The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (55 page)

There are two different accounts of what followed. According to one – that of the village headman – Hayward’s ring was next torn from his finger. Then the leader of Mir Wali’s men drew his sword. Realising that he was going to die, Hayward uttered what those present took to be a prayer. Seconds later he was dead, slain by a single stroke of the sword. So that there might be no witnesses to the crime, his five servants were killed. The murderers then hastened to Hayward’s camp, which they proceeded to ransack in search of his own personal possessions and the gifts he was carrying. Their task now complete, they rode back to Yasin to report to their master, and to hand over to him the Englishman’s valuables. The other account of Hayward’s death, said to have come from one of his murderers, and which was to gain wide currency at the time, maintains that he asked his captors for one last favour before they killed him – to be allowed to watch the sun rise over the mountains. If the story is true, then the Mir’s men let him walk forward to a piece of rising ground. There, with his arms still tightly bound, Hayward stood in silence while the sun rose. Then he strode back to his captors, declaring: ‘I am ready’.

It was just how the Victorians liked their heroes to die. Hayward’s treacherous murder, in one of the world’s most desolate spots, stirred the nation profoundly when word of it reached London by telegraph from India nearly three months later. Surprisingly, no painter tried to immortalise the scene, although the popular poet Sir Henry Newbolt would later do so in verse. His poem – ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ – ends thus:

And now it was dawn. He rose strong to his feet,
     And strode to his ruined camp below the wood;
He drank the breath of the morning cool and sweet,
     His murderers round him stood.

Light on the Laspur hills was broadening fast,
     The blood-red snow-peaks chilled to a dazzling white;
He turned, and saw the golden circle at last,
     Cut by the Eastern height.

‘O glorious Life, Who dwellest in earth and sun,
     I have lived, I praise and adore Thee.’
                                                    A sword swept.

Over the pass the voices one by one
     Faded, and the hill slept.

Whatever the outrage felt by Victorian England towards Hayward’s murderers, there was very little that could be done about it short of dispatching a punitive expedition into these dangerous wilds, and that was something that the Viceroy had no intention of doing. The tragedy proved all too clearly the point which Sir John Lawrence and others had made – that one should not allow Europeans, however willing or brave, to venture into regions where their deaths could not be avenged. Immediate efforts were nonetheless made to try to discover the precise circumstances of the murder, as well as to retrieve Hayward’s body so that he could be given a proper burial. It was obviously too dangerous to send investigators to the spot, and nothing very useful was to emerge as to whether Mir Wali was solely responsible for the murder, or whether others were behind him, as some suspected. Both the Maharajah of Kashmir and the ruler of Chitral were rumoured to have been involved, although there is no evidence against either of them.

Hayward’s body was recovered on the initiative of one of his friends, a British geologist named Frederick Drew, who was in the employ of the Maharajah of Kashmir. Unable, for reasons of personal safety, to visit Yasin or Darkot himself, he sent instead a highly trusted British Indian sepoy to discover all he could about Hayward’s death, and to try to find and bring back his remains. The resourceful soldier, at considerable risk to his own life, succeeded in recovering Hayward’s corpse from beneath a pile of rocks which had been heaped on it, and in conveying it back to Drew at Gilgit. He also rescued some of the explorer’s possessions, including books, maps and papers, which his murderers had judged valueless.

On December 21, Drew was able to report to the Royal Geographical Society that he had buried its gold medallist in a garden beside the fort in Gilgit, a detachment of troops firing three volleys over the grave. Later a headstone was erected bearing these words: ‘To the memory of G. W. Hayward, Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society of London, who was cruelly murdered at Darkot, July 18, 1870, on his journey to explore the Pamir steppe. This monument is erected to a gallant officer and accomplished traveller at the instance of the Royal Geographical Society.’ It remains there to this day in what was to become Gilgit’s Christian cemetery, though now one has to obtain the key from the cobbler’s shop opposite if one wishes to see it. At the time of Hayward’s burial there grew beside it an apricot tree which, it is said, never bore fruit again. Today only a weeping willow stands there.

As for the treacherous Mir Wali, he was never brought to justice. However, shortly afterwards he was forced to flee from Yasin, for the ruler of Chitral, using British wrath over Hay-ward’s murder as a pretext, forcibly relieved him of his authority. This was supposedly by way of punishment, but it soon became obvious that the real motive was to enable him to reward one of his relatives with Yasin’s rule. Mir Wali’s sins finally caught up with him, though. After evading pursuit for several years, he met with a violent and dramatic end at the hands of his enemies – according to one account plunging over a precipice locked in a deadly embrace with an assailant. More than a century later Hayward’s name is widely remembered throughout the region. At Darkot, hardly less remote today than in his time, villagers took me to the bleak spot beside a small stream where, they say, Hayward was killed. My guide, as it happened, was a direct descendant of Mir Wali. According to a British traveller, Colonel Reginald Schomberg, who passed through Darkot in the 1930s, Hayward’s pistol, telescope and saddle were said still to be in the possession of local families. More recently, in the 1950s, six topographical watercolours by the murdered explorer turned up in the Bombay bazaar, and were subsequently sold at auction in London. Just how they found their way on to the market will forever remain a mystery – like so much else about George Hayward.

