considering Dost Mahomed’s country his own, had given it away to Shah Soojah.
To this friendly letter the Governor-General returned a friendly reply. It was his wish, he said, that the Afghans “should be a flourishing and united nation;” it was his wish, too, that Dost Mahomed should encourage a just idea of the expediency of promoting the navigation of the Indus. He hinted that he should probably soon “depute some gentlemen” to the Ameer’s Court to discuss with him certain commercial topics; and added, with reference to Dost Mahomed’s unhappy relations with the Sikhs, and his eagerness to obtain assistance from any quarter: “My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British Government to interfere with the affairs of other independent states.” With what feelings three years afterwards, when a British army was marching upon his capital, the Ameer must have remembered these words, it is not difficult to conjecture.
This project of a commercial mission to Afghanistan was no new conception of which Lord Auckland was the parent. It had at least been thought of by Lord William Bentick—and, certainly, with no ulterior designs. It was suggested, I believe, to Lord William Bentinck by Sir John Malcolm. That Lord Auckland, when he wrote to Dost Mahomed about “deputing some gentlemen” to Caubul to talk over commercial matters with the Ameer, had much more intention than his predecessor of driving the Barukzye Sirdars into exile, is not to be asserted or believed. He may have seen that such a mission might be turned to other than commercial uses; he may have thought it desirable that the gentlemen employed should collect as much information at the Ameer’s Court as the advantages of their position would enable them to acquire. But at this time he would have started back at the barest mention of a military expedition beyond the Indus, and would have scouted a proposal to substitute for the able and energetic ruler of Caubul, that luckless Suddozye Prince—the pensioner of Loodhianah—whose whole career had been such a series of disasters as had never before been written down against the name of any one man.
Apart from the commercial bearings of the case, he had little more than a dim notion of obtaining a clearer insight into the politics of Central Asia. But vague and indefinite as were his conceptions, he was haunted, even at the commencement of his Indian career, by a feeling of insecurity, engendered by the aspect of affairs beyond the British frontier. There was a shadow of danger, but he knew not what the substance might be. Any one of the strange combinations which he was called upon to consider, might evolve a war;[108] so at least it behoved him to prepare for the possible contest, by obtaining all the knowledge that could be acquired, and securing the services of men competent to aid him in such a conjuncture.
Since distant rumours of an Afghan invasion had disturbed the strong mind of Lord Wellesley, much had been learnt both in India and in England concerning the countries between the Indus and the Oxus. The civil and military services of the East India Company, numbering in their ranks, as they ever have done, men of lofty enterprise and great ability, had, since the commencement of the century, brought, by their graphic writings, the countries and the people of Central Asia visibly before their home-staying countrymen. Before the close of the eighteenth century, but one English traveler—a Bengal civilian, named Forster—had made his way from the banks of the Ganges across the rivers of the Punjab to the lakes of Cashmere, and thence descending into the country below, had entered the formidable pass of the Khybur, and penetrated through the defiles of Jugdulluck and Koord-Caubul to the Afghan capital, whence he had journeyed on, by Ghuznee, Candahar, and Herat, to the borders of the Caspian Sea. The journey was undertaken in 1783 and the following year; but it was not until some fifteen years afterwards, that the account of his travels was given to the world. Honourable alike to his enterprise and his intelligence, the book exhibits at once how much, during the last seventy years, the Afghan Empire, and how little the Afghan character, is changed.
The great work of Mountstuart Elphinstone, published some fifteen years after the appearance of Mr. Forster’s volume, soon became the text-book of all who sought for information relating to the history and geography of the Douranee Empire. But Elphinstone saw little of the country or the people of Afghanistan; he acquired information, and he reproduced it with marvellous fidelity and distinctness, and would probably not have written a better book if he had travelled and had seen more. It was left for a later generation to explore the tracts of country which were unvisited by the ambassador; and for a later still to elicit encouragement and reward.
Years passed away before government began to recognise the value of such inquiries. When Mr. Moorcroft, of the Company’s Stud-Department, a man of high courage and enterprise, accompanied by Mr. Trebeck, the son of a Calcutta lawyer, set out in 1819, in the mixed character of a horse-dealer and a merchant, upon his long and perilous journey; spent the last six years of his life in exploring the countries of Ladakh, Cashmere, Afghanistan, Balkh, and Bokhara; and died at last in the inhospitable regions beyond the Hindoo-Koosh, nothing but absolute discouragement and opposition emanated from a government that had not the prescience to see the importance of such investigations.[109]
In 1828 Mr. Edward Stirling, an officer of the Bengal civil service, being in England on furlough, undertook to return to India by the route of Khorassan and Afghanistan. From Sir John Macdonald, the Resident Minister at Teheran, he received every encouragement and assistance; but the Indian Government looked slightingly upon his labours, and neglected the man. The information he had acquired was not wanted; and he was put out of employment, because he had over-stayed, by a few weeks, the period of his leave of absence. Those were days when no thought of an invasion from the westward overshadowed the minds of our Indian statesmen.[110] But when, a few years afterwards, a young officer of the Bengal cavalry, named Arthur Conolly—a man of an earnest and noble nature, running over with the most benevolent enthusiasm, and ever suffering his generous impulses to shoot far in advance of his prudence and discretion—set out from London, proceeded, through Russia, across the Caucasus, and thence through Persia and Khorassan, accompanying an Afghan army from Meshed to Herat, and journeyed on from the latter place to Candahar, and, southward, through Beloochistan and Sindh to India, there was little chance of the information which he collected on his travels being received with ingratitude and neglect. The period which elapsed between the time when those travels were completed and the date at which their written results were given to the world, deprived Arthur Conolly of some portion of the credit which he might otherwise have received, and of the interest which attached to his publication. Another officer had by this time made his way by another route, through the unexplored regions of Central Asia, and laid before the government and the country an account of his wanderings. On him, when Lord Auckland bethought himself of despatching a commercial agent to Caubul, the choice of the Governor-General fell.
Born in the year 1805, at Montrose, and educated in the academy of that town, Alexander Burnes proceeded to Bombay at the early age of sixteen, and, at a period of his career when the majority of young men are mastering the details of company-drill, and wasting their time in the strenuous idleness of cantonment life, had recommended himself, by his proficiency in the native languages, to the government under which he served. Whilst yet in his teens, he was employed to translate the Persian documents of the Suddur Court, and, at the age of twenty, was appointed Persian interpreter to a force assembled for a hostile demonstration against Sindh, rendered necessary by the continued border feuds which were disturbing the peace of our frontier. In a little while he became distinguished as a topographer no less than as a linguist; and as a writer of memoirs, and designer of maps of little-known tracts of country, soon rose into favour and repute. Attached to the department of the Quartermaster-General, he was employed upon the survey of the north-western frontier of the Bombay Presidency, and shortly afterwards was appointed Assistant Political Agent in Cutch, a province with which he had made himself intimately acquainted. In the young officer a spirit of enterprise was largely blended with the love of scientific research. He was eager to push his inquiries and to extend his travels into the countries watered by the Indus and its tributaries—the fabulous rivers on the banks of which the Macedonian had encamped his victorious legions. It was not long before occasion offered for the gratification of his cherished desires. A batch of splendid English horses had been despatched, in 1830, to Bombay, as a present to Runjeet Singh; and Sir John Malcolm, then Governor of that Presidency, selected Alexander Burnes to conduct the complimentary mission to Lahore.[111] Instructed, at the same time, to neglect no opportunity of acquiring information relative to the geography of the Indus, he proceeded