Playwright in the cages

World enough and time - Austen Layard and the Library of Nineveh

2011-01-30T13:35:00.009Z

For my valedictory post on this blog, at the end of my residency at the NLS, I thought I'd share two more favourite items from the John Murray Archive.

What you can see above is a passport, circa 1842, personally signed by Lord Palmerston, then foriegn secretary.

Pretty cool to start with.

It's issued to one Henry Austen Layard, son of a reduced aristocratic family, who'd been born in Paris on his parents heavily extended honeymoon, raised in Italy, and then had been uncomfortably educated at an English public school, where his knowledge of foriegn parts and foriegn ways (and enthusiasm for art) had gone down pretty much as badly as you'd expect with his beef-eating schoolmates.

His father by now was serving the Empire in Ceylon, and young Layard got this passport in 1842 intending to travel overland to India to take up a post as a solicitor.

He never made it...as a glance at the rest of his passport can show.

It all got a bit complicated in the Middle East...these entry stamps show him going back and forth between Constaninople, Damascus and Baghdad...one one occasion pretending to have the plague...travelling in company with a chum (who was also heading to India), and then alone, but finding himself detained...intelligence gathering on the activities of the Otttoman Empire, the Persians, the Russians and, of course, The French.

He ran into and befriended a Major Henry Rawlinson, who we last met giving a cameo appearance in Afghanistan when he himself was spooking around the Hindu Kush and running into Russian agents on a similar mission.

Layard bears, then, a family resemblance to Alexander Burnes, my previous hero, who had combined his personal, outsider's passions with officially unofficial derring do.

Burnes had been a bit obsessed with his name sake, Sekundar -Alexander, of the Great variety - but Layard, in contrast to Burnes bloody fate, was to live into respected old age as an MP and art collector...and long time contributor to the Murray's Quarterly Review. (His correspondence with the Murrays fills several grey folders in the archive).

Because he had a bit of luck.

The French had been doing some digging in Mesopotamia, exploring "tels" or mounds, which yielded more archaeology on a Sunday stroll than Time Team can dig up in a couple of series. And Layard thought he'd have a go.

What he (and his partner and rival , the similarly eccentric French diplomat Paul Emile Botta) dug up over the next two years (1845-7), now crams room after room of the British Museum and the Louvre.

(They took half each, roughly)

They'd found Babylon...the Babylon of the Assyrians, and before them, the Sumerians. They discovered ancient civilizations, city after city, room after room, carved fresco after carved fresco. They discovered languages, ancient script, carved into walls and pillars. That which had only existed before in the pages of the Bible and the fantasies of Byron, was before them...theirs were the first eyes to see any of this for two thousand years.

It almost beggars the imagination...how it must have felt to see the massive stone lions, the fantastically detailed scenes of battle and hunting...and how inscrutable it must have been to them, like landing on another planet.

It's an amazing story, for which I have not world enough or time...the deciphering of the script over the next thirty years, the discovery of a flood narrative that seemed to confirm Noah...accounts of the Babylonian exile of the Jews...and, above all, the story of Gilgamesh, King of Kings, and his battle with death recently brilliantly dramatised by the late lamented Edwin Morgan (as yet unstaged)...itself the oldest written narrative we know.

Rawlinson, already a Murray author, put Layard on to Albemarle Street, and the Murrays published book after book of Layard's adventures and discoveries, including Monuments of Nineveh in 1849, which is a quite beautiful coffee table sized presentation of the most spectacular archaeological find before Tutankamun.

(Rawlinson was among the translators and interpreters of this materiaL)

But what I want to leave you, and this blog with, are these.

On his knees in the dark of the burial mounds of lost cities, Layard, by the light of a lamp, exactly transcribing page after page of cuneiform from the very walls...painstakingly copying stories he couldn't begin to read or understand.

For me, the most heroic image imaginable, and the most appropriate for a library like the NLS. One can imagine, ten thousand years from now, scholars and curators, (if there will still be such people), painfully examining the buried remains of GBIV, picking out the characters and attempting to piece our lives together from a labyrinth of scratchmarks.

I hope we get that lucky.

Enjoy. Even better, come to the NLS and enjoy before the ten thousand years are up. It's all here. It's all available free. To everybody.

It's been a priviledge.

Afghanistan and Wrapping Up

2011-01-14T12:04:00.002Z

I'm coming to the end of my residency now at the NLS. It's been an exciting and bewilderingly diverse three years. This blog has been one of the more interesting experiments. I've tried to use it to tell stories that have fascinated me, and as ways of thinking about how these documents from the 19th Century impact on an understanding of the world today...for me, anyway.

To conclude my posts on Afghanistan, then, I'm going to hand over first to the redoubtable George Glieg, the Scottish miliary clergyman and all round muscular Protestant, whose gripping account of the First Afghan War the Murray's published in 1843.

It's surprising how resonant it is:

"So ended a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close after suffring and disaster, without much glory attaching either to the government which directed, or the great body of the troops which waged it. Not one benefit, either political, or military, has England acquired by the war. Indeed, our evacuation of the country resembled almost as much the retreat of an army defeated as the march of a body of conquerors, seeing that to the last our flanks and rear were attacked, and such baggage as we did save, we saved by dint of hard fighting. Nevertheless, British India proclaimed what the whole world good naturedly allowed, that we had redeemed our honour, and were once more victorious."

This was the official proclamation of the end of the "forward policy" in Afghanistan that had been announced, with much more fanfare, likewise in Simla, only four years before:

SIMLA PROCLOMATION 1842
"The government of India directed its army past the Indus in order to expel from Afghanistan a chief believed to be hostile to British interests and to replace upon his throne a soverign represented to be friendly to those intersts, and popular with his former subjects The chief believed to be hostile became a prisoner, and the soveriegn believed to be popular was replaced upon his throne, But...after events which brought into question his fidelity to the government by which he was restored, he lost, by the hand of an assassin, the throne he had held only amid insurrections.

Disasters unparalelled in their extent, unless by the errors in which they originated, and by the treachery in which they were completed, have {now} been avenged

(see last post)

....and...again attached the opinion of invincibility to the British Arms.

The British army in possession of Afghanistan will now be withdrawn to the Sutej...the Governor General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidt the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes...the combined army of India and of England...will stand in unassailable strength upon its own soil, and forever...preserve the glorious empire it has won..."

And Alexander Burnes, Murray author, diplomat of talent, linguist of genius, and Scotsman on the the Make...is still there...

Next time, to wrap things up for me as well as the British Army of the Indus, a couple of treasures I have to share before I go.

Revenge - Afghanistan 1842

2011-01-04T12:24:00.002Z

In previous posts, through the writings of Murray authors Alexander Burnes and Lady Sale, I've explored first hand accounts of the outbreak and disasters of the First Afghan War. A third author, Reverend George Glieg, takes the story a little further. The Empire wasn't simply going to lick it's wounds. No. There had to be a response to the humiliation of British Arms.

Abandoned now was any pretext of bringing civilization and order, abandoned now was any talk of countering Russian infiltration of British India. The second British army to invade Afghanistan had no intention of staying, no ambitions towards regime change.

On the 15th of April, two and a half months after Dr Bryden rode half dead into Jallalabad, General Pollock, arriving from India with reinforcements, launched a punitive attack on Kabul in August with two infantry regiments and two squadrons of cavalry. This wasn't politics, this was revenge - shock and awe.

Reverend Glieg was with them:

"And very harrowing to the feelings of the soldiers was this long march. The narrow path by which they moved was strewn with the remains of Elphinstone's army. One upon another lay the dead; some of them reduced to skeletons, some with the features so entire that by many of their old acquaintances they were recognised. Flocks of vultures wheeled over the heads of the living and seemed to claim the dead as their own; while the smell that arose, especially on the night air, was dreadful. Our gallant fellows looked upon the scene of slaughter, and wished for revenge; and they never suffered an opportunity of gratifying the desire to pass unimproved."

He goes on

"The enemy fought with great desperation, standing till but a few paces divided them from our troops, and gave way even then only when the fixed bayonets gleamed before them, and they heard the shout wherewith the British Infantry invariably preface a charge. Then might be seen a flight and a pursuit, the one winged by terror, the other animated to perseverance by a burning thirst of revenge. The 3rd Light Dragoons were set loose upon the fugitives. They soon overtook them, and hewed, left and right, as men do who have the deaths of their friends and comrades to atone for; and the whole summit of the hill, as well as the slope beyond it, and the road, and the declivities leading down to it, were strewed with the bodies of the slain."

"They did not leave a house standing in Istaliff...fire consumed both cottage and castle..gardens, vineyards and orchards were all cut down."

Next priority was the release of the British hostages, including Lady Sale, still assiduously writng in her journal. Again, I can't be alone in recognizing the "human interest" aspect of the campaign, and its esstially emotional character. Glieg tells the story like this

"Akbar Khan had retreated with the wreck of his army towards the Hindoo Kush...one of his followers, Salee Mohammed by name, (incapable of withstanding the influence of money) had been won over to betray his post, and was actually moving towards Cabul with the whole of the British prisoners...when told at length that Lady Sale was safe, and that she and his widowed daughter Mrs Sturt, were on their way to rejoin him (General Sale) , there arose a shout, which the men of the regiment soon took up."

And when the hostages were restored, it was time to get out, leaving nothing but bad momories behind.

"Having thus re-established the prestige of British Invincibility, Pollock made ready to return to India. A son of Shah Shujah, Futteh Jung by name, proclaimed himself King. Few men of any note rallied to him, and the young man was made to understand that he need not look to the Ferighees (the British) for the support which his own countrymen witheld from him. Having settled these poiunts, General Pollock gave directions for inflicting on the guilty capital the punishment which it deserved.

With natural vanity, Akbar Khan had built a mosque to commemorate the destruction of Elphinstone's force, which he gave the name of the Feringhee Mosque, and which his flatterers affected to regard as one of the wonders of the world. It was levelled to the ground; and then followed the blowing up of the bazaars, the burning of chief's houses, the destruction of the city gates, and last of all, a conflagration...

On 12th october, the army began it's march towards the (Indian) provinces. Till the mountains of Bootak shut it from them, the soldiers of Sale's brigade saw the whole face of the sky red with the flames which they had contributed to raise."

Coming up, a consideration of these memories, and reflections on what they might mean for our current entanglements

First as tragedy, then as farce...So what do you call it this time?

2010-12-20T10:08:00.002Z

In case you think I'm the only one who thinks that reading a few well written history books might save the State Depoartment anmd the FO a good deal of trouble, here's a wee piece from the NATO Review from 2009, just for Christmas...I've put in some italics

Enjoy

On October 1, 1838, Auckland laid out his reasons for war in the Simla Manifesto, a document filled with distortions and outright fabrications designed to cement support for the war. This included the assertion that Dost Muhammed had agreed to ally with the Russians, something he had never done.

It is worth highlighting Auckland’s claim that a Persian siege of Herat was the equivalent of a Russian takeover of Afghanistan, and that in turn made necessary a British invasion. Auckland’s analysis turned a distant and manageable problem into an imminent and existential threat. Such twisted reasoning turned a professed desire to defend Afghanistan into a determination to conquer it.

The Simla Manifesto’s detractors – often military men – were numerous. Sir Henry Marion Durand, an irascible but capable soldier who often fought with his superiors, wrote that “the exaggerated fears of Russian power and intrigue… invested Herat with a fictitious importance wholly incommensurate with... its position in regard to Kandahar and the Indus."

Lord Salisbury identified the essential problem: "You must either disbelieve altogether in the existence of the Russians, or you must believe that they will be at Kandahar next year. Public opinion recognises no middle ground."

With this statement, Salisbury had recognised that democratic war demands absolute and implacable enemies. If they do not exist, then they must be invented; and if they do exist, then their menace must be maximised.

Poor intelligence, accepted as gospel by the mutually-reinforcing views of the war's supporters, also played a prominent role. The "politicals" often poorly understood the tribal allegiances that were the basis of Afghan political life. In addition, the region’s geography worked against the British – in particular, the mountainous terrain, where long columns of troops would be exposed to sniper fire.

It was also believed that the Afghan population would eagerly accept the restoration of Shah Shuja on the throne. The truth was far less certain. Upon taking Kandahar, Envoy Sir William MacNaughten assured Auckland that the Afghans had "greeted the British officers as liberators". While this seemed true, it grievously underestimated Afghan resentment towards the occupying force.

More profoundly, there was little if any evidence that Dost Muhammed ever seriously considered an alliance with the Russians. Given the difficulties that the British themselves faced, the idea of a huge Russian army simply marching through Afghanistan to India was in itself highly questionable.

It is almost as if the war’s proponents conceived of modern warfare as a gigantic game of Risk: move your little pieces, and when territories turn your player colour, they become yours. It is a highly idealised view, divorced of such banal notions as supply lines and native sentiments. It is also an amateurish view.

The lie was given to the affair when, as the Army of the Indus prepared to march towards Afghanistan, the Persians lifted the siege of Herat and went home. Although the war’s professed justification was now gone, the British marched on anyway. Too many men and too much money had been mobilised for peace to break out. The war had become its own justification.

It is thus remarkable that the British conquered Kabul with relative ease. The problem was not the war, but the ensuing peace.

Some lessons, it seems, we are determined not to learn.

How the Bad News came to Jallalabad

2010-12-13T09:50:00.002Z

In this Post, The Reverend George Glieg's account of how the Force under Lady Sale's husband, General Robert, "Fighting Bob" Sale, themselves penned up by hostiles in Jellalabad, heard the news of the disaster

"It is a fact, which every surviving officer of the thirteenth will vouch for, that almost from the first, Colonel Dennie had boded ill of the force left in Cabul...His words were :

"You'll see. Not a soul will escape from Cabul except one man; and he will come to tell us that the rest are destroyed." Under such circumstances, it is very little to be wondered at, if men's blood curdled while they watched the advance of the solitary horseman, and the vopice of dennie sounded like the response of an oracle when he exclaimed "Did I not say so? Here comes the messenger."

He was brought in bleeding and faint and covered with wounds; graspoing in his hand the hilt and small fragment of a sword...

Dr Brydon told how the column set forth; disorganised and cowed; how first the baggage and, by and by, the soldiers, were set upon by the enemy. He described the wavering and imbecility of the leaders, the insubordinate conduct of the men ...and last of all, the treachery of Akbar Khan, who, enticing the General (Elphinstone), with all the other officers of rank, into his power, left the wreck of the army without anyone to guide it...when matters arrived at this point, there was an end to discipline, to order, and of course, to strength...at last, all the sepoys and camp followers having died, some of cold and fatigue, others by bullets or the sword, a miserable remnant of the 44th regiument, with about forty European officers, arrived in the vicinity of Gundamuck...here it seems that some of the officers and men parted compazny...one by one they dropped off...till six only remained...a band of ruffians rushed upon them, and cut down two. The other four galloped off, and Dr Brydon, who was the worst mounted...soon fell into the rear...he soon came up with the body of one of his friends, terribly mutilated...an Afgahn horseman, armed to the teeth, confronted him...hew fought for his life...he rode on bleeding and weak...and being soon afterward espied from the rtamparts of Jellalabad, was brought in to the garrison."

In the words of contemporary military historian, Patrick McCrory :"Here was a force that, with its camp followers, women and children, had numbered some 16000 souls on the day it marched from Kabul under a shameful capitulation and an illusory safe-conduct; one week later, on 13 January 1842, Surgeon William Brydon rode alone into Jellalabad, the only British survivor. In the nights that followed a great light would be kept burning over the Kabul gate at Jellalabad and every fifteen minutes four buglers would sound advance. But there were no more stragglers to respond to beacon or bugle."

Earthquakes as Usual - Lady Sale and the Retreat from Kabul 1842

2010-12-07T12:46:00.006Z

What is it about the Brits and their Memsahibs? Do we attribute it to bravery or bloody mindedness their steadfast refusal to be unruffled, or to assume that wherever they are in the Empire, they can behave like they're in Surrey dealing with a minor problem with the servants, when in fact, they're on the roof of the world being shot at by the natives?

From the journal of Lady Sale, published by John Murray in 1843

23rd November 1841

"I had taken up my post of observation, as usual, on the top of the house, whence I had a fine view of the field of action and where, by keeping behind the chimneys, I escaped the bullets that continually whizzed past me"

The fight continued till about ten o'clock, by which time our killed and wounded became very numerous. The fire of the enemy told considerably more than ours did, from the superiority of their juzails and jingals over our muskets. The Afghans fought from behind sungahs and hillocks, whilst our men were perfectly exposed, labouring under the disadvantage of being drawn up in square, from an apprehension of an attack from the Afghan cavalry...

(It's like she's dissecting a poor showing from the England bowling attack...insufficient attention being paid to line and length...she continues)

It was very much like the scenes depicted in the battles of the Crusaders. The enemy rushed on: drove our men before them very like a flock of sheep with a wolf at their heels...All appearing to be over, I hastened home to get breakfast ready."

