by Neil Oliver
While Harlan remained as confident as ever—indeed, thrilled by the seemingly limitless opportunities for self-advancement he saw before him—his army did not. Probably because they knew the dangers more intimately than their commander, the soldiers had allowed themselves to be spooked. Just months into his journey, Harlan awoke one morning to find that the bulk of his men had deserted him in the night. Realizing that force was no longer a realistic option, he dismissed all but a dozen of the remainder and struck out for Kabul—dressed in the garb of a holy man. Harlan was a gifted linguist but had not yet had time to fully acquire either the tongue of the Afghans or the neighboring languages of Persian and Arabic. Rather than trying to talk to those he encountered, and so risking giving himself away as a foreigner—a feringhee—he would play dumb and allow the natives to think he was too deep in holy contemplation to bother himself with tittle-tattle.
Whether the locals were fooled—or rather chose to indulge an apparently harmless feringhee blessed with useful medical skills—is hard to say. In any case Harlan and his followers reached the city of Peshawar, where he was well treated, before pressing on to Kabul itself, reaching the lair of Dost Mohammed Khan in the spring of 1828.
Harlan was impressed by the city and its master, “a man of slender proportions, tall, and about 37 years of age.” And herein lay the secret of the American’s success: it seems he carried no prejudice, no bigotry and had instead the wisdom of an open mind. He allowed for difference, for points of view that differed from his own. Rather than seeking to judge, to impose his own culture, he absorbed the ways of his hosts. While Britain—and more particularly the British East India Company—sought to control new lands by “making the world England,” Harlan was prepared to be changed by what he experienced.
The time he spent with Dost Mohammed persuaded Harlan that his host was too firmly in place to be routed by any invasion on behalf of Shujah. Abandoning his plans to subvert and overthrow the incumbent in Kabul—having in fact come to admire him—he decided instead to seek his fortune and his empire elsewhere. Dost Mohammed was after all just one ruler among many in the lands beyond Britain’s thrall—and certainly not the most powerful. Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, he had learned, employed a handful of well-paid European mercenaries to lead his forces—and this modern army had made him second only to the mighty British Empire. Ranjit was also a sworn enemy of the King of Kabul and perhaps, reasoned Harlan, his own new-found knowledge about his erstwhile host might endear him to the ruler of the Punjab.
If it looks to our eyes as though the Quaker from Pennsylvania was engaged in a game, moving from square to square on a great chessboard, then that is entirely fitting. Long before Harlan arrived in India, the British Empire had persuaded itself it had an imperial rival in Central Asia. Tsarist Russia had made her own territorial gains. In 1800, the two empires were separated by around 2,000 miles, most of it unmapped and unknown to outsiders. Steadily though, as the early years of the 19th century began to pass, the Tsar’s forces began to make gains at the expense of a third, ancient empire in the region—that of Persia. In 1813, the first Russo-Persian War was brought to an end by the Treaty of Gulistan. The Persians were on the back foot, and under the terms of the treaty they accepted that the lands known to us today as Azerbaijan, Daghestan and Georgia belonged now to the Tsar.
To say that Britain was alarmed by all of this is a gross understatement. Convinced that Russia would shortly attempt to make inroads on the fabulous imperial jewel that was India, British agents began to make their first moves in what became known as the Great Game. Historians are generally agreed that it was fueled primarily by British paranoia and Russo-phobia—that the Russians at the time were unaware that any “game” was even being played, far less that they were one of the two players. But it is undeniable that each empire began to play closer and closer attention to the moves and supposed objectives of the other.
The central playing field of the game was Afghanistan. Britain was obsessed by the possibility that Russia might take control of the country and use it as a lofty staging post for moves into India itself. Josiah Harlan therefore—with his own dreams of empire—had stumbled unwittingly into a drama the scale of which he could hardly have imagined. And yet—and here is an important trait of men like Harlan and of manly men in general—even if someone had sat him down and described the global forces at work, he would have been unfazed. There are those (indeed, most of us) who believe we are only pawns, tiny cogs in a machine driven by engines of impossible power; those people play their insignificant part and keep their heads down. And then there are the few, like Josiah Harlan, who consider that it is individuals, and not great empires, that dictate both their own destinies and those of the nations around them. Josiah Harlan was of the sort of manly men who do whatever they want, and damn the consequences; who find the world around them unacceptable and so set out to shape it in their own image.
