The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk

  Anyone less determined than Moorcroft would have given up in disappointment. After all, he could have returned to London and resumed his career as a successful vet. But he had not forgotten the horses which he had come so far to find. If the approach to Bokhara through Chinese Turkestan was blocked, then they would have to take the more dangerous route across Afghanistan after all. What Moorcroft did not realise was that their many months in Ladakh spent trying to negotiate with the Chinese across the mountains had been pointless almost from the start. For the artful Rafailov, whom Moorcroft held in such esteem, had successfully poisoned the minds of the senior Chinese officials against them before setting out on his own fateful journey through the passes.

  Moorcroft and his companions now tried to make up for lost time, leaving Leh before the letter summoning them home could reach them. In the late spring of 1824, after travelling through Kashmir and the Punjab (taking care to steer well north of Ranjit Singh’s capital, Lahore), they crossed the Indus and entered the Khyber Pass. Beyond it lay Afghanistan, and beyond that Bokhara.

  ·8·

  Death on the Oxus

  To take an ill-armed caravan laden with precious goods, and rumoured to be carrying gold, through the heart of Afghanistan was at the best of times a perilous undertaking. To attempt this when the country was in the grip of anarchy, and teetering on the brink of civil war, called for courage, or perhaps foolhardiness, of the highest order. Yet this is what Moorcroft and his companions now boldly set out to do. The prospects of their coming out alive, of reaching the River Oxus with themselves and their merchandise intact, seemed slender. Some of the wild stories which preceded them, moreover, were hardly calculated to improve their chances.

  According to one of these they were really the secret advance guard of a British invasion force, and they had come to spy out the land prior to its annexation. Perhaps the Afghans could read Moorcroft’s thoughts, for before very long he was writing to Calcutta proposing just that. If the British did not get their hands on Afghanistan first, he warned, then the Russians almost certainly would. And what better moment than the present, when two rival factions were vying for the Afghan throne? A single British regiment, Moorcroft argued, was all that would be needed to place a suitably compliant candidate on the throne. As usual, his suggestion fell on deaf ears. However, it would not be long before other, far more influential, voices were clamouring for precisely this, and claiming the idea as their own. For Afghanistan was destined to loom large in British imperial history, and Moorcroft merely to be ahead of his time.

  Another rumour which greatly embarrassed them was that they were prepared to pay those tribes whose territories they traversed generously for safe passage. They went in constant fear of attack or treachery, but also won friends through Moor-croft’s veterinary skills, which were much sought after in a land almost entirely dependent upon domestic animals for its livelihood. The ferocity of the Afghan summer was a severe trial for them all, affecting even their dogs, two of which died from sunstroke. The heat, observed Moorcroft, ‘was as if it had been blown from a blacksmith’s forge’. As always, while they travelled, he made copious notes about the people and topography, wildlife and livestock, agriculture and antiquities. At the great Buddhist site of Bamian, which they were the first Europeans ever to see, they gazed up in awe at the two colossal figures carved from the cliff face, the taller of which they calculated to be 150 feet high, an underestimate of some 30 feet. They also wrote their names in a cave in charcoal, and a century and a half later Moorcroft’s was still there.

  Finally, nearly eight months after entering the Khyber Pass, and after overcoming a wearying succession of obstacles, they reached the banks of the Oxus, becoming the first Englishmen ever to set foot there. Considering the dangers and difficulties they had faced, it was an astonishing feat of courage and determination. Even today few Europeans have seen the Oxus, so remote is its course, and those who have done so have mostly viewed it from the air when flying between Tashkent, in Soviet Central Asia, and Kabul. The strategic importance of the mighty river was not lost on Moorcroft, who no doubt could visualise the Cossacks swimming with their horses across it. ‘The current’, he noted, ‘was less rapid than I expected to have found it, not exceeding two miles an hour. The banks were low, and the soil loose, like those of the Ganges, and the water was similarly discoloured by sand.’

