Montgomerie first trained his men, through exhaustive practice, to take a pace of known length which would remain constant whether they walked uphill, downhill or on the level. Next he taught them ways of keeping a precise but discreet count of the number of such paces taken during a day’s march. This enabled them to measure immense distances with remarkable accuracy and without arousing suspicion. Often they travelled as Buddhist pilgrims, many of whom regularly crossed the passes to visit the holy sites of the ancient Silk Road. Every Buddhist carried a rosary of 108 beads on which to count his prayers, and also a small wood and metal prayer-wheel which he spun as he walked. Both of these Montgomerie turned to his advantage. From the former he removed eight beads, not enough to be noticed, but leaving a mathematically convenient 100. At every hundredth pace the Pundit would automatically slip one bead. Each complete circuit of the rosary thus represented 10,000 paces.
The total for the day’s march, together with any other discreet observations, had somehow to be logged somewhere safe from prying eyes. It was here that the prayer-wheel, with its copper cylinder, proved invaluable. For concealed in this, in place of the usual hand-written scroll of prayers, was a roll of blank paper. This served as a log-book, which could easily be got at by removing the top of the cylinder, and some of which are still preserved in the Indian State Archives. Then there was the problem of a compass, for the Pundit was required to take regular bearings as he journeyed. Montgomerie decided to conceal this in the lid of the prayer-wheel. Thermometers, which were needed for calculating altitudes, were hidden in the tops of pilgrims’ staves. Mercury, essential for setting an artificial horizon when taking sextant readings, was hidden in cowrie shells and poured out into a pilgrim’s begging bowl when required. Concealed pockets were added to the Pundits’ clothing, and false bottoms, in which sextants could be hidden, were built into the chests which most native travellers carried. All this work was carried out in the Survey of India’s workshops at Dehra Dun under Montgomerie’s supervision.
The Pundits were also thoroughly trained in the art of disguise and in the use of cover stories. For in the lawless lands beyond the frontier their safety would depend on just how convincingly they could play the part of holy-man, pilgrim or Himalayan trader. Their disguise and cover had to stand the test of months of travelling, often in the closest intimacy with genuine pilgrims and traders. Some were away for years. One became the first Asiatic to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal, having contributed ‘a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia than any other individual of our time’. At least two never returned, while a third was sold into slavery, although he eventually escaped. In all, their clandestine journeys were to provide a wealth of geographical intelligence over some twenty years which Montgomerie and his fellow cartographers at Dehra Dun used to fill in many of the no-go areas on the British maps of Central Asia.
Just what drove men like Mirza Shuja to face such hardships and extreme dangers for their imperial masters has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps it was the inspirational leadership of Montgomerie, who took such a pride in their individual achievements, and who looked upon them as his sons. Or possibly it was the knowledge that they belonged to an elite, for each was aware that he had been hand-picked for this great task. Or maybe Montgomerie had managed to imbue them with his own patriotic determination to fill in the blanks on the Great Game map before the Russians did. In an earlier book, Trespassers on the Roof of the World, I have described some of the Pundits’ more prodigious feats of exploration, which I shall not attempt to retell here. Sadly, very little is known of these men as individuals, for none of them left memoirs of any kind. However, it is in Kipling’s masterpiece Kim, whose characters so clearly come from the shadowy world of Captain Montgomerie, that they have their just memorial.
In Kashgar, in the spring of 1869, neither Shaw nor Hayward had any idea of this. Mirza, the mysterious Indian, they learned, had been arrested and chained to a heavy log. More ominously for Shaw, Yakub Beg had been enquiring whether he and the Indian had been in communication, and whether he still had in his possession the two watches with which he was known to have arrived. Both he and Hayward were becoming increasingly perturbed as they received no further word from Yakub Beg, for it was now nearly three months since Shaw’s audience with the ruler. Although both men were well treated, enquiries put to court officials produced no satisfactory explanation for this long silence. In fact, if they did but know it, there was a very good reason for Yakub Beg’s procrastination – the Russians.
