by Craig Murray
I am certain His Lordship will not imagine from any of the remarks contained in this letter that it is my wish to criticise or detract from the information which Lieutenant Burnes’s journals contain […]34
Burnes was unaware of this attack. He was trying to find a route to Bokhara which avoided the Kunduz territory of the notorious Uzbek ruler, Murad Beg. Beg’s evil reputation was deserved. He had taken Badakshan in 1829 and deported 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. His tax assessment on Saigan and Khamard was one slave per every three households – annually. Murad had a reputation for enslaving travellers, particularly non-Muslims. Delays, detentions and fines he had imposed on Moorcroft and Trebeck had contributed to their deaths. Beg had expanded his territories by conquest and owed part of his military success to an artilleryman deserter from the 24th Bombay NI known as ‘Jemadar Sahib’.35 But he had also expanded his revenues by encouraging caravans to pass through his territories with safe escort, and only levying the sharia-ordained duty of one-fortieth.
The only way to avoid his territory was to skirt the Hindu Kush to Herat, a circuitous route to Bokhara which Burnes eschewed. Jabbar Khan organised a passage for them with a small caravan that was going via Khulm, traversing the territory but not the capital of Murad Beg, led by an experienced kafilbashi named Hyat. Burnes and Gerard now became Armenian merchants, Sikunder Armeni and Gerard Armeni, while Mohan Lal was going to work in one of the Indian banking houses in Bokhara. The surveyor Mohammed Ali became an Indian merchant. Jabbar insisted on riding with them for several miles and Burnes wrote, ‘I do not think I ever took leave of an Asiatic with more regret than I left this worthy man.’36
The high passes of the Hindu Kush were dangerous. At 12,000 feet they rode with boots frozen to their stirrups and eyes snowblind. They crossed a series of ravines on weak snowbridges.37 As usual, Burnes’ published account downplayed the danger, but he wrote privately:
Our journey across the Hindoo Koosh was […] a fearful undertaking. We wound for days among hills and ravines, which hid the sun from our view, and rose over us to a perpendicular height of two and three thousand feet […] I had my nose frost-bitten […] and nearly lost my sight from the glare […] I shall indeed be sorry when our journey draws to a close, for I have never spent a happier time in my life […]38
Burnes was not merely conforming to an archetype of the dauntless British explorer: he was helping to create that archetype. Gerard wrote to his brother that the Hindu Kush was nothing compared to the Himalayas proper.39 But he wrote to a fellow officer that, entering the fatal territory of Khulm and Bokhara, he expected they would be ‘martyred’.40
On 26 May the small party were surrounded by a large force of raiders. Fortunately, the chief of Kamard, Rahmatulla Khan, had sent his son to guide them on this stage and the band, owing some allegiance to the father, were persuaded to let them go. But it had been a close call.
At Bamian, they paused to study the famous giant statues, which Burnes correctly identified as Buddhist. The valley of Bamian was hauntingly desolate, and studded with low remains of habitations. These were deserted, but the caves pockmarking the cliff face around the Buddhas were inhabited. One of the giant figures itself contained caves where people were living, and at night the glimpses of torchlight in the recesses, combined with the odd human shout, were unnerving. Gerard wrote ‘one dwells in the contemplation of the scene, till it actually appears of an infernal kind […]’.41 From Bamian they had an escort provided by the Governor, Haji Khan Kakar, until they reached the territories of Murad Beg.
Burnes and Gerard now wound their turban cloths close around their faces, but arriving at Khulm, it was plain that their disguise was far from foolproof. They were detained in the town until word could be received from Murad Beg as to whether they were allowed to proceed. On 1 June 1832 Mohan Lal was invited to dinner by Chiman Das, a prominent Hindu merchant, who told him that he realised that he was a munshi travelling with farangis. Chiman Das suggested to Mohan that, if the British really were spies, he extort money from them and split it with him, but Lal stoutly maintained they were just poor men returning home.
