The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  The surviving ancient sources on Carrhae are all reliant on earlier histories, now lost. According to Plutarch, Crassus marched with “seven legions of men-at-arms, nearly four thousand horsemen and about as many light-armed troops” (Crassus, xx, 1), implying about forty thousand men. The identity of the legions is not known; however, Plutarch mentions that a thousand of the cavalry had “come from Caesar,” presumably veterans of Julius Caesar’s recent campaigns in Gaul and Britain. At that date, legionaries were still “citizen-soldiers” rather than career professionals, bound by terms of service not normally exceeding six years. The memories of the campaign in my prologue, including the ill omens on crossing the Euphrates, the death of Crassus and the humiliation of Caius Paccianus, are all from Plutarch (Crassus xix, xxxi-ii) and Dio Cassius (Roman History xl, 16-27); Plutarch has Crassus being killed by a Parthian, and Dio Cassius “either by one of his own men to prevent his capture alive, or by the enemy because he was badly wounded.” Afterward, “the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery.” Plutarch tells us that in the whole campaign “twenty thousand are said to have been killed, and ten thousand to have been taken alive.”

  The only indication of the fate of those prisoners is a single line in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who describes Margiana, a city east of the Caspian Sea, as “the place to which the Roman prisoners taken in the disaster of Crassus were brought” (vi, 47). Margiana, present-day Merv in Turkmenistan, was a Parthian citadel and gateway to central Asia. The Roman prisoners could have been used to build the huge circuit of walls whose crumbling ramparts can still be seen at Merv today. The walls required rebuilding on numerous occasions, and it is intriguing to note that the Romans in Italy were first developing techniques of concrete construction at this time—the basis for the idea in the novel of how deliberate sabotage may have come about.

  The suggestion that survivors of Carrhae may have escaped from Merv and made their way east comes from a controversial interpretation of Chinese written sources, first published in the 1950s. In 36 BC the Han Chinese mounted an expedition against the Hsiung-nu, the Huns, who were establishing a foothold in Sogdiana in central Asia. The ancient History of the Former Han Dynasty contains an account of the Han siege of the Hsiung-nu fortress, probably based on contemporary paintings, including a passage translated as more than a hundred foot-soldiers lined up in a “fish-scale” formation (chs. ix, xxiv-v). Some modern scholars have equated this with the testudo, the “tortoise,” a Roman formation in which shield was locked with shield, as Plutarch put it in his account of Carrhae (Crassus xxiv, 3). The Han army also found a “double wooden palisade” outside the citadel, a description perhaps reminiscent of Roman fortification techniques. These two references have led some to imagine that the Hun army included Roman mercenaries.

  Nothing definitive has yet been found in the archaeology of central Asia to support this idea. The most intriguing discovery is an inscription in southern Uzbekistan, some five hundred kilometers east of Merv, similar to the fictional inscription in chapter 3; it may refer to the Fifteenth Legion, possibly an Imperial legion of that number founded in AD 62, but conceivably a legion of the same number from the century before. A thousand kilometers northeast from there lies Cholpon-Ata, the extraordinary field of boulders with petroglyphs—rock carvings—beside Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. The images mainly relate to the spiritual life of the local population, but Issyk-Kul was a staging post on the Silk Route and my own explorations there suggest the potential for discovering other inscriptions. In a mountain valley to the south, I rode a horse that may have descended from the fabled akhal-teke, the blood-sweating heavenly horses of Chinese mythology. The lake itself contains inundated ancient structures and artifacts, and rumors abound of sunken cities and tombs, even that of Genghis Khan himself; archaeological diving now underway in the lake could produce wonderful discoveries in the near future.

  More than fifteen hundred kilometers southeast, past the forbidding Taklamakan Desert, lies the village of Zhelaizai in Gansu province of China. Some believe this to have been Lijian, a place where prisoners from the battle against the Huns in 36 BC may have been settled. The name Lijian—perhaps derived from “Alexander”—may have meant “westerner.” The population today does indeed contain a striking number of green-eyed, fair-featured people, though DNA analyses to test for western origins have proved inconclusive. Silk Route travelers would have passed this place close to the end of their journey toward Xian, site of the tomb of the First Emperor, Shihuangdi, at Mount Li outside the city. The “Brotherhood of the Tiger” in this novel is fictional, but the idea is based on other Chinese secret societies, and the fiefdoms are those of the First Emperor’s family (Records of the Grand Historian, Shi ji 5). “Tiger Cavalry” were employed as the Emperor Ts’ao Ts’ao’s personal bodyguard in the third century AD, perhaps based on an earlier bodyguard; their weapons could have included prized bronze halberds such as the one in this novel, based on an actual halberd on display in the British Museum (OA 1949.5-18 1,2). The tomb itself was said to have been guarded by twenty households, supposedly the basis for twenty modern villages around Mount Li, so the idea of a hereditary custodian is rooted in the history of this extraordinary site, one of the remaining unexcavated wonders of the ancient world.