(Full English, presumably. Never mind. Roll on Crimbo)

25th December1841

A dismal Christmas day, and our situation far from cheering."

Far from cheering, she says, entirely surrounded....On Thursday sixth of January 1843, accepting the inevitable, with the commander, Lord Elphinstone, incapacitated by illness, and Burnes and McNaghten, the political officers, dismembered and on display in the town, the British garrison, 4500 men and 12000 followers, began the the long, terrible, doomed retreat from Kabul. Immediately, any illusions of safe passage, or of British pluck being enough to see anyone through,were violently and cruelly disabused, with Lady Sale's own family among the immediate casualties.

On the eighth, she recounts that

"We commenced our march about mid-day...we had not proceeded half a mile when we were heavily fired upon...poor Sturt rode back (to see after Thain, I believe): his horse was shot from under him, and before he could rise from the ground, he received a severe wound in the abdomen...the pony Mrs Sturt rode was wounded in the ear and neck. I had fortunately only one ball in my arm, three others passed through my poshteen near the shoulder without doing me any injury. Fortunate it was for Mrs Sturt and myself that we kept with the chiefs. Would to God that Sturt had done likewise, and not gone back....

Sturt had only recently recovered from the injuries he sustained on the night the insurrection began, two months before)

Lady Sale continues:

9th January. Mrs Trevor kindly rode a pony and gave up her place in the kajava to Sturt, who must otherwise have been left to die upon the ground. The rough motion increased his suffering and accelerated his death; but he was still conscious that his wife and I were with him; and we had the sorrowful satisfaction of giving him Christian burial.

In her the entry for the tenth, Lady Sale tells us that both order and hope have already vanished in the snows "No sooner was it light than the usual rush to the front was made by the mixed rabble of camp followers, Sipahees and Europeans in one huge mass. Hundreds of poor wretches, unable to seize any animals for themselves, or despoiled by stronger persons of those they had, were left on the road to die or be butchered."

Lady Sale and her daughter survived only as hostages of Akhbar Khan. . Of those who remained with the column attempting to reach Jellalabad, only one Englishman, a doctor called Brydon, got there alive. The British Army had lost, in a single action, 15000 souls.

At this time, I'm not going to go into Lady Sales experience of captivity or her eventual release, along with her notes for this amazing journal. Let's say goodbye to her, for the purposes of this blog anyway, with her entry for March 13th, as a captive, upper lip regaining its stiffness.

"Earthquakes as usual"

You've got to love 'em.

The illustration at the top of this blog, by Lt James Rattray, is of the site where the remnants of Elphinstone's tattered army were finally destroyed in January 1842, when, later in the year, General Pollock led a brutal punitive expedition into Afghanistan...to which we will turn next, in the company of another Murray author, the Reverend George Glieg. The picture credit, from the British Library, is below.

Jugdelluk, the last stand made by General Elphinstone's army in ...
This lithograph was taken from plate 21 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James
Rattray. The Briti... ... Artist: Rattray, James (1818-1854). ...
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00021000.html
- 26k - Cached Version

Lady Sale and the siege of Kabul - November 1841

2010-12-02T14:01:00.006Z

Continuing extracts from the Journal of Lady Florentia Sale, published by John Murray in 1843:

There is another (unflattering) mention of Burnes in Lady Sale's journal entry for the next day, which is full of recrimination against Afghan aliies (the King the Brits supported seems to be a perfect bounder!) , stuffed shirts in Calcutta, and sickly, feeble General Elphinstone in particular...

"It is further worthy of remark that Taj Mohammed Khan says he went to Sir Alexander Burnes the very day before the insurrection broke out, and told him what was going on. Burnes, incredulous, heaped abuse on the gentleman's head; and the only reply he gave him was "Shuma beseeah shytan ust" on which Taj Mohammed left him. This anecdote was told us by himself.

There's no translation of this choice phrase offered...but Shytan is Satan to you and me..."Go to the Devil", then...at the politest...

By the fourth day, the injured Sturt is strong enough to take part in consultations, but grainstores as well as ammunition dumps and the treasury have been seized by the insurgents.

"The servants are to get half rations from the commisarriat tomorrow" is Lady Sale's comment, running the household staff being her demesne.

By the 8th, Sturt is back on active duty, as the only engineering officer in the cantonment, and is effectively in charge or organizing the defences

Lady Sale goes on:

"Sturt went to Gen Elphinstone...who gave him carte blanche, and desired that all his instructions should be obeyed. He has accordingly placed fifteen guns in position. We have only two artillery officers...available...now Waller is wounded...we have no labratory men - no ther engineer officer than Sturt, who, weak as he is, has to do everything."

There is perhaps a little motherly pride creeping in here. This chap was her son in law...By contrast, almost in an aside. in the same day's entry we find this:

"It is said that Mohun Lull has named the man who killed poor Sir Alexander Burnes..."

Her Ladyship does not recall when she was first told of his death. But we must remember that John Murray rushed her journal into print in 1843, to capitalise on the publicity she attracted as a captive (later in our story) of the beastly Afghans...

Lull, an intelligence agent who worked with Burnes, tells us he knows who killed him. She does not mention him again as far as I can tell...I haven't read the whole thing yet...but her thoughts are now pervaded with frustration and helplessness...as Macnaghten begins negotiations with the chiefs for surrender and retreat...and pride in her beloved Sturt, whose "revovery and energy appear little short of miraculous"

On the 17th of Novemebr comes news that her husband General Sale's column has reached Jalallabad...and from now on, reaching there themselves becomes the focus of all hope for the besieged garrison in Kabul.

'Interior of the City of Kandahar, from the house of Sirdar Meer' taken from plate 23 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray.

Long dark night in Kabul - November 2nd, 1841

2010-11-29T16:27:00.002Z

The long, dreadful night continues. Insurrection has broken out...confusion is everywhere...and her son in law is dreadfully wounded. Lady Sale writes in place of her sleep...filling page after page.

"There were of course various reports. We first heard that, on the affair breaking out, Sir A Burnes went over to the Wuzeer's...and that he was safe there, excepting having been shot in the leg...The King, from the Bala Hissar, sent intelligence to the Envoy "that Burnes was all right;" but a few hours later acknowledged that he did not know anything of him, neither did the envoy at seven in the evening, when Capt Lawrence and Capt John Conolly came to enquire after Sturt's health."

We know, as I've written in previous posts, that Burnes and his brother were already dead.

She gets reflective towards the end of the night.

"It appears a very strange circumstance that troops were not immediately sent into the city to quell the affair in the commencement; but we seem to sit quietly with our hands folded and look on"

I think the truth is probably that the Brits realized without saying it, that they had bitten off a lot more in Afghanistan than they could chew. The cost cutting that provoked rebellion in the first place indicates that the powers that be did not want to throw good money after bad. The policy of regime change (as outlined in earlier posts) had been an unpopular failure in the country, where they now seen not only as Feringhee-(Franks..Crusaders) - occupiers...but worse, as being weak and anxious to leave. The expedition had been undertaken in haste, with poor intelligence, and insufficient resources. (Against the advice of experts, like the hero of my early posts, Alexander Burnes).

And now, a decision had already been tacitly taken to cut and run...Sale's regiment had left before Nott's had come to relieve them...the weakness had been seen and exploited by an enemy far stronger than anticipated...and the mission was doomed. The only question now was whether all the troops and their families were now doomed too.

All that was possible now, and far from certain, was getting out of there alive.

As I've said elsewhere, does not all this ring bells of conemporary resonance almost too obvious to be rung? Or, as Lady Sale puts it, still writing that same terrible night.

"Most dutifully do we appear to shut our eyes on our probable fate."

The Indestructible Lady Sale

2010-11-23T12:24:00.001Z

This is the frontispiece from "Disaster in Afghanistan" by Lady Sale, rushed into print by John Murray in early 1843...Her Ladyship was still in England recovering from three months of siege and seven more of being held hostage by Akbar Khan...just one episode in the broader catastrophe, but the only written account of the siege to survive...Indeed, of the 16000 odd British subjects, Indians included, who were left in Kabul after Her Ladyship's husband, General "Fighting Bob" Sale had marched out with his regiment, (which included our other witness, Reverend George Gleig), Lady Sale, one of a handful of hostages, was one of the few to survive.

Left unedited by Murray, Lady Sale's book is a transcribed daily journal...written in moments of leisure, or of minute by minute reportage, its not a narrative, let alone a considered account. The writing lacks the polish and poise of the Reverend Gleig...but makes up for it by being told in real time, as it were...

(I'm not sure if there's any publishing precedent for such a thing. Maybe my more learned colleagues at the NLS can help me out with that?)

As she says in her introduction...written from Calcutta, "I have not only daily noted down events as they occurred, but often have done so hourly"

So, right or wrong, whatever she thought was happening at the time, accurate or not, is what Murray rushed into print not long after her rescue from captivity in Afghanistan in September of 1842.

So, for example, she says contradictory things about the fate of Alexander Burnes (my first hero of this series) ...for whom she seems to have had little affection or personal concern...Burnes disappearance (and, as it happened, murder) was the first serious violence of the Cabool uprising inNovember of 1841. But Lady Sale doesn't know he's dead for quite a while, and doesn't tell us how she felt when she found out.

In fact, she says very little about how she "felt" about anything. None of your Lady Diana "Queen of Hearts" cobblers here...this is how the aristocracy used to behave. Good thing too, unless you were on the recieving end.

For example : (my interpolations in italics from now on) :

"29th October

We hear that since the force (Sale's Regiment) left Khoord Cabul they have never pitched a tent. The rear guard has been attacked daily, and the bivouak fired on every night. The camels are dying forty a night from cold and starvation. Lieut. Jennings (13th) has been wounded severely in the arm, the bone broken, and the ball went through into his side. Lieut. Rattray (13th) wounded, and a sergeant killed and 3 men wounded; 4 or 5 Sipahees (Sepoys) of the 35th wounded.

And so on. Dry. Factual. Stiff upper lipped.

31st October

The potatoes thrive well, and will be a very valuable addition to the cuisine. The cauliflowers, artichokes and turnip radishes are very fine...the Cabul lettuces are hairy and inferior....

1st November

No letters from camp (Sale's), which has caused both surprise and anxiety.

2nd November

Last night a party of Kohistannes entered the city...this morning, early, all was commotion in Cabul; the shops were plundered and the peoplke were all fighting...Capt Johnson's (paymaster to the Shah's forces) house and treasury in the city were attacked, as also Sir Alexander Burnes's...

This is the first time she mentions Burnes in her journal. She could not know that he was already dead. Besides, her attention that fateful day was elsewhere.

Capt Sturt...went to General Elphinstone, who sent him with an important message...to the King to concert with him measures for the defence of that fortress. Just as he entered the precincts of that palace, he was stabbed in three places by a young man well dressed, who escaped into a building close by, where he was protected by the gates being shut.

Captain Sturt was her son in law.

I cannot describe how shocked I was when I saw poor Sturt; for Lawrence, fearing to alarm us, had said he was only slightly wounded. He had been stabbed deeply in the shoulder and side, and on the face (the latter wound striking on the bone just missed the temple): he was covered with blood issuing from his mouth and was unable to articulate...the mouth would not open, the tongue was swollen and paralysed and he was ghastly and faint from loss of blood. He could not lie down from the blood choking him...he was better towards evening; and by his wife's (her daughter's) unremitting attention in assisting him to get rid of the clotted blood from his mouth...he was by eleven o'clock able to utter a tolerably articulate sound. With what joy did we hear him faintly utter "bet-ter"; and he really seemed to enjoy a tea-spoonful of water, which we got into his mouth by a drop or two at a time, painful as it was to him to swallow it.

I must admit, that as I approach the end of this residency, the idea of a dual theatrical Portrait of Mr Burnes and Lady Sale becomes and icreasingly tempting thought of one of the things I might do next.

Death in the Hills

2010-11-15T17:23:00.005Z

I'm drafting this blog entry on the day when the death of the 344th British soldier in Afghanistan since 2001 was announced.

We've been here before. Worse, even...much worse. But much is the same. We are the same, alike devising strategy on the basis of cultural myopia and wishful thinking in general. And the Afghans are the same too. They are just waiting for us to leave. They don't know how long that will take. But they know it will come.

In 1841, matters, it must be said, accelerated.

The immediate spur to the revolt against the British Army occupying Kabul that year was, in fact, the withdrawl of a bribe.

(In a tribal society, the withdrawl of a financial inducement is an insult, as well as an inconvenience. Tribal politics, as we know in contemporary Afghanistan, ARE politics - the balance of financial tribute with military capability is the mechanism of civic stability - the central state, in the European model, scarcely exists except as a power broker and funding channel, whether the money comes from heroin, guilty oil shieks, or the UN).

The Reverend George Gleig, Chaplain to the Regiment of General "Fighting Bob" Sale, who we've been hearing from previously, assessed the Afghan situation in 1841 as follows:

'Candahar with the whole of the territory to the Helmand, if not pacified, was quiet; while the tribes in possession of the passes...were at once mollified and rendered happy by the receipt of a sort of blackmail, which, to the amount of 8000 pounds a year, the British Government paid to them as the price of protection to its communications. Nobody therefore dreamed of danger...yet the spirit of discontent was very busy through the whole compass of the Doorannee empire...

...as the whole of the troops, whether following the British standard or serving under that of the Shah, were fed and paid for at the expense of the Indian Treasury...the supreme government at Calcutta began to complain...instructions were given to the envoy that he should practice a rigid economy...Sir William Macnaghten seems to have met these instances with...every desire to fall in with the views of his superiors. He could recommend that the forces...be diminished...but he promised to reduce its expenses to the lowest practicable figure...Up to the autumn of 1841, [the Ghilzie chiefs] fulfilled their part of the treaty...but now it was decided to higgle with them about terms, and instead of 8000 poinds, 4000 pounds were offered. They indignantly rejected the proposal...and entered eagerly into the conspiracies which were everywhere maturing'.

He then gives us a flavour of what it was like to be stationed there...much as it is now, it seems.

'...to stray to any distance beyond the perimeters of the camp was never safe, and in more than one instance proved fatal, two British officers who had gone to fish the stream...were attacked...and one, Lt Inverarity of the 16th lancers, was murdered....while a body of not fewer than two hundred camp followers, when endeavouring to make their way back to Hindostan, were betrayed, disarmed and butchered to a man...the health of the troops began to give way...'

Then, in November, the storm broke in its full, hellish fury.

This is from a letter from James Burnes, Alexander's brother, (Alexander Burnes is the central figure in the early posts in this sequence) to James Carnac, 1 Feb 1842 (Wellesley 37313/135), and it's a translation of an intercepted message sent to Afridi tribesmen in the Khyber Pass.

'The fact is this, that on the third Tuesday of the blessed month of Ramadan in the morningtime it occured, that with other heroic champions stirring like lions, we carried by storm the house of Sickender Burnes. By the grace of the most holy and omnipotent God the brave warriors, having rushed right and left from their ambush, slew Sikander Burnes with various other feringees of consideration'.

Though they didn't know it yet, the British Army in Kabul, somewhere between twelve and sixteen thousand of them, including camp followers, was doomed.

Almost every single one of them...

Top image: 'Ko-i-staun foot soldiery in summer costume' taken from plate 12 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray. Used by permission of The British Library.

Sex

2010-11-11T16:54:00.008Z

I must not pass so lightly over so important a part of the population of Cabool as the ladies. Their ghost like figures when they walk abroad make one melancholy; but if all be true of them that is reported, they make ample amends when within doors for all such sombre exhibitions in public.
Alexander Burnes, 'Travels Into Bokhara', John Murray 1835

I couldn't resist fleshing out, as it were, the portrait in these blog posts of my first hero here...Alexander Burnes...a racy individual and spy...and friend of the Murrays, as well as a successful author. The boy from Montrose knew how to have a good time.

The following continues my extracts from the Reverend George Gleig's first hand account of this most pungent of Victorian military disasters. Here he is describing the social scene of the occupying British forces in Kabul in 1841, and Burnes own special role on that scene:

'Not only the houses of such men as the envoy, the commander in chief and Sir Alexander Burnes were thrown open to [the Afghan Chiefs] but the mess of ther 13th recieved its frequent guests, most of whom ate and drank as if there had been no prohibitory clauses in the Koran or elsewhere. Among other means adopted to entertain the aristocracy of central Asia, the British Officers got up a play: a theatre was constructed, scenery painted, dresses prepared; and as the pieces which they chose were chiefly broad comedies, such as 'The Irish Ambassador' and others of the same sort, great amusemewnt was afforded to the audience...while Burnes and others skilled in the dialect of the country, translated the speeches as they were uttered. The Afghans are a merry people, and have a keen relish of the ludicrous and the satirical; and as the interpreter never failed to bring the jokes of the actors home to them, they marked their delight by bursting into frequent peals of laughter.'

