory. The Afghans had recaptured it from the Emir of Bokhara only a matter of weeks before, and the young prince was a son of the King of Afghanistan. Both king and prince were known to be deeply suspicious of Europeans, and especially of the English and the Russians, who were thought to have predatory intentions towards this no-man’s-land between Russia and India.
So when he followed up his remark – like a clever child who has made a new discovery – by saying ‘Tell me, you really are an Englishman in disguise are you not?’, it was an anxious moment. Hadji Rashid laughed it off, saying, ‘Have done, Sire!’ and reminding him that those who mistook a believer for an infidel were themselves unbelievers. In truth, any Russian or Englishman discovered at Herat would have been in danger of his life, but any who had been so monstrously blasphemous as to disguise himself as a hadji and a holy man of Islam, when in fact he was a Christian infidel, would have been in danger of meeting a very grisly death indeed.
The hadji in question was not in fact a hadji, nor a dervish, nor a Turk, nor an Englishman; he was a Hungarian named Arminius Vambery, but he aspired to be an Englishman. He spoke English and when his adventurous travels were over he returned to England and shared his experiences with London society. In addition, he was every bit as dangerous to the independence of Herat and Afghanistan as any born Englishman could have been. In fact he was to warn the British government in explicit terms about the dangers of leaving a vacuum in this quarter of Central Asia. How he came to be there, however, is an intriguing story.
Born in Hungary in 1832, Vambery had early in his life shown an aptitude for languages and an enthusiasm for all things oriental. He had settled in Constantinople and become to all outward appearances a Turk; he shunned European society, European clothes, European food, European languages and the European quarter of the city. In particular, he was obsessed with all the ramifications of Islamic life and doctrine. He longed to visit those spiritual havens of Islamic learning and tradition which were to be found in Central Asia at Bokhara, Khiva and elsewhere. The fact that no European had ventured into this wild haunt of Turkoman slave-traders for almost twenty years (since Dr Wolff had set out from England to determine the fate of Stoddart and Conolly) acted as a further incentive to the adventure-seeker. Another inducement was the political importance of the region: with the Russians advancing year on year across the steppes, and with one khanate and emirate after another shortly to fall to them, Vambery felt that there was no time to lose in finding information about what was going on, and transmitting that to the party most interested – Britain with its Indian empire. But whatever the incentives and inducements, the most important thing was to find a way of getting there and getting back alive.
It was with this in mind that Vambery moved from Constantinople to Tehran. Here in Persia he based himself in the Turkish embassy and, in view of his long residence and excellent connections, received the support and help of the Turkish ambassador. The ambassador also made a practice of befriending Islamic pilgrims who passed through Persia on their way to or from Mecca. Many of these were Tartar dervishes, and Vambery found in them, for the first time, a group of people who shared his obsession with travelling to the Islamic holy places of Central Asia. Word spread through the caravanserais of Persia that here at the Turkish embassy in Tehran was a man who understood and sympathized with dervish pilgrims. There was speculation that he might well be a dervish himself, so convincing was his knowledge of all things Islamic and his command of Turkish and other languages.
Vambery saw his chance in March 1863 when a group of pilgrims from Chinese Tartary called at the embassy: ‘barbarous as they seemed, wretched as was their clothing, I was yet able to discover in them something of nobility’, he later wrote. Their leader wore a green robe over his ragged dress and topped it all with a colossal white turban, and ‘by his fiery glance and quick eye
, showed his superiority’. These pilgrims were the chiefs of a small caravan group, numbering some two dozen souls in all. They were homeward bound to Khokand and Kashgar, and would therefore be travelling through all that part of Central Asia which Vambery had for so long wished to reach. After an hour of talking to them, an idea struck him: ‘What if I journeyed with these pilgrims to Central Asia? As natives, they might prove my best Mentors: besides, they already know me as the Dervish Reshid Efendi [. . .]’
