by Neil Oliver
Suddenly out of the blackness appeared the unmistakable outline of a Chinese junk. With no other option available to him, Kerans ordered full steam ahead. The timber sides of the local vessel were no match for the armored steel plate of the Amethyst and at a full speed of 19 knots she cut through the obstacle as though there was nothing before her bow but driftwood.
All that remained to obstruct them now was the mighty communist-held fort at Woosung, within sight of the sea. Searchlights played across the dark water and found the Amethyst, in all her battered, bloodied and magnificent defiance. She would not be stopping now, or even slowing down. This was the course she had chosen and she would not be thwarted by any foe.
And then the strangest thing happened. She was within easy reach of the communist guns. The searchlights had her lit up like a fair and every pair of lungs aboard had drawn in a breath and held it. But no gun fired. The moment dragged on and the peace remained unbroken. Perhaps right there at the end the communists were simply glad to be seeing her leave their company once and for all.
A boom lay stretched across the mouth of the river and without a thought the Amethyst burst through the final obstruction and plunged into the open sea. Directly ahead was a second ship of war, thundering toward them. It was the Consort, the destroyer that had tried so valiantly to help them months before, with the loss of many lives.
As the Consort’s crew cheered the return to the fold of that wounded frigate, a message was received over the telegraph: “Have rejoined the Fleet south of Woosung,” it read. “No damage or casualties. God Save the King.”
The Amethyst returned to Britain for a refit in November 1950. Thereafter she saw active service in the Korean War before starring as herself in the 1956 film of the Yangtze Incident entitled Their Greatest Glory. Richard Todd played the part of Kerans. According to legend, a special effects explosion caused more damage aboard than anything the communists had manage to inflict in 1949.
A year later she returned to Plymouth, where she was sold and broken up for scrap.
In the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, a grove of ginkgo trees commemorates her dead.
The loneliness of command
Great ships and manly men—these were the kinds of things we used to produce in Great Britain. And the rest of the world accepted the truth of it like an immutable law of the universe. As a nation we used to have the best dreams and the grandest ambitions, and we fashioned from ourselves a breed of men that believed those dreams could be made reality with just a strong jaw, a firm handshake and a bit of backbone. We don’t make anything now. We’ve given away or destroyed all our industries and thousands of our men spend the best years of their lives answering phones in call centers or doing something or other in IT. A lot of the rest are at home minding the kids. How did we let all this happen? Men can be tamed and domesticated—that much is obviously true—but most would be better off out in the woods and hills, like the lions and tigers and bears.
At the very least, surely there are better and more productive things we could all be doing with our time? You’ve only got to look back to the fringes of living memory to find the sort of spirit that believed all things were possible.
On arrival in the port of Lyttelton, New Zealand, Scott and his crew were welcomed ashore by the locals as if they were long-lost sons. The men, many of whom were bachelors, were soon invited to live in the homes of local families, and more than one took rather too much advantage of the generous hospitality extended to them. The Wild is often just below the surface.
It wasn’t all good news. When you round up the sort of men ready and willing to leave the world behind and march off into the unknown wearing just scratchy woollen sweaters, scratchier tweed pants and sturdy shoes, you have to be ready to deal with some rough and tumble. Scott wrote that the drunkenness of some of his crew disgusted him and vowed to “have it out with them somehow.” He added: “There are only a few black sheep but they lend color to the flock.”
First Lieutenant Charles Royds, RN, one of the young naval officers assigned to Scott for the expedition, took a similar view of the men he commanded:
Better men never stepped a plank whilst they are at sea, but in harbor they are nothing but brute beasts, and I am ashamed of them, and told them so, and penitent indeed they are, but only until they are drunk again.
This is one of the perennial problems of leaders, heroes and manly men—the nature of us lesser mortals. The mass of humanity is barely up to the job, any job, and this inertia must be overcome by those few who are born knowing what all of us could be doing. Great leaders have all the chutzpah required to turn a shapeless rabble into an engine fit for travel to the ends of the earth.
Manly men aren’t just born—they are also made by other manly men who’ve been well schooled in the arts of discipline, routine and washing outdoors in cold water. But part of the loneliness of command, and therefore of commanders, is the acceptance of the fact that nothing very much is going to be achieved—ever—unless they drive it forward by the sheer force of their own will.
Scott went so far as to dismiss several of the worst offenders and replace them with others he was able to recruit in New Zealand. Finally on December 21 the Discovery was ready to continue her journey and steamed away from the earthly temptations of Lyttelton toward the terra incognita of Antarctica.
Did the burden of command weigh heavily on Scott’s shoulders at this time? If that were so, he went out of his way to conceal any trace of self-doubt or weakness from his officers and men. Much of this outward display of self-confidence was about the details. His officers noticed for example that he never once appeared in the wardroom unshaven. Though his efforts made it apparent he wasn’t particularly skillful about the chore of laundry, he always did his own clothes washing and made self-reliance and independence a visible part of his character. Whether in fair weather or foul, he expected his brother officers to conduct themselves like gentlemen. At mealtimes there was always Grace and the offering up of the Loyal Toast. There were fines for swearing. As far as possible, too, he remained in good humor in front of all of the men, sending the signal that all was well.