So far so cosy, and only slightly naughty. The Reverend Gleig, however, goes on to make some observations on sexual license, which, as we'll see, may not be unrelated to the particularly sticky end that overcame Alexander Burnes...as well as being a properly Churchly thing to say in the light of what happened next.

'Though they do not, like other Mohammedan races, universally shut up their women,the Afghans are as open to jealousy as orientals in general...their women...could not but be pleased with the attentions the Feringhees showed them. It is much to be feared that our young countrymen did not always bear in mind that the domestic habits of any people ought to be sacred in the eyes of strangers...whatever errors they may have committed, the great mass of the garrison of Cabul atoned for them terribly; and the survivors...will doubtless more and more become conviced that the gratification of the moment is purchased at too high a price.'

So far so general, but to get ahead of myself for a moment, Lady Sale, the other Murray author who was a first hand witness of the subsequent and horrible events says something curious, perhaps unguarded, certainly disapproving and revealing about Burnes' reputation as a bon viveur, this an entry in her journal from November 1841, when the insurrection has started, and Burnes has gone missing:

'Our only hope of Burnes' saftey rest on the possibility of him having obtained refuge in some harem.'

Now, what immediately occurs to me the image of her ladyship talking to a couple of subalterns, and asking them, "What do you think has become of Mr Burnes?"

And then one of these two chaps saying to Lady Sale..."Don't worry about old Sandy. Knowing him he's probably shacked up in some knocking shop"

I think it is something like this that she has sanitised for her personal journal.
As my colleague David McClay said when I told him this story over a latte from the nice new cafe here at the Library, "it's like 'Carry on Up the Khyber'...but with slaughtering".

Top image: 'Ladies Of Caubul' from plate 24 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray.

Bottom image: 'Kandahar Lady of Rank, Engaged in Smoking' from plate 29 of 'Afghaunistan'

Afghanistan 1841 - Ice Skating and Cricket

2010-11-01T15:21:00.005Z

Had I but my kingdom, how glad I should be to see an Englishman at Cabool, and to open the road tween Europe and India.
Shah Shooja quoted by Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', John Murray 1835.

I'm handing over this whole post, pretty much, to the Reverend George Gleig, and these excerpts from his "With Sale in Afghanistan" that Murray published in 1843, the year after the military catasrophe of the First Afghan War...and the bloody massacre of the retreat from Kabul.

Gleig, a Murray mainstay in the Quarterly Review and elsewhere, was a quite extraordinary fellow, a Church of Scotland Minister and Army Chaplain, a veteran of Waterloo and the Peninsular War and a military historian of a very high order. In 1841 and 2 he served with General "Fighting Bob" Sale in the Afghan conflict.

To begin our acquaintance with his memory and his talent, let us look at his description of the political situation, and of life in the British Army Cantonment at Kabul in 1841, before the waste matter hit the you know what, and establish a bit of Victorian tone to our continuing story:

'There was no increase of good feeling on the part of the inhabitants towards the invaders. The province submitted, or appeared to submit, to the rule of Shah Shujah, but of enthusiasm in his cause no class of society exhibited a sign...'

Gleig continues:

'...the city was quiet and so were the towns and villages dependent on it; and the whole of general Elphinstone's command...being concentrated around Cabul, it is hardly to be wondered at if men, accustomed to give the law and to be obeyed, should have discredited all rumours of a rebellion...there was society in the cantonments, for many of the officers had been joined by their wives and families...Parties rode hither and thither to visit and inspect such objects of curiosity as were described to them. Baba Shah's tomb, the obelisk of which tradition ascribes the structure to Alexander the Great...and as far into the mountains as it was deemed prudent to go, offered irresistable attractions to the admirers of both nature and art...

(James Rattry's illustration of this tomb is at the beginning of this post. Tourist attraction, you see.)

Wherever Englishmen go, they sooner or later introduce among the people whom they visit a taste for manly sports. Horse racing and cricket were both got up in the vicinity of Cabul; and in both the chiefs and people soon learned to take a lively interest...being great gamblers, they looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players; but it does not appear that they were ever tempted to lay aside their flowing robes and huge turbans...on the other hand, our countrymen attended them to their mains of cocks, quails and other fighting animals, and betting freely, lost or won their rupees in the best possible humour. In like manner, our people indulged them from time to time in trials of strength and feats of agility...very muich to the astonishment of their new friends, they in every instance threw the most noted of the Cabul wrestlers. The result of this was to create among the Afghans a good deal of personal liking for their conquerors.

There is a lake about five or six miles from Cabul...in the winter of 1839-40, it was covered with a coat of ice more than ordinarily thick, on which the Afghans used to practice the art of sliding, far more skillfully, as well as gracefully, than their European visitors...the clumsy manner in which the Feringhees assayed that boyish sport whiuch induced them to reiterate that heat and not cold was the white man's element...our young gentlemen set themselves to the fabrication of skates, and in due time a party of skaters, equipped for the exercise, appeared on the lake. The Afghans stared in mute amazement "Now we see that you are not like the infidel Hindoos that follow you: you are men, born and bred like ourselves...we wish that you had come among us as friends... for you are fine fellows one by one, though as a body, we hate you"'.

Yes... well by the time he wrote this memoir, the Reverend knew what was coming next.

The illustration by James Rattry below shows the British encampment outside Kabul. You see how exposed in was. On the left of the city in the background is the Bel Hissar...the fortified ancient centre where the King lived...and roughly in the middle is the location of the Envoy Alexander Burnes house..where his murder took place, and the insurrection began.

Bala Hissar and city of Caubul with the British cantonments from ...
This lithograph is taken from plate 16 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James
Rattray. Kabul ha... ... Artist: James Rattray (1818-1854). ...
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00016000.html
- 25k - Cached Version

Temple of 'Ahmed Shauh', King of Afghanistan
This lithograph was taken from plate 27 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lietenant
James Rattray.
The tomb... ... Artist: James Rattray. Medium: Lithograph, coloured.
Date: 1848 ...
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00027000.html
- 25k - Cached Version

Puppet Kings and Security forces: Afghanistan 1839

2010-10-28T16:35:00.007+01:00

The Afghans do not appear to have the smallest prejudice against Christians.
'Travels in Bokhara' by Alexander Burnes, published by John Murray 1835

We've met Alexander Burnes who was a sensual, ambitious young Scotsman on the make, a talented linguist who argued for one policy...that of offering support to Dost Mohammed's rule in Kabul as a bulwark against the Russians, but who changed to supporting the Dost's overthrow when that became the policy of his superiors, and accompanied the Army of the Indus that overthrew Dost Mohammed in 1838, reversing the policy of containment, and pursuing what was then called "forward policy" in Afghanistan, denying it to the Russians through a military presence, rather as the 2001 invasion was supposed to deny the country as a base of operations to Al Quaida.

Entirely understandable from a careerist point of view...that way lay promotion...but it did identify him personally, among the Afghans, as a perjurer...perfidious Albion in a single pair of pants.

Later, once the army was in occupation of Kabul, it was his anxiety to be rid of his boss, Mcnaghten, and thus secure his own promotion, that led him to underestimate the danger faced by the British Army of occupation…If there was peace, then his boss would leave, and he’d get the top job for himself. So he told everyone, including himself, that there was peace, though he knew deep down this wasn’t true.

In the end, it was his ambition to be visible, combined with this last misjudgement that led him and his brother to their nemesis, and the long knives in the garden of his house in Kabul in November 1841.

Burnes murder was the start of an insurrection that was to drive the British out in ignominious, bloody defeat.

To continue my series of posts on Murray publications and its paralells with our more resonant military SNAFU, I'm handing over for a moment to the introduction written by Patrick Macrory (the author whose "Signal Catastrophe" inspired the first Flashman novel) to a book that called 'Disaster in Afghanistan' by Lady Florentia Sale, published by Longmans in 1969 in their Military Memoirs series, but which was reprinted from an original published by the firm of John Murray in 1843 in the immediate wake of said catastrophe.

This is his description of the situation in which the army of occupation found itself, Macrory as a proper military historian saying it better than I could.

'Kabul was entered on 7th August 1839, and Shah Soojah was restored to his throne. Dost Mohammed fled into the interior, where for some fifteen months he carried on a desultory guerilla warfare. He then made his surrender to the British Envoy at Kabul, and was sent off to an honourable exile in India. There he was presently joined by all his family, with the significant exception of his favourite son, Akbar Khan. Akbar preferred to live an outlaw's life somewhere out beyond the Hindu Kush and implacably bided his time.'

Back to me.

This is a picture of the court of the puppet King as rendered by Lt James Rattray, a friend of Burnes, reproduced by kind permission of the British Library.

The British and Sikh installed King proved to be unpopular, however...a bit like Mohammed Karzai today...but as with Karzai, the only alternative ruler was the enemy, so the Regime Change, which had been intended to be an Afghan only affair, required the continued presence of British troops.

I trust this is making you feel sick?

McCrory continues:

'Reluctantly the British decided that some of their own troops must remain in Afghanistan for Soojah's protection. So, when General Keane and the greatest part of the Army of the Indus marched back to India at the end of 1839, a division was left at Kandahar under General Nott and a force of two brigades at Kabul itself...Soojah, for reasons of prestige, opposed (their) being housed in the Bala Hissar, the great citadel...that contained his own palace, and it was decided to build cantonments on the plain a mile or so outside the city...as badly designed as they were badly sited.'

So far so familiar...but then we get to some more Victorian touches and nuances...a bit of the old Raj...the women arrived.

'Before the end of 1839, MacNaghten, realizing the that the occupation was going to be indefinitely prolonged, sent for his wife to join him at Kabul. The sepoys too, were encouraged to bring up their families".

I do have to love how the Brits, no matter where in the world they are, still think they're in Surrey. I suspect this is the secret of their former success. Here, Mcrory describes their life in Kabul:

'Life in the cantonments was a gay butterfly existence. There were horse racing, hunting and amateur theatricals. When winter gripped the land, the British had skates made by the farriers and skimmed over the frozen lakes to the astonishment of the Afghans...the same could be said in summer of cricket.'

Finally, Macrory quotes Alexander Burnes, hero of my earlier posts in this series, now "British Resident", who had a courtyarded mansion in the city, saying that at his weekly dinner parties he could lay before his guests:

'champagne, hock, madeira, sherry, port, claret, suaterne, not forgetting a glass of curacoa and maraschino, and the hermetically sealed salmon and hotchpotch [veritable hotchpotch, all the way 'frae' Aberdeen], for deuced good it is, the peas as big as if they had been soaked for bristling'.

Good old Sandy...a party animal to the last...

Next...the Reverend George Gleig and his first hand account (published, naturally, by the Murrays) of the calm before the storm.

Interior of the palace of Shauh Shujah Ool Moolk, Late King of Cabul.
This lithograph is taken from plate 3 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray. Used by permission of the British Library.

Imperial Intrigue and vanishing Russian agents - Alexander Burnes and Henry Rawlinson on Her Majesty's Secret Service

2010-10-25T16:48:00.012+01:00

Ah, those Murray authors!

Whether they went in search of Godliness or a good time, they surely got around...further research reveals there were two of them kicking around on secret business in Afghanistan in the 1830s, running into Russian spies who were on the same mission as themselves. Much as in Afghanistan now you can't tell who is working for who without a crib sheet.

We've already met Alexander Burnes...here's the other one, Henry Rawlinson, later to be the discoverer and decipherer of Ancient Sanskrit in Mesopotamia, from Patrick Mcrory's Signal Catastrophe, Hodder and Stoughten 1966 (republished as 'Kabul Catastrophe' in 1986).

"Major Rawlinson, an officer on the staff of the British Minister at Teheran, was bivouacking one night in the wild desert country about a hundred miles west of Heart…he found another party camping nearby. Some of them…wore Cossack uniform...Their officer rose and bowed politely in silence…Rawlinson addressed him in French, but he shook his head. The Englishman tried his own language and was answered in Russian. Rawlinson then switched to Persian and the stranger replied in halting Uzbeg-Turkish, of which the British officer knew just enough to carry on a simple conversation…the two officers smoked a silent friendly pipe together and Rawlinson rode on his way…Two days later the young Cossack officer rode into the Persian camp and at once greeted Rawlinson in excellent French with the smiling comment that "it would not do to be too familiar with strangers in the desert". Rawlinson, realizing that this was the first evidence of direct communication between St Petersburg and Kabul, immediately posted back the 750 miles to Teheran to report to his minister that he had met a Russian emissary to Dost Mohammed, and that his name was Captain Vickovich."

(Though he only had a walk on part in this adventure, because he SURVIVED it...we will be meeting Henry Rawlinson again in my NEXT series of posts...from Iraq...and no, Virginia, we didn't invade Iraq in the 1840s...that had to wait till the 1920s...no, what Rawlinson was doing in Iraq a few years later, in company with Murray author, Henry Austen Layard, was digging up Nineveh and confirming the bible as an historical document...later...later)

Meantime, "We are in a mess here" wrote Alexander Burnes, in Kabul to negotiate with the then ruler there, Dost Mohammed, to a friend; "the emperor of Russia has sent an envoy to Kabul to offer Dost Mohammed Khan money to fight Runjeet Singh!!! I could not believe my eyes and ears; but Captain Vickovich arrived here with a blazing letter, three feet long...the Amir came over to me sharp, and offered to do as I like…and I sent an express at once to my Lord A, telling him that after this I knew not what might happen, and it was now a neck-and-neck race between Russia and us."

Burnes, as envoy, now found himself in a cleft stick. He was not authorised to offer the Dost anything by way of an alliance because the Brits were simultaneously making lifelong chums of the Sikhs (at least until we had a war with THEM...which wasn't long in coming...1842, actually).

"Russia has come forward with offers…Persia has been lavish in her promises, and Bokhara and other states have not been backward.Yet...the chief of Caubaul declares that he prefers the friendly offices of the British...I have no authority…am I to stand by and see us ruined at Kandahar?"

But by the time Burnes was writing this, in late 1838, the decision to invade Afghanistan (in order to prevent Dost Mohammed from making an alliance with Russia, which he had no intention of doing, then or later) had already been taken.

This is confirmed by what happened next. Burnes had left Kabul. Soon after however, the then Russian allies, the Persians, abandoned their siege of Herat. Lord Palmerston, who had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude towards Russia, protested to the embarassed Russians about them sending an agent to Kabul and Count Nesselrode, a Russian diplomat who knew that his Tsar's ambitions in the region were unrealistic hogwash, took the opportunity to disavow his own agent…he pretended he had no knowledge of him, (John le Carre didn't invent all this stuff, it seems) saying he:

"knew no Captain Vickovish except an adventurer of that name who had been ...engaged lately in some unauthorised intrigues at Kabul and Kandahar."

As Mcrory continues the story:

"Vickovich realised that he was to be a sacrifice on the altar of appeasement. He went back to his hotel, wrote a few bitter and reproachful messages, burnt the rest of his papers and blew out his brains".

Yes, well, all a great spy story to be later thrillingly retold by Murray author Peter Hopkirk in 'The Great Game' .

But, in the meantime, McCrory says: "The Russian backed threat to Afghanistan had melted like snow in summer. Now was the time far the british to leave well alone."

Fat chance, as we'll see. Meanwhile, the enticing Afghan women above are again taken from the exquisite work of Lt James Rattray who was in the British Army of the Indus that invaded Afghanistan in 1838. It wasn't all about politics, you know...

As we shall see.

'Ghiljie women in the lower orders' taken from plate 6 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray Used by permission of the British Library.

Catastrophe on the Frontier - Afghanistan 1842 - The Dodgy Dossier

2010-10-25T16:16:00.004+01:00

Dost Mohammed wished to know if we had any designs on Cabool. He had been told of us by some Russian merchants
'Travels into Bokhara' by Alexander Burnes, published by John Murray, 1835

I'm heading towards two first hand accounts, published by John Murray, of what is known as The First Afghan War.

(We're now in the middle of number four...or five...if you count our covert involvement in the Moujahedin War of the 1980s. This is a portrait of Dost Mohammed from Burnes' "Cabool" . He was the man the British displaced as Amir...he then returned to power after the Brits had been kicked out. It is possibly worth noting that one of the senior commanders of today's Taliban has named himself after this guy...however, I digress)

Many aspects of this earlier conflict should be horribly familiar to us. One of these aspects is the contoversy surrounding the whole business, with which the hero of my earlier posts, Alexander Burnes, was not unconnected.

He was an intelligence officer, as well as successful Murray author, and one accusation at the time was that his "intelligence" had been repressed, and, to employ an appropriate anachronistic neologism, spun.