The customs official who detained them was sympathetic, but in fear of his own life if he allowed them to pass without express permission of Murad Beg. He had seen through their disguise, but Burnes bribed him with twenty gold tillars. Eventually, he agreed to take Burnes to Murad, while the rest of the party waited at Khulm. Burnes was genuinely worried about his appearance before the notorious Murad Beg. As he departed for the seventy miles to Kunduz, Mohan Lal noted: ‘perseverance appeared to vie with the anxiety and melancholy which appeared on his face’.
At Kunduz they discovered that Murad was in Khanabad, and on 5 June they were escorted there to meet him. Murad Beg accepted his officer’s description of Burnes as Armenian without close scrutiny. Burnes wrote home that he ‘quite humbugged Moorad Khan and all his court, and got a dress of honour and an escort out of the country’, though he did add that it was the customs officer who did the talking.42 Appearing before Murad Beg in disguise, Burnes had been in very great danger, and was not out of it yet. His account of an ‘escort out of the country’ was untrue. He galloped all the way back from Kunduz to Khulm in a single stage, and Gerard and he then dashed out of Khulm without even stopping to collect food and their clothes, leaving Mohan Lal and the rest of the party to pay, pack and follow. Burnes reported that Murad Beg was ‘a cruel and unrelenting man’.43 Mohan Lal noted that Beg had sex with every little boy he saw, either by payment or by force.44
On 10 June 1832 Mohan and the party with an escort of horsemen provided by Chiman Das rejoined Burnes and Gerard at Mazar i Sharif. They stayed at the same lodging house where Trebeck had died of fever. Burnes, who had a sentimental side, was very affected. They learnt that it was in Mazar that most of Moorcroft’s effects had been plundered on his way towards Bokhara, and the chief was believed to possess many of his papers. But warned that the city was full of Islamic fanaticism, they reluctantly decided it was best not to pursue this.
On 11 June they reached Balkh, where they were subjected to search by customs officials. The chief officer attempted to seduce Mohan Lal, offering him Rs400 and reciting to him a Pashtun verse which Lal translated as ‘If you sit on my head and my eyes, I will bear you pleasantly because you are agreeable’! Gerard misses this incident and specifically commends the customs officer as helpful, taking 10 per cent of their declared gold coin as duty but not troubling them further.45
For Burnes, Balkh had more innocent pleasures than those requested by the customs officer. He noted the climate was delightful, despite the area’s reputation as unhealthy. The apricots were as big as apples, while Burnes was happy to have cherries for the first time since arriving in India.46 He spent time wandering around the ancient ruins, making sketches and scratching for coins and artefacts.
In the early hours of a moonlit night, their little party wound out of the town for a simple but moving ceremony. Led by an aged haji who had taken part in the burial, they paid their respects to the graves of Moorcroft and Guthrie, buried at the margin of the foetid marshland. As unbelievers, Moorcroft and Guthrie had been consigned to this desolate spot and their graves unmarked. The haji advised them against erecting a grave marker, lest it become a focus for desecration.
By comparison, at least young Trebeck’s lonely grave in Mazar had received some respect, lying in a garden in the shade of a mulberry tree: ‘A whole party, buried within twelve miles of each other, held out small encouragement to us who were pursuing the same track and were led on by nearly similar motives.’47
On 15 June, after a twelve-hour ride in temperatures that peeled skin from their faces, they reached the banks of the Amu or Oxus. They were unable to resist galloping straight to the river and throwing themselves in. Their work now went into overdrive, as the practicability of a Russian invasion through Balkh and Kabul, after coming down the Oxus from the Aral Sea, was the priority subject set for them to investigate.
They had been surveying the route all the way from Kabul; they now needed information on the Oxus itself, its navigability and the availability of boats, its fords and ferries, and the capacity of the countryside to provision an army, plus the allegiances and views of local chiefs and the capability of their forces. Very little of this was to be published by Burnes, but rather was provided in reports to the Secret Department. The two carefully surveyed the river, marking the precise co-ordinates, altitude, width, depth and flow at this strategic crossing place, concluding that the river was a little smaller in all respects than the Indus at Attock.