Taking his leave of Dost Mohammed, Harlan crossed into the Punjab in 1829, arriving in the city of Lahore and swiftly seeking out one of Ranjit’s mercenaries. He was Frenchman Jean Francois Allard, the pre-eminent member of the small cadre of foreigners who had modernized the Sikh army along the lines of contemporary European forces. The maharajah himself, Harlan soon discovered, was a man of insatiable appetites, and with the wealth and power to indulge them all. He expected his guests to behave likewise, but pragmatic Harlan merely turned a blind (Quaker) eye to his would-be employer’s excesses while managing to avoid much if any active participation. He soon proved his worth to Ranjit Singh and by 1832 had been installed as Governor of the large and rich province of Gujrat. He served his employer—and himself—very well in his new role. In addition to the governance of his own province, he continued to advise the maharajah on wider issues.
When trouble flared between the Sikhs and Dost Mohammed Khan over control of the disputed Peshawar region, Harlan showed himself to be an arch manipulator and diplomat. The Afghans were wrong-footed and forced to withdraw, back to their mountain fastnesses—and yet Dost Mohammed seemingly found it in his heart to be impressed by the machinations of his former guest. When Harlan finally argued with Ranjit, over allegations that the American was profiting from the stamping of counterfeit coinage, it was to Kabul that he fled to lick his wounds and make new plans. Dost Mohammed, who knew a good thing when he saw it, welcomed him back with open arms.
Harlan’s dreams of glory finally came within his grasp in 1838 when Dost Mohammed allowed him to march at the head of an Afghan army against a neighboring warlord and slave trader named Murad Beg. As a Quaker, Harlan was deeply opposed to the mere notion of slavery—and this alone would have served as his motive for going to war on Dost Mohammed’s behalf. But he was also proud of the fighting prowess of “his” Afghans and determined to prove that such a force could cross the Hindu Kush. This supposedly impenetrable waste of glaciers and mountains had been seen as a permanent barrier since the time of Alexander. Harlan believed great riches and power could be amassed by an army—and a leader—able to complete the journey intact.
Not only was the American able to prove his point about his army’s mobility—and crush the threat from Murad Beg—he also found time, high in the mountains of western Afghanistan, to celebrate his rise to leader of men. As his army crested the Koh-i-Baba mountain range of the Hindu Kush, he ordered a full review of his troops—and a flag-raising ceremony the like of which may never be seen again:
“I surmounted the Indian Caucasus, and there upon the mountain heights, unfurled my country’s banner to the breeze, under a salute of twenty-six guns,” he wrote. “On the highest pass of the frosty Caucasus, that of Kharzar, the star-spangled banner gracefully waved amidst the icy peaks and soilless, rugged rocks of a sterile region, seemingly sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity.”
There is an old joke that says when God was almost finished creating the Earth he found he had an enormous pile of rocks left over. From these, he made Afghanistan. Yet for Jos
iah Harlan it was a land that offered him all he needed or wanted. He noted the “soilless, rugged rocks” and yet the admitted sterility of the place made no difference to him. In his own mind, within his sense of himself, he had brought everything required of a king. Barren rocks they may have been, but for Harlan they served as firm foundations for the greatness he believed had been his all along.
It was that same campaign that gifted him the opportunity to have himself elevated to the status of royalty. En route to successfully tackling the slave trader, Harlan encountered men of the Hazara clan of Ghor, a western province of Afghanistan, led by their chief Mohammed Reffee Beg. The Hazaras were so impressed by the discipline of Harlan’s troops, and by the power of his heavy artillery, they promptly made the American an extraordinary offer. Would he accept the title of Prince of Ghor, and lead the Hazaras to greatness?