The more I look into this story, the more horribly familiar it is...the same blend of wishful thinking and fear driven opportunism as has organised the last decade of foriegn policy...so...before I go any further:

Here is the 'dodgy dossier' of the time, or rather an extract from the official rationale for the invasion, known as the SIMLA DECLARATION of 1838:

"by the measures completed, or in progress, it may reasonably be hoped that the general freeedom and security of commerce will be promoted; that the name and just influence of the British government will gain their proper footing among the nations of Central Asia; that tranquility will be established on the most important frontier of India; and that a lasting barrier will be raised against hostile intrigue and encroachment. His majesty, Shah Soojah ool Moolk, will enter Afghanistan, surrounded by his own troops, and will be supported against foriegn interference and factious opposition by a British Army. The Governor General confidently hopes that the Shah will be speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects, and, the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established, the British army will be withdrawn..."

The 'Governor General' is the Govenor General of British India, the document continues:

"The Governor General has been led to these measures by the duty....of providing for the security of the possessions of the British Crown; but he rejoices that, in the discharge of his duty, he will be enabled to assist in restoring the union and prosperity of the Afghan people..."

On Dost Mohammed, with whom Auckland had sent Burnes to negotiate, Auckland's manifesto had this to say:

'The Dost is further accused of "a most unjustifiable and cruel aggression...so long as Caubul remained under his government, we would never hope that the tranquillity of our neighbourhood would be secured or that the interests of our Indian Empire would be preserved inviolate. It has been clearly ascertained from the various officers who have visited Afghanistan (i.e. Burnes) that the Baruzye chiefs, from their disunion and unpopularity, were ill fitted under any circumstances to be useful allies to the British government".'

In this, he was saying what he and Burnes knew to be untrue. But a "forward policy" for Afghanistan had been decided, and justification had to be found for the invasion. I hope that rings great big jangling bells for you as it does for me.

Just as in recent times, this incursion was not unopposed at the time...and the accusations of mendacity again resonate rather around the belltower...

The following comes from 'Letters to the Morning Herald' by D. Urquhart published as a pamphlet in London in 1843...reminds me of my letters to the Glasgow Herald in 2002.

'There is but one reason alleged why we invaded Afghanistan, and one only justification of the war offered, and that is the unfriendliness of Dost Mohammed. Our only object was to construct a chief of Cabool who should be friendly...are we to believe that we had such idiots for rulers that they believed all this?....in the present case, they come forward with no statement of wrongs or dangers - they come forward only with an insinuation...and set up a certain dynasty in a certain country...because of there being certain unstated designs of certain other powers....Did we not march an army into their country, take by force of arms but without the forms of war? Did we not then establish a government by means illegal and unjust, and having the external characters of foriegn domination and religious persecution. England, hitherto the assertor of the rights of nations, has become herself the invader, the spoiler, the oppressor, the destroyer.'

What is more, D. Urquart goes on to allege that he has papers in his possession written by Alexander Burnes that prove that the intelligence was distorted, and that the causus belli were deliberate fraud...

And if there's anyone out there who knows where THOSE papers are, I wish they'd tell me. And maybe 160 years from now someone will find a letter from George Bush to Tony Blair. There's some material in the national Archive in London I intend to check out first chance I get.

I've also just found out that there was a parliamentary inquiry twenty odd years later, into the distorting of that intelligence...more later perhaps...

Next time, a bit more factual context for the invasion before launching once more into the wastelands of rhetoric. And some more of that nice Lt Rattray's pictures to look at...In the meantime, courtessy of the good people at the British Library, here is the frontispiece image of his book on the Costumes and Peoples of "Afghaunistan" published in 1847, when the bloodbath was over, and the picturesque could once again be presented to his wealthy subscribers.

As a grim postscript, among these subscribers, their names marked by an astersisk to indicate their decease, are the names of Alexander Burnes and his brother David, that of Lord Elphinstone, the ill fated commander of the Kabul; Garrison, and that of the envoy, Sir William McNaghten. None of them survived their noble intentions to see the fruits of Lt Rattray's labours with pen and watercolour.

This lithograph of Dourraunnee chieftains in full armour was taken from the frontispiece of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant
James Rattray.
www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/apac/other/019xzz000000562u00001000.html

Pretty, isn't it?

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Pretty, isn't it?

Death on the Frontier - The End of Our Man in Bokhara.

2010-10-01T14:45:00.009+01:00

I'm moving on next to contemporary accounts of what became of the British Army of the Indus in the Kabul uprising of 1841, and the events that followed. What with already being dead and everything, our hero, Alexander Burnes, unfortunately, wasn't able to offer us any insights into the forces that the British invasion had unleashed. Or indeed to illuminate the ghastly sequence of events that had led him and so many others to their joint and several demise. So, for succeeding posts, we will have to turn elsewhere.

So, later on, we'll be hearing from two other Murray authors, Lady Florentia Sale and George Gleig, both eyewitnesses, about what happened next, as well as digging a little deeper into the causes of the disaster.

In the meantime, here are Burnes last written words, from his journal on the night of 31st October 1841: "What will this day bring forth? It will make or mar me, I suppose. Before the sun sets I shall know whether I go to Europe or succeed McNaghten. I grow very tired of praise and I suppose I shall get tired of censure in time."

McNaghten, by the way, was his chief, who he hoped to succeed as Envoy of Her Majesty. For the sake of promotion, Burnes had downplayed the danger they were facing...his chief would only leave,(and Burnes succeed him) only if all were quiet...so Burnes had to make himself believe that all was quiet...

On the morning of 2nd November,Alexander Burnes, traveller, spy and celebrity author, along with his young brother Charles was cut to pieces in the garden of his house in Kabul, within sight of the garrison cantonments. They had been led into the garden by a mysterious Kashmiri who helped them into disguises, but when he had them among the mob, cried out:

"See, friends, here is Sikundar Burnes!"

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Five

2010-10-01T14:43:00.012+01:00

As we passed through the city, some of the people cried out, Take care of Cabool. Do not destroy Cabool!
Alexander Burnes 'Cabool', John Murray, London, 1842

What I'm featuring here is an image of Dost Mohammed, with whom Burnes went to Kabul to negotiate in 1835, and an extract from the Preface to ''Cabool', his second and last book, published by John Murray in 1842. These are the last published words of the author, who wrote a foreward from the Cantonment of the British Army of occupation at Kabul in September of 1841.

Burnes, some of whose exploits and adventures as a British Intelligence Officer we've been looking at, and whose adventures had been published by the Murrays, was a member of the British Expeditionary Force that had occupied Kabul in 1838, indulging in a bit of regime change, ousting Dost Mohammed in favour of the former King, Shah Sootej.

As Burnes himself said, the book itself is an account of his previous mission to "Cabool", when the British had been looking for an alliance with the same Dost Mohammed. Burnes recommended to his chiefs that Dost Mohammed was fully in control of Kabul in a way that no one else could be; that he was intelligent and far sighted and wanted the British as allies, not enemies; and that he was, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, a man with whom we could do business...

(Burnes can't quite suppress the feelings underlying his recommendation in the published book, despite it being frankly opaque when it comes to politcal opinion. The young Scotman on the make had a career to construct, and to disagree with his chiefs in a travel book would not have served his turn. Similarly, his first book, "Travels in Bokhara" which made his name and secured his knighthood, is nothing if not cagey about what he was actually doing there)

Burnes liked Dost Mohammed...he can't stop himself from saying so...It is a continuing tribute to his stature that one of the current leaders of the Taleban has re-named himself "Dost Mohammed" in his honour.

It was Dost Mohammed's very qualities of strength and intelligence that those higher up than Burnes in the hierarchy of British Intelligence were afraid of. The Dost was an enemy of Runjeet Singh, (Sikh ruler of Lahore), and was, understandably, also talking to the Russians...who had their own "Man in Kabul" at the same time as Burnes.

(We will meet the mysterious and unfortunate Ignatieff in a later post)

So the British decided they wanted somebody more pliable to talk to..less independant...they favoured Shah Sootej, a former ruler...who was already conveniently in the pocket of the aforementioned and formibable Runjeet Singh...

So, in 1838, against Burnes advice, the British invaded and deposed Dost Mohammed.

(The image of the Dost in this post was painted in captivity, by another Scottish officer, James Rattray, whose wonderful images we reproduce on gracious permission from the British Library.)

In another uncomfortable echo of the stormy present, it seems that Burnes original intelligence reports were doctored by the time they got to the House of Commons, so as to reach the opposite conclusion. That is, Burnes had said...this man is formidable, so we should talk to him...but the government, paranoid about the Russians encroaching on the frontiers of the In dian Empire, altered that to read : This man is formidable...get rid of him...

By the time this book was published, Burnes was already dead, cut to pieces in his garden in Kabul...and the British Army in Afghanistan had attempted a retreat to Jallalabad...some 12 -16000 of them. (A lot of them were Indian, so no one really had a reliable count)

And it was the Dost's son, Akbar Khan Mohammed, who was raising an army in the mountains to repel the "feringee", and restore his father to the throne...

In any case, his being dead too by the time of publication gives what Burnes has to say in his foreword here a certain poignancy:

"Some time has now passed since the following pages were written. They contain my personal recollections of an interesting country through which I passed, and in which I resided on a mission to Cabool in the years 1836-7 and 1838. Subsequent events have not diminished, as it appears to me, the anxiety of the public for information regarding these regions: on the contrary, the great political events of which they have become the arena have given importance to all that appertains to them. On political subjects, however, it is not, at present, my intention to enlarge. The time is yet distant when an accurate judgement can be passed on the line of policy which we have adopted; but the travellers...have paved the way for the political enquirer if, in the mean while, they can portray something of the tone and spirit of the people among whom circumstances have now placed us".

At the time of writing, Burnes and a British army of 16 000 were in Kabul...with a hellish storm of Holy War about to break over their heads. I trust that my readers are finding this all horribly familiar.

Lithograph above: Dost Mahommed, King of Caubul, and his youngest son taken from plate 2 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray (1818-1854). Used by permission (c) The British Library Board.

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Four

2010-10-01T14:36:00.003+01:00

He showed me thirty or forty dancing girls, dressed uniformily as boys. This, said Runjeet Singh, is one of my regiments, but they tell me it is one that I cannot discipline.
Alexander Burnes from 'Travels into Bokhara', John Murray, London, 1834

If you've been following my recent posts, you'll know that we're travelling right now, with Alexander, or Sekundar, "Bokhara" Burnes...successful author and Central Asian superspy for the British interest on India's North West Frontier...last seen in Cairo, on his way to his mission to Kabul, and his eventual nemesis beneath the knives of the faithful in an Afghan Garden in 1841...

But this is blog entry is a trophy of happier times. It's a letter written to Burnes in Farsi, one of several eastern languages in which he was fluent, that resides in the archive of Burnes' publisher, John Murray of Albemarle Street.

As outlined in Burnes first book, 'Travels into Bokhara' published by Murray in 1834, the first part of his mission had been to conduct a gift of horses to Runjeet Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, with whom the Brits were keen to establish relations. The two men appear to have got on famously, sharing a passion for horseflesh, and perhaps other kinds of flesh as well. This letter, though looking exotic, and therefore much prized by Burnes' brother, as well as his publisher, is actually pretty boring, being along the lines of "Horses recieved with thanks, Runjeet Singh", but there is another curiosity tucked away in the uniform grey folders they keep in the stacks of the National Library of Scotland...namely a letter to John Murray III from Burnes' surviving brother David in (probably in 1842) that obviously accompanied this document, part of which goes like this:

I have now the pleasure of sending you, in obedience to my brother's orders, Runjeet Singh's last letters to him, which he forwarded along before he left. I had hoped to have done it sooner but have had great difficulty in getting it out of the hand of a lady to whom my brother had given a sight of it, and {through them, I? } have had to show it to one or two other ladies, Runjeet deemed to be a great favourite with the fair,

Believe me to be yours faithfully, David Burnes...Regent Street, Saturday 14th"

In other words, these letters from the East, in their exotic provenance, carried an erotic frisson. The calligraphy itself, in its curves and dots, was sexy and exciting...ladies, in mourning for their hero, clutched these proofs of Kama Sutra to their bosoms...reciept for horses or not. You can see these mysterious and sexy horse reciepts below...

Coming soon...the beginning of the end... and Burnes' last words from the frontiers...

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Three

2010-09-29T11:10:00.003+01:00

"He made me repeat the kualma or creed in Persian and in Arabic to his inexpressible delight. He said that our greatness had risen from a knowledge of mankind and attending to other peoples' customs as well as our own." Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', John Murray, London, 1834

Alexander Burnes, Travel Writer, Diplomat and Spy, was one of those 19th Century Brits who partook of "otherness".First, he was a Scot. Second, he was a gifted linguist, fluent in Persian and Urdu, read enough Arabic to talk about the Koran in Kabul,( impressing the hell out of his host, Dost Mohammed), and spoke enough Punjabi to get by disguised as a merchant, negotiating his way past bandits on the road into the Hindu Kush and in negotiating entrance at all to the city of Bokhara in Central Asia, a sacred city of Islam forbidden to non Muslims, and especially to the "Feringee"...meaning Franks...or Europeans.

(Memories of the atrocities of the 11th century Crusaders die hard out there...as George Bush might be able to tell you.)

By "otherness", I mean transformation. As we know from the story of Lawrence of Arabia, there was, for the likes of TE Lawrence and Richard Burton and Alexander Burnes, all to a degree outsiders in their own cultures, a certain liberation in embracing the East. There are undertones of both the sexual and spiritual to this "Orientalism" as Edward Said famously described it. There are a number of other examples from the John Murray stable.Byron himself found a personal liberation in Ottoman territories. Isabella Bird recovered health and confidence only when hiking up mopuntains in the Americas or China...

One has to read between the lines a little, but both in Burnes' published writings and what I've seen and read of his private correspondence, he was one of those rare birds of the Imperial flock who found the strangeness of foriegn parts stimulating, and that he wanted to remake himself in that other place.

(The illustration above, by the way, is called "Arab companions of Alexander Burnes"...They were not, of course, "Arabs" at all...but that term signifies exactly the "Eastern Other")

Again, it is clear that Burnes delights in associating himself with that earlier "Sekundar"...Alexander the Great...seeking out relics, imagining he has located battlefields. He walks the valleys of the Sind and Sutej with a mental map of conquest, and of another self, already in his mind.

Which makes me think that this man's presence in later fiction extends past his being a character (and model) in the first Flashman book. Daniel Dravitt in Kipling's 'Man who would be King' again comes to imagine himself as 'Alexander Redux' in an unnamed city in Central Asia, till he too is destroyed like Burnes was, by feeling himself more at home than was justified.

But I'm anticipating events I'm going to deal with later. Getting ahead of myself.

One of the disciplines and pleasures of reading archive correspondance is that it takes you to the past in the historic present tense. Someone writing a letter is only thinking of the moment. So let's rejoin Burnes at a moment in Cairo in March1835.

He's on his way back East after scoring spectacular success in a diplomatic mission to the Punjab and Afghanistan, and his onward travels into central Asia and the Persian Empire...had reported his success to his chiefs, and to a public eager for tales of travel and discovery...and is now writing a curiously "constructed" version of himself to the son of his publisher, the future John Murray III...Take a look at them at the top of this entry...and reproduced here.

In the John Murray Archive are two versions of the same letter...facsimilies. It has been copied, presumably by one of Murray's clerks, preserving even the upside down placing of the postscript at the top of the letter...it has been treasured then, marked out as special. The physical peculiarity of the letter as object has been highlighted and reproduced as somehow special. This colours the reading and quoting of its text...enriches its voice:

He describes the

"Pyramids of Egypt, which, as my favourite author Gibbon says 'still stand erect and unshaken above the floods of the Nile, after an hundred generations of the leaves of autumn have dropped into the grave'"

He continues: "I cannot believe myself so far distant from the salons of London, but the moment I reach Alexandria the line of demarkation was too apparent, the transition from civilisation to barbarism was instantaneous and we recieved before leaving the steamer the astounding information that 15,000 individuals had died of plague withion the last three months and that 1298 had perished on the previous day..."

He is letting us and the Murrays know that A) It's rough out here, and B) he's right at home.

He knowingly quotes Byron to a Murray...from the poem Childe Harold...exclaiming happily "New shores descried made every bosom gay" He talks, as Byron famously did of the Pillars of Hercules, Lisbon...the Kingdom of the Goths...of the world through the glass of books...

(It is extraordinary how everything I come accross in this archive seems to lead back to Byron by some route or other)

Knowingly, flatteringly, he goes on: "The Quarterly is lying before me and strangely enough I have been perusing the very article which treats of Mohammed Ali in that able essay regarding the encroachments of Russia...Cairo is in sight, the boatmen are singing a song of delight in the music(?) not such however as attended on Cleopatra in her galley nor enough to make charmed into a forgetfulness of all your many attentions to me..."

Both for it's charm and it's intrigue, I have to call this double version of himself en route to his last mission my First Treasure on my voyage of search of Alexander Burnes...