He calculated that they had good connections in Bokhara. While memories of Stoddart and Conolly were still alive this was undoubtedly the most frightening of his possible destinations. But one problem was that he knew such oriental pilgrims would never believe he was motivated by genuine geographical curiosity: ‘they would consider it ridiculous, perhaps even suspicious’. So he had to persuade them that his motive was purely religious, that: ‘I had long silently, but earnestly, desired to visit Turkestan, not merely to see the only source of Islamite virtue that still remained undefiled, but to behold the saints of Khiva, Bokhara and Samarcand’. Not a word should ever be uttered about his political and quasi-military concerns about Russian expansion into the region.
He said he had been waiting a whole year in Persia in the hope of finding just such a group of dedicated pilgrims as themselves with whom he could travel in fulfilment of his pious ambitions. His listeners were totally persuaded of his sincerity and, by now being convinced that he was indeed a dervish, they said it gave them ‘infinite pleasure that he should regard them as worthy of the friendship that the undertaking of so distant and perilous a journey in their company implied’. He had been accepted.
His future travelling companions immediately started warning him of the dangers: there would be periods when, for weeks at a time, they would be with ‘no house, no bread, not even a drop of water to drink’. Besides the risk of being killed or taken prisoner and sold into slavery, there was also the risk of being buried alive in sand storms. ‘Ponder well, Efendi, the step! You may have occasion later to rue it.’ They also wondered how he would manage the return journey without them. He persuaded them that such material considerations did not weigh with him: ‘I must hasten away from this horrid kingdom of Error’, he said. Eventually, to seal the deal, the leader of the dervish caravan embraced and kissed him, which forced Vambery to confess, ‘I had, it is true, some feeling of aversion to struggle against. I did not like such close contact with those clothes and bodies impregnated with all kinds of odours’.
When Vambery told his Turkish patrons and friends of his decision, they declared he was a lunatic to journey to a region from which few had ever returned. Especially, they said, he was mad to go with a group of dodgy characters ‘who for the smallest coin would destroy me’. Despite all these forebodings, it was decided that the expedition would set out within a week: Vambery did not want his credentials to be exposed to too long study – nor did he want his own nerve to give way. He asked for advice on what he should take with him, and was told to shave his head and to exchange his Turkish-European costume for Bokharan dress; he should also ‘dispense with bedclothes, linen, and all such articles of luxury’. His anxiety about the trip was not diminished by visiting his potential fellow travellers at their caravanserai and finding them in two small cells – one with ten occupants, the other with fourteen. ‘They seemed to me dens filled with filth and misery.’
But rather than dwell on these awaited discomforts, Vambery got down to discussing the route they should take. There were basically two alternatives: the first – via Meshed, Merv and Bokhara – was the shortest, but involved passing through the Tekke tribes, ‘the most savage of all the Turkomans, who spare no man, and who would not hesitate to sell into slavery the Prophet himself, did he fall into their hands’. The second route passed through the country of the Yomut Turkomans, who were considered an honest and hospitable people, and then passed through Khiva; the trouble with this route was that it involved a passage of forty stations through the desert, without a single spring of drinking water. Considerable debate followed, at the conclusion of which it was decided that ‘It is better to battle against the wickedness of the elements than against that of man [. . .] God is gracious, we are on His way [. . .] He will certainly not abandon us’. Beards were stroked and everyone acclaimed ‘Amen’.
Vambery was told to be ready in two days’ time. He spent those two days having last-minute doubts: even if he were brave enough to face the risks, was he physically strong enough to survive the hardships? One thing that bothered him especially was that he had been lame since birth: would he tire too soon if forced to walk long stretches? Vambery was not a man to go back on his resolve: he decided he and his companions would just have to put up with his lameness. The call of the khanates was not to be denied.
