The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (34 page)

To add to his predicament, there was considerable confusion, even in the Khan’s mind, as to who precisely the British were. Until news of Eldred Pottinger’s role in Herat’s defence reached Khiva, few if any Khivans had ever heard of them. No Englishmen were held as slaves, and none, so far as anyone could recall, had ever visited Khiva. Many believed them merely to be a sub-tribe, or a vassal state, of the Russians. It was even rumoured that the British, having successfully seized Kabul, were proposing to join forces with the advancing Russians and divide Central Asia between them. In view of these wild tales, the prospect of Abbott persuading the Khivans to surrender their slaves in exchange for a Russian withdrawal seemed remote indeed. It appeared far more likely that he would end up with his throat cut like his unfortunate ‘English’ predecessors, or be thrown into a dungeon like Colonel Stoddart in neighbouring Bokhara.

But if Abbott was anxious about his safety, so too was the Khan about his. Believing the Russians to be advancing still towards his capital with an army said to be 100,000 strong, he was desperate for help from any quarter. He agreed to receive the British officer and consider what he had to offer, although, lest he be a spy, great pains were taken to ensure that he saw as little as possible of Khiva’s defences. At the first of several audiences he was to have with the Khan, Abbott presented his credentials, together with the letter he bore from Major Todd, his superior at Herat. He was uncomfortably aware that these amounted to very little. ‘I had been sent on the spur of the moment,’ he wrote later, ‘without even credentials from the head of the Indian Government.’ The Khan was clearly disappointed by the contents of Todd’s letter, evidently hoping that Abbott had been sent to offer him immediate military assistance, not merely expressions of goodwill. Abbott explained to him that so important a decision could not be made by Major Todd, but only by the British government in London. This would take time, and very soon the Russians would be at the gates. There was only one possible way of preventing this, and that was for the Khan to hand back all the Russian slaves he held, thereby removing the Tsar’s widely proclaimed excuse for advancing on Khiva.

Abbott offered to travel northwards himself with the slaves, or a token party of them, to meet the Russians and try to negotiate a deal with them on the Khan’s behalf. But the Khivan ruler, long versed in treachery, was suspicious of this. After all, although he did not quite say as much, the newcomer might well be in collusion with the Russians. He put it more delicately. What, he asked, was there to prevent the Russians from seizing both him and the slaves and continuing their advance? Abbott was forced to admit that he could not guarantee success. If London and St Petersburg were rivals in Asia, the Khan enquired, then was not Abbott concerned lest the Russians simply murder him? Abbott explained that the two countries were not at war, even if Britain had no wish to see Khiva occupied by Russia, and that each had an ambassador in the other’s capital. The Russians, he added, had too much respect for British military and political power to risk molesting one of her subjects. The Khan pointed out that the Russians had shown no respect for his ambassadors, but had merely arrested them, his own brother among them. Such things, Abbott explained, might happen where retaliation was clearly impossible, but London and St Petersburg lay quite close to one another, and ‘the naval and military force of England were too formidable to be trifled with’.

While the Khan mulled over Abbott’s offer, they turned to other subjects. It soon became clear to Abbott that the Khan had little idea of the relative sizes of Britain, Russia and his own small kingdom. ‘How many guns has Russia?’ he asked Abbott. The Englishman replied that he did not know for sure, but that it would be a very large number indeed. ‘I have twenty,’ the Khan told him proudly. ‘How many has the Queen of England?’ Abbott explained that she had so many that no precise count was kept. ‘The seas are covered with the ships of England, each bearing from twenty to one-hundred-and-twenty guns of the largest size,’ he went on. ‘Her forts are full of cannon, and thousands lie in every magazine. We have more guns than any nation in the world.’

‘And how often can your artillerymen fire?’ the Khan asked him.

‘Our field artillery can fire about seven times in a minute.’

‘The Russians fire their guns twelve times a minute.’

‘Your Majesty has been misinformed,’ Abbott replied. ‘I myself belong to the artillery, and know such firing to be impossible.’

‘The Persian ambassador asserts it,’ the Khan insisted.