Coming next...another oriental treasure...a letter in Farsi, or Persian - a language of Afghanistan, to Burnes, written by the great Runjeet Singh, to whom Burnes was to deliver some Shire horses (horses of that size being unfamiliar in those parts) while conducting, rather more plausibly, an intelligence mission to secure British alliances with the Sikhs of Lahore, explore possibilities with the new Ruler of Afghanistan.

(or of Kabul anyway...no one person has EVER succeeded in ruling the whole territory, statehood or not)

the redoubtable Dost Mohammed...before proceeding to explore the Russian presence in their own backyard of Bokhara.

He didn't find any Russians there, not this first time...but that's to get ahead of myself again. I must stop doing that. He'll meet them soon enough.

Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes and Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part Two

2010-09-25T12:17:00.013+01:00

"Runjeet Singh enquired whether wine was best before or after food; and laughed heartily after an answer from myself when I recommended both"
Alexander Burnes, 'Travels into Bokhara', published by John Murray, London, 1834

So who was this Alexander Burnes? The first thing I read was that he was Scottish, which is always agreeable. He came from Montrose, one of four sons of the Provost, from a family that claimed a connection with the poet. The added "e" in "Burnes" bespeaks a certain gentrification, as indeed does the fact that two of his brothers were doctors... both the one who died with him, cut to pieces in a garden in Kabul in November of 1841, and his surviving brother, who corresponded with the Murrays after his death.

One of the features (and indeed organising principles) of this blog is that the letter and business archives of the Murray's publishing house should act as a kind of lens into history, so I thought I'd best start there...and I'd have to say (with some relief given the scale of the story of which they form a tiny but significant part) that the collection's holdings from Burnes are quite modest. Modest...but oddly potent. After all, he died young with only one proper book under his belt, "Travels to Bokhara", written on the long voyage home in 1833. It was this book that made him famous and got him knighted.

As he wrote to his mother in 1834:
'I have been inundated by visits from authors, publishers, societies and whatnot…I am a perfect wild beast.'

One of the publishers was, of course, John Murray. He confided further in a another letter home that King William himself had said to him in Brighton:

"Really, sir, you are a wonderful man. I heard you were an able man, but now I know you are most able. I trust in God your life may be spared, that our Eastern Empire may benefit by the talents and abilities which you possess"

His second book, "Cabool" is both politically cagey and fragmentary by comparison.

(I should just add for my far more assiduous library colleagues that the reason I don't cite the exact dates for these letters is that I don't know what they are. They are quoted from "Kabul Catastrope" by the otherwise redoubtable military historian Patrick Macrory...and he doesn't either)

Burnes was our first "Man in Bokhara" and elsewhere...but he was hardly the last. And hardly the last to die in the service of political gamesmanship in that part of the world. To attempt to understand his story might illuminate our own concerns.

Here are a couple of highlights from the archive for me, that have led me into particular lines of speculation about character and politics...which are, after all, the twin concerns of the playwright as well as the reader in me. First a letter written from his brother's house in London on January 25th, 1834, on his return from his first great foray into spying and negotiating for the Empire on the North West Frontier. Burnes is writing to Murray about the publication of his first book "Travels into Bokhara" which deals with a diplomatic mission to Runjeet Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, and his further explorations of culture and river systems...all the way to the Holy Muslim City of Bokhara in central Asia (via a bit of exploration of the new regime of Dost Mohammed in Kabul).

The first thing I noticed was that his signature is rather fabulous. And the second thing I noticed is his concern for his own image and the robust health of his ego. He writes that he's:

"accepting the sum of 800 guineas, the amount fixed on by you. I might. I am aware, have received a larger sum of money for my work but I feel much obliged to you for your liberal offer...You are of course fully aware from my personal communications with you that I have to submit a proof sheet to the authorities as the work goes on and that they have it in their power to strike out any political observations that are likely to give offence. I am sure that their pruning will much improve the work and I pledge myself that the arrangements will not cause delay...

With reference to your request that my picture should form the frontispiece of the book, I am ready to comply with it on these terms that the likeness be given in costume with these words under it "The costume of Bokhara" It will be well known that it is a portrait and will save me from the appearance of vanity..."

In both ego and appetite for danger, he seems to anticipate Lawrence of Arabia. Here he is writing about the portrait again on June 13th 1834:

'I see the advertisement in the quarterly states my book to be accompanied by a "portrait of the author". You would oblige me very much by altering this in the subsequent advertisements for the portrait is engraved as the "Costume of Bokhara". It was intended to have the knowing ones to find it out, Believe me, most truly yours, Alexander Burnes.'

He only wants the best people to know that this is his picture...a reputation is a thing to be managed in the interests of a career. He's not wrong about that.

On the 28th of December, now en-route back to the East for his next mission, he is writing to Murray in a jolly mood from Paris...there is a definite change in tone which indicates both that the two were now friendly, (through Burnes and Murray's son, John Murray lll, were of an age) and that Burnes knew how to have himself a good time. It's the rather naughty letter of a younger man who knows he'll be indulged his peccadilloes...

"what with dances and dinners time flies faster in this capital than ever I have found it - I have been living FAST in every sense of the word and for a stake of five francs in the lottery have my fellow traveller and myself...2700 francs which we hold FAST but like a good Christian, I shall render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and scatter it in Paris..."

Then follows Burnes' approbation of the 2nd edition proofs...which is the one I've seen...he admires the book's production, and he's right...it's quite gorgeous. He also likes the size of it, which will make the book like Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' (1833), but he talks about engravings again and says:

"I would like however if you could make some alteration in my visage in the "Costume of Bokhara" for it is said to be so arch and cunning that I shall be handed down to posterity as a real Tartar!!... I am enjoying Paris very much and think that your son's prediction of my never getting beyond it will prove true...with my best wishes to him and your family, believe me, yours ever sincerely..."

I think we can infer from these letters that Sandy is a bit of a man for the ladies, a man concerned with and aware of, his own attractiveness. Maybe George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman books, took more than Burnes' ability with languages, and propensity to travel through barbaric regions in disguise, as a model for his roguish hero...

Next time, an image conscious communication from Egypt, and my first treasure from this story of derring do along the frontiers of the Empire...

Normal Service to be Exhumed as soon as possible

2010-09-14T14:44:00.002+01:00

Just to say I'm currently innundating my colleagues here with unreasonable demands for images I can use here...on Alexander Burnes and the Afghan War of 1838-41...and on a chap called Austen Layard who dug up Nineveh a little later the same decade...and once I have some nice things for you to look at while I'm going on about them...normal service will be resumed...

Disaster in Afghanistan 1841 - Part One - Our Man in Bokhara - Alexander Burnes

2010-09-02T11:17:00.007+01:00

"In the year 1831 I was deputed in a political capacity to the court of Lahore, charged with a letter from the King of England, and a present of fine horses to the ruler of the country." Alexander Burnes 'Travels into Bokhara', published by John Murray, London, 1834.

The very first time I visited the Murray's extraordinary house of business in Albemarle Street, John Murray 7th, with courtesy undimmed by his having given this tour ten thousand times before, showed me the gallery of portraits of Murray authors from the last two hundred and fifty years. There was Byron, of course, and Scott. There was David Livingstone, Disraeli...

Many of these portraits were paintings commissioned by the publishers for their books. The originals now hang in the Murray's drawing rooms. He stopped me at this one.

"Him",he said, "I wish you'd do something about him." It's a couple of years later, sir.But here goes.

"This is Sir Alexander Burnes "in the costume of a native of Bokhara." he said. I looked at it, and I was lucky enough to know a little about who this was.

"Sekundar Burnes" I said. And John Murray's eyes lit up.

I then had to explain, slightly apologetically, that the reason I knew who he was, was that I'm a big fan of the Flashman novels (see previous post) by George MacDonald Fraser...and Burnes is a minor character in the first of them (and one of the best) "Flashman" - which deals with the immediate aftermath of Flashy's rustification from Rugby School, his joining the army, and immediately getting mixed up with skullduggery and wenching on the North West Frontier in 1841 and 2.

From the novel, Burnes, I knew, was an intelligence officer. One of those epic Victorian adventurers...who had gathered intelligence and conducted diplomacy in southern and central Asia. Obsessed with his namesake, Alexander the Great, whose traces in that part of the world he assiduously traced, Burnes was one of the desert loving English...and met his melancholy fate in Kabul as the first prominent British casualty in the great disaster of the First Afghan War.

In the novel, Flashman becomes a hero because he is one of only two survivors of the horrific retreat from Kabul in 1842. This is the event that launches him on his fictional career of poltroonery in every available trouble spot in 19th century military history. In real life, it was only a field surgeon, Doctor James Brydon, out of at least 12,000 military and civilian personnel, who crawled wounded into Jallalabad in January of 1842.

I vaguely knew who Burnes was, then, and promised John Murray I'd try to find out more. And so I have. The following series of posts record some of the things I've found in the John Murray Archive about Burnes, whose books on his "Travels to Bokhara" and "Cabool" Murray published in 1834 and 1841 respectively...

Just as a taster, before we get going on the archive material, here’s a little bit of Kipling...from the Barrack room Ballads, a light hearted ditty called 'The young British Soldier' which illustrates the continuing resonances of the massacre that was to come, and that brought generations of British pilgrims to the gravesites of what a later Murray author, Peter Hopkirk, echoing Kipling (who in turn was echoing Arthur Connolly, another of it's martyr) was to immortalise as 'The Great Game'

"When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your Gawd like a soldier"

Yes, it was a bit like that...

Englishmen on Ice - concluded

2010-06-22T10:11:00.012+01:00

At the end of my last post, I asked myself whether I'd found the North West Passage in the cages of the John Murray Archive, here at the National Library of Scotland.

In a way, I think I did. After all, it doesn't exist anywhere else but on paper...

After this marathon series of Arctic posts, in which I've hoped to form at least an initial response to the long story of courage and irreponsibility that was the search for the North West Passage in the Canadian Arctic, as documented by the publisher John Murray between 1818 and 1859, I want to take a moment or two to reflect before setting back off into the archival wilderness in search of new treasures...

(To get more detail on what follows, I'd refer you back to the beginning of this series...)

First, the heroism and sacrifice involved. Franklin's account of his first abortive expedition to find the Passage by the land route, published in 1822 to his lasting fame, is a memoir of horror, but also one of pride in the moral capacity of 19th Century Englishmen to endure anything in the name of commerce and discovery.

That journey, like its many many successors, was animated by a sense of moral certainty that a trade route around the top of Canada between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would be found, and found by English grit. This was an illusion born of commercial optimism and a sense of Providence...that God had arranged geography in the interests of the Empire. And this sense of destiny was itself mostly down to one man, the extraordinary Rear Admiral John Barrow, who, in turn, was a key figure in the Murrays' expanding empire of print in this period.

All those lives, Franklin's included, were lost for something that was never there to be found. The first person to make the passage...that is, to sail a vessel all the way from one ocean to another, was the redoutable Roald Amudsen, he who later beat Scott to the South Pole...and it took him four years in a specially rebuilt fishing smack...1903-1907...hardly a commercially attractive prospectus...

Anyway, by that time, thousands upon thousands of indentured labourers were hacking their Yellow Fevered way through the ithsmus of Panama...and making the polar route redundant...doing it the hard way, perhaps...but at least not the impossible way.

In the course of my reading on this, I've also come to believe that it was a similar sense of what must be morally possible, even if geographically inept and defiant of such tawdry considerations as evidence, that later was to animate the outrage of Charles Dickens, among others, when Dr Rae returned to London with Inuit tales that Franklin's last expeditioon (in 1845-8) had not only failed and become hopelessy, and fatally lost in the wilderness, but had succumbed to what Rae called "the last resource " of cannibalism before they all perished.

Just as it was a moral certainty that the passage had to be there, so it was, (according to Dickens and the outraged Lady Franklin) morally impossible that Englishmen had become "savages". In both cases, a moral imperative over rode the actual overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Likewise, perhaps, it was a moral rather than a scientific certainty, held by Lady Franklin, that her husband's "sacrifice" should not have been in vain. Her insistance that he had, despite perishing with all hands, somehow succeeeded in finding what he set out to find, infected statuary in London's Waterloo Place, schoolbooks for generations, and his hero's memorial and empty tomb in Westminster Abbey.

(According to Captain Scott, Franklin's memory also inspired him in his own Polar ambitions, with what result, we are acquainted.)

My last reflection is that none of this should make a "modern" feel complacent. We too are afflicted with "morally possible" narratives...These are repeated to us over and over again every time we watch the news or read a newspaper. Every time we think about Al Quaida, for example, we shape the narrative to our own sense of moral comfort. I think we should be just as certain that later times will find the stories we tell ourselves every day just as implausible as we find these Victorian tales of derring do in the Tundra.

Speaking of matters Afghan, that's where I'm heading next...to the first Afghan War in 1838-42...when, possibly with the best of illusory intentions, we took on a spot of regime change, and found ourselves in military occupation of that troubled land.

Once again, there were stories to be told, both of optimism and defeat. And once again, whatever it was we might learn, or choose not to learn, nothing could be allowed to interupt the comforting stories we told ourselves as we buried the dead.

It too, makes uncomfortable reading...and for almost exactly the same reasons...that we humans can tell ourselves any story, and persuade ourselves of the rightness of any action...but we still end up, more often than not, lost in the wilderness, like Sir John Franklin, eating our own boots.

Englishmen on Ice (Part 18) - The modern search for Franklin's Bones.

2010-06-07T22:20:00.015+01:00

'Unravelling The Franklin Mystery - Inuit Testimony' by David C Woodman, McGill-Queen's University Press 1991

If any of this stuff on Franklin et al has been interesting, I must recommend the above as the single most interesting book I've read on the 19th Century search for the North West Passage.

Woodman meticulously reconstructs the Franklin narrative into discreet episodes and locations...and his suppositions have the advantages of detail, and of decisions, desperate and logical, being made.

How can he possibly do this, 150 years on...?

It's very simple. He simply takes seriously the gathered testimony of the witnesses.

Witnesses, cry the ghosts of McClintock, Lady Franklin and Charles Dickens...(see previous posts) What witnesses are you talking about?

Inuits...or "Esquimaux" as the 19th Century would have it. Dr Rae, the Orcadian who brought back the first evidence of the expedition's demise (Posts 11 and 12), had heard the story and got artefacts from the Esquimaux. What Woodman has done, is to gather Rae's, and other, later Inuit narratives, and take them seriously. Simple, really.

He, and the recovered testimony of the "savages", make a compelling narrative...if necessarily an heuristic one. As he says himself:

"The problem with Inuit traditions does not in the end have much to do with whether they are 'true' in the historical sense.We cannot even remotely approach a verdict on any of them 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. The difficulty lies only in determining which truth we are hearing - whether Kokllarngnun visited Parry, Ross or Franklin - and in deciphering testimony concerning identically named places like "Omanek" or "Shartoo".

These were events WITHIN the Inuit world, is what he's saying...and the significance of events and chronology is consequently framed within a narrative that serves different societal purposes, from the societal purpose served, for example, by McClintock's "Voyage of the Fox", just as did Dickens' version of the only possible truth as Published in his magazine 'Household Words' .

(Sorry to keep referring you back to previous entries, but I think it's worth it, I really do.)

Woodman concludes his evidence based reconstruction of the disaster like this:

"The crews of the Erebus and Terror were simply in a no win situation. They found an open passage which was unknown to their contemporaries, and which treacherously froze solid behind them...those sent to their aid incorrectly concluded that this passage was non-existent. The Erebus and terror became trapped in what was possibly the least favoured spot in the Canadian Arctic. A similarly equipped modern group, knowing what we do today, might not fare any better... if they came to grief in Poctes Bay, then Victoria Strait was the only alternative.

If Crozier led his men in search of fresh meat, then he also went the right way. (they may have been responding to the tinned meat being inedible and actually poisonous). The stories of the final survivors living with Too-shoo-art-theriu could indicate that at least some of the men absorbed as much of the native ways as they could...
Finally Woodman reflects:

"a letter written by Willem Barents, the intrepid Dutch explorer who spent the winter of 1595 at Ice Haven on Novaya Zemlya was recovered intact in 1871, 276 years later.

I have little doubt that somewhere, probably ten feet from the remains of a once prominent marker, a Franklin record was similarly buried in the permafrost. When discovered, it will render all speculative books, this one included, obsolete. "

Next, and finally on my own Arctic Exploration, some reflections on what I might make of all this, if I were to make anything at all...did I find the North West Passage in the John Murray Archive?

Part 17 - Voyage of the Fox - Headless Corpses and the Vicar of Wakefield

2010-06-07T22:18:00.018+01:00

This post continues to explore discoveries made on Francis McClintock's "Voyage of the Fox", published in 1859 - you can read more about it in earlier posts. He'd been sent by Lady Jane Franklin to find evidence of her husband's heroic sacrifice in search of the North West Passage...and to counter the accusations of cannibalism that had been laid against the expedition's name by beastly Eskimos...

