The Ogre, page 2
By the second century AD the Kushan empire was well established in the north-west of India and the Pamir mountains where it had control of the lucrative trade in silk. The Kushans, who were Buddhist, established a winter capital at Peshawar. The most famous Kushan king, Kanishka (ruled AD c.128–151), built innumerable monasteries and stupas all around the upper Indus valley, and in the environs of Gilgit, Hunza and Chitral particularly at the summit of various passes.
The Chinese embraced Buddhism in the first century AD. Thereafter Chinese monks made arduous pilgrimages into Tibet, the Himalaya and Karakoram. One of the main pilgrim routes went through Kashgar, over the Boroghil and Darkot passes to Swat. Faxian made this journey in AD 403 writing a detailed description of his travels which took a whole month from Kashgar to Darel. Hsuan-Tsang (AD 602–664) travelled for sixteen years through the entire length of the Himalaya keeping complete records for his book Datang-Xiyu-Ji (‘Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions’).
Many of the early travellers came to honour the most important of all Buddhist shrines in the region – the thirty-metre-high wooden statue of Maitreya Bodhisattva. The land around Darel and the Swat valley was fertile enough to support a large community of monks. It was from there that Guru Rinpoche, known also as Padmasambhava, the most revered of all the Buddhist missionaries, left the valley of Swat in the eighth century to spread Buddhism amongst the Tibetans. Until the eighth century anyone travelling through Tibet required a large military escort. After Guru Rinpoche’s conversion of the people to Buddhism, and with a rejuvenation of the Bon religion, peace reigned.
– Chapter 3 –
European Interest in the Region
Western Europeans became more interested in the far east of Asia after the arrival of the Mongol hordes in Eastern Europe. Plenipotentiaries had been sent by the Pope and the King of Hungary to make contact with the Great Khan then ruling his empire from the town of Karakorum (Harhorin) to the west of present-day Ulan Bator. Louis IX of France despatched a messenger, the Flemish monk and traveller William of Rubruck, on a fact-finding mission (1253–1255); on his return William reported the presence of a French female cook, a German silversmith and the nephew of an English bishop. The court and town was a bustle of commercial activity with people from all parts of the empire and beyond, engaged in trade but also in serious open debate. There were not only mosques but there was also a Christian church. His report tempered the entrenched European opinion that the Tatars were all barbarians.
Nearly 750 years ago Niccolo and Maffeo Polo left Venice for a second visit to the Great Khan, this time accompanied by Niccolo’s son, seventeen-year-old Marco. They travelled through Herat and Bokhara (Bukhara) on the Silk Road, north of the Pamirs and north of the Karakoram mountains, passing through Samarkand, Kashgar (Kashi), Yarkand (Shache) and Khotan (Hotan). They were the guests of Kublai Khan from 1275 to 1292. Marco was a particularly welcome guest due to his flair for languages and administrative skills.
The Mughal capital had been relocated to Dadu (Beijing) with a summer palace at Xanadu. The family travelled widely around the realm until finally they were allowed to leave China in a flotilla of fourteen junks bound for Hormuz in Persia. Two years after leaving the Great Khan they were back home in Venice. Marco’s triumphant return was short-lived for while fighting for Venice against Genoa during a naval battle he was captured and imprisoned where his memoirs were recorded.
Although Marco had penetrated deep into the heart of the Mongol soul and way of life he wasn’t the only European to journey east as William of Rubruck revealed. There were many others who, no doubt, had interesting tales to tell. It is the old story that, if you are to be famous, then you must write books or have books written about you! As luck would have it for Marco and for us he was imprisoned with Rustichello of Pisa, a well-known author of romantic novels, who, over the three years of their incarceration, wrote up Marco’s account of his remarkable journey east and the time he spent with the Great Khan. The Western world had the benefit of Marco’s observations made within the Great Khan’s inner circle. These revelations in his book, Travels, helped to bring the educated elite of Europe closer to the Far East and encourage others to emulate such ventures.
Marco made very little reference to the Karakoram and no reference at all to their name. The first Europeans to travel into the high mountains of Asia were the Jesuit missionaries based in Goa. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they came in search of Prester John, a legendary Christian patriarch and king popular in European chronicles, following up on rumours, subsequently found to be false, that there were enclaves of Nestorian Christians practising their religion in the Himalaya and Tibet. Portuguese traders had long ago reported, on their return to Goa, that up in the Himalaya they had heard that the inhabitants were practising their religion with all the trappings of a Catholic church service. What their informants had actually witnessed was the Buddhists practising their faith, swinging incense, lighting candles and chanting traditional incantations.
This came to light only after the journeys made throughout the region by a Portuguese Jesuit, Bento de Goes, in 1603, who joined a trading caravan from Lahore to Kabul, and later through the Pamirs to Yarkand. In doing so he became the first European to cross from India over the mountains into Central Asia. In 1624 courageous Catholic priests Father Antonio de Andrade and Brother Manuel Marques made a difficult four-month journey from Agra, crossing the 18,000-foot Mana Pass, to arrive in Tsaparang on the Upper Sutlej. It was there they established a mission, subsequently visited by many other Jesuits, some via the Mana Pass but others through Kulu and over the Rohtang Pass further to the east.
Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) will for ever be associated with the early explorations of Tibet. To know more about this it is worth referring to the comprehensive An Account of Tibet – The Travels of Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia, edited by Filippo de Filippi (1931). Early on in his travels Desideri became the first known European to have crossed the Zoji La when, in 1715, he journeyed from Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh. Missionary necessity enabled him to overcome his horror of travelling into the mountains since he found them ‘the very picture of desolation, horror and death itself ’. Almost a century later, at the end of the eighteenth century, Westerners began to romanticise the mountains and hold them as places also for spiritual renewal.
– Chapter 4 –
The East India Company
Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, London merchants petitioned Queen Elizabeth I for permission and support to trade in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Despite losing ships, the merchant adventurers persisted with their plans, and on the last day of 1600 the Queen granted a royal charter to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies’. Convoys of merchant ships made huge profits for the merchants and their aristocratic backers who were able to establish sprawling country estates on the proceeds of their profits. The company became known as the East India Company and also as the Honourable or British East India Company and informally as the John Company, after merchant and ship owner Sir John Watts, one of the company’s founders who was elected its governor in April 1601.
The East India Company expanded to account for half the world’s trade in basic commodities, such as silk, cotton, indigo dye, tea, opium and saltpetre, used in the manufacture of gunpowder, after seeing off the Portuguese, Dutch and finally the French. During the first 100 years it was primarily a trading company with the governors reluctant to spend profits building an empire. However, with the establishment of trading posts, the defeat of a Mughal viceroy in 1757 at the Battle of Plassey in Benghal, and with the general decline of the Mughal empire in India, the company expanded the territory it controlled.
By 1803 the East India Company had built up a private army of more than a quarter of a million troops which at the time was twice the size of the British Army. The company increasingly took over administration for the territories it had moved into until the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The following year the Government of India Act passed through parliament enabling the British Crown to take direct control of Indian affairs. The British involvement in India moved on a stage into the British Raj.
Commerce, the defence of empire, as well as missionary zeal, helped people to overcome fears of the snowy ranges. Servants of the East India Company were sent north to unravel the complexities of the geography so that trading routes might be established through the mountain barrier to the fabled cities on the silk route. Increasingly the East India Company and the British Government sought information about the topography as well as the inhabitants of the mountainous North-West Frontier so as to be prepared for incursions by Russian and even French aggressors.
In 1798, 40,000 French troops sailed from Toulon and Marseille for Egypt in preparation to take back India from the British. The governor general of India, Lord Wellesley, used this opportunity to embark upon a ‘forward policy’ by taking control of most of India except Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir, all of which remained independent kingdoms. This was a remarkable achievement in his seven years tenure as governor general. However, by then Nelson had destroyed all but two vessels of the French fleet lying off the coast of Egypt.
Despite this setback Napoleon kept alive the possibility of driving the British out of India and creating a French empire in the east. In 1807, full of confidence from recent victories in Europe, he suggested to Tsar Alexander I of Russia that the French and the Russians should combine to attack India from the north. Napoleon was prepared to contribute 50,000 troops. The East India Company and the British Government had heard many rumours about Russian designs on India which had largely been discounted due to the distances involved and the harsh terrain that would have to be crossed, but now, with the support of a military genius, the company was galvanised into action.
Napoleon’s adventures in Egypt suddenly alerted the British to the vulnerability of their Indian empire and how important it was to steer Persia and Afghanistan away from having any dealings with the French or the Russians. Napoleon had set the foreign policy agenda where India was concerned for the next 150 years.
The most likely route the French and Russian invasion would take was in the footsteps of Alexander, overland through Persia and into Afghanistan or Baluchistan. Overtures were therefore made to the shah of Persia who eventually came firmly under British influence thanks to Captain John Malcolm, a native of Eskdale in Dumfriesshire. This young soldier from the Borders was by 1810 more knowledgeable of Persia than any other Briton. Part of the arrangement made with the shah for his support of Britain was that the British would help train his army in modern warfare. Malcolm, who had by now been promoted to major general, came with a small group of highly trained officers to not only instruct the Persian army but also to check out and report back on the geography of Persia from a military perspective.
The next step was more hazardous, requiring secret incursions into other more hostile states to the north and south of Persia. All this is well written up in Peter Hopkirk’s book The Great Game. There the reader will know of the valiant efforts during 1810 of Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Henry Pottinger of the 5th Bombay Native Infantry. Both young men, barely in their twenties, were tasked to go where no European had gone before, through challenging terrain forever at the mercy of fickle and hostile tribal chiefs.
They had parted company in Nushki in Baluchistan to widen the scope of their reconnaissance; Charles Christie eventually entered Herat, western Afghanistan. He was only the second European to venture into this important town, strategically placed on the historic east–west route connecting Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan with the Indus valley. Pottinger travelled further west and eventually after three months, and more than 2,250 miles later, they were both together in Isfahan. They could now finally relax in friendly Persia, being out of danger from hostile tribesmen, and write up reports that proved to be invaluable to the British defence of India from the west. They had managed to evade capture by disguising themselves variously as holy men or as Tatar horse dealers. Such men, so resourceful and able to think on their feet, were the backbone of empire at this time, with more to follow in their footsteps.
