The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (5 page)

In the event, Peter was never again to pursue his dream of opening up a golden road to India, along which would flow unimagined wealth. He had already taken on more than one man could hope to achieve in a lifetime, and accomplished much of it. But long after his death in 1725 a strange and persistent story began to circulate through Europe about Peter’s last will and testament. From his death bed, it was said, he had secretly commanded his heirs and successors to pursue what he believed to be Russia’s historical destiny – the domination of the world. Possession of India and Constantinople were the twin keys to this, and he urged them not to rest until both were firmly in Russian hands. No one has ever seen this document, and most historians believe that it never existed. Yet such was the awe and fear surrounding Peter the Great that at times it came to be widely believed, and versions of its supposed text to be published. It was, after all, just the sort of command that this restless and ambitious genius might have given to posterity. Russia’s subsequent drive towards both India and Constantinople seemed, to many, confirmation enough, and until very recently there existed a strong belief in Russia’s long-term aim of world domination.

It was not for another forty years, however, until the reign of Catherine the Great, that Russia once again began to show signs of interest in India, where the British East India Company had been steadily gaining ground, principally at the expense of the French. In fact one of Catherine’s predecessors, the pleasure-loving Anne, had returned all Peter’s hard-won gains in the Caucasus to the Shah of Persia (hardly in keeping with Peter’s supposed will) on the grounds that they were draining her treasury. But Catherine, like Peter, was an expansionist. It was no secret that she dreamed of expelling the Turks from Constantinople and restoring Byzantine rule there, albeit under her firm control. This would give her fleet access to the Mediterranean, then very much a British lake, from the Black Sea, still very much a Turkish one.

In 1791, towards the end of her reign, Catherine is known to have carefully considered a plan to wrest India from Britain’s ever-tightening grip. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this idea was the brain-child of a Frenchman, a somewhat mysterious individual named Monsieur de St Genie. He proposed to Catherine that her troops should march overland via Bokhara and Kabul, announcing as they advanced that they had come to restore Muslim rule under the Moguls to its former glory. This would attract to Catherine’s standard, he argued, the armies of the Muslim khanates along the invasion route, and foment mass uprisings against the British within India as word of their coming spread. Although the plan got no further than that (she was dissuaded from it by her chief minister and former lover, the one-eyed Count Potemkin), this was the first of a long succession of such schemes for the invasion of India which Russian rulers were to toy with during the next century or so.

If Catherine failed to add either India or Constantinople to her domains, she nonetheless took a number of steps in that direction. Not only did she win back from the Persians the Caucasian territories which Anne had restored to them, but she also took possession of the Crimea, that last surviving stronghold of the Mongol empire. For three centuries it had enjoyed the protection of the Turks, who saw it as a valuable shield against the increasingly aggressive colossus to the north. But by the end of the eighteenth century, the once warlike Crimean Tartars had ceased to be a force to be reckoned with. Taking advantage of territorial gains she had made at the expense of the Turks on the northern coast of the Black Sea, and of internal strife among the Tartars, Catherine was able to add the Crimean khanate to her empire without a shot being fired. She achieved this, in her own words, simply by ‘placing posters in important locations to announce to the Crimeans our receiving them as our subjects’. Blaming their troubles on the Turks, the descendants of Genghis Khan meekly accepted their fate.

The Black Sea now ceased to be a Turkish lake, for not only were the Russians to build a giant new naval arsenal and base at Sebastopol, but also their warships were within two days’ sailing of Constantinople. Fortunately for the Turks, however, a freak storm not long afterwards sent the entire Russian Black Sea fleet to the bottom, temporarily removing the threat. But although the great city astride the Bosporus which she had dreamed of liberating from Muslim rule was still firmly in Turkish hands when Catherine died, the road leading to it was now appreciably shorter. For the first time Russia’s increasing presence in the Near East and the Caucasus began to give cause for concern among senior officials of the East India Company. Among the earliest to sense this was Henry Dundas, President of the Company’s new Board of Control, who warned of the danger of allowing the Russians to supplant the Turks and the Persians in these regions, and the long-term threat this might pose to British interests in India if the cordial relations then existing between London and St Petersburg were ever to deteriorate or collapse altogether.

However, in the light of what happened next, such fears were momentarily forgotten. A new spectre had suddenly arisen, representing a far more immediate threat to Britain’s position in India. Still only in his twenties, and burning to avenge French defeats at the hands of the British there, Napoleon Bonaparte had turned his predatory gaze eastwards. Fresh from his triumphs in Europe, he now vowed to humble the arrogant British by cutting them off from India, the source of their power and riches, and eventually driving them from this greatest of all imperial prizes. A strategic foothold in the Near East, he believed, was the first step towards this. ‘To conquer India we must first make ourselves masters of Egypt,’ he declared.

Napoleon wasted no time in setting about this, borrowing every book on the region which he could discover, and marking heavily those passages which interested him. ‘I was full of dreams,’ he explained long afterwards. ‘I saw myself founding a new religion, marching into Asia riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hands the new Koran I would have written to suit my needs.’ By the spring of 1798 all was ready, and on May 19 an armada carrying French troops sailed secretly from the ports of Toulon and Marseilles.