It was the right way to be, for as they continued south the reality of the challenge ahead was being made clear to all of them. Their destination would be no place for weaklings, or those unable to take care of themselves and of their comrades. Soon after departing from New Zealand, they encountered the pack-ice for the first time. When they stopped in Lady Newnes Bay to kill seals for fresh meat, they saw ice 150 feet thick. As if this wasn’t enough to demonstrate that here was a place owned and controlled not by man but by Mother Nature, the awesome Aurora Australis—the Southern Lights—put on regular performances.
Young Dr. Edward “Bill” Wilson, the expedition’s assistant surgeon and a devoutly religious man, wrote to his wife to tell her of the otherworldly scenes he was daily witnessing. And there’s another thing—letters. Not for these men the text or the hurried cell phone call. Instead they devoted countless hours to writing pages and pages of letters to wives, parents, children, friends and acquaintances. They somehow managed to make more of their time than we ever do today:
“I long to do as much as I can that others may share the joy I find in feasting my eyes on the colors of this wonderful place, and the vastness of it all,” wrote Wilson. “‘The works of the Lord are great and very worthy to be praised and had in honor’ but I do wish you could see them here.”
But no one new would be joining them for the foreseeable future, not their wives or anyone else. As far as the men aboard the Discovery were concerned, they were alone in the world. Alone at the top of the pyramid of command—with the lives of 47 men depending upon his abilities and judgmment—Scott had to look inward for inspiration. He would have to find the strength to match that of other great men—those who had faced the obstacle of sometimes unsatisfactory raw material and yet found ways to shape it in their own image.
Josiah Harlan, the Man
Who Would Be King
“Cut, you buggers—cut!” bellows Daniel Dravot, fearless and defiant to the last, as a priest uses a machete to hack at the mainstays anchoring a rope bridge across a terrifyingly deep ravine. He’s the Man Who Would Be King—King of Kafiristan—and he’s been found out at the last. Having allowed his subjects to believe he’s a god—nothing less than the reincarnated son of Alexander the Great and the rightful ruler of the land—he’s been brought down by the woman he chose to be his queen. Roxanne, beautiful but gullible, believed physical union with a god would cause her to burst into flames. In her terror, she bit his face as he tried to kiss her on their wedding day. As the blood flowed down his cheek, the priests realized Dravot was not a god but a mortal man—and a fraud. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to flee, accompanied by his best friend Peachy Carnehan, the pair are captured and marched to a ravine marking the boundary of Kafiristan. Carnehan is made to watch while Dravot is forced to march out onto the wooden planking of the bridge. Once he’s in the middle, suspended in space over a drop of thousands of feet, priests on either side cut the ropes and Dravot falls and falls and falls—he falls so far he’s out of sight before he smashes onto the rocks below. This is the end of the man who would be king…or at least, the end imagined by the great English storyteller Rudyard Kipling and turned into a movie by American director John Huston. The fact is that Kipling based his yarn on a real man—a real-life adventurer. And while his leading character was an English soldier called Daniel Dravot who met his maker in the fictional land of Kafiristan, the real man who would be king was a 19th century American Quaker who became Prince of Afghanistan, led his own regiment of Union soldiers during the American Civil War and died, alone and forgotten, on a street in the city of San Francisco.
Josiah Harlan was born on June 12, 1799. He was the ninth child and sixth son born to Joshua and Sarah Harlan, a Quaker couple living in Chester County, Pennsylvania. A seventh son, Edward, would complete the family four years later. Josiah grew to be a tall, strapping lad, self-confident to the point of arrogance. He was passionately interested in botany and medicine, and in Greek and Roman history. A voracious reader, he devoured the contents of every book he could lay his hands on, teaching himself Latin and ancient Greek along the way. He was especially fascinated by the achievements of Alexander the Great—and it was this interest that planted the seed for the adventure that would come to dominate his life.
In early 1820 Josiah’s father arranged for him to serve as the “supercargo”—the commercial manager—aboard a merchant ship bound for China and India. This first trip lasted over a year and the travel bug bit Josiah hard. In 1822, just months after his return home, he set sail aboard another merchant ship bound for the East.
The lands with which young Josiah now began to make contact comprised another world entirely. He took his first taste of that strangeness, that utter foreignness, less than 200 years ago, and yet the places he described are, in large part, as lost to us now as the civilizations of the ancient Greeks, the Aztecs or the Celts. More than anything else—the crucial difference from our 21st century perspective—the unknown world then was a far, far bigger place. In the early 19th century there were still places—many places—where a man who so wished could disappear, could cast off the person he had been before and become something quite new. In 1822, even the America of Harlan’s birth still held sights, sounds and smells as yet unknown to most white inhabitants of the continent; much of the West was still there for the winning, after all. But a white man disembarking from a sailing ship in a port like Calcutta, in the first decades of the 19th century, encountered wonders, dangers and possibilities too many and varied to be dreamed of today.
