‘Josiah was proud of US republicanism but was attracted to monarchy.’ Photo: from Wikimedia Commons
Battle royal: Eleanor Nesbitt on unlikely Quaker Josiah Harlan
‘Paramount chief of the Hazarajat, companion of the imperial stirrup, and paragon of the mighty grandees.’
O ne hundred and fifty years ago, Josiah Harlan, a very unusual Quaker, died of tuberculosis in San Francisco. Josiah had been readmitted to the Religious Society of Friends after the withdrawal of a judgement against him for violating the rule of pacifism. His career – in Burma, India and Afghanistan – had in fact been very far from pacifist. In 1824, without any medical qualifications, he enlisted as a military surgeon to the British East India Company, and then served with the army in Burma. He had hoped to serve as an officer in the army of Ranjit Singh but on the way met Shah Shuja, the brutal deposed ruler of Afghanistan, and decided to recruit a hundred or so mercenaries to reinstate him.
Josiah was almost certainly the first American to set foot in Afghanistan. In 1836 he returned there to fight an Uzbek slave trader. Emulating his hero, Alexander the Great, he took about 1,400 cavalry, 1,100 infantry and 1,500 support personnel, plus horses, camels and war elephants (which, like Alexander’s elephants, had to turn back in mountainous terrain). In Kabul (which had very polluted water), he resorted to smuggled wine and whisky to avoid cholera. But in Punjab he avoided Ranjit’s Singh’s notoriously intoxicating ‘fire water’, and eschewed drunken parties.
Josiah was proud of US republicanism but was always attracted to monarchy – it was his fascination with royalty that had attracted him to Punjab and Afghanistan. He was pleased when Ranjit Singh appointed him governor of Gujrat, albeit with the warning that he would lose his nose if he misbehaved. In Afghanistan he became prince of Ghor.
In the US, too, Josiah was no more of a pacifist that he had been in Asia. When civil war broke out there, he recruited his own private army to fight for the Union. His men mutinied, however, because of his high-handed abrasive manner, and Josiah was court-martialled.
My own first encounter with Josiah was through the Sikh storyteller Sarbpreet Singh’s book, The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia (Josiah had tried to persuade the US government to buy camels from Afghanistan). Others know him, perhaps, as the inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.
An unsusual life, then: paramount chief of the Hazarajat, companion of the imperial stirrup, and paragon of the mighty grandees. But, as Jan Morris has pointed out, ‘In many ways, Harlan remained faithful to his Quaker origins through it all’. His hatred of slavery and imperialism (and perhaps his love of books, languages and botany) was born there – and seem to have endured to his end.