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Napoleonic Nightmare

It was from the lips of a native of Bengal that Lord Wellesley, the new Governor-General of India, first heard the sensational and unwelcome news that Napoleon had landed in Egypt with 40,000 troops. The man had just arrived in Calcutta from Jeddah, on the Red Sea, aboard a fast Arab vessel. A full week was to pass before the tidings were officially confirmed by intelligence reaching Bombay via a British warship. One reason for the delay was that the French invasion force had managed to give the British Mediterranean fleet the slip, and it had not been known for some weeks whether it was bound for Egypt, or was heading round the Cape for India.

The fact that Napoleon was on the move with so large a force had caused grave alarm in London, especially to Dundas and his colleagues at the Board of Control. For the East India Company’s position in India was still far from secure, even if it was now the paramount European power there, with a virtual monopoly of the country’s commerce. Fighting the French and others had almost reduced it to bankruptcy, and the Company was in no position to take on Napoleon. It was with some relief, therefore, that it was learned that he had got no further than Egypt, although this was threat enough. Widespread conjecture now followed as to what Napoleon’s next step would be. There were two schools of thought. One argued that he would advance overland through Syria or Turkey, and attack India from Afghanistan or Baluchistan, while the other was convinced that he would come by sea, setting sail from somewhere on Egypt’s Red Sea coast.

Dundas was sure that he would take the land route, and even urged the government to hire Russian troops to intercept him. The Company’s own military experts believed that the invasion, if it came, would be sea-borne, although the Red Sea was closed for much of the year by contrary winds. To guard against this danger, a British force was hastily dispatched round the Cape to block the exit to the Red Sea, and another sent from Bombay. The strategic significance of the Red Sea route was not lost on Calcutta. Some years earlier, news of the outbreak of war between Britain and France had reached India this way in record time, enabling the Company’s troops to steal a march on the unsuspecting French there. Although, as yet, there was no regular transportation service via the Red Sea and Egypt, urgent messages and travellers in a hurry occasionally went that way rather than by the usual route around the Cape, which could take up to nine months or more, depending on the winds and weather. But Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt was to put a stop to this short cut for a while.

Unlike senior government and Company officials in London, Wellesley himself did not lose too much sleep over Napoleon’s presence in Egypt. He was frankly far from convinced that it was possible to launch a successful invasion from there, whether by land or by sea. This, however, did not prevent him from turning the fears of those in London to his own advantage. A firm believer in forward policies, he was as keen to advance the Company’s frontiers in India as the directors were to keep them where they were. They simply wanted profits for their impatient shareholders, not costly territorial gains. As it was, the Company had found itself drawn reluctantly and expensively into the vacuum created by the disintegration of Mogul rule in India, and therefore increasingly involved in government and administration. Consequently, instead of being able to provide their shareholders with the annual dividend they had been guaranteed, the directors faced ever-mounting debts and the perpetual threat of bankruptcy. Fighting off an invasion, they knew, would be totally ruinous, even if successful, as little assistance could be expected from the government at home which was itself engaged in the life-and-death struggle with France.

The crisis gave Wellesley the opportunity he needed, however. This was the excuse to crush and dispossess those native rulers who showed themselves to be friendly with the French, whose agents were still extremely active in India. But he was not to stop there. As he took full advantage of the free hand London was forced to give him to protect its valuable interests, large new areas of the country came under British control. Because his reports took so long to reach London, and anyway were always deliberately vague, Wellesley was able to continue these expropriations throughout his seven-year tenure as Governor-General. Thus, by the time of his recall in 1805, Company territory, its subsidiary states and regions partially controlled by it had expanded dramatically from the original three coastal presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay to include the greater part of India as we know it today. Only Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir still retained their independence.

The initial impetus, or pretext, for this spectacular piece of empire-building had been provided by Napoleon’s precipitate move. Yet that threat, which had caused such panic in London, proved to be extremely short-lived. Making up for his failure to find and intercept the French armada before it reached Egypt, Admiral Horatio Nelson finally came upon it anchored in Aboukir Bay, east of Alexandria. There, on August 1, 1798, he trapped and destroyed it, only two vessels managing to escape. He thus cut Napoleon off from France, severing his supply lines, and leaving him to get his troops home as best he could. But if this defeat enabled Company chiefs in London to breathe again, the young Napoleon had far from abandoned his dream of driving the British out of India and building a great French empire in the East. Indeed, wholly undisturbed by his failure in Egypt, he was, on his return to France, to move from strength to strength with a succession of brilliant victories in Europe.

Before embarking on these, however, he was to receive a startling proposition from St Petersburg. It came, early in 1801, from Tsar Paul I, Catherine the Great’s successor, and offered him the opportunity to avenge himself on the British and further his ambitions in the East. Paul, who shared his dislike of the British, had decided to revive the plan, which Catherine had turned down a decade earlier, for an invasion of India. It too involved a long advance southwards across Central Asia by Russian troops. But he had a better idea. It should be a combined attack by both Russia and France, which would make victory over the Company’s armies virtually certain. He put his grandiose plan secretly to Napoleon, whom he admired almost to the point of infatuation, and awaited his reply.