Having fought against them in the past, Yakub Beg was aware that his mighty northern neighbour represented an infinitely greater threat to his throne than the Chinese, whom he had defeated without much difficulty. He also knew that their troops were poised on the frontier, not many days’ march from Kashgar. Altogether they represented a more immediate priority than his two British visitors, who could quite happily be kept on ice for the time being. For its part, St Petersburg was in something of a quandary over Yakub Beg. Not only was it worried by the prospect of Kashgar becoming a rallying-point for anti-Russian feeling in Central Asia, but with British help and encouragement the Muslim adventurer might even try to launch a crusade aimed at driving the Russians out of their newly acquired territories. The hawks were impatient to invade Kashgaria and place it under permanent Russian rule, while time was still on their side. Anxious not to allow this promising new market to slip from its grasp, St Petersburg was sorely tempted. But in the event, as always, the Tsar and his ministers were guided by what they felt they could get away with. For the Russians to march into Kashgaria would be bound to enrage and alarm both the British and the Chinese (the latter regarding it still as part of their empire, albeit momentarily lost). With the disaster of the Crimean War still fresh in Russian minds, Tsar Alexander did not yet feel confident enough to risk it. Instead of an army, therefore, an envoy had been sent to Kashgar to try to find another solution.
What St Petersburg most wanted from Yakub Beg was his recognition of the treaty rights, especially the trading concessions, which Ignatiev had obtained from the Chinese. It was particularly anxious to prevent these from going to the British. For his part, Yakub Beg was eager for Russian recognition of his rule, and a guarantee that his frontiers would be secure against invasion. However, St Petersburg was unwilling to grant his regime formal recognition, since this would permanently damage its relations with Peking. He, at least, was mortal. The Chinese would be around for a long time. Although Shaw did not realise it, these negotiations had still been in progress when he first arrived in Kashgar. Indeed, a Russian envoy had left for home shortly before, taking with him Yakub Beg’s nephew as an emissary to St Petersburg. But Alexander had refused to receive him, fearing that this might be seen by both Peking and Yakub Beg himself as implying recognition. Yakub Beg was incensed. Realising that the Russians had no intention of recognising his authority, he decided to show his displeasure in a way calculated to cause them the maximum alarm and annoyance. He turned to those whom he knew by now to be their principal rivals in Central Asia – the British.
The first that Robert Shaw knew of this, although he had ho idea what lay behind it, was when, to his great relief, he found himself summoned to an audience with Yakub Beg. ‘Today,’ he noted in his diary on April 5, ‘I have some news to write. I have had my long expected second interview with the King.’ Although he made no attempt to explain the long delay, Yakub Beg proved even more amiable than at their first meeting. Brushing aside Shaw’s reminder that he did not represent the British government, but had travelled to Kashgar of his own accord, Yakub Beg told him: ‘I consider you my brother. Whatever course you advise, I will take.’ Other extravagant compliments followed. ‘The Queen of England is like the sun, which warms everything it shines upon,’ he declared. ‘I am in the cold, and desire that some of its rays should fall upon me.’ Shaw, he said, was the first Englishman he had ever met, although he had heard much of their
power and truthfulness from others. ‘It is a great honour for me that you have come. I count upon you to help me in your country.’
The compliments over, Yakub Beg now got down to business. ‘I am thinking’, he told Shaw, ‘of sending an envoy to your country.’ What did his visitor think? Shaw said he thought it was an excellent idea. In that case, Yakub Beg declared, he would dispatch a special emissary bearing a note to the ‘Lord Sahib’, as he called the Viceroy. Welcoming this, Shaw offered to brief the individual chosen, promising to smooth his path in every way possible. After a further exchange of compliments, Shaw withdrew, hardly daring to believe that he might soon be free to leave for home. Aware, though, of Yakub Beg’s reputation for every kind of double-dealing, he knew that he would feel much happier once he was safely across the frontier.