‘Then he is misinformed. No artillerymen on earth are more expert than the British, yet we never by choice fire more than four rounds in a minute. We would not throw away our fire, as must happen when the gun is not freshly aimed each time. We count not the number of shots fired, but the number which take effect.’

Never having seen modern artillery in action, however, the Khivans had no idea of its terrible destructive power against mud-built fortifications or cavalry charges. Some of the Khan’s ministers even seemed confident that they could turn back Perovsky’s force when it approached the capital. Abbott pointed out that if the Russians, who had almost unlimited resources, failed to free the slaves at their first attempt, they would simply return with an even more powerful force which the Khivans, however bravely they fought, would have no hope of defeating. In that case, the Khan’s chief minister replied, ‘if we die fighting the infidels, we will pass straight to paradise.’ For a moment Abbott was lost for an answer. Then he asked them: ‘And your women? What kind of paradise will your wives and daughters find in the arms of Russian soldiers?’ The ministers fell silent at that uncomfortable prospect. Abbott began to feel that he was making some progress towards convincing them that their only salvation lay in freeing the slaves, and allowing him to act as intermediary with the Russians. However, he still had a long way to go yet, and in the meantime he found himself subjected to an endless catechism by the inquisitive Khan and other court officials – questions all too familiar to British officers visiting Muslim lands. The idea of a woman ruler, for instance, never failed to cause amazement and amusement.

‘Is your king really a woman?’ he was asked.

‘She is.’

‘Is your king married?’

‘No, she is very young.’

‘If she marries, does her husband become king?’

‘By no means. He has no authority in the state.’

‘How many cities has your king?’

‘They are too numerous to count.’

And so it went on. Were the King’s ministers all women? Did the English always choose women kings? Was it true that they had telescopes which could see through the walls of a fortress? Was England as cold in winter as Khiva? Did they eat pork? Was it true that they had taken Balkh? Was Russia much larger than England? On this last question, with so much at stake, Abbott felt it necessary to elaborate. ‘This very issue’, he told them, ‘was the subject of a bet between the English and Russian missions at Teheran, which, after the most careful investigation, was decided in favour of the English.’ Queen Victoria, he went on, ‘has absolutely more territory, about five times the number of subjects, and several times more revenue than Russia.’ But in addition to her land empire, there was also the sea. A glance at the map, he said, would show them that the seas occupied three times as much of the earth’s surface as the land, adding that ‘wherever the ocean rolls, there my Queen has no rival.’

By now the Khivans had learned that General Perovsky’s invasion force had been halted by the terrible weather on the steppe, although they did not yet appear to know that the Russians were struggling back to Orenburg. It was assumed in Khiva that once the weather had begun to improve they would continue their advance. After days of prevarication and discussion, Abbott was summoned once again to the Khan’s presence. It had been decided, he was informed, to make use of his services. Accompanied by a number of Russian slaves – as a token of Khivan goodwill – he was to proceed, not to Perovsky’s headquarters, but to St Petersburg where he would negotiate on the Khan’s behalf the return of the rest of the slaves. These would be freed if the Tsar agreed to abandon all military operations against Khiva and to return the Khivan hostages held at Orenburg. Abbott would be given a letter from the Khan stating these terms which he was to deliver in person to Tsar Nicholas.

To undertake such a mission was greatly in excess of Abbott’s instructions from Major Todd, which had simply been to try to persuade the Khan to release his Russian slaves in the hope of preventing Khiva from falling into Russian hands. Abbott had, it later transpired, already exceeded his authority by discussing with the Khan the possibility of a treaty between Great Britain and himself. To be fair, however, there was no way in which he could obtain further instructions or advice from his superiors. Apart from the vast distances involved, he soon discovered that his dispatches to Todd were being intercepted by the suspicious Khan. Abbott therefore decided to risk official displeasure, calculating that were he to succeed in permanently lifting the threat towards Khiva, rather as Eldred Pottinger had done over Herat, nothing more would be said. Moreover, to travel from Khiva to St Petersburg, through the heart of Great Game country, offered the prospect of a rare adventure.