  At Khwaja Salah, the main crossing point, the river appeared to be no wider than the Thames at Charing Cross, although elsewhere it was far broader. In spring, they were told, when the snow in the Pamirs, where the Oxus has its source, began to melt, the river was in some places a mile or more in width. From Khwaja Salah three flat-bottomed wooden boats operated a ferry service, each capable of carrying twenty camels or horses.

  By now it was winter and the snow added to their discomfort, reducing the desert to a quagmire, often knee deep, and greatly reducing the caravan’s progress. Five days after crossing the Oxus they reached Kashi, the second largest town in the kingdom of Bokhara, whose 16-year-old governor, Prince Tora Bahadar, was the Emir’s second son. To reach his palace, in order to pay their respects, they had to struggle through rivers of mud beneath which lurked cavernous holes, invisible from above, into which a man might momentarily vanish. Their brief audience with the youthful governor, Moorcroft reported, passed off cordially, ‘and augured well for our reception at Bokhara’. What he did not know was that behind the teenager’s charming manner and ‘constant smile’ were hidden a ruthless ambition and evil nature. Not only would he murder his elder brother and seize the throne of Bokhara on their father’s death, but he would also later cast two British officers into a rat-infested pit before having them beheaded in the square overlooked by his palace.

  On February 25, 1825, Moorcroft and his companions were able to make out in the distance the unmistakable line of minarets and domes which they knew were those of Bokhara, the holiest city in Muslim Central Asia. So holy was it said to be that while elsewhere on earth the daylight shone downwards from the skies, from Bokhara it radiated upwards to illuminate the heavens. For Moorcroft and his weary party it must have been a triumphant sight, justifying all that they had been through since leaving Calcutta. ‘We found ourselves’, he wrote that night in his journal, ‘at the gates of that city which had for five years been the object of our wanderings, privations and perils.’ Sadly, their elation was to prove short-lived. As they entered the city the following morning they were greeted by excited children crying ‘Ooroos . . . Ooroos’ – ‘Russians . . . Russians’. Moorcroft knew in that moment that they must already have seen Europeans, and that he had been beaten to his goal by his foes from the north.

  It had happened, he soon learned, more than four years earlier. But news travelled so slowly in the vast Asian heartland that neither he, in the far north of India, nor his superiors in Calcutta had learned of it. The Russians, for their part, were happy that it should remain that way, for they regarded Muslim Central Asia as lying firmly within their own sphere of influence. The mission, officially a diplomatic and commercial one, had set out in October 1820 from Orenburg. It had brought with it a fulsome letter from the Tsar to the Emir who, through native go-betweens, had agreed to receive it. To further smooth the way, the Russians also brought lavish gifts, including guns and furs, watches and European porcelain. It was hoped that these would create an appetite among rich Bokharans for more such goods. For the Russian factories – of which there were now some 5,000, employing 200,000 workers – were becoming desperate for new markets.

  The home market was too small and impoverished to absorb the rapidly growing volume of goods being produced, while their British rivals, using more sophisticated machinery, were able to undercut them in both Europe and America. However, in Central Asia, on their own doorstep, lay a vast potential market where, so far anyway, they faced no competition. The British must, at all costs, be kept out of Central Asia. The bazaars of the ancient Silk Road were to be filled with Russian goods onl
y. To St Petersburg the Great Game was as much about commercial penetration as about political and military expansion, especially in those early years, although inevitably the flag – the two-headed imperial eagle – followed the caravans of Russian merchandise. It was a remorseless process which, on the British side, only Moorcroft had yet foreseen. And here, in far-off Bokhara, he himself had come face to face with it for the first time, for already the bazaars were filled with Russian goods.