The Russians had long been concerned about the activities of British officers, explorers and other travellers in a region which they had come to look upon as lying within their sphere of influence. Thus the journeys of Shaw and Hayward (and perhaps even the Pundits, of whose existence they were by now very likely aware) had not gone unobserved by General Kaufman in Tashkent. Even more disturbing to him, however, was the British mission, ostensibly commercial, which Lord Mayo had dispatched under Sir Douglas Forsyth to the court of Yakub Beg. For the Muslim leader was currently showing himself to be extremely hostile to St Petersburg, strengthening his military posts along their common frontier, and prohibiting the entry of all Russian goods and merchants. To Kaufman it must have looked as though the British had at last abandoned their policy of masterly inactivity, and were preparing to bring Kashgaria under their protection and to monopolise its trade. In fact, though the Russians did not yet know it, the British had met with a reverse. On reaching Yarkand, the mission had discovered that Yakub Beg was at the eastern end of his kingdom, nearly a thousand miles away, and was not expected back for quite some time. There were those who suspected that he had done this deliberately, fearing on careful reflection that he might needlessly risk St Petersburg’s wrath by receiving the British. Whatever the reason, the mission had no choice but to return empty-handed to India. Coupled with the unavenged murder of Hayward and his servants, this rebuff, intended or otherwise, represented a serious blow to British esteem in Central Asia.

It was at this moment that St Petersburg launched the first of a series of major moves which were to strengthen greatly its political and strategic position in the region. Spurred on by Count Ignatiev, who had shortly before been appointed as his country’s ambassador to Constantinople, it unilaterally renounced the humiliating Black Sea clauses forced on it under the Treaty of Paris after the Crimean War. These, it may be recalled, banned Russian warships and naval installations from the Black Sea. The news caused consternation in London, for the ban’s purpose had been to keep the Russian fleet as far away as possible from the Turkish straits and the Mediterranean, and so safeguard Britain’s imperial lifeline with India. However, not having the full backing of the other major European powers, the British were unable to do much about it short of going to war with St Petersburg, and that the government was unwilling to do.

Russia’s next forward move followed soon afterwards, in the summer of 1871, though because of the remoteness of the region where this occurred it took the British three months to hear about it. The Muslim territory of Hi, which commanded important strategic passes into southern Siberia, had shaken off Chinese rule during the recent insurrection and won temporary independence. Lying adjacent to Yakub Beg’s domains, to the north-east of Kashgar, it had not yet been annexed by him. But believing, or at least claiming, that Yakub Beg was about to seize it, General Kaufman ordered his troops to pre-empt any such move, lest the Muslim ruler’s occupation of the territory threaten Russia’s southern borders. For it was across these passes, it should in fairness be said, that in Mongol times the destructive hordes had poured into Russia, causing them to be likened by Russian strategists to the Khyber Pass. However, that was not the Hi valley’s only significance. It was also rich in minerals, as Kaufman’s geologists were well aware, while for good measure it served as the principal granary of this desolate region, a fact which can hardly have escaped his generals. On June 24, the Russians marched through the passes into Hi, where they defeated a force more than twice their strength which attempted to stop them. The following day they entered Kuldja, the capital, the Russian commander proclaiming it to have been annexed ‘in perpetuity’ although he had no authority to do so. Later St Petersburg corrected this, declaring that the occupation was merely temporary.

So distant was Hi from the nearest Chinese outposts, since their expulsion from Turkestan, that Peking was totally unaware of the Russian incursion until officially informed of it by St Petersburg. It was explained to the Chinese that the Tsar’s forces had recovered Hi from the rebels for the Emperor, and would hold on to it until he was once again able to defend it against Yakub Beg or anyone else. This did not deceive the Chinese, who immediately demanded that it be restored to them. St Petersburg refused, and relations between the two powers became extremely chilly. No longer worried by the prospect of upsetting Peking, the Russians decided to reopen discussions with Yakub Beg over the old questions of recognition and trade. In the spring of 1872, they dispatched a senior political officer to his court at Kashgar with instructions to offer him full recognition in exchange for opening his markets to Russian goods on specially favourable terms which would effectively keep out the British. This time the talks were successful, or so the Russians thought.

It was Yakub Beg’s aim, however, to keep foreign influence to a minimum in Kashgaria. The best way to achieve this, he reasoned, was by playing one side off against the other. No sooner had the Russian envoy departed than he sent a special emissary to the British in India expressing his profound regrets at his unavoidable absence the previous year, and inviting them to dispatch a second mission to Kashgar for talks with him. Alarmed by news of the Russian visit, Lord Northbrook, the new Viceroy (Lord Mayo had been assassinated the previous year), accepted gratefully, and in the summer of 1873 a second British mission set out across the Karakorams. Far larger than the earlier one, it consisted of political and military officers, trade experts, surveyors and other specialists, and was headed once again by Sir Douglas Forsyth. His instructions were to obtain from Yakub Beg a trade deal similar to that which he had granted to the Russians, and to gather as much intelligence as possible from this little-known region, whether political, strategic, economic or scientific. With its escort of infantry and cavalry from the Corps of Guides, and its numerous interpreters, secretaries, clerks and servants, the mission totalled 350 men and 550 baggage animals. After thirty years, Britain’s policy of masterly inactivity in Central Asia, condemned by its hawkish critics as craven surrender to Russia’s designs, was at last coming to an end.