For Josiah Harlan, it was the step he had longed to take. As Prince of the Hazaras he could build an empire, here in the mountains of western Afghanistan. In time, he thought, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with any other emperor—and be greeted by them as brother and equal. The title of Prince of Ghor was a hereditary one, meaning it would pass in due course to Harlan’s heirs, for all time. A contract was duly prepared, signed by both parties, and exists to this day.
As a fiction, “The Man Who Would Be King” requires a considerable suspension of disbelief, but the truth of Josiah Harlan is stranger and more impressive yet. Rejected by a woman on the other side of the world, he had set out into an unknown future armed only with books about botany, history and medicine. He had no medical training yet passed himself off as a surgeon; he had no military training and precious little experience of fighting of any kind and yet became a warlord; he was an American citizen from Pennsylvania and yet was made Prince of Ghor. This, then, was the world as it was, not so very long ago—and the kind of men who once strode upon it.
But by the time the new prince was making his way back to Kabul, in April 1839, to celebrate his many triumphs, the wider world had changed once more. Britain had made a decisive move in its Great Game. Convinced that the Afghanistan of Dost Mohammed Khan was growing politically close to Russia, the British Army of the Indus had been dispatched to replace him. The more docile Shujah Shah Durrani, who’d spent most of the last 30 years as a guest of the British at Ludhiana, was soon paraded in triumph through the streets of Kandahar. But while the British liked to think the Kandaharis were delighted by the return of the exile, in truth his day was long past. His presence was more likely to light the match of violence than it was to bring peace and reconciliation.
The juggernaut rumbled inexorably toward Kabul, flattening the once impregnable walls of Ghazni along the way. With the infidels less than 100 miles from his capital, Dost Mohammed sent emissaries to find a way in which he might cling to power. He offered to surrender the throne to Shujah in return for being appointed as his vizier. But Shujah, drunk on the heady fumes of a kingdom regained, would settle for nothing less than exile for his erstwhile usurper.
Harlan might have fled, or gone over to the side of the British. All had changed however, for the man from Pennsylvania. Unlike the British, who chose to ride roughshod over anything unfamiliar in their path, Harlan had learned to value and to love the people of his latest adoptive home. After all, he was now a prince of Afghanistan in his own right. He chose instead to stand at the shoulder of the Amir whose overthrow he had once plotted, and in defiance of the man who had first employed him to do so.
With the Prince of Ghor beside him, Dost Mohammed made a last attempt to rally his forces:
“You have eaten my salt these 13 years,” he cried out to the troops who were now seeking to melt away before his eyes. “Grant me but one favor in requital of that long period of maintenance and kindness—enable me to die with honor…one last charge against the cavalry of these Feringhee dogs; in that onset I will fall; then go and make your own terms with Shah Shujah!”
It was to no avail. The remnants of his army deserted him and Kabul fell. Dost Mohammed and a handful of followers fled the city on horseback, heading for the north and the Hindu Kush. Harlan stayed behind for a while, but was soon so disgusted and shamed by the conduct of the British and their puppet king Shujah that he too left for air less tainted by ignorance and heathen folly.
The occupation of Kabul by the Army of the Indus was briefly self-satisfied—but ignorance and bad planning meant it was never really secure and always ultimately doomed. While officers paraded through the streets and palaces in all their finery, making free with the Afghan women and anything else that caught their eyes, righteous vengeance made its dark plans. The maintenance of open supply lines back to British India depended upon cash bribes to the Ghilzyes tribes who controlled the treacherous mountain passes back to Jalalabad. Crucially, these same Ghilzyes loathed Shujah almost as much as they loathed the British that had forced him upon them. When the British halved the payments as part of an ill-conceived cost-cutting exercise, the chieftains promptly shut the passes. The army of occupation was cut off from the world it knew and could control…and the stage was set for tragedy.