Harlan might well merely have skimmed the surface of those shocking, intoxicating, captivating worlds before returning home to a life of domesticity and convention. But while he was still in India he received a letter that would change everything—a letter from his fiancée. They had met back home the year before—during the break between his voyages—and Harlan had quickly fallen in love and proposed marriage. The woman had accepted his offer but, distance having made her heart grow less fond, she’d since met and married another. This then was the stark news she put in her letter to Josiah. Such a missive would have upset any faithful man, but for Harlan it built a wall separating his past from his future. It seems too that between the lines of that letter he glimpsed a truth he had not noticed before: that the distant world of Chester County, Pennsylvania, was a small one. Perhaps it looked to him now, from such a distant viewpoint, too familiar, too claustrophobic and too staid. It was anyway a world much too small.
Accordingly, he turned his back on all he had known before and set about making himself anew. Despite the fact that his only medical knowledge was self-taught from books, he joined the Honourable East India Company in 1824 as a military surgeon. He was part of the subsequent British invasion of Burma before illness overtook him and forced him to step out of the lines and take time to recover. The truth was, however, that he had begun to feel stifled and held back by the formalities and strict hierarchies of that most British of institutions. By 1826 he had resigned his post in favor of exploring the mysterious interior of the great sub-continent.
Already taking shape in his mind was an extraordinary fantasy—a dream rather more believable in the context of a fictional short story than anything normally contemplated in real life: having seen the British Empire in action, Harlan had begun to plan for nothing less than an empire of his own.
Beyond the vast tracts of India controlled for Britain by the Company lay the darkly exotic territory of the Punjab—still independent and ruled by the Maharajah Ranjit Singh, leader of the Sikhs. Precious little was known about the Punjab; the Maharajah and the Company lived side by side peacefully enough but each tended to mind his own business. But beyond the Punjab, further to the north and west, lay the entirely mysterious Muslim country of Afghanistan. A handful of Westerners had penetrated its borders—if hearsay was anything to go by, at least—but in 1826 next to nothing was known about who lived there, and how.
As a student of Greek history, Harlan knew Afghanistan had once numbered among the conquests of Alexander the Great—but that had been more than 300 years before the birth of Christ. During the intervening 20 or so centuries, a shroud-like curtain had swung into place between that forbidden and forbidding place, and the nations of the West. In the mind of a man like Josiah Harlan—a man who saw no earthly reason to set any boundaries around his ambitions—it seemed the lost world of Afghanistan might be the place in which a fellow could and should make for himself a kingdom. He could follow in the footsteps of Alexander and find space for his own greatness.
In the border town of Ludhiana, beside the Sutlej River marking the boundary between the Punjab and British India, Harlan succeeded in gaining an audience with a dispossessed King of Afghanistan. Shujah Shah Durrani had once sat upon a throne in the fabled city of Kabul, but had been deposed by his half-brother, a man named Dost Mohammed Khan. He lived now in elegant exile in British Ludhiana, brooding darkly about all that had been, and that might be again. Shujah and Dost Mohammed Khan were senior representatives of two rival clans competing endlessly for power. Dost Mohammed was of the Barakzai, while Shujah was of the Saddozai. But in truth, the whole country was riven by uncountable blood feuds caused by slights real or imagined—family against family, clan against clan—creating a lethal web of Byzantine complexity. Any man seeking to get himself involved in the ebb and flow of power between the clans did so at great peril.
It is therefore very hard to imagine the combination of self-confidence, gall and arrogance required to enable a Pennsylvania Quaker-turned-self-taught-surgeon to see himself as a warrior and leader of men in such a place. And yet Harlan gamely offered to raise an army, invade Afghanistan, depose the usurping prince and restore Shujah to his throne. In return, he told Shujah, he wanted to be made vizier—a high-ranking role that would confer upon Harlan en
ormous political clout within the country. It was the boldest of plans accompanied by the most audacious of demands, and yet his offer was readily accepted.
Harlan duly raised an army of mercenaries, renegades, mavericks and dreamers, the ranks given a bit of backbone and discipline by the presence of a few sepoys—Indian soldiers drilled in the ways of the British Army. He marched them, behind an American flag made specially for the job in Ludhiana, along the British bank of the Sutlej and on into the independent territories existing in the murky hinterland between British India, the Punjab and Afghanistan itself. As well as his few hundred troops, he brought a small fortune in gold and silver coins from Shujah—funds for meeting all traveling expenses and, more importantly, for bribing the many petty chiefs he would encounter along the way.
However unlikely the quest, however dangerous and unpredictable the terrain, Harlan confidently led his motley band deep into the wilds beyond British India. They reached the mighty Indus River that flows from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, through a valley that had cradled, each in its turn, the civilizations of the Buddhists, the Scythians, the Aryans and others besides. Harlan was by now far from any source of Western help or support. The influence of the British was lost behind him and he was now on the fringes of Afghanistan itself. Now it was the rivalries of strangers that would conspire to shape his fate. Ranjit Singh and his Sikhs, and the various Afghan warlords—Dost Mohammed Khan predominant among them from his power base in Kabul—watched each other constantly, vying for opportunities to strike. Now Josiah Harlan of Pennsylvania was among them and about to find the going more treacherously dangerous than before.