But there remained one last problem – Hayward. Nothing had been said about him during Shaw’s audience with Yakub Beg. In view of the latter’s evident eagerness to woo the British, Shaw had assumed that Hayward would be free to return home too, although perhaps not via the Pamirs, which was what his sponsors, the Royal Geographical Society, had hoped. Then one of Shaw’s servants brought him ‘an ugly rumour . . . that I should be sent back to India with an envoy . . . and that Hayward would be kept as a hostage for his safe return.’ At the same time he received an anxious note from Hayward himself. In this he said that he had learned that Yakub Beg was proposing to hold on to him. Much as Shaw disliked Hayward – ‘the thorn in my flesh’, he calls him in his diary – he knew he could not simply abandon him to the whims of an oriental despot with an unsavoury reputation for cruelty and treachery. Still confined to his own quarters, he at once sent a note to one of Yakub Beg’s senior officials, a man with whom he was on excellent terms. In this he warned that it would be a waste of time and effort for Yakub Beg to send an envoy to India seeking Britain’s friendship, ‘so long as an Englishman is kept here against his will’. It was a risky thing to do, he knew, but it worked. The following day he was informed that not only Hayward, but also the mysterious Mirza, whom Yakub Beg seemed to associate with them, would be free to return home. The envoy would follow later.
Shaw and Hayward got back to a hero’s welcome, having been given up for dead by some. Despite their close confinement, they had managed, albeit quite independently, to bring back with them an immense amount of intelligence – political, commercial, military and geographical. The latter was to win for both men that ultimate prize among explorers, the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. For his part, however, Mirza Shuja was to receive no such reward or acclaim. Although it was due to his determined efforts that the Survey of India was able to produce its first, if somewhat rough, map of northern Afghanistan and the Pamirs, his activities had to be kept secret still. Only when a Pundit had made his final journey could his identity be disclosed. Sadly, Mirza would not live to enjoy this, for he was destined to be murdered in his sleep while on another mission to Central Asia, this time to Bokhara.
Both Shaw and Hayward, who saw eye to eye on very little else, returned to India convinced that the Russians were proposing to march into Kashgaria, overthrow Yakub Beg, and add his kingdom to their own Central Asian empire. After that it would only be a question of time before they continued southwards into northern India via the very passes by which the two British travellers had entered Kashgaria, and across which Shaw was hoping to send his tea caravans. Until then the great mountain systems to the north of India had been regarded by strategists in Calcutta and London as impenetrable to a modern army weighed down with artillery and other heavy equipment, and requiring regular supplies of food and ammunition. Shaw and Hayward, having crossed those mountains both ways, now questioned this, arguing that one pass in particular – the Chang Lung, lying north-east of Leh – offered an invader a back-door route into Ladakh, and thence into northern India. Although this rose to over 18,000 feet, both Shaw and Hayward (the latter a former army officer) believed that artillery could be dragged over it.
Had Sir John Lawrence still been Viceroy, no official notice would have been taken of their views. Indeed, they would almost certainly have been severely reprimanded for meddling in affairs of state, as Moorcroft had been half a century earlier. But during their absence he had retired and had been succeeded by a younger Viceroy with a more open mind. India’s new chief was Lord Mayo, who had not only visited Russia but had also written a two-volume work about the country. It was not surprising, therefore, that he was eager to hear what these two enterprising young travellers had to say about Yakub Beg and Russian machinations beyond the Pamir and Karakoram passes.
Their warnings, however, would not go unchallenged by the military establishment, even if none of the latter had ever set foot themselves in the passes they discussed with such intimacy. ‘It is conceivable’, one War Office colonel wrote, ‘that 10,000 Kirghiz horsemen might be able to traverse a difficult road . . . with nothing but what can be carried at the saddle bow. But turn these into European soldiers with their trains of artillery, ammunition, hospital supplies, and the innumerable requirements of a modern army, and the case is totally different. The resources of the country that might suffice for the one would be utterly insufficient for the other.’ However, if Shaw and Hayward had failed to convince the defence chiefs that the Cossacks were about to swarm down through the northern passes into India, they did succeed in opening up a great debate on the general vulnerability of the region to Russian incursion. And they did more than that, for they also managed to interest the new Viceroy in Yakub Beg’s diplomatic overture. Their hand was strengthened here by the timely arrival in India of the latter’s special envoy.