Although Abbott appeared to have allayed earlier Khivan suspicions that he was a Russian spy, even now the Khan was taking no chances. To protect himself from being double-crossed, he was anxious to obtain a hostage in place of the departing Abbott. Under the guise of altruism he proposed a plan for rescuing Colonel Stoddart from the clutches of his neighbour, the Emir of Bokhara, with whom he was currently at odds. He claimed to have information that Stoddart was allowed out of his prison cell each day to take exercise. His plan was to dispatch a small force of horsemen to try to snatch the Englishman from under the noses of his guards. But not only was Abbott suspicious of the Khan’s motives for wishing to rescue Stoddart, he was also doubtful about the accuracy of his information. While it was his dearest wish to see his fellow countryman freed, he strongly opposed the rescue attempt on the grounds that if the Emir got wind of it he would immediately put Stoddart to death. The idea was dropped, but still fearful of being tricked, the Khan and his ministers decided at the last minute to go back on their offer to allow a number of Russian slaves to accompany Abbott. So it was that on March 7, 1840, with a small escort of Khivans, Abbott set out across the desert for Fort Alexandrovsk, the nearest Russian post, 500 miles away on the Caspian Sea, from where he hoped to make his way to the Tsar’s court at St Petersburg.

Meanwhile, having heard nothing whatsoever from Abbott since his arrival in Khiva, and even fearing that he might be dead, Major Todd decided to dispatch a second officer to find out what was happening there, and to try, where Abbott had seemingly failed, to persuade the Khan to release his Russian slaves. The man he chose was Lieutenant Richmond Shakespear, aged 28, an able and ambitious career political, and a cousin of the novelist Thackeray. Unlike the evangelically minded Conolly and Abbott, he was less concerned with introducing the benefits of Christian civilisation to Central Asia than with keeping the Russians out – not to mention advancing his own career. ‘The chances of distinction are so great and the hazards so slight,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘that the heart of a wren would be gladdened by the prospect.’

Wearing native dress and accompanied by eleven carefully chosen Heratis, including seven armed troopers, Shakespear left for Khiva on May 15. Four days out of Herat the party met a rider from the north who told them a wild tale. Abbott, he assured them, had reached St Petersburg where he had not only succeeded in negotiating a Russian withdrawal, but had also persuaded the Tsar to demolish all his forts on the eastern shore of the Caspian. If this was true, then there was clearly little point in Shakespear proceeding any further. But he was not convinced, and anyway had no intention of abandoning such an adventure. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he noted in his diary. ‘At any rate, I shall go on to Khiva.’ Certainly there was no sign of any let-up in the activities of the slave-raiders, for that same day they came upon a Turcoman caravan bearing fresh victims northwards to the market in Khiva. There were ten of them in all, he observed, ‘two females and the rest boys – mere children’. Although Shakespear’s own well-armed party outnumbered the Turcomans, he felt unable to intervene. Such a move, he explained afterwards, would have destroyed all hope of his mission succeeding, and thereby ending ‘this most detestable traffic’. Furthermore, he added, ‘had I turned the poor children loose, they would soon have been retaken.’ Instead he confined himself to lecturing the astonished slavers on the abomination of their ways, while his own men showered curses and abuse on them.

After passing safely through the ancient caravan town of Merv, they entered the most perilous stretch of the desert, on the far side of which lay the Oxus. Even by daylight the trail was hard enough to follow, for wind and sand quickly covered up the tracks of previous caravans. The only clues were the bones of animals, and the occasional skull of a camel which some public-spirited traveller had stuck on a thorn bush beside the way. Yet even at night, in total darkness, their young guide was able to find the trail. ‘It was pointed out to me,’ Shakespear noted, ‘and though I dismounted and tried hard to distinguish it, I failed.’ During the day the heat was extremely severe, and they were haunted by the fear of failing to find each successive well. ‘Had anything happened to the guide,’ Shakespear observed, ‘or had he been less intelligent, the destruction of the party would have been inevitable.’