On 17 June they crossed the Amu at Termez in a ferry pulled by swimming horses, a method Burnes thought might usefully be adopted in India. Their crossing point was slightly to the west of where the Soviet ‘Friendship bridge’ stands today. Gerard noticed that the ferry looked more capable than anything on an Indian river, of a construction similar to a British sloop. They continued their journey by camel, slung one each side in panniers four feet long, a stifling and sickening method of travel. Karshi in June is over 100°F and not even pleasant in a LandRover. As usual, Burnes is reticent about the hardships, but Mohan Lal not so: ‘People who have not been in the desert, and have not undergone the torment of thirst, can scarcely believe our sufferings […] my tongue stuck to my palate, my parched lips burned with the heat of fire, and my throat was so dry that I could not speak.’
Burnes, as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, had a wide range of intellectual interest, which fortunately included medicine. He and Gerard had both caught malaria in Balkh or Termez – where it is still endemic today. Alexander went down first with severe fever – the only time he is recorded as getting ill. Gerard, who had been suffering bad health for months, followed a few days later.
Burnes had taken a revolutionary new treatment with him – quinine – and taking large doses at the first sign of fever he used this successfully to combat the illness, which had killed both Moorcroft and Trebeck. Gerard, a Company surgeon, refused Burnes’ quinine and treated himself with calomel. Calomel, or mercury chloride, is a naturally occurring, mildly toxic, laxative mineral widely used by the British at this period. It was normally stored in cedar boxes; exposure to sunlight changes it to highly poisonous mercury bichloride.
Only once extremely weak did Gerard agree to try quinine. Company surgeons were still treating malaria with bleeding. Emily Eden in 1838 had hers treated with leeches, and then with morphine. The Transylvanian physician to the Sikh Court, John Honigberger, was frustrated: ‘As for the deadly poisons calomel and opium! These glitter as brightly on the East Indian medical horizon as they do amongst English physicians.’48 Eventual acceptance of quinine in the British Empire is generally attributed to the success of Baikie’s Benue expedition in 1857.49 Burnes’ adoption of cutting-edge medicine – presumably advised by James – was a generation ahead of his time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
To Bokhara and Back
It was not that difficult to reach Bokhara. The hard part was to get back again. Moorcroft, Trebeck, Stoddart, Conolly and arguably Gerard all died in the attempt. Burnes succeeded. He was not unique. Joseph Wolff was a successful contemporary, Witkiewicz and other Russian envoys were known there. A formal Russian mission in 1820 was associated with a brave German doctor, Eversmann, who spent three months living in disguise gaining covert intelligence.
The merchant Anthony Jenkinson of the Royal English Muscovy Company had reached Bokhara in 1558. Jenkinson found little interest in English broad-cloth, and was unable due to local wars to proceed to Tashkent, Khokand and China as planned. But he did succeed in freeing twenty slaves and making friends with the Emir of Bokhara.1 The journey was probably safer in Jenkinson’s time, during the great flowering of Islamic culture in Central Asia, which had since narrowed to a more obscurantist view.
Bokhara remained the most prosperous trading centre of Central Asia, at the hub of routes from Kabul, India, Russia, Persia and Western China. Its population of 150,000 included a large merchant community, over 800 Hindu bankers from Shikarpur and Multan, and some 3,000 Jews. It was not a closed Muslim city, merely a paranoid one. Merchants of all nationalities thronged the streets, but had first to establish their bona fides as genuine traders. Many who failed this test were summarily executed.
Bokhara had been in decline for centuries from its central position in Muslim theology, but a mild revival had been undertaken in the 1820s by a reforming Emir, who reinvigorated the state with religious underpinning, just as Dost Mohammed was doing in Kabul. The next young Emir, Nasrullah Khan, had inherited something of the religious mystique of his predecessor but was a bad character. He had beheaded three of his full brothers and twenty-eight half brothers or first cousins. and became notorious in Britain for the execution of Stoddart and Conolly, by no means his only European victims. Burnes was in extreme danger while in Bokhara.