Lord Mayo was convinced that India’s best defence lay, not in forward policies or military adventures, but in the establishment of a chain of buffer states friendly to Britain around its vast and thinly guarded frontiers. The most important of these was obviously Afghanistan, now ruled by Dost Mohammed’s son Sher Ali, with whom Calcutta enjoyed cordial relations. Here was Mayo’s chance to add another link to the chain by making a friend of Yakub Beg. With these two powerful rulers as Britain’s allies, India had little to fear from the Russians. In a crisis Mayo was willing to assist them with arms and money, and perhaps even military advisers. With a handful of British officers and generous helpings of gold, he declared, ‘I could make of Central Asia a hotplate for our friend the Russian bear to dance on’. It was much what Moorcroft had proposed many years before when he outlined to his superiors a strategy whereby British officers commanding local irregulars would halt an invading Russian force in the high passes by rolling huge boulders down on it from above.
Lord Mayo gave orders for a small British diplomatic mission, thinly disguised as a purely commercial one, to return with Yakub Beg’s special envoy to Kashgar. It was led by Sir Douglas Forsyth, a senior political officer. Its purpose was to make exploratory contacts with this powerful Muslim ruler who, it appeared, preferred the friendship of the British to that of the Russians, and also to investigate the possibility of establishing regular caravan traffic across the Karakorams. Sir John Lawrence, fearing the political consequences of the latter, had always opposed any such initiatives. But Mayo took the opposite view, seeing commerce as a means of extending British influence into Central Asia with the minimum of risk. He also saw it as a way of combating the growing influence of the Russians, with their manifestly inferior goods, in the states beyond India’s northern frontiers. Nor was he blind to the commercial advantage to be gained from opening up Kashgaria where, according to Robert Shaw, there were anything up to sixty million potential customers, each one a tea-drinker and a cotton-wearer, eagerly awaiting the British caravans. Shaw was invited by Mayo to join the Forsyth mission, and immediately accepted. George Hayward, the loner, had other plans. He too was preparing to venture into the unknown once again. His objective was the Pamirs, beyond whose towering peaks and unmapped passes lay the nearest Russian outposts. And this time no one was going to stop him.
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The Feel of Cold Steel Across His Throat
When word of George Hayward’s plans reached the ears of the authorities, considerable pressure was brought to bear on him to call off his expedition. Not only were the dangers to a lone European traveller in this wild and lawless region immense, but it was also a highly sensitive area politically. Indeed, it was for just such hazardous operations as this that the Pundits had been conceived and trained. To a man like Hayward, however, the risks merely made it more attractive. In a revealing moment he had once written to Robert Shaw: ‘I shall wander about the wilds of Central Asia possessed of an insane desire to try the effects of cold steel across my throat.’ From anyone else this would simply have sounded like bravado. But Hayward, as his few friends would confirm, genuinely relished danger, though in retrospect it appears more like a death wish. Having no close ties or family, moreover, he had little to lose, and a great deal to gain if he succeeded. For on one thing everyone was agreed. Hayward was a first-rate explorer and a surveyor of great skill. If he did get back alive, his discoveries were likely to be of immense value.
Originally, like his Kashgar journey, the Pamir expedition was to have been sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, which now had Sir Henry Rawlinson as its President, and some of whose operations in Central Asia smacked as much of the Great Game as of geography. But in the meantime something had happened which had caused Hayward reluctantly to distance himself from the Society for fear of embarrassing it. It had also greatly increased the dangers of the expedition, for it had made an enemy of the Maharajah of Kashmir, through whose territory the explorer would have to pass on his journey northwards. The affair had sprung from an earlier visit which Hayward had made to a remote region beyond the Maharajah’s domains known as Dardistan. Here lived the Dards, a fiercely independent people with whom the Maharajah was constantly at war. It was from them that Hayward had learned of an appalling series of atrocities which Kashmiri troops had carried out in the Yasin area of Dardistan some years earlier. Details of these, which had included tossing babies into the air and cutting them in half as they fell, had been sent by Hayward to the editor of The Pioneer, the Calcutta newspaper. They had been published in full, under Hayward’s name, although he insisted that this had been done expressly against his instructions. Inevitably, a copy of the paper had found its way into the hands of the Maharajah, a ruler whose goodwill and cooperation the British authorities were most anxious to preserve, and who was now reported to be extremely displeased.
The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia Page 37