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  The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea survives as a tenth-century AD manuscript in a library in Heidelberg, copied from an original written in Greek about a thousand years earlier. It is one of the most remarkable documents from antiquity, detailing maritime trade from Roman Egypt down the African coast as far as Zanzibar, and across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. In recent decades there has been an explosion of interest in the archaeology of the Periplus, especially with the excavation of the Red Sea port sites of Berenikê and Myos Hormos. The merchant’s house in this novel is fictional, but the finds are representative of actual discoveries at these sites, including Italian wine amphoras reused as water containers, thousands of peppercorns from India, ballast stones from Arabia and India, Indian hardwood—reused ship’s timbers, including teak—and south Indian pottery. One sherd had a Tamil graffito bearing a personal name also attested in south India. Many other potsherds with inscriptions—ostraka—are known, including part of the archive at Myos Hormos of a man named Maximus Priscus. In this novel, the ostraka with the text of the Periplus, and the previously unknown section—mentioning Crassus’ legionaries—are fictional. Nevertheless, potsherds would have been a sensible writing material for a draft, before copying the final text onto papyrus.

  The ancient site of Arikamedu, south of Pondicherry, was first extensively excavated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1940s, and has been the subject of renewed investigations since the early 1980s. Many still believe, as Wheeler did, that the sherds of Roman amphoras and fineware at the site indicate the presence of merchants from Egyptian ports such as Berenikê—or their local agents—who traded with merchants coming across the Bay of Bengal and down from central Asia, bringing exotic goods such as silk and lapis lazuli. Divers from the Archaeological Survey of India have begun to investigate the waters off Arikamedu and other sites mentioned in the Periplus. As more archaeologists see Roman involvement with India as a two-way cultural process—with as much Indian influence on the west as the other way around—we can look forward to the discovery of more sites that represent the trade in the Periplus, one of the most extraordinary episodes of maritime endeavor the world has ever seen.

  Some thirty nautical miles southeast of Cape Ras Banas in the Red Sea lies St. John’s Island (Arabic Zeberged), the only source in antiquity of the gem peridot, undoubtedly the topazai mentioned by Strabo and Pliny as the product of an island close to Berenikê. One Red Sea port mentioned in the Periplus that has yet to be conclusively identified is Ptolemais Thêrên, “Ptolemy of the Hunts,” nor has a seagoing elephant-carrier—an elephantegos-yet been found. Neverthless, several Roman wrecks co
ntaining wine amphoras are known in the Red Sea, very possibly ships destined for Arabia and India. The Periplus specifically mentions gold and silver coins as the main Roman export—for trade on the Malabar coast we are exhorted to take coin, “a great deal of it”—and this is consistent with the emperor Tiberius’ lament about the bullion drain (Tacitus, Annals, iii, 54; also Pliny, Natural History vi, 101; xii, 84), as well as with the discovery of many thousands of gold and silver coins in south India. There can be no doubt that a Roman wreck will one day be discovered in the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean with a wealth of gold to rival the treasure wrecks of the Spanish Main.