In previous posts we've seen how McClintock's findings were used to contruct the myth of John Franklin, the English hero who gave his life in the name of Arctic geography! But McClintock found something else, altogether more disturbing, which points us in the direction of a much darker story. Having found the only written evidence of Franklin's lost 1845 expedition in search of the North West Passgae, (see last post) McClintock's voyage, and his triumphant narrative, continue:

On p 294, on King William Island...McClintock's men make their second, and most macabre discovery...a longboat, a mile from the sea, that has obviously been dragged overland, containing two headless corpses ...and two books : 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and 'Christian Melodies', as well as:

"an amazing quantity of clothing...seven or eight pairs of boots...twine. nails, saws, files, bristles, wax ends, sailmakers palms, powder, bullets, shot., leather cartridge cases, knives, clasp and dinner ones, needle and thread cases, two rolls of sheet lead...and such as, for the most part, modern sledge travellers in these regions would consider a mere accumulation of dead weight...eleven large spoons, eleven forks, twenty six pieces of plate, eight with F's crest...watches..."

When you read about this, you can't help but think of this forensically. Why were starving, desperate men, lost in the wilderness, hauling all this overland in a boat?...and why was the boat pointing to the North East...why were these men heading back towards the ships...away from where bodies had been found to the south...where were their heads?

(More corpses were found years later, with knife marks on arm and leg bones, even further South at a place on the mainland immediately named Starvation Point)

Had they all gone mad?

Well... given four years in the Arctic wilderness and a good deal of lead poisoning, as determined in a 1990s post mortem of bodies buried on Beechey Island, madness was probably the least of their problems. Mad was the best way to be, I imagine. You can't help but speculate...though McClintock, in his propaganda book, certainly isn't going to.

Did the boat haulers split off from the main body to try to return to the ice bound ships for supplies? Why were they dragging all this STUFF? Were they the guardians of civilization against the unspeakable appetites of the wilderness? Were these the ones who refused to take their share in the eating of the dead?

McClintock isn't going to think about that...about any of this...but I can't really help myself...and I'm not alone. As I play my last post over Franklin's lost bones, next time, we'll see that, despite the best hagiographical efforts of McClintock and his sponsor, Lady Jane Franklin, and his publisher, John Murray, more than 150 years later..the hunt is still on....and Franklin and his men have finally found someone to chronicle their loss...

Someone, finally, to listen to the witnesses....

Englishmen on Ice 16 - Voyage of the Fox - the message in the tin

2010-06-07T22:12:00.023+01:00

Continuing my series on the tangled, pretty much ghastly, history of 19th Century Arctic exploration as recounted in the publications and Archive of John Murray:

Francis McClintocks' book of 1859, which is the climax of this sequence, 'The Voyage of the Fox' does exactly what it promises - it really is 'a narrative of the discovery of the fate of John Franklin'.

(Franklin's 1845 Expedition had vanished into a wilderness of rumour and tales of cannibalism, as outlined in previous entries)

The book is beautifully produced, and has a pocket in the inside cover containing one of the nicest maps I've ever seen - which is pictured here. It is written in the plain prose of the English hero. It is based on daily journal entries but with a terrific forward narrative sense. Published very quickly after his return, the writing was an essential element of the expedition. Perhaps the central element. McClintock was going out there, after all, to find and tell a story.

And the Voyage succeeded. McClintock came back with the story of noble self sacrifice that England wanted to hear. His Lieutenant, Hobson, found a cairn at what was known as Victory Point, and a metal can lying beside it, soldering broken, open to the air, containing a single sheet of paper. Here is the original, courtesy of the excellent online resources of the National Martime Museum.

This was the real find of the voyage- and to this day, this is the only written relic of the lost expedition. McLintock's book contains a quite beautiful facsimile of it...reproduced below...and I hope some of my colleagues here can tell me how it was done...was it photographed? It certainly seems that way. But if so, how did they NOT reproduce the burn marks...? Did the burns happen later? How? Was it the Germans?

A puzzle for another time.

McClintock describes the document on page 283 of the first edition, in his chapter for May 1859...

"In the first place, the record paper was one of the printed forms usually supplied to discovery ships for the purpose of being enclosed in bottles and thrown overboard at sea...blanks being left for the date and position."(The printed form reads...in English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish and German: "Whoever finds this paper is requested to forward it to the Secretary of the Admiralty, London, with a note of the time and place at which it was found; or, if more convenient, to deliver it for that purpose to the British Consul at the nearest port.") McClintock continues:

"The paper has been written on twice, the first time filled out neatly in available space by Lt Gore, and says:

'28th of may, 1847. HM Ships "Erebus and Terror wintered in the ice in lat 70 o5 North, long 98 23 W. Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in lat 74 43 28 N, long. 91 39 15 W after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat 77 and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All Well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday 24th May 1847' "(an error in dates? we know they wintered at Beechey Island in 1845-6..because burials had been found there and dated... so where were they when this was written? The same place perhaps, but in 1846/7? Sorry...can't resist doing a bit of CSI myself...) Also, this paper must have been taken out from the tin - it was written on again by Fitzjames and Crozier , two officers on the expedition, on April 25th 1848, in a fevered scrawl round the outside reading:

"April 25th 1848 HM ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this, having been beset since Sept 1846 [6!]. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain FRM Crozier landed here in lat 69 37' 42" N long 98 41W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847; and the total loss by deaths of the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men signed FRM Crozier Captain and senior officer, James Fitzjames, Captain HMS Erebus".

And a senior officer's endorsement in Crozier's writing:

"and start (on) tomorrow, 26th, for Back's 'Fish River".

The document also says that it has been moved four miles from Point Victory where it had been deposited by the late Lt Gore.

But they must have already been in extremity...to write twice over on the same piece of paper. To head South from their wrecked ships must have been a last, desperate hope...and sure enough, all that has been found since are bones...or as McClintock puts it:

"A sad tale was never told in fewer words".

The image of the original document found on McClintock's voyage shown in this blog entry is © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London www.nmmimages.com

15th entry - Englishmen on Ice - The Voyage of the Fox - Lady Franklin Expects

2010-06-07T22:10:00.018+01:00

I'm looking now at the first edition of this book, The Voyage of the Fox, whose provenance I described in my previous posts -

You can see it here, and Lord, it is a beautiful thing! Published by John Murray III in the same month as Darwin's Origin of Species...(there's an advert for this in the back)...this is Captain McClintock's narrative of not only his own voyage, with a ship bought and refitted by Lady Franklin, but of her husband John Franklin's redemption...his redemption from failure and loss, and from the evidence of cannibalism collected by Dr John Rae.

Let's have a look at McLintock's instructions, as lovingly reproduced in the book, from his employer: Lady Franklin herself...

"Aberdeen June 29th 1857

My Dear Captain McClintock
You have kindly invited me to give you "Instructions" but I cannot bring myself to feel that it would be right in me in any way to influence your judgment in the conduct of your noble undertaking; and indeed I have no temptation to do so, since it appears to me that our views are almost identical...I am sure you know that the rescue of any possible survivor of the Erebus and Terror would be to me, as it would be to you, the noblest result of our efforts...next in importance is the recovery of the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public and private, and the personal relics of my dear husband and his companions.

And lastly, I trust it may be in your power to confirm, directly or indirectly, the claims of my husband's expedition to the earliest discovery of the passage"

To which one immediately responds, "What claims? Whose claims?" There are no survivors, no written records have been found.

Franklin's "claim" to be the discoverer of the North West Passage is exclusively an emotional one. And to substantiate that claim, Lady Franklin has to follow the despised Dr Rae's directions, (the detestable Dr Rae, who brought back Inuit reports of mass death and cannibalism...)
Lady Franklin is telling McClintock where to look...King William Island, where she continues...

"if Dr Rae's report be true (and the govt of our country has accepted and rewarded it as such) these martyrs in a noble cause achieved their at their last extremity, after five long years of labour and suffering, if not at an earlier period."

I savour the irony of this. The very purpose of this new voyage is to rubbish Rae's account of cannibalism, but to launch the Fox at all, she needs to accept the rest of Rae's information as accurate. I think, in fact, she knew that it was all true. As a character, she gets better and better.

(see blog entry 12 and 13 in this Englishmen on Ice series for the story of Rae's discoveries and reactions to them.)

Lady Franklin is sending McLintock out there to confirm what she knows in her heart to be true: that her husband succeeded, that he died a successful hero. No other outcome is acceptable...especially since he'd probably never have gone back out there aged 59 if she hadn't got him the gig... (again, see previous posts, especially part 9..."It's not my fault!" ).

It also tells me, from the dramatist's point of view...that if she knew ALL of Rae's narrative to have been accurate...she therefore had to make all the greater effort to succeed, suppress and replace it with the story of heroism that England, and her super-ego, required...

This book, then, is a propaganda excercise of retrospective justification, and a quite brilliantly executed one too.

Next time, I get past the prologue, and discuss what McClintock actually FOUND...

Englishmen on Ice 14 - The Voyage of the Fox - The Penelope of England gets Odysseus' Honour back - The Meaning of the Message

2010-06-07T22:05:00.020+01:00

In 1857, a ship called the 'Fox' departed on a search for Franklin's lost arctic expedition, captained by one Francis McClintock and financed (again) by Lady Franklin herself - the mission, to find evidence of Franklin's party and it's noble demise. Upon his return, McClintock's journal was published as : "The Voyage of the 'Fox' in the Arctic seas, a narrative of the discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions". The title page is pictured here, published, as had been all the major Arctic narratives of the century so far, by John Murray, in 1859.

And what a publication it is! And what a vindication of a lost English hero! What an addition to the myth of self-sacrifice! What a tribute to Lady Jane Franklin - the Penelope of England!

Franklin's 1845 expedition to find the North West Passage, which is the main subject of this series of posts, had vanished without trace. In 1854, evidence of disaster, of cannibalism and degradation had been returned to England by the beastly Dr Rae...an Orcadian working for the Hudson Bay Company. The record had to be set straight...and the good order of the universe restored!

Murray's triumphant, beautiful publication of McClintock's book was only one element of a fierce PR campaign by Lady Franklin. Queen Victoria and Albert met the Fox on its return...and there was no way the message was not going to be positive. And just in case the plain facts of McClintock's journal didn't do the trick, the text is bolstered and interpreted in advance by a couple of 'spin doctors'. First, an Admiralty letter recognizing McClintock's triumph, and giving the official seal of (retrospective and grudging) approval to what had been a private and unofficial voyage.

(The Admiralty had given up on Franklin years before...but now they were anxious to add their voice to this panegyric affirmation of the only acceptable truth):

"I am commanded by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to acquaint you that, in consideration of the important services performed by you in bringing home the only authentic intelligence of the death of the late Sir John Franklin and the fate of the crews of the Erebus and Terror, Her Majesty has been pleased...to sanction the time you [McClintock] were absent on these discoveries in the Arctic Regions, viz. from the 30th June 1857 to the 21st September 1859, to reckon as time served by a captain in command of one of her Majesty's Ships, and my Lords have given the necessary directions accordingly..."

So McClintock and his men aren't going to lose their Navy Pay after all. There follows a second preface to the main narrative, also by the Admiralty,which starts:

'The following narrative of the bold adventure which has successfully revealed the last discoveries and the fate of Franklin, is published at the request of the friends of that illustrious navigator. The gallant McClintock,when he had penned his journal amid the Arctic ices, had no idea whatever of publishing it...he and his companions have cleared up this great mystery.
To the honour of the British nation, and also let it be said to that of the United States of America, many have been the efforts made to discover the route followed by our missing explorers. The highly deserving men who have so zealously searched the Arctic seas and lands in this cause must now rejoice that the merit of rescuing from the frozen north the record of the last days of Franklin, has fallen to the share of his noble minded widow.

Lady Franklin has shown indeed what a devoted and true-hearted Englishwoman can accomplish. The moment that relics of the expedition were brought home (in 1854) by Rae, and that she heard of the account given to him by the Esquimaux of a large party of Englishmen having been seen struggling with difficulties near the mouth of the Back or Great Fish River, she resolved to expend all her available means (already much exhausted by four other independent expeditions) in an exploration of the limited area to which the search must thenceforth be necessarily restricted."

Later the preface says that the search lead McClintock to believe Franklin’s party reached...

"as far as lat 70 degrees five minutes north and long 98 degrees 23 minutes west, where the ships were beset, it is clear that he [Franklin], who, with others, had previously ascertained the existence of a channel along the north coast of America, with which the sea wherein he was interred had a direct communication, was the first real discoverer of the North West passage. This great fact must therefore be inscribed upon the monument of Franklin."

The wish has become the fact, and entered the history books: it is now an official fact that Franklin found the Northwest Passage, even though, as I've said in other blogs, it didn't exist.

It said so on the statues, on the monument in Westminster Abbey (that took another ten years of Lady Franklin's lobbying...but she was like a Joanna Lumley by then...they weren't going to say no)...and it said so in the school books. Do follow the Abbey link..the inscription is priceless...

For me, the really compelling Franklin narrative here is hers, not his. She was a better traveller than him (she went round the world...she was in the Crimea, Egypt, Syria...)...she was the first white woman to walk from Melbourne to Sydney...but she was also instrumental in his failure as Governor of Van Diemen's Land, and in promoting him to lead the last expedition...and so in his death...and those of his companions...

and then, perhaps in expiation, in creating his legend.

She had ships named for her, plays written...she wasn't Penelope at all...she was Odysseus. And an extraordinary, terrible Englishwoman. If I was going to write a play about all this, she would be the main character in it.

Part Thirteen of Englishmen on Ice - Dr Rae - Arctic CSI

2010-06-07T21:55:00.029+01:00

As we saw in the last post, Charles Dickens disapproved of Dr John Rae, the trader who returned to Britainfrom Canada with news of John Franklin's doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

He did, however, in the wake of his denunciations, allow the good doctor a right of reply. So, in January 1855, he printed Rae's account of what he'd found, and what he'd been told, in full. Bit of a long post this, but I think it’s worth quoting at some length Rae's account, as it now follows, seems admirably clear to me, and lacking in prejudice towards the Inuits, although, perhaps for that very reason, it was introduced by Dickens as:

"A very unsatisfactory document on which to found such strong conclusions as it takes for granted"

Rae's narrative is pretty harrowing. April, he tells us, he meets up with "natives" and this is his entry for the next day:

"We were joined by another of the natives who had been absent seal hunting yesterday: but being anxious to see us had visited our snow house early this morning and then followed our track. This man was very communicative, and on putting the usual questions as to his having seen white men before, or any ships or boats, he replied in the negative; but said that a party of kabloonans had died of starvation a long distance to the West of where we then were, and beyond a large river. He stated that he did not know the exact place - that he had never been there and that he could not accompany us so far."

Franklin’s fate was obviously the Talk of the Sweat Lodge...here is another quote from Rae’s report:

"The substance of the information then and subsequently obtained from various sources was to the following effect. In the spring, four winters past, (1850) whilst some Esquimaux families were killing seals near the northern shore of a large island, named in Arrowsmith's charts King William's Land, about forty white men were seen travelling in company southward over the ice and dragging a boat and sledges with them. They were passing along the west shore of the above named island. None of the party could speak the Esquimaux language so well as to be understood; but by signs the natives were led to believe that the ship or ships had been crushed by ice, and that they were then going to where they expected to find deer to shoot...From the appearance of the men, all of whom, with the exception of an officer, were hauling on the drag ropes of the sledge and were looking thin - they were then supposed to be getting short of provisions; and they purchased a small seal, or piece of seal from the natives. The officer was described as being a tall, stout, middle aged man.

At a later date, the same season, but previous to the disruption of the ice, the corpses of some thirty persons, and some gravers were discovered on the continent, and five dead bodies on an island near it, about a long day's journey to the north west of the mouth of a large stream which can be no other than Back's ‘Great Fish River’ (named by the Esquimaux Oot-koo-hi-ca-lik...of those seen on the island, it was supposed that one was that of an officer (chief) as he had a telescope strapped over his shoulders, and his double barreled gun lay underneath him...

From the mutilated state of many of the bodies, and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life.."

"A few of the unfortunate men must have survived until the arrival of the wild fowl (say until the end of May) as shots were heard, and feathers of geese were noticed near the scene of the sad event.

There must have been a number of telescopes, guns, watches, compasses etc all of which seem to have been broken up as I saw pieces of these different articles with the natives - and I purchased as many as possible, together with some silver spoons and forks, an order of merit in the form of a star, and a small silver plate engraved "Sir John Franklin, KCH"

None of the Esquimaux with whom I had communication saw the white men, either when living or after death, nor had they been at the place where the corpses had been found, but had their information from natives who had been there, and who had seen the party when travelling over the ice. From what I could learn, there is no reason to suspect that any violence had been offered to the sufferers by the natives."

Thus ends the first of many attempts to reconstruct the story of the disaster, as it were, forensically.

