The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (35 page)

Three days later they were through the worst of it, and before long found themselves on the banks of the Oxus. From there it was only a hundred or so miles to Khiva, which they entered on June 12. They had covered some 700 miles in a little under a month, a day or two faster than Abbott. In Khiva Shakespear learned of the misadventure which had befallen his brother officer after setting out on his long journey to St Petersburg. Betrayed by his guide, Abbott had been attacked in the desert by raiders. He himself had been wounded, robbed of all his possessions and taken captive, while his men were carried off for sale. By a miracle, however, a messenger sent after him by Todd, carrying money and letters, caught up with him. Finding that he was being held by men who were nominally subjects of the Khan of Khiva, the messenger warned them of the terrible consequences when word of their treachery reached the capital. Abbott’s captors had become even more alarmed when they learned that he was carrying a personal letter from the Khan to the Tsar of Russia, fearing retribution from the latter as well. The Englishman was hurriedly released, with profuse apologies and excuses. His men were freed, and his horse, uniform and other possessions were restored to him.

Abbott now continued his journey to Alexandrovsk, a tiny military fort on the Caspian, where he hoped to get his wounds treated before proceeding to St Petersburg. However, wild tales that he was leading a 10,000-strong force against the post had preceded him, and at first he was refused entry. Once it was realised who he was, and that he was injured, the gates were immediately opened, and he was welcomed by the Russian commandant and his strikingly beautiful wife, who saw to it that his wounds were carefully treated. When he was fit enough to travel again, Abbott set off for Orenburg and from there, bearing his letter to the Tsar, for St Petersburg. But in distant Khiva, Shakespear had no way of knowing any of this, or even whether Abbott was still alive. One thing was certain though. Abbott had clearly failed to persuade the Khan to surrender any of his Russian slaves. Here lay the ambitious Shakespear’s chance.

On the evening of his arrival in Khiva, Shakespear was summoned to the Khan’s presence. ‘His Highness received me very graciously,’ he reported, and the two men appear to have hit it off from the start. Shakespear was favourably impressed by the Khan’s lack of ostentation. ‘There is no pomp or show about his Court, no guards whatever, and I did not see a jewel of any sort,’ he wrote. The tall, extrovert Shakespear – a handsome, commanding figure, according to contemporary accounts – appears to have cut more of a dash with the Khan than the rather shy and earnest Abbott. Certainly the outcome of his visit seems to suggest this. In fact, Shakespear had not chosen a particularly auspicious moment to arrive and seek to persuade the Khan to free his Russian slaves. For by now the full magnitude of the Russian disaster in the snowfields to the north had reached the capital, and the Khivans were cock-a-hoop over what they claimed as a monumental victory. Privately, however, the Khan himself was less sure, being anxious about what the Russians might do next. Abbott’s warning that, even if they failed at their first attempt, the Russians would return in immensely greater strength, clearly worried him, thus making Shakespear’s task of persuasion that much easier.

In his subsequent account of his mission, Shakespear gives us few details of his negotiations with the Khan, or of the arguments he employed to achieve his purpose. What does emerge, however, was that, like Abbott, he greatly exceeded his authority by holding out the bait of a treaty between Britain and Khiva. It was neither the first nor the last time that players on either side in the Great Game took the name of their government in vain to win advantage over their adversaries. But whatever the inducements used by Shakespear to persuade the Khan, he gradually found him more and more receptive to the argument that the best way to protect himself from Russian wrath would be by surrendering all his slaves. Finally, on August 3, Shakespear was able to record in triumph in his diary: ‘The Khan . . . has made over to me all the Russian prisoners, and I am to take them to a Russian fort on the eastern shore of the Caspian.’

He at once set up his headquarters in a garden outside the capital, lent him for the purpose by the Khan, where the slaves were brought to him for documentation as Khivan officials rounded them up. By the following day he had counted more than 300 males, 18 females and 11 children. On average, he discovered, the men had been in bondage for ten years, and the women for seventeen. ‘With one exception,’ he observed, ‘they were all in fine health.’ Most of the men had been seized while fishing in the Caspian, while the women had been taken from around Orenburg. ‘They all seemed poor people, very grateful, and altogether it was one of the pleasantest duties I have ever executed,’ Shakespear noted that evening. But his problems were far from over yet. Despite the Khan’s edict that all Russian slaves were to be surrendered to him, there was a marked reluctance to comply with this among those who had paid a high price for their bondsmen. A sturdy male slave, after all, changed hands for £20 or more – the equivalent of four thoroughbred camels, Shakespear recounts. Word began to reach him via those who had been freed that a number of their countrymen were still being detained.

One such case, involving two young children, was brought to his attention by their desperate mother, who herself had just been liberated. It transpired that the two children, a 9-year-old girl and her younger brother, were in the service of a powerful lady at the Khan’s court, who was determined to keep them. After much negotiation she was induced to free the boy, but insisted on keeping the girl. On hearing this the distraught mother told Shakespear that rather than leave without her child she would prefer to stay behind in bondage. ‘She then taunted me’, he wrote, ‘with the promise I had made to obtain the child’s release.’ This was too much for him, and ordering his horse he rode to the Khan’s palace. There the chief minister was anxious to know the reason for this sudden and unannounced visit, but Shakespear thought it wise ‘to lead him astray on this point’. He was painfully aware that his request for this one child’s release might put the entire operation at risk. It was imperative therefore that he spoke to the Khan in person, rather than through an intermediary, on so sensitive an issue.