  The Rampa Rebellion of 1879-81 was the largest uprising of tribal people to occur in central India during the period of the British Raj, and was put down by a brigade-sized expedition of the Indian army. The immediate cause of the rebellion was a tax on toddy, the alcoholic drink made from palm sap, though the backdrop included discontent over forestry regulations and the corruption of the native police. It was a protracted campaign, beset by the terrible “jungle fever,” and its history has never been properly written. The picture here is based on daily reports in the Madras Military Proceedings and Madras Judicial Proceedings, private correspondence, regimental records and biographical information on the British officers involved (in some contemporary accounts, “Rampa” appears as “Rumpa,” a more phonetical spelling). There are no known personal reminiscences of the campaign, though a sense of the language and outlook of a Royal Engineers officer on a jungle campaign in the 1870s can be gleaned from Lieutenant R G. Woodthorpe’s The Lushai Expedition 1871-1872, describing a punitive expedition into Burma. The dramatic events early in the Rampa Rebellion were reported in the London Times and The New York Times, including the attack on the steamer Shamrock by over one thousand rebels and Lieutenant Hamilton’s fight in the jungle, but interest waned as the rebellion dragged on and became mired in disease and monsoon. The wording of Hamilton’s account is taken from his report of 20 August 1879 in the Madras Military Proceedings, showing that his sappers expended 1050 rounds and killed at least ten rebels. Surgeon Walker’s description of the jungle fever in chapter 5 is taken from a report by Surgeon-Major J. Bilderbeck, Thirty-sixth Madras Native Infantry, in May 1880, when all of the British officers and three-fifths of the sepoys in his regiment were struck down. The Kóya treated fever with the remedy described in chapter 9 (Note on the Rampa Agency, East Godavari District, Madras, 1931, p. 31). Rampa district today remains little changed from the 1880s, and the jungles of eastern India are a haven for Maoist terrorists as well as attracting mining prospectors backed by foreign investment.

  An account from 1876 describes the sacred vélpus, including the potent Lakkála (or Laka) Rámu. The vélpus were bamboo tubes, kept hidden away. The animistic spirits of the jungle, the konda deváta, included a tiger god. The Godavari volume of the Imperial Gazetteer of India notes that near Rampa village, “beside a waterfall about 25 feet high, is a shrine formed of three huge boulders, two of which make a kind of roof, and fitted with a doorway and one side-wall of cut stone. The water of the fall pours continually between the boulders. A rough lingam and other holy emblems have been carved out of the rock.” In my fictional shrine, the Indian iconography is based on cave carvings at Badami and sculpture elsewhere in India, including the yakśas and yakśīs figures. The Rampa shrine is where several police captives were executed in 1879. A native eyewitness described one “sacrifice”: “Chendrayya himself cut off his head with a sword. They sacrificed him to Gudapu Mavili.” (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 5 September 1879). Other accounts describe “meriahs” being sacrificed or rescued, and headless bodies being found. The riverside sacrifice scene is a fictional representation of these events, and derives further detail from eyewitness accounts of human sacrifices recorded in Major-General John Campbell’s A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice (1864)—including Captain Frye’s rescue of a meriah, quoted here in chapter 4—and from Christoph and Elizabeth von Fürer-Haimendorf’s The Reddis of the Bison Hills: A Study of Acculturation (1945), one of few detailed anthropological studies of the hill tribes of the upper Godavari.

  Several of the characters in this novel are based on actual individuals in the Rampa Field Force, some with names altered. Joseph Fawcett Beddy was assistant commissioner for the Central Provinces, and accompanied Hamilton during his affray in the jungle. The official report on the rebellion to the Government of India states that Beddy “died from fever” after the affray (Madras Judicial Proceedings, 14 December 1881); but his tomb inscription at Wuddagudem recorded that he was “shot in the late Rampa Rebellion” (H. Le Fanu, List of European Tombs in the Godaveri District with Inscriptions Thereon, Cocanada 1895). Dr. George Lemon Walker, Surgeon to D and G Companies, Madras Sappers and Miners, during the Rampa Rebellion, was indeed born in Kingston, Canada, and received his medical training at Queen’s University in Belfast. From 1884 his superior in medical charge of the Madras Sappers was Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross—later Sir Ronald Ross, famous for identifying the Anopheles mosquito as the carrier of the malaria parasite, and whose patients would have included sapper veterans of Rampa suffering from the dreaded “jungle fever.”

  Of the Madras Sappers, the fictional Sergeant O’Connell is inspired by Sergeant John Brown, who embarked for India in 1860, served in the 1875-6 Perak campaign in Malaysia and was pensioned as a quartermaster sergeant in 1881. Sapper Narrainsamy served in Burma and the Chin Lushai expeditions in the late 1880s. Of the subalterns, Robert Ewen Hamilton died in 1885 from cholera, “his health shattered by continued attacks of malarial fever” during the Afghan war and the Rampa Rebellion. The fictional Lieutenant Wauchope is based on Robert Alexander Wahab (who later used the spelling Wauhope for his Irish name); he was indeed from an Irish family with American connections. His health was also eventually broken by malaria, causing his early retirement in 1905, though by then he was a colonel with a distinguished record in almost all of the northwest frontier military expeditions of the period.