However credible and humane I find this account, (and however revealing it is that Dickens published nothing further on the matter, taking part in theatricals aside) , it's patent credibility did nothing to diminish the intensity with which Lady Franklin now determined to have one last go at clearing her husband's name, and attaching to it the glory which her own guilt in the matter, I think, had decided it deserved.

It was going to be down to Lady Franklin herself to save the story, and send out a new expedition that would return with the heroic narrative she needed. Of noble sacrifice, and above all, of success. And this, as you'll see in the next few entries, with the collaboration of John Murray, inter alia, is exactly what she did.

These formidable Victorian ladies!

Englishmen on Ice a la carte (Part 12) The Last Resource - Dr Rae's Unspeakable Discovery

2010-06-07T16:01:00.040+01:00

After his expedition of 1845 to find the chimerical Northwest Passage (a fondly wished for but non-existent trade route across the top of Canada) had vanished without trace , 14 expeditions to find John Franklin were launched between 1847 and 1854 , four financed by Lady Franklin herself...which resulted, among other things, in her being sued by her own family for blowing the inheritance on a quite possibly guilt induced fantasy. She, after all, had been instrumental in getting her corpulent, elderly husband the job in the first place, as you can read in previous entries.

You can see a picture of him above, (courtesy of the good people at the National Maritime Museum) just before the expedition set off. Not looking too well, is he?

In 1854 Franklin was finally declared dead by the admiralty...Polar exploration had fallen out of fashion...besides there was the Crimean War to contend with any minute.
But that same year, news of Franklin's fate appeared out of nowhere, or rather, through the unexpected agency of Orcadian Dr John Rae, who had gone out mapping King William Island for the Hudson Bay Company, who came back to Britain in 1854 with the first physical evidence of the expedition found since the finding of three graves on Beechey Island some years before:

, A spoon, buttons, a matchbox...and a medal, awarded to Franklin by the Royal Hanoverian Guelphic Order.

These items are now in the collections of the National Maritime Museum and images of some of the items in their collection of artefacts found by Rae and other expeditions to search for Franklin are shown here. Rae wrote a letter to the Times about the objects and the testimony he had collected.

Rae also reported confidentially to the Admiralty, though as a Hudson Bay Company employee he had no need to. He had a terrible story to tell:

"In the spring, four winters past, a party of white men, amounting to about 40, were seen travelling southward over the ice and dragging a boat with them by some Esquimaux who were killing seals near the north shore of King William's Land, which is a large island. At a later date the same season the bodies of some thirty persons were discovered on the continent and five on an island near it....From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource - cannibalism- as a means of prolonging existence".

To Rae's horror, the Admiralty leaked the story. A confirmation that it wasn't worth looking any further was perhaps just what they were looking for...And all hell broke loose.

Furious denunciations of this mere trader were issued by the great and the good, most notably including Charles Dickens, who wrote in his weekly journal that the story could not be true of Englishman, and that Rae himself was suspect for believing the accounts given him by "natives", and not investigating himself.

..."We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel" Dickens wrote.

He devoted two lengthy articles in Household Words in December 1854 to denouncing Orcadians and Northern savages in general, quoting at length, interestingly, from Franklin's own memoir of the disasterous 1818-21 overland expedition (see previous posts) to prove that if Englishmen didn't eat each other then...

(it was only a Canadian trapper called Michel who did murder two people and eat one of them)

...then it was morally impossible to believe such nonsense now!

He also directed and starred in a play hastily written by Wilkie Collins called 'The Frozen Deep', a tale of Arctic suffering and ultimate self-sacrifice and moral redemption, performed in his own house, and later revived in a Royal Command Performance for the Queen, who clearly shared his distaste for these accusations of cannibalism.

(That was how he met Ellen Ternan, in fact, as a little added piquancy for Dickens lovers, of whom I'm one)

Theatricals and scandal aside, Rae's report had closed the case for the Admiralty...they weren't going to send out any more ships if all they were going to find was evidence of failure, madness and degradation.So who could save England's reputation now?

All images shown in this blog entry are © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Part Eleven of "Englishmen on Ice" - Lady Franklin: He's not dead!

2010-06-07T15:59:00.013+01:00

To continue the story of Franklin's last (and by now, lost) expedition to find the Northwest Passage, we've reached February 1854. John Franklin's been missing now for getting on for nine years. Expedition after expedition to search for him and his party has been sent out, some financed by Lady Franklin herself.

(to the annoyance of her family, who saw her squandering their inheritance...they actually went as far as sueing her at one point..)

...and the Admiralty have given up. All they've found so far is three graves of sailors who had died early in the expedition...It's not looking good for Franklin...

(These bodies were exhumed on Beechey Island not long ago, by the way, and were found to contain lethal levels of lead...which may well have come from badly soldered cans...but which would have also caused mental illness, among other things. It gets worse and worse, doesn't it?)

But, and this shows that boneheaded behaviour is nothing new in bureaucracy, it was in early 1854 that the Admiralty made the crass inducement to Lady Franklin that if she gave her husband up for dead, she'd get a widow's pension. At which point, she went publically bananas with rage, sending a copy of her letter to the Admiralty to the Times:

"My husband's conviction that where Esquimaux can live, there also can Englishmen, with their superior intellect and larger appliances, has often been quoted...they went forth, my lords, at your bidding, and went to those seas which you gave them liberty to explore...they have deserved, surely I may say they have deserved of their country that she should ascertain their fate...it remains for me only to thank your Lordships for the communication you have been pleased to make me, that the widows of those who are to be considered to have died in the service of their country, after the 31st of March next, will be entitled to pensions, according to the existing regulations. Your lordships will scarcely require me to tell you, after what I have written, that I do not feel it in my power either to claim or to accept a widow's pension."

This public stand gathered her a good deal of popular support. It was an irresistible pitch...the faithful wife, doggedly refusing to give up on heroic husband. She truly became the English Penelope, weaving her tapestry of hope among the twittering of faithless bureaucrats...

Then came news of Franklin from out of the blue...In November that year, a dour Orcadian working for the Hudson Bay Company called Dr John Rae was going to bring home news...not good news...dreadful, degrading, humiliating news...

At which point, Enter Charles Dickens...Stage left...

Englishmen UNDER the Ice (part ten) - Rapping on the table

2010-06-07T15:57:00.010+01:00

The disappearance of John Franklin's 1845 expedition to find the Northwest passage caused a flurry of activity in the spirit world and an innovative use of his letters...of archive material, I suppose...as a means of talking to the dead...I suppose that all archive reading is a means of communication with the spirit world, but this was intended rather more literally...

This is an excerpt from 'A practical investigation into the Truth of Clairvoyance containing Revelations of the fate of Sir John Franklin and some enquiries into the mysterious rappings of the present day by An Unprejudiced Observer' in which the 'Observer' describes taking one of Franklin’s letters to a clairvoyant:

'In no way or manner did I mention my possession of this letter to the clairvoyant, or ever hint at the slightest intimation of submitting such a letter to her. When awake she has no suspicion that she was being questioned on the subject. She has no views of her own to support, and takes no deeper interest in the matter than the generality of feweling hearted persons. I procured then, a letter of Sir John Franklin and placed it in the clairvoyant's hand. The following remarkable answers were elicited by the questions which I put.
Q: I put a letter in your hand, can you tell me anything about it?
A: have you put salt on it? * I never saw the writer.
* this letter was not written at sea, but in London

Q: Is it from a man or a woman
A: And I never will.

Q: Why not?
A: I think nobody will ever see him again.

Q: Is the writer a man or a woman?
A: A man

Q: Can you tell where he is now?
A: He is down in the water; all of them, when I saw them.

Q: How did they get down in the water?
A: I saw them in a ship; the ice went up against it and broke it in pieces. They ran about the deck and cried out. I do not see them now. It is all solitary. There was daylight there, but the weather was heavy and dark. I saw them on the ship. There was plenty of open water, but the wind blew and the ice rushed down. I saw them once on land. They came to land in little boats, then got into their ship, and came no more. They left three people behind.

Q: Why?
A: Because they had closed their eyes.

Q: Did you see the writer of that letter on shore?
A: Yes. They were very comfortable. If they had stayed there they would be living now, but they made haste to get in their ship and they soon went (down). You will never hear any more of them. They will never be found in all the places where they are looking for them. They left no paper, they did not mean to go for some time, but the water came open, and they went away quickly. '

It's not just on blogs that we get to hear from the dead and disappeared...

Englishmen on Ice Part Nine - It's not my fault! Second Arctic Treasure

2010-06-07T15:55:00.014+01:00

To put this document in context, I feel I need to refer you back to previous entries...but in brief, the story was this. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, in a bid to save his political career, had agreed to lead a last attempt to find the mythical trade route around the top of America known in the nineteenth century as the Northwest Passage. His ships disappeared, and it became a matter of national pride to rescue Franklin and his 129 men in two ships.

It's all rather reminiscent of the "betrayal" of Gordon in Khartoum years later...a gallant Englishman abandoned by his country in the desert...but with beastly Esqimaux as opposed to whirling dervishes...

Anyway, here is Lady Jane Franklin, writing to her husband's publisher, John Murray III, with her husband already eight years missing. Known as the English Penelope, she was imagined by the public to be an archtype of loyal, patient womanhood, but I think if you read between the lines of this, she is responding to her own guilt. To the thought in her own mind that she pushed her dopey, overweight, over-aged husband into this, to overcome the disgrace of what had happened to his abortive career as Lt Governor in Van Diemen's Land, or Tasmania: though she says, it is not for her

“to judge whether Sir John lost any of the prestige attached to his name by his administration of the affairs of Van Dieman’s Land… What I am concerned with as his wife…is to deny that he was influenced by any other motive in accepting the command of the Arctic expedition that that which had moved him on a former occasion"

The lady doth protest too much...She was no shrinking violet according to her recent biographer Ken McGoogan. She was one of those intrepid Victorian ladies...went all the way round the world in her eighties, she did...And from previous experience, one might conclude that she had never been all that reluctant to see the back of Hubby.

Having read some of his speeches to newly arrived convicts in Tasmania, I can see why. (see earlier blog - part eight)

Anyway, this letter gives an insight into the complexity of their relationship, as well as her public role as Penelope to his Odysseus, which makes this my second Arctic treasure. Next time...a use of a letter of John Franklin's rather different to this blog, I hope...A medium using a letter of Franklin's to talk to him "on the other side".

Englishmen on Ice 8 - Barrow's Last Throw

2010-06-07T15:53:00.024+01:00

In 1845 John Barrow organised a new expedition to solve the mystery of the Northwest Passage...a sketch of the history of previous expeditions has made up recent posts in my 'Englishmen on Ice' series of blog entries. They set the scene, I hope. Now we come to the meat of it.

The 1845 Expedition, two ships refitted with icebreaking hulls (they hoped), steam engines and 5-years' supplies...the Erebus and Terror...(later the names given to the twin volcanoes at McMurdo Sound...where Scott of the Antarctic set off South) ...this expedition was the most lavish yet. Barrow asked James Ross to command. But he was forty-seven...he thought he was too old. So they gave it to Franklin...who was fifty nine.

Barrow wrote "Although Sir John Franklin had already reached an advanced period in life, and had but just been released from the harassing duties of a colonial governor [of Van Diemen's Land, the name then used for Tasmania]...he willingly renounced every enjoyment for the further advancement of his country's glory. He was of the opinion...that it would be an indelible disgrace to England were the flag of any other nation to precede her's through the Northwest Passage"

Actually...Franklin had been RECALLED from Tasmania with his tail between his legs and accusations of financial mismanagement ringing round his ears. He'd fallen out with Montagu, the colonial secretary, and sacked him...but Montagu was better connected than he was.

Mind you, Franklin had had his troubles out there in the penal colony...partly because his wife, Lady Jane, had been an activist for penal reform in a slightly myopic, dreamy way.

(She was an amazing woman, mind...first white woman to walk from Melbourne to Sydney...left her husband behind...Did that a lot later in their possibly tedious marriage...she went on solo walking tours in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere...in company with a mysterious Lutheran pastor...but that's another story for another time perhaps).

This gossip is from Ken McGoogan's excellent biography "Lady Franklin's Revenge", and this is the transcript of Franklin's regular speech to arriving convicts as reported in the Hobart Times:

"Men, you have been sent here by the laws of your country as bad men; unfit to go at large; dangerous to the peace of society; dangerous to the security of property; you are all bad men, very bad men indeed. You are an extremely bad man. I cannot conceive of how any man could be so desperate, so depraved. How merciful her majesty was to spare your life. Hanging would have been too good for you! Sympathiser! Bad man! Very bad man!"

Hmm...Barrow maybe sent the wrong Franklin...

The Erebus and Terror with 129 men and the hopes of John Barrow on board set off for glory...they were spotted by a whaler off Greenland in July of 1845...and were never seen by white men again...

Next up on the blog is a letter from the John Murray Archive from Lady Jane Franklin to John Murray...and a bit of documentary insight, I think, into the human story behind all this.

English men on Ice Part 7 - Parry was the best of Barrow's Boys

2010-06-07T15:51:00.013+01:00

I've been coming across some more material on the epic story of the search for the Northwest Passage that formed a minor sideline in the publishing output of the firm of John Murray throughout the nineteenth century. This is at least in part derived from 'Barrow's Boys' by Fergus Fleming, which is a witty and racy account of the period I'm touching on in this series of blogs.

I thought that before proceeding to the story of John Franklin's second Arctic disaster (for the first see previous entries) I'd say a bit about what happened in between, and refresh what I've said earlier about the man who was behind it all.

As Franklin and William Parry mounted their two-pronged assault on the wilderness in 1819, they had the scathing words of their chief, Sir John Barrow, the Second Secretary of the Admiralty, (and an important friend and supporter of many, many aspects of the Murrays' output for nearly fifty years) about Sir John Ross's trip to explore the region the previous year ringing in their ears. Ross had rather sensibly turned back and didn't lose a man, but Barrow was furious, and went as far as to aver that what was lacking in Ross was simply the pluck and endurance required. Not a single man had died, which was a sign of cowardice...a 'summer cruise' he called it.

Here's the quote from Barrow in the January 19th number of the Quarterly Review: "A voyage of discovery implies danger...but a mere voyage like this, in the summer months, may be considered a voyage of pleasure".

Which gives you a clue. For Barrow, suffering was the measure of moral success, and it was moral success that counted for most...luck didn't enter into it.

While Franklin and his men were starving on the Coppermine River, Sir William Parry, (who also wrote his material up for Barrow and Murray), was doing rather better by sea. Parry was a planner...the most successful of all the expedition leaders that Barrow dispatched...On his many expeditions through the 1820s and 30s, for example, scurvy was combated with lemon juice in pastilles...and casualties were minimal.

On that first trip, Parry took the Northern route through Lancaster Sound...and got much further west than anyone else was to do for many years. He and his men wintered on Melville Island on their very first attempt in 1819...which ironically raised expectations that this thing might be possible after all.

But no one ever got that far again... not with an intact ship anyway...The ice just happened to be open that far that summer...and was open again on the way back. That is, Parry got lucky...but there was something in the collective mindset that couldn't believe in luck...so his comparative success raised future expectations. Fatally.

When Amudsen finally DID make a continuous trip across the top of Canada by sea in 1907, it took him four years, on a tiny purpose built boat. The Northwest Passage as a trade route was a chimera... and will remain so until the ice melts in Arctic summers more permanently. Like it's doing now...

Another entertaining feature of Parry's journey for a playwright (and grist to the mill if I was writing a play) is that, like the officers in Botany Bay in the 1790s, or the besieged cantonments in Kabul in 1841, or the Colditz Story, come to that, amateur theatricals helped to pass the time over the winter. James Ross in particular spent a lot of time in drag, apparently...

(It was his uncle John's disgrace in turning back in Baffin Bay, discussed above, that cut him out of the Admiralty running...but it was John Ross who made the money later on...with Theatrical Arctic Panormas in Vauxhall Gardens based on his own execrable water colours...)

Parry knew he had been lucky to get as far as he did...but saw they were iced in...and was dubious about the south...though he tried that route in 1820, while Franklin's land based expedition that year was falling apart...

But Parry, for all of his professional pragmatism demonstrated over and over again in his three trips was ultimately eclipsed by Franklin...not because of publication as such...Murray published all their accounts, but because of suffering. Franklin suffered. Franklin ate his own boots. So Franklin sold more books, and conformed more closely to the rear Admiral's sense of morality. Rather as if a moral compass was more important than an actual one, or than the geography and ethnography of the region as it actually existed.

In any case, to continue the main thrust of the narrative in this series of posts, Franklin, rescued by Inuits, did survive, but not having found what he was looking for, made another trip up North before heading down South for a prestigious posting as Governor of the penal colony of Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land. It wasn't going to work out for him, however...and it was the Arctic that years later would be the culmination of his career and the repository of his bones...And another Murray publication of course. The next posts will, I hope, get us closer to the heart of his story. I'm beginning to feel iced in by all this material myself...