  Inevitably, there had been more to the Russian mission of 1820 than a purely commercial reconnaissance, as Moorcroft must have guessed. It had had orders, it would later transpire, to bring back detailed plans of Bokhara’s defences, and as much military, political and other intelligence as possible. One of its members, a German-born doctor named Eversmann, had undertaken the almost suicidal task of entering the capital in disguise and mingling with the Emir’s subjects to glean all he could there, on the assumption that the mission and its escort would be kept outside the city’s walls. Although the Emir had agreed to receive the Russians, they were taking no chances, for they had not forgotten the treachery which had led to the massacre of the Khivan mission. In addition therefore to the cavalry and infantry escort, they took with them two powerful artillery pieces which, if the need arose, would make short work of Bokhara’s mud walls, palaces and mosques.

  The 1,000-mile march across steppe and desert was to prove a gruelling one for both men and animals, and they lost many of their horses long before reaching the Emir’s territory. Although the Kazakhs, through whose domains they first had to pass, gave them little trouble, at one spot they came upon more than a hundred corpses lying in the desert, the remains of a Bokharan caravan which had been attacked by raiders. They served as a grim reminder of the problems that their own merchants’ caravans would face if the predatory Kazakhs were not first brought to heel. More than two months after setting out they reached the first Bokharan outpost, and the following day were met by a caravan bearing fresh fruit, bread and fodder for their horses, thoughtfully sent by the Emir himself – but not something that an invading force from the north could look forward to. Four days later they pitched their camp outside the gates of the capital and awaited the Emir’s summons.

  Here was Dr Eversmann’s chance. Under cover of the excitement caused by the arrival of the ‘Ooroos’, and posing as a merchant, he managed to slip unnoticed into the city and find lodgings in a caravanserai. While the members of the mission and their escort were accommodated in a village outside the walls, this somewhat shadowy figure, about whom little appears to be known, set to work gathering information ranging from military matters to the sexual proclivities of the Bokharans. Of the latter he was to write: ‘Were I not constrained by shame, I could relate incredible facts.’ Apparently things went on in Bokhara which ‘even in Constantinople’ were taboo. The people, Eversmann tells us, had no notion of ‘refined sentiments’, but thought only of sexual gratification, despite the brutal punishments inflicted on those caught indulging in these unnamed ‘enormities’. The Emir himself was no exception. In addition to his harem, the doctor reported, he enjoyed the services of ‘forty or fifty degraded beings’ in this city where ‘all the horrors and abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah’ were practised.

  Eversmann’s disguise, the precise details of which are not known, must have been remarkably convincing, for the Emir’s secret police, with informers everywhere, appear to have suspected nothing during his three-month stay in Bokhara. But he was acutely aware of the dangerous game he was playing. Asking a question, or even taking a stroll, he wrote, was enough to arouse suspicions, and thereby invite unwelcome attention. All intelligence which he gleaned during the day had to be copied down ‘clandestinely at night’. The doctor’s luck, however, was eventually to run out. By ill chance he was recognised by a Bokharan who remembered him from Orenburg, and who denounced him to the secret police. He had planned to pass all his notes to a member of the mission and then himself join a caravan bound for Kashgar, in Chinese Turkestan, where it seems he proposed to gather similar intelligence for his masters. But he was warned that the moment he left town, and was clear of any Russian protection, he was to be murdered.

  The Emir did not allow his discovery of this piece of Russian duplicity to sully the cordial relations which he had just established with his powerful neighbours. Presumably this was why Eversmann was to be quietly done away with when he and his companions had gone their separate ways. The doctor now hastily changed his plans and decided to return to Orenburg with the mission which, having completed its tasks (including the discreet drawing of a plan of the city walls), was sitting it out until the worst of the Central Asian winter was over.

  On March 10, 1821, amid protestations of undying friendship, the Russians departed the Emir’s capital, from which he ruled over a kingdom almost the size of the British Isles. Fifteen days later they left the last of his territories. Their one regret, like Muraviev at Khiva, was at having to leave behind them numbers of their fellow countrymen whom they had found among the slaves of Bokhara. Some of them had been so long in bondage that they had almost forgotten their mother tongue. ‘At the sight of us,’ one of the mission reported, ‘they were unable to hold back their tears.’ But whatever the mission’s feelings, there was little they could do for these poor wretches other than publicise their plight, as Muraviev had done, and pray for the day when Russian rule would prevail in Central Asia, and such cruel and barbaric practices would be outlawed for ever.

  If St Petersburg had entertained thoughts of taking Bokhara by force, nothing in fact came of them. Indeed another four decades were to pass before it finally came under Tsarist sway. However, to Moorcroft the danger of the Russians returning with a conquering army seemed real enough. During his own stay in Bokhara, where he had been well received by the Emir, he had made two more uncomfortable discoveries. One was that the Russian-made goods in the bazaars, despite their inferiority, were actually preferred to those which he and his companions had faced so many perils and hardships to bring to Bokhara. No less disappointing was the discovery that the horses – those fleet and hardy beasts he had dreamed of for so long – were no longer to be found in any numbers in the Emir’s kingdom.

  Bitterly disappointed at this final failure, Moorcroft decided to head for home before the passes into northern India were closed by snow for the winter. Taking with him those few horses he had managed to acquire, he and his companions set off back along the route by which they had come. Once across the Oxus, however, Moorcroft decided to make one last attempt to buy horses at a remote desert village to the south-west where he had heard they were to be found. Leaving Trebeck and Guthrie at Balkh, he set off with a handful of men. It was the last that they would ever see of him.

  Mystery will always surround the fate of Moorcroft, as well as that of his companions. Officially he died of fever on or about August 27, 1825. He was nearly 60, by Indian standards an old man, and had been complaining of ill-health for some months. His body, too decomposed to indicate the cause of death, was brought back not long afterwards to Balkh by his men and buried there by his companions. Within a short time Guthrie too was dead, followed not long afterwards by Trebeck, both deaths apparently due to natural causes. Meanwhile the expedition’s interpreter, long in Moorcroft’s service, had also died. It seemed too much of a coincidence, and soon rumours began to circulate in India that they had been murdered, probably poisoned, by Russian agents. Another version, rather less sensational, was that they had been killed for their possessions. In the view of his biographer, Dr Alder, Moorcroft almost certainly did die from some kind of fever, his will to live perhaps finally broken by the discovery that there were no horses of the type he sought at the village on which he had pinned his last hopes.

  But there is one last twist to the story. More than twenty years after his supposed death, two French missionary explorers who reached Lhasa, 1,500 miles away to the east, were told a curious tale before being expelled by the Tibetans. An E
nglishman named Moorcroft, pretending to be a Kashmiri, had lived there for twelve years, they were assured. It was only after his death, while on his way to Ladakh, that the truth had come to light. For in his home were discovered maps and plans of the forbidden city which this mysterious stranger had apparently been preparing. Neither of the two French priests had ever heard of Moorcroft before, but they reported that a Kashmiri who claimed to have been his servant had corroborated the Tibetans’ story. When first published in 1852, in an English-language account of their travels, this extraordinary revelation was to cause a minor sensation in Britain. For it raised the question of whether it really was Moorcroft’s decomposing body which his companions had buried at Balkh, or that of someone else.

  Moorcroft’s biographer, while not totally ruling out the possibility that he could have faked his own death rather than return home to face his critics and official censure, nevertheless believes this to be highly unlikely, ‘the great weight of evidence and probability’ being against it. Only temporary insanity, Dr Alder concludes, ‘perhaps under the influence of high fever, could account for actions so utterly inconsistent with Moor-croft’s character, his record and everything he stood for’. One possible explanation which has been suggested for the Frenchmen’s story is that when Moorcroft’s caravan broke up after his own and his companions’ deaths, one of his Kashmiri servants may have found his way to Lhasa with maps and papers belonging to him. When the servant subsequently died on his way home to Kashmir, these – bearing Moorcroft’s name – might well have been found in his house. The unsophisticated Tibetans, ever suspicious of outsiders’ intentions, would have assumed the maps to be of their country, and the dead servant to be the Englishman whose name they bore, who evidently had been spying on them all those years.