  The fictional Lieutenant Howard is based on Lieutenant Walter Andrew Gale, my great-great-grandfather, the longest-serving of all the Madras Sapper officers in the Rampa Field Force. He had been detailed for the second phase of the Afghan war in late 1879, but remained in Rampa as the deployment there dragged on through 1880. His son Edward died in Bangalore in April that year, aged one year and five months. After leaving the Madras Sappers in 1881 both he and Wahab became specialists in survey, developing skills honed in the Rampa jungle. Gale returned with his young family to England in 1885 and became an instructor in Survey at the School of Military Engineering, Chatham, where he edited the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers. As Secretary of the R.E. Institute he was fully involved in the academic life of the Royal Engineers, and would have attended lectures on subjects ranging beyond purely military matters-including archaeology, which had developed in India as an offshoot of survey. The topic of Howard’s fictional lecture at the Royal United Service Institution in London would have been in keeping with the remarkable range of interests pursued by engineer officers at this period. The Institution housed the only known collection of artifacts from the Rampa Rebellion—two matchlock muskets, two swords and a scabbard, two bamboo arrows, a bird arrow, a shield and four arrowheads—donated by a fellow Madras Sapper officer and Rampa veteran, Lieutenant A. C. Macdonnell, R.E. in 1882 (Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, xxv, p. xxxi); the museum was closed in 1962, when any of these artifacts still in the collection would have been dispersed.

  Gale and Wahab were together again in 1889, when Wahab returned to Chatham for courses of training. The final disappearance of the two retired colonels into Afghanistan is fictional. However, both men were intensely familiar with the Afghan frontier region, and would have been poised for such an adventure. Wahab spent almost twenty years with the Survey of India demarking the boundary with Afghanistan, from
Baluchistan to the Khyber Pass and beyond. He was famous as a mountaineer, and his boundary markers still survive on the frontier today. Gale returned to India and became Commanding Royal Engineer of the Quetta Division of the Indian army and Supervising Engineer in Baluchistan, responsible for the entire province including the volatile frontier region. One of his colleagues in the Baluchistan administration was Aurel Stein, the famous Silk Route explorer, then employed as archaeological surveyor by the government; his and Colonel Gale’s reports appear together in the Administration Report of the Baluchistan Agency for 1904-1905. Stein was also a personal friend of Robert Wahab, who shared his passion for classical history and was responsible for the most likely identification of Aornos, the mountain spur that Alexander the Great famously captured; Wauhope (as he became) is acknowledged warmly in Stein’s classic On Alexander’s Track to the Indus (1929). Twenty years before that book was published, there were still parts of Afghanistan so remote that hardly any Europeans had ever visited them, including the fabled lapis lazuli mines described in Lieutenant John Wood’s A Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Source of the River Oxus (1841), quoted here in chapters 13, 15 (including the Pashtun verse), 18 and 19. At different times in their careers, and possibly together, Gale and Wahab must have stood before the Bolan Pass on the route to Afghanistan, gazing at the awesome cleft in the mountains that had lured so many soldiers and adventurers to the land beyond, in search of glory and treasure but so often ending in death.

  Royal Engineers officers were exhorted to be “soldiers first and engineers afterwards” in an instructional paper edited by Captain W. A. Gale in the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers for 1889 (Colonel E. Wood, C.B., R.E., “The duties of Royal Engineers in the Field,” vol xv, 69-96), and were fully trained to act as infantry. In India, officers not on campaign spent a great deal of time hunting, so were closely familiar with firearms and were often expert marksmen. In this novel, the 1851 Colt revolver with Upper Canada markings is a genuine piece that I have fired, as are the Snider-Enfield and Lee-Enfield rifles. Colt revolvers were used extensively by British officers during the 1857-8 Indian Mutiny, and cap-and-ball revolvers were still favored decades later by adventurers such as Sir Richard Burton in areas where cartridge ammunition was not readily available. The Madras Sappers were armed in 1879 with the Snider-Enfield rifle, though the British army had converted to the Martini-Henry several years earlier. Many old service rifles found their way to the north-west frontier and Afghanistan, where British rifles still used today include Lee-Enfields made at Long Branch in Canada. Scoped Lee-Enfields and Mosin-Nagants made highly effective sniper rifles during the Second World War. The Mosin-Nagant was used by the Soviet female snipers called zaichata, “little hares,” after their mentor, Vasiliy Zaitsev; one of them, Lyudmila Pavli-chenko, had more than 300 kills, and is the basis for the sniper in this novel.