Englishmen on Ice Part 6 - Tuck in, sir...you're starving...

2010-06-07T15:49:00.013+01:00

Before proceeding to a more chronological account of later expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, I thought I'd use this post try to communicate a flavour of John Franklin's book published by Murray in 1822, which was one of the first big successes of the travel narratives that were a mainstay of the company's output for the Victorian period.

Here, illustrated by a page from his original notebooks, is the chapter summary of the end of Franklin's first foray into the frozen North in 1819, from the book, which he wrote about the expedition with one of his companions on the expedition, John Richardson.

Each little synopsis a telegram of what is, believe me, eye popping
horror:

"CHAPTER 12.

Journey across the barren grounds.

Difficulty and delay in crossing Copper-Mine River.

Melancholy and Fatal Results thereof.

Extreme Misery of the whole Party.

Murder of Mr. Hood.

Death of several of the Canadians.

Desolate State of Fort Enterprise.

Distress suffered at that Place."

Understatement...upper lips so stiff they could crack a nut...or is that

just the cold. It was Endurance...that was the ideal, and the inspiration

for later cold addicted nutters like Scott, and Amudsen and Shackleton...

they were not just in search of concrete coastlines, but moral abstractions.

Tests of self against absolute nothingness.

Richardson's narrative takes the biscuit...
or it would if they had some left...
Richardson and two companions
have been left behind while Franklin goes on
to Fort Enterprize  (which turns out to be deserted...
but that's
another story)

Richardson has an account of being fed
what he thinks is "wolf meat" by
Michel, one of the Canadian trappers...
who has actually murdered his mate
and is bringing him back a piece at a time
(no...seriously)
Michel goes out, brings back a few choice cuts...

And then Michel behaving rather arrogantly, bossing
his betters about.
Till even the phlegmatic Richardson
begins to think Michel
does seem to be acting a little oddly.
Especially when he puts a bullet into
the prostrate Mr Hood.

At which point, Richardson begins to twig that
the meat supply
out there has been exhausted...
That it might not have been
wolf they've been eating at all.
It's been human meat,
Mr Hood is now on the menu...
and they're next...

If it wasn't so horrible,
you'd hire Tex Avery to animate a vulture
putting salt and pepper
on them.

Until the point one morning, when the good Edinburgh doctor
resolves the situation with Michel :

"I put an end to his life by shooting him
through the head with a pistol"

What really gets me about this is not the idea of publishing it...
it's good queasy stuff...
it's that Scott and Amudsen et al read this,
and thought. "Golly, can't wait to have a go"

Next time, some more accounts of the chimerical
search for the Northwest Passage.

If you're interested in the context of all this,
please refer to earlier posts.
And if you're interested in the book itself,
you know where to come.

Englishmen on Ice Part Five - Arctic Treasure - Franklin's Notebook 1821

2010-06-07T15:46:00.008+01:00

New Treasure. These are some of John Franklin's original notes on his first failed mission to find the Northwest Passage through the seas north of Canada from 1819 t0 1822. They were written in a hut on the Coppermine River while eating his boots...and the lichen off rocks...which they called...no, you're going to love this ..."Tripes des Roches" like it was the choicest item in a Piccadilly resteraunt.

It is how the British got an empire, you know. Blind bravery and NO conception of where they were.

Just to digress a tad into some observation then some speculation...

It was Roald Amudsen, the same Norwegian bounder who had the bad taste not only to get to the South Pole first, before Captain Scott, but also to come back alive with all his men, who actually also earlier had had the sheer lack of sportsmanship to be the first to successfully sail a boat all the way through through the Northwest Passage accross the top of Canada, in 1907, similarly, without loss of life. (Did the man understand NOTHING?)

Amudsen's success in the navigation of the Northwest Passage in 1907, as later in Antarctica in 1912, was founded on his very unBritish (because realistic) assessment of the lunatic nature of the enterprise. To get to the Pole? Well, famously...go fast and dirty...with dogs...hundreds of dogs...who you could feed to the other dogs...while Scott of the Antarctic, like Franklin before him, wanted to go with horses and tractors, like he could turn the place into Surrey or somewhere...

British explorers went to these places not just because they were THERE...but because they wanted to make USE of them...demonstrate that there was nowhere on Earth that an Englishman could not feel at home...

Likewise, it was John Barrow's monomania that the North West Passage would be found to be a practical shipping route...as opposed to a geographical curiosity, that killed all those men. British commercial pragmatism, in this instance, as in so many others, amounted to lunacy.

Amudsen knew the Northwest Passage was an abstraction, that's all...that variable ice melt and movement meant that now this way was navigable...but tomorrow it wouldn't be...so you focus on the practicalities of the lunatic task in hand...and give yourself four years supplies, a small crew, and no expectations of "practical" application of your journey.

An odd example of an acknowledgemt of the abstract, hence Germanic, nature of the enterprise, being paradoxically pragmatic. Or is that a hopelessly tangled thesis. Perhaps I'll develop it later. Or perhaps not.

Meanwhile, on these documents, you can see the water damage and wear, quite faded, written in pencil...not as poignant as Scott's last journal, but much of it written with as little expectation of survival. Looking at the thing you can feel the pain and exhaustion in the faded, blunted pencil marks...you can feel the cold.

Hence an arctic treasure that bears the marks of its physical provenance...stained by snow and sweat.

Earlier posts here have looked at the context of that first voyage. This object from the archive speaks of geographical failure, but of cultural success. It sold like hot cakes. Which Franklin could probably have done with at the time.

Likewise, a dose of Norwegian realism would have been handy for the expeditions that followed Franklin on an expedition to find something that was never there : a viable trade route accross the top of America, as we'll see...

Next time, a quick glance at the contents of Franklin's bestseller...before we go on, deeper and deeper into desolation...

Sir John Franklin - A Tale of Two Disasters, or, Englishmen on Ice Part 4

2010-06-07T15:44:00.015+01:00

Next in this sequence, let's meet the talismanic figure of the era...and a star of the John Murray Archive...

Bookending this heroic, and let us not hesitate to say, lunatic era in the search for the Northwest Passage, was one man, and two books, published by Murray in 1822 and 1859...one written in part by John Franklin, (and from which samples will follow in a later entry or two) being an account of a disasterous attempt to find the Passage overland from Great Slave Lake in Canada, up the Coppermine river to the sea...which was the biggest bestseller of the lot.

(Both Scott and Amudsen later claimed it as inspiration, which ought to tell you something about THEM)...

Franklin's account, scribbled in agonised pencil scratchings in 1819-21 as he lay dying by inches of scurvy and starvation (He and the other survivors were rescued by Inuits) is full of gallant details...they only survived at on lichen growing on stones...but they called it "Tripes des Roches" like they were in a resteraunt in Paris...

Most famously, it contains accounts of the explorers cooking and eating their own boots...like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush...which is almost certainly where the idea came from...

It also tells of a trapper called Michel who went mad...murdered two of the party, and brought back fresh cuts of meat to his companions, claiming he'd killed a wolf...

Unbelievably ghastly...and the public ate it up with gusto.

(Franklin's original notebooks from this trip are in my treasures gallery)

The second book is 'The Voyage of the Fox', published by Murray (John Murray III) in the same month as he published Darwin's Origin of Species...November 1859, and this was the account by Captain Francis McClintock of his expedition to find traces of Franklin's disappearance in 1845.

Yes, Franklin, by now aged 59 and in poor health...had gone BACK in 1845! looking for the same thing...the chimerical Northwest Passage...him and 129 men in two well equipped ships...who were sighted by a whaler in Lancaster Sound, and then just vanished in the wastleland. John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty and the Navy then sent a series of expeditions to look for HIM...

One of which found two graves on Beechey Island in 1850...there were then some vague reports from native Inuits collected in 1853...then the Admiralty gave up.

Not Lady Franklin though. She never stopped hoping. (There will be much more in future blogs about Lady Franklin)

Franklin's first disaster had made him a national hero...what McClintock found on the voyage of the Fox made Franklin into an icon of heroic sacrifice for generations of English Schoolboys (including Captain Scott...who wrote an introduction to a reissue in 1910 of Franklin's original Arctic narrative)...and since then?

There are archaeologists up there still looking for the corpses...autopsies were performed in 1999 on the bodies at Beechey Island, (discovering a terrifying level of lead poisoning in the corpses, probably from the new fangled tinned food they brought with them...the cans were sealed with lead solders!) and Franklin himself got his statue in Waterloo Place, and an empty mausoleum in Westminster Abbey, as a result of Lady Franklin's assiduous, dogged, obsessive lobbying.

Coming next, my second Arctic Treasure.

Englishmen on Ice Part Three - Chasing the Wild Goose from the Congo to Canada

2010-06-07T14:02:00.022+01:00

Continuing my series of posts about the Murray Arctic exploration narratives with this rather lovely image of one of Aaron Arrowsmith's beautiful maps he did for the Navy...and for John Murray...(from a book called 'The Voyage of the Fox' from 1859...of which much more later...)

At this moment, at the risk of prolonging the curtain raising on these tales of derring do, I want to explore the mindset behind these explorations a little, and to say for reasons of completeness that the Victorian explorer story really starts for the John Murray Archive with the "Narrative of an expedition to explore the river Zaire, usually called the Congo, in South Africa", published in 1816, written by the hapless commander of that particular disaster, Captain J. K. Tuckey, R.N.

This was where the partnership between John Barrow as director of explorations for the Admiralty, and John Murray as the publisher of the resulting best selling exploration journals really began...

Barrow sent Tuckey to confirm one of his many pet theses: in this case that the river Niger flowed into the river Congo...that rivers would be found radiating from the Congo that would open up the African continent to Trade and Bibles in every direction...from Jo'burg to Cairo, from Kinshasa to Addis Abbaba

(This was why everyone went looking for the source of the Nile...why Stanley crashed through the jungle breaking stones and bodies from Zanzibar west to the Atlantic)

The Niger doesn't flow into the Congo, incidentally...but one must understand the mindset: God wants England to succeed. He will therefore arrange rivers in Africa to avoid the French.

Tuckey wasn't sent to find where the Niger actually WENT...merely to confirm the arrangements of Providence…that the Lord had thoughtfully provided a comprehensive river trading network in the interests of Imperial commerce. Amen.

He didn't find it. It wasn't there to be found, but the failure was HIS failure. Not Barrow's or God's. Men died. Lots of men died.

For Africa and the Arctic, this would set the pattern of geographical exploration guided by wishful thinking. This was especially true of the long search for what was called the Northwest Passage...a Northern route to the Pacific across the North coast of America...to which Barrow dedicated his efforts, his political capital, and many, many lives over the next thirty years...

Such a trade route would be of enormous benefit to the Empire...God made the world for the benefit of that Empire...So the North West Passage simply must exist...all it needed was the gumption to go and find it...

And Murray had publishing rights to everything the Admiralty provided as expedition after expedition sailed into the ever shifting ice.

They never found it, of course. It wasn't there to be found any more than the Niger flowed into the Congo. (Not as a trade route anyway...but hey...give global warming a few more years...Lancaster Sound might be the Suez Canal)

Never mind. Everyone loved a shipwreck story. And it was the polar narratives that swiftly followed Tuckey, starting withJames Ross in 1818, (accompanied by junior officers like William Parry, John Franklin, William Crozier and his own younger brother James) that really set the standard of suffering for the era.

Next time...we meet the star of our show..and one of the Archive's Firmament of genius and craziness... John Franklin RN...the man who ate his boots...

Englishmen on Ice Part Two - War Surplus

2010-06-07T13:56:00.009+01:00

This is Part Two of a series of posts about the polar exploration narratives published by the Murray dynasty throughout the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the search for the North West Passage, and on the exploits of John Franklin, whose relics are a highlight of the John Murray Archive. (See my treasures gallery).

Rear Admiral Barrow wrote in 1816: "To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be, at any time, but more especially in time of profound peace, more honourably or more usefully employed than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver and Flingers, and others of our countrymen"

In other words, now that the war against Napoleon was over, how do we keep the Navy big? By keeping it busy. How do we hang on to all those newly promoted officers? By offering them rewards and promotion for mapping the unknown world.

And as he writes in the Quarterly Review the next year, with the first expedition to Baffin Bay about to be on its way under Parry and Ross to search for the Northwest Passage, the Russians are coming...there are rumours that the Russians might try to cross via the Berring Straits the other way, the swine:

"It would be somewhat mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the 19th century which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the 16th...there is, however little to fear on this score"

Besides the imperial was the spiritual imperative. The testing of the self. Which was even better done by icy wastes than by tropical diseases. As I've said elsewhere, it was "clean".

As an example of the genre, here's Henry Morely in a piece called "Unspotted Snow" he wrote for Charles Dickens' Household Words at the height of the "Find Franklin" mania in 1854 which drew this period in the unhappy history of exploration to a close: (Franklin and his final expedition had gone missing in 1845...as you'll see in much more gory detail later) :

"For three hundred years the Arctic seas have now been visited by European sailors; their narratives supply some of the finest modern instances of human energy and daring, bent on a noble undertaking, and associated constantly with kindness, generosity and simple piety. The
history of Arctic enterprise is stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain."

And a clean bad time was had by all...as we shall see...

Introducing "Englishmen on Ice"

2010-05-15T13:02:00.021+01:00

The following series of 20 posts are going to be on one aspect of the Murrays' central position as publishers of travel writing in the 19th Century and beyond.

Apart from from actual guidebooks for amateur travellers, and the fact that Childe Harold (a poem by Lord Byron) itself is, in some ways a travel book, John Murray of Albemarle Street had a particularly close relationship with the Admiralty, founded on John Murray II's friendship with Rear Admiral John Barrow (which in turn derived from the first Murray's naval career). Barrow was one of the most frequent and popular contributors to the Murrays' Quarterly Review, and also the director of operations for the enormous effort that went into mapping the world in that expansive time..especially the coastlines and rivers that might be open for trade...

(that was the chief purpose of the Voyage of the Beagle...Darwin being on board to discover evolution was a happy or unhappy accident, depending on how you look at it)

I'm focussing especially on the search for what was known as the Northwest Passage around the top of Canada, that Barrow was convinced for reasons of providence must exist...and especially on two publications that more or less bookend the epoch...both involving Sir John Franklin, who, before Scott of the Antarctic, was probably the best known of icebound Englishmen...mainly because, like Charlie Chaplin in the Gold Rush, he ate his own boots...(I bet that's where the idea came from)...while trapped in a hut in the Canadian wilds in 1819.

Franklin was an English hero in the best traditions of heroic failure. Twenty five years after his boot eating activities and the hugely successful publication of his expedition memoir, in 1845 he was the leader of the single best equipped and funded expedition to find the North West Passage to date...

Franklin was in command of two ships, converted to steam and icebreaking...the Erebus and Terror (which gave their names to the volcanos at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica years later). This expedition vanished completely, and a good part of the entries to come are about the attempts to find out what had happened, and the reaction of Charles Dickens, among others, when an Orcadian explorer called Dr Rae came back with testimony from the native Inuits that Franklin's lost men had been reduced to eating something altogether more disturbing than their boots. It's an amazing story of which I have now scratched the surface (like many others before me) and to which I am anxious, with a playwrighting hat on, to return.

Making Connections

2010-05-15T12:59:00.005+01:00

In the John Murray Archive, everything connects to everything else. That office in Albemarle Street was like a nerve ganglion where every 19th century sensation met.

Byron has an affair with Caroline Lamb, whose husband William, under the title of Lord Melbourne, will go on to be Victoria's first Prime Minister, who had an alleged affair with Caroline Norton, who published poems on the Factory Acts for Murray, and later, having lost her children as a consequence of the alleged affair, became a leading campaigner for the property rights of married women, excoriated in Murray's Quarterly Review.

Byron's Child Harold, Murray's first great success, also inaugurated a genre of personal travel narratives, which met up with the exploration narratives of Africa and the Arctic by figures such as John Franklin and David Livingstone. One of these mapping expeditions to Latin America was undertaken in 1835 by HMS Beagle, whose Captain brought on board as gentleman companion one Charles Darwin, whose narrative of the Voyage was published by Murray, which led Murray, 15 years later, to become the publisher of the Origin of Species, which rivals the Bible and Newton's Principia as the most important work ever to see print.

At the same time, in the very same month, John Murray III published an extraordinary Dictionary of the Bible, which is almost as long as the original, in which every tree, shrub and event of the scriptures is re-presented in taxonomic, scientific form...and an account of the discovery of what had happened to Franklin's disappeared expedition of 1845...The Voyage of the Fox, a copy of which he sent to Charles Darwin, having earlier published Austen Layard's archaeological researches which founded their success on their apparent confirmation of the biblical narrative.

So it goes on and on...if you start with Byron you can also trace the romantic heritage of the exploring British Hero through Alexander Burