The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (16 page)

For a start, Yarkand lay 300 miles away to the north, across some of the most difficult passes in the world, especially in winter, and it could take months to get a reply from officials there who, at the best of times, were not given to hurrying themselves. However, although it was some time before he realised it, there were other factors conspiring against Moor-croft’s efforts to enter Chinese Turkestan, or Sinkiang as it is now called. The powerful local merchants had for generations held a monopoly over the caravan trade between Leh and Yarkand, and had no wish to lose this to the British. Even when Moorcroft offered to appoint the most prominent of them as the East India Company’s agent, they continued to sabotage his efforts. Only afterwards was he to discover that they had warned the Chinese that the British were planning to bring an army with them the moment they were allowed through the passes.

Moorcroft had not been long in Leh when he discovered that he had what he most feared, a Russian rival. Ostensibly he was a native trader who operated across the passes between Leh and the caravan cities of Chinese Turkestan. In fact, as Moorcroft soon found out, he was a highly regarded Tsarist agent, of Persian-Jewish origin, who carried out sensitive political and commercial missions for his superiors in St Petersburg. His name was Aga Mehdi, and he had begun his singular career as a small-time pedlar. Soon he was dealing in Kashmiri shawls, celebrated throughout Asia for their great warmth and beauty. Then, with remarkable enterprise, he had made his way across Central Asia, eventually reaching St Petersburg, where his shawls had attracted the attention of Tsar Alexander himself, who had expressed a wish to meet this enterprising merchant.

Alexander had been much impressed by him, and had sent him back to Central Asia with instructions to try to establish commercial contacts with Ladakh and Kashmir. This he had succeeded in doing, and some Russian goods now began to appear in the bazaars there. On his return to St Petersburg the delighted Tsar had presented him with a gold medal and chain, as well as a Russian name, Mehkti Rafailov. A more ambitious mission was next planned for him, this time with political as well as purely commercial objectives. His orders were to proceed considerably further south than ever before, to the independent Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. There he was to try to establish friendly contacts with its ageing but extremely astute ruler, Ranjit Singh, who was known to be on excellent terms with the British. He bore with him a letter of introduction from the Tsar, signed by his Foreign Minister, Count Nes-selrode. This, innocent enough on the face of it, declared that Russia wished to trade with Ranjit Singh’s merchants, who would be welcome to visit Russia in return.

Moorcroft was not slow in discovering all this, and through his own agents even managed to obtain a copy of the Tsar’s letter. It appeared to confirm his worst suspicions about Russian intentions. He also found out that this enterprising rival was expected shortly in Leh, on his way to Lahore, Ranjit Singh’s capital. ‘I was anxious to see him,’ Moorcroft observed in his journal, ‘that I might be able better to ascertain his real designs, as well as those of the ambitious power under whose patronage and authority he was employed.’ Moorcroft learned too that Rafailov, to use his new name, was carrying not only a considerable sum of money, but also rubies and emeralds, some of great size and value. The latter, Moorcroft suspected, were almost certainly intended as gifts from the Tsar to Ranjit Singh and others, being too valuable for local sale or barter.

The Englishman also heard, from those returning across the passes from the north, of Rafailov’s worrying activities in this strongly Muslim corner of the Chinese Empire. In Kashgar, it was reported, he had secretly promised local leaders the Tsar’s support in casting off the Manchu yoke. Were they to dispatch to St Petersburg the rightful heir to the throne of Kashgar, Rafailov was said to have told them, then he would be sent back at the head of a Russian-trained army to recover the domains of his ancestors. Whatever the truth of this, Moorcroft observed, the local populace appeared only too happy to believe that the Tsar was their friend. Rafailov, it was clear, was a formidable adversary. His knowledge of the peoples and languages of the region, not to mention his intelligence and enterprise, equipped him superbly for the task with which Moorcroft believed he had been entrusted – ‘to extend the influence of Russia to the confines of British India’, and to gather political and geographical intelligence from the intervening territories.

All this Moorcroft reported in his dispatches to his superiors, 1,100 miles away in Calcutta, together with his discovery that Rafailov had been escorted across the most treacherous stretch of his journey, the lawless Kazakh Steppe, by a troop of Cossack cavalry. Moorcroft was now more than ever convinced that behind St Petersburg’s bid for the markets of India’s far north lay what he called ‘a monstrous plan of aggrandisement’. Where caravans of Russian goods could go, the Cossacks would surely follow. Rafailov was merely a scout, feeling the way forward and preparing the ground. Believing that the destiny of northern India lay in their hands, and that this wily newcomer, now only a fortnight or so away, had somehow to be foiled, Moorcroft and his companions awaited his arrival with some excitement.

It was never to be, however. Precisely how the Tsar’s man died is not clear. But somewhere high up in the Karakoram passes he perished, his remains joining the thousands of skeletons, human and animal, strewn along what one later traveller called ‘this via dolorosa’. Moorcroft tells us little except that his rival’s death was ‘of a sudden and violent disorder’. One can only guess that he died of a sudden heart attack or from mountain sickness, for in places the trail carried the traveller up to nearly 19,000 feet above sea level. Possibly even Moorcroft, an experienced medical man as well as a vet, did not know the cause of Rafailov’s death, or perhaps the answer lies buried somewhere among the 10,000 pages of manuscript which represent his reports and correspondence. Any suggestion that Moorcroft himself had anything to do with it can almost certainly be discounted. Not only was he an extremely honourable man, but he was also generous to a fault. According to his biographer, Dr Garry Alder, perhaps the only man to have thoroughly explored the Moorcroft papers, he saw to it that his adversary’s small orphaned son was adequately provided for and educated, although that is all we are told. Until the Russian secret archives of the period are made available to Western scholars, the precise truth about Rafailov will not be known for certain. Moorcroft, however, was genuinely convinced that he was a highly trusted agent of Russian imperialism – just as Soviet scholars today brand Moorcroft himself as a British master spy sent to pave the way for the annexation of Central Asia. Had Rafailov lived a few years longer, Moorcroft maintained in a letter to a friend in London, then ‘he might have produced scenes in Asia that would have astonished some of the Cabinets of Europe.’