On being ushered into the Khan’s presence, Shakespear asked that the girl be allowed to go with her mother. The Khan assured him that she had no wish to leave her comfortable home in the palace, but Shakespear insisted that she was too young to know her own mind. The Khan remained undecided for a moment. Then he turned to the chief minister and ordered rather crossly: ‘Give him the child.’ Shortly afterwards she was produced and handed over to Shakespear. ‘I have seldom seen a more beautiful child,’ he wrote that night in his diary. It seemed clear that she was intended for the Khan’s own harem. When she set eyes on Shakespear, who was in native dress, she at once mistook him for a slave-trader and began to scream. Nothing, she swore, would make her go with him. But fortunately Shakespear had with him a man she knew and trusted, and finally she was persuaded to accompany him, being lifted up behind him on his saddle. The following morning both children were brought to Shakespear by their grateful mother to thank him.

Even now, however, the party was not complete. Twenty or so Russians had still to be handed over, and once again Shakespear had to protest to the Khan that his edict was being defied. Showing him the list of those whom he knew to be detained, he argued that unless he could take all the Russians with him he would have to call the whole thing off. So long as any of the Tsar’s subjects remained in Khivan hands, he pointed out, the Russians would have a pretext for invading their territory. ‘His Majesty was astounded at my plain speaking,’ Shakespear recounts, ‘and gave his minister an order in a tone which made him shake.’ Anyone found detaining a Russian slave, he declared, would be put to death. The next day seventeen more Russians were handed over, some still in chains. This now left only four unaccounted for, and finally just one. The headman of the village in which the latter dwelt came to Shakespear and swore on the Koran that the missing man was dead. But his father, also a slave, insisted that he was still alive and being held against his will. In the end, after a thorough search of the village, the Russian was found hidden in a vault beneath the granary.

On August 15, two months after Shakespear’s arrival at Khiva, the party was ready to leave on its 500-mile march across the desert to Fort Alexandrovsk on the Caspian. In addition to the freed slaves – 416 of them in all – Shakespear was to be accompanied by an armed escort provided by the Khan. Although the latter had decreed that from now on the seizing of Russians would be punishable by death, Shakespear had no wish to see the slaves merely fall into the hands of the lawless Turcomans once again. The close shave of Abbott and his party a few months earlier on this very same route was a reminder of the need for both armed protection and extreme vigilance.

As it set out from Khiva the caravan must have presented an extraordinary spectacle. ‘The plain was so open’, wrote Shakespear, ‘that the camels crowded together and marched
en masse,
the children and women riding on panniers, singing and laughing, and the men trudging along sturdily – all counting the few days which remained ere they should rejoin their countrymen.’ Shakespear must have been feeling understandably pleased with himself, for he had achieved single-handed what a heavily armed Russian force had so abysmally and humiliatingly failed to do. His boldness and directness in dealing with the all-powerful Khan, risky though this was, had enabled him to succeed where Abbott too had failed. ‘The release of these poor wretches has surprised the Turcomans amazingly,’ he observed, ‘and I humbly hope that it is the dawn of a new era in the history of this nation, and that ultimately the British name will be blessed with the proud distinction of having put an end to this inhuman traffic, and of having civilised the Turcoman race, which has for centuries been the scourge of Central Asia.’ He appears to have forgotten, however, as the Khan clearly had not, that the Khivans still retained their far more numerous, if less valuable, Persian slaves.

As the caravan approached the Russian fortress at Alexandrovsk, Shakespear sent ahead one of the ex-slaves, bearing a letter in English from himself, to alert the commandant. At first the messenger was received with the gravest suspicion by his fellow-countrymen inside the fort, just as Abbott had been, for they clearly feared a trap. They had difficulty, too, in understanding Shakespear’s letter, while news of the freeing by the Khan of all his Russian slaves was, the British officer noted, ‘too astounding to be credited’. It took the Russian garrison a whole night to overcome their suspicions. This fear of treachery, however, was not confined to the Russians. When the party got to within six miles of the fortress, the Khivan escort and camelmen refused to advance any further lest they be taken captive by the Russian troops. They pointed out that in accompanying the caravan so far they had already exceeded the Khan’s instructions. But it was still too far for some of the smaller children to walk, and many of the adults had possessions which they were unable to manage by themselves. Finally the nervous camelmen agreed to provide twenty animals for the final leg of the journey, while they waited at a safe distance for their return.

So it was that the slaves reached Alexandrovsk, and liberty at last. Their reception, Shakespear observed, would have made a most memorable painting. ‘The worthy commandant’, he wrote, ‘was overpowered with gratitude.’ He even gave Shakespear an official receipt for the rescued slaves, on which he scrawled: ‘They expressed themselves unanimously grateful to you as their Father and Benefactor.’ That night, writing to his sister to break the news to her, Shakespear declared triumphantly that ‘not a horse nor even a camel has been lost’. The following evening the Russians laid on a banquet in his honour at which they drank to the health of Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas, as well as to that of their English guest. Shakespear’s own men were much alarmed at the ceremonial firing of guns and the cheering, not to mention the consumption of alcohol. Indeed, all devout Muslims, they were horrified by some of the infidel customs which they encountered for the first time at Alexandrovsk.

On the day after their arrival one of them came rushing to Shakespear in distress. He had just seen the Russian soldiers feeding their pet dogs – unclean creatures to Muslims – and thought that they were being fattened for eating. ‘There was a woman there too,’ he told Shakespear, ‘whose face and neck was uncovered.’ Worse still, he went on, her legs were bare, ‘and I saw up to her knee!’ He and his companions had also peered into the garrison chapel. ‘They worship idols,’ he exclaimed. ‘I saw it. All of us saw it.’ Muttering ‘Repentance . . . Repentance’, he begged to be allowed to depart without further delay with the dispatches he was to carry back to Todd at Herat. The following day, amid vows of undying friendship, they set out on their long homeward journey. ‘Never had a man better servants,’ wrote Shakespear in his diary.