As late as 1829, Lord Ellenborough, the president of the East India Company Board of Control, suggested, according to Charles Masson, the army deserter who became a government spy in Kabul, ‘We ought to have “information”. The first, second and third thing a government always ought to have is information.’ To this end there were fifteen confirmed Europeans on fact-finding missions into Afghanistan before the first Afghan War of 1839. One of the most effective of these agents was Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) who was in 1809 the first envoy to the court of Kabul.
By 1815 he had published, in two volumes, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, which, apart from a huge amount of detail covering the social and economic life of the people, also included a map of ‘Caubul On A Reduced Scale Shewing Its Relative Situation To The Neighbouring Countries’. The map featured ‘The Kurrakooram’ and the ‘Hemalleh’ as well as the major river systems of the area showing the Indus flowing through Kashmir. This was the first detailed map of the north-west Indian subcontinent. The map was of considerable use to future travellers and the book their bible for the next fifty years.
Elphinstone was born in Dumbarton and after an education at the Edinburgh Royal High School, joined the civil service of the East India Company arriving in Calcutta in 1796. He not only distinguished himself collecting information in Afghanistan but also impressed his superiors, including Wellesley, for having a natural aptitude for soldiering. He became governor of Bombay where he put his energy and negotiating skills into establishing education for Indians at a time when educating ‘natives’ was held in horror back in Britain. Elphinstone College, which he established in 1856, is a fitting legacy to his philanthropic endeavours. Another legacy was to have built the first bungalow on the Malabar Hill of Bombay. It quickly became, and remains, the upmarket residential area of the city where the former editor of the Himalayan Journal and secretary of the Himalayan Club lives.
The Franco-Russian attack never took place since France set about Russia and lost an army during the retreat in midwinter from a burnt-out Moscow. The Russians, emboldened by their success in reducing La Grande Armée from 400,000 to 9,000, again turned their attentions towards the East and the Indian subcontinent.
The springs to adventure might be narrowed down to man’s propensity for being inquisitive but also acquisitive. It was Cicero in the first century BC who observed ‘What has always fascinated man the most is the unknown’. This fascination surely must underlie one of the main reasons men left hearth and home to face unimaginable hardship and frustrations, sometimes over many years, journeying through the Karakoram and surrounding mountain ranges. Ostensibly, they may well have gone as geographers opening up routes for trade or defence, but they were also smitten with the addiction to the uncertainties of the unknown.
During the first half of the nineteenth century several brave and resourceful Europeans arrived on the scene, including William Moorcroft (1767–1825). To all outward appearances he explored the Karakoram and beyond out of commercial interest. He became obsessed with opening up trade with Central Asia between Yarkand and the Caspian Sea to ensure the protection of British India in depth by creating trading posts throughout the region. John Keay in When Men & Mountains Meet (1977) summed up his vision as ‘bringing prosperity and order whilst making of the region an outer rampart in the landward defences of India’.
Moorcroft was from Ormskirk in Lancashire and became a veterinary surgeon later employed by the East India Company in Bengal. During his time in India and Central Asia Moorcroft successfully investigated opportunities to develop a trade in wool with Tibet. In doing so he introduced wool from Tibetan goats that could be made into fine pashmina shawls. He is also credited with discovering the true source of the Indus and Sutlej and was thus able to prove they were quite separate from the Ganges river systems. Moorcroft also plotted on his map the Yarkand River and showed for the first time that it rises on the north flank of the Karakoram mountains. He was the first Englishman into Leh from where he made incursions into the Karakoram exploring the Nubra Valley at the eastern end of the range. He was regarded by his contemporaries, and later by Kenneth Mason, as one of the most important explorers of the region and, like so many, his life ended tragically still in harness in the service of the company.
From 1819 to 1825 Moorcroft travelled into Ladakh, Kashmir, Baltistan and Afghanistan where he eventually died in mysterious circumstances, possibly from a fever. However, his travelling companions, George Guthrie, George Trebeck and Moorcroft’s regular interpreter, perished at the same time also from unknown causes suggesting they may well have been murdered for their possessions or, as rumour would have it at the time, poisoned by Russian agents. Fortunately, Moorcroft’s papers were discovered and published in 1841, including a map, drawn up with the aid of a sketch made by George Trebeck.
Here, of course, use of the word ‘discover’ is in relative terms: it is not as in making discoveries in Antarctica where no one had ever been before; discoveries here invariably mean ‘seen for the first time by non-indigenous inhabitants’. The fact that Moorcroft spent years travelling as far as Bokhara in Uzbekistan looking for better stud horses to improve the bloodline of East India Company horses suggests that sheer curiosity to look around the next corner was a major motivating factor. In fact, he didn’t find any of the horses he was looking for in Bokhara but he did find considerable evidence of Russian penetration all along the Silk Road and to the north of the Karakoram.