Rafailov’s unexpected removal from the scene did little to lessen Moorcroft’s near-paranoia about Russian designs on the northern Indian states. Without consulting his superiors in Calcutta first, and with no authority to so act, he now negotiated a commercial treaty with the ruler of Ladakh on behalf of ‘British merchants’. It was, he was convinced, a master stroke which would eventually open up the markets of Central Asia to manufacturers at home, then still suffering from the economic ravages of the Napoleonic wars. His enthusiasm, however, was not shared by his chiefs. When news of the unauthorised treaty reached them, they at once disowned it. Not only were they unconvinced of Russia’s designs on Central Asia, let alone India, but they were also anxious to avoid doing anything likely to offend Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab, whom they regarded as a most valuable friend and neighbour. The very last thing they wanted was to have him, and his powerful, well-trained army of Sikhs, as a foe. And it was no secret in Calcutta that Ranjit Singh, following his earlier annexation of Kashmir, jealously viewed Ladakh as lying within his own sphere of influence.

It was too late, however, to prevent him from finding out about the treaty. Moorcroft had already written to him warning him that Ladakh was an independent state in whose affairs he must not meddle, and adding that it was the ruler’s wish to become a British protectorate. An abject apology for Moor-croft’s transgression, together with a total retraction of the treaty, was hastily sent to Ranjit, but not in time, it seems, to save Moorcroft from the Sikh’s fury (let alone that of his own chiefs, who had still to deal with him). For not long afterwards there began a series of mysterious attempts on the lives of Moorcroft and his two companions.

The first of these was made by an unidentified gunman who fired at them through the window at night, narrowly missing George Trebeck as he sat writing, the would-be assassin perhaps mistaking him for Moorcroft who spent hours at his portable desk preparing reports and writing up his journal. Subsequently two further attempts were made on Moorcroft’s life by nocturnal intruders, one of whom he shot dead. The frustrated assassins now tried a new tack. Before long Moor-croft and his companions experienced unexplained pains, which they attributed to some kind of fever. But if they had fallen foul of Ranjit Singh (not to mention those local merchants whose monopoly they threatened), they still had friends among the Ladakhis, some of whom clearly knew what was going on. One night, as Moorcroft was racking his brains over the cause of their malady, he was visited by two strangers, their faces covered to conceal their identity. By means of gestures they made it unmistakably clear that he and his companions were being poisoned. After some suspect tea had been disposed of, the aches and pains abruptly ceased. And so, oddly, did the assassination attempts.

But if Moorcroft had survived the vengeance of these foes, he was now to face the displeasure of his own employers. So far the directors had been surprisingly tolerant of their Superintendent of Stud and his endless and costly quest for fresh bloodstock. After two fruitless expeditions, they had even allowed him to embark on another, his present journey to Bokhara. There was no doubt that they badly needed the horses, and Moorcroft had, in the course of his travels, sent back a great deal of valuable topographical and political intelligence. Even his increasing Russophobia did not perturb them too much. They merely closed their ears to it. However, interfering with the East India Company’s highly sensitive relations with neighbouring rulers was an altogether different matter.

Their first move was to suspend Moorcroft, together with his salary, and a letter to this effect was dispatched to him. This was followed not long afterwards by another letter, ordering his recall. It appears that Moorcroft received word of his suspension, but not of his recall to Calcutta. He was nonetheless mortified. ‘I secured for my country’, he protested, ‘an influence over a state which, lying on the British frontier, offered a central mart for the expansion of her commerce to Turkestan and China, and a strong outwork against an enemy from the north.’ The humiliation of being disowned by his own side must have been hard for him to stomach. On top of that he had signally failed to arouse the directors’ interest in the great untapped markets of Central Asia, or to convince anyone in Calcutta or London of the menace which he believed Russia posed to British interests in Asia.

Anyone less determined than Moorcroft would have given up in disappointment. After all, he could have returned to London and resumed his career as a successful vet. But he had not forgotten the horses which he had come so far to find. If the approach to Bokhara through Chinese Turkestan was blocked, then they would have to take the more dangerous route across Afghanistan after all. What Moorcroft did not realise was that their many months in Ladakh spent trying to negotiate with the Chinese across the mountains had been pointless almost from the start. For the artful Rafailov, whom Moorcroft held in such esteem, had successfully poisoned the minds of the senior Chinese officials against them before setting out on his own fateful journey through the passes.

Moorcroft and his companions now tried to make up for lost time, leaving Leh before the letter summoning them home could reach them. In the late spring of 1824, after travelling through Kashmir and the Punjab (taking care to steer well north of Ranjit Singh’s capital, Lahore), they crossed the Indus and entered the Khyber Pass. Beyond it lay Afghanistan, and beyond that Bokhara.

·8·
Death on the Oxus

To take an ill-armed caravan laden with precious goods, and rumoured to be carrying gold, through the heart of Afghanistan was at the best of times a perilous undertaking. To attempt this when the country was in the grip of anarchy, and teetering on the brink of civil war, called for courage, or perhaps foolhardiness, of the highest order. Yet this is what Moorcroft and his companions now boldly set out to do. The prospects of their coming out alive, of reaching the River Oxus with themselves and their merchandise intact, seemed slender. Some of the wild stories which preceded them, moreover, were hardly calculated to improve their chances.