Having taken leave of Afghanistan Harlan headed not for home, but for Russia. He was briefly a hit with high society there—and may even have tried to interest the Tsar’s government in his route through the Hindu Kush—but soon the call of the land of his birth became too strong to resist. He was back home by 1841—and from the far side of the Atlantic could read in the newspapers about what would soon unfold in Afghanistan. By the end of that year the British forces in Kabul—4,500 fighting men and more than 12,000 wives, children and other camp followers—finally lost control of the city and the country. The mob had taken and killed the senior commanders before a wholesale withdrawal was underway. The retreat from Kabul was a horror of biblical proportions. In the teeth of winter, the straggling column attempted to march the 90 miles through frozen, treacherous passes toward the sanctuary of British Jalalabad. Afghan chiefs who had promised safe conduct now unleashed their warriors upon the soldiers, women and children. A single survivor—assistant army surgeon Dr. William Brydon—arrived in Jalalabad on January 13 to tell the awful tale.
Josiah Harlan, of course, might have been able to warn them in time. Indeed, if his value to the occupying force had been identified and understood, it could all have been so different. But his knowledge and experience of the places and their peoples—amassed during 18 years in which he had learned not to judge but to understand—was cast aside by the British along with so much else. Soon they would return, crushing the rebellion and trampling into the dust any hope of real and lasting peace. Dost Mohammed returned to his throne in Kabul and would be a faithful ally of Britain and the Company in years to come. But the future of relations between Afghanistan and the West was already set. The chance of love and understanding had come and gone.
Back home in America, the Prince of Ghor still had fire in his blood. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he volunteered to raise a regiment of Union soldiers. His hatred of slavery was a strong as ever—but the old warlord’s ways would prove an uncomfortable fit with the modern army of the North. He duly raised his regiment and was effortlessly popular with the rank and file. His ambitious young officers, however, found they could not tolerate the ways of a hoary old soldier who had learned his techniques of command and discipline among the pitiless mountains of the Hindu Kush. Their hysterical complaints eventually brought about a court martial, and although Colonel Harlan was eventually exonerated and cleared of any fault, his military career was over.
He dreamed then of traveling once more—perhaps back to Afghanistan to reclaim his princedom; perhaps to China to tutor the Emperor in the ways of war. It was in 1871, while living in San Francisco and still making plans to return to the East, that time finally caught up with the Prince of Ghor. A hard life well lived had taken its toll and he was suffering from tuberculosis when he collapsed in the street one day while out and about his business.<
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There were no mourners at the funeral of the man who would be king, no tears shed. Only in the still frozen mountains of the Hindu Kush, carried on the wind and in the howling of the wild dogs that roam there still, is his name heard any more.
The luck of the Irish
Leaders are hardly immune to personal disaster. Scott would have understood from childhood that the sort of men who set out to change the world were at the greatest risk of being destroyed by it. He would also have known that even the most careful and rigorous preparations could never be enough to cope with every eventuality. Another vital lesson to be learned from the life and death of a man like Josiah Harlan is that all human endeavor depends, at least in part, upon luck.
Josiah was an adventurer and a rogue. He was highly intelligent and self-taught with a natural genius for strategy, planning and diplomacy. He was a talented and insightful student of human nature and adept at winning others round to his point of view. But in addition to all these abilities, he knew how to ride his luck; when to hold the cards and when to put them down and walk away from the table.
On January 3, 1902, as the Discovery crossed the Antarctic Circle, it still remained to be seen whether or not Scott was a lucky man. From Lady Newnes Bay he went ashore and headed inland, accompanied by Dr. Wilson and Lieutenant Royds. Eager to take advantage of any available high ground for a better look at the surrounding terrain, they scrambled up the slopes of the closest of the volcanic peaks. From an unnamed summit they took in their first view of the Great Ice Barrier, its awe-inspiring mass striding away from them as far the eye could see.
Back aboard ship, they set a course alongside the great white cliffs of ice towering 200 to 300 feet above their heads. They steamed along the Barrier’s length for days, marveling at the very existence of an “eighth wonder of the world.” While they watched from the deck, icebergs ten miles or more in length and weighing millions of tons were “calved” from the great mass of it and began their silent journeys toward the north.