Disease was perhaps a still greater risk. Bokhara was recovering from a cholera epidemic. The most immediate result for Russia of attempts to boost trade with Bokhara was the arrival, via merchants, of cholera in Moscow in 1830; 9,000 people were infected and 5,000 died.2
Cholera is a marker of trade flows from Central Asia in this period. The first cholera pandemic originated in Calcutta in 1817 and spread through the Punjab, Afghanistan and Bokhara to southern Russia. The second originated in Bokhara in 1828 and spread through Russia to Western Europe, and thence to Great Britain, Ireland and the USA. Cholera was a new horror outside Asia and its spread a direct result of trade globalisation. The widespread revolutionary outbreaks in European cities in 1830–1 and 1848–9 coincided with cholera pandemics travelling from Bokhara.
Bokhara faced severe water shortages. It stood six miles from the river and was fed by a canal which was only opened one day in fifteen, to conserve water, and also served as a sewer. Burnes reported a major drought; the canals had been dry for 60 days. People existed on a rationed supply from the city’s tanks, filled from the sewerage-laden canal.3 This lack of clean water contributed to the cholera.
Once Burnes reached Bokhara, he felt sufficiently secure in his achievement to send back a report to Bentinck himself. He reported hopefully that the twenty-seven-year-old Emir was entirely dependent upon his minister, the Kush-Begi ‘an elderly man, partial to Europeans and from whom we received much civility’.4 Burnes had been summoned to see the Kush-Begi or ‘Lord of Chiefs’ the very day they arrived, 27 June 1832. Gerard had been put to bed, still delirious. Burnes had changed into good quality native clothes and walked into the Ark or Citadel of Bokhara, where it was forbidden to non-Muslims to ride. He had carefully observed etiquette, and had got on well with the Kush-Begi following a two-hour interrogation. The Kush-Begi was an imposing man, well-dressed and well-spoken, who wore fine clothes and the high-heeled long leather boots favoured by Uzbek nobility of both sexes.
The Kush-Begi agreed that they might reside in a private house rather than the public caravanserai. They had to wear ‘infidel’ dress – a black gown fastened with a simple rope, and a black cap. Burnes rather skates over this, perhaps he saw it as degrading, but Gerard is quite explicit. They were never allowed to ride in the city, and did all their writing secretly by hooded lights. Gerard notes that Moorcroft had suffered none of these restrictions, but he had declared himself a British Envoy, whereas Burnes and Gerard appeared as officers travelling home privately. They never felt any hostility.5 Burnes asked the Kush-Begi whether he might meet the Emir. This alarmed the minister, who replied: ‘I am as good as the Emir […] what have travellers to do with Courts?’6 Only years later did Burnes realise ‘it seems he feared the King doing us an injury […].’7
The Kush-Begi’s son committed a rape while the party were in Bokhara. He was tried before the Qazi, and the brutal sentence of seventy-five lashes carried out, then he was led around the town tied to a scrawny camel, subject to the abuse of the mob. His father officiated at the punishment. Bokharan justice was fierce but impartial. Burn
es noted that the women of Bokhara were attractive and the men were not jealous, adding in Latin that they were more interested in young boys.8
Alexander sent the alarming information to Bentinck that the Russians had applied to Bokhara for permission to bring an army through their territories to invade India, but that the Emir had declined.9 This was a fiction invented by the Kush-Begi to curry favour with the British. He played the same game with Russian envoys.
Burnes went outside the city to visit the tomb of Bahaudin Naqshbandi, a Sufi divine whose followers still constitute an important sect, and whose descendants settled in Jerusalem, where they live today under increasing pressure from a government which covets their district. Burnes enjoyed the festive atmosphere of the Bokharans galloping out to the tomb on donkeys, and noted that the locals considered two visits to this tomb the equivalent to performing the Haj.10
In Bokhara Burnes met Sarwar Khan and his brother Omar. Sarwar Khan was the paramount chief of the Lohanis, the great nomadic tribe which ranged annually deep into India and as far north as Bokhara. The Lohanis were the principal carriers of goods between India and Central Asia, trading as individuals, and operating as financiers too. Their caravans could consist of 30,000 camels, and groups divided and reunited as they wandered a network of traditional routes, varying according to climate, grazing, wars and available merchandise. Burnes immediately realised that the Lohanis were the essential conduit for the penetration of Central Asia by British goods.