Having left Tehran, the first obstacle was the Elburz range of mountains along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. It was uncomfortably hot during the day, and mercilessly cold at night. Despite his lameness, Vambery found he needed to dismount from his horse and walk for longish periods in the early mornings to keep his circulation going. What luggage they had was carried on the horses. Their night quarters were in villages surrounded by forests of boxwood.1 When the villagers went out to collect spring water to make tea, there was a sudden alarm: undefined wild animals had been seen loitering round the spring, and leaping into the forest at their approach. Vambery seized a rusty sword and set off into the trees, only to discover – fortunately at a good distance off – ‘two splendid tigers, whose beautifully-striped forms made themselves visible occasionally from the thickets’. A more menacing presence was that of the jackals who infested their camp and against which Vambery ‘was obliged, in self-defense, to use both hands and feet to prevent their making off with bread-sack or a shoe’.
After some difficulties, mostly caused by suspicions about the provenance of Vambery, they managed to embark on their crossing of the Caspian in a boat made out of a hollowed tree-trunk. The passengers were packed in two rows alongside each other ‘like salted herrings’ so that the centre of the boat was free for the passage of the crew. At night, Vambery’s neighbouring passengers fell on top of him snoring, but he felt he could not wake them, as to do so ‘would have been a heinous sin, to be atoned by never-ending suffering’. Fortunately a favourable wind carried them quickly across the water to the Turkoman coast of the Caspian and Vambery felt for the first time that Persia was behind him and there was no looking back. Even here, he was observed to be different from the other pilgrims and given special treatment by a Turkoman chief who assumed he was Turkish. Convenient as it was to be given preferential treatment – a place in a more comfortable tent – it was nonetheless disturbing to be so consistently spotted as the odd man out and it made him nervous.
As they sailed further up the Caspian coast, they reached the southernmost extremity of the tsar’s domains. Vambery noted that there were three Russian warships patrolling these waters, to prevent Turkoman pirates from harassing shipping along the Caspian coast. While Vambery could see the need for this, he later commented in his book that the Russians were exploiting their control of the coastal shipping to ‘establish friendly relations with one tribe so as to make use of it against another’. One local khan was known to act as a spy on behalf of the Russians and give advance notice to the latter of intended raids; however, he had at an early age succumbed to the charms of ‘Russian brandy’ (vodka) and had become such a confirmed alcoholic that he no longer functioned and his sons ‘were very careful not to give intelligence to the Russians of any projected marauding expedition’. Vambery was already alert to such evidence of the Russians employing their policing activities to gain political influence.
The same khan made a practice of receiving all pilgrims on their way through his port, but Vambery was very relieved that they were obliged to anchor off shore and so not be exposed to a meeting with him, as he was sure that the khan’s experience of European countenances would have enabled
him easily to expose Vambery as something very different from what he purported to be. The ship was due to be inspected by the Russian authorities the next day, and Vambery was anxious that as his complexion ‘was not yet brought to an Asiatic hue’ he might be detected. He did not fear any inhumane treatment at Russian hands, but rather that they would ‘dissuade me from persisting in my adventure’. So when the Russians approached he adopted a ‘stooping and half-lying position’ which he hoped would conceal his neck, which was particularly white. It was a close run thing. One of the Russian naval officers scanning the group of pilgrims remarked, ‘See how white that hadji is’. But he did not pursue his comment further.
When they got clear of the Russian port and set off overland, one of the other pilgrims coached him in how to throw off his Turkish manners and appear to be a more oriental pilgrim. None of their party ever suspected him of being more closely European than his professed identity as an Islamic Turk. Sometimes they stayed for lengthy periods based in one place, and Vambery was able to accompany local chiefs on local missions, learning more all the time about his surroundings. Occasionally such missions were prolonged by the need to ‘keep clear of hundreds of wild boars which were roaming about’ or other natural hazards. As he coped with all this, he was gradually becoming part of the scene. He was even able – with the use of his compass – to help them orientate a mosque correctly towards Mecca. He also found that, since as a dervish he was expected to spend many hours in contemplation and reverie, he was able to sit slumped listening to the endless political talk about their raids and their relations with all their neighbours – Russians, Persians, Khivans and others – without being expected to contribute to the talk. Vambery was successfully immersing himself in the Turkoman world and gaining insights that no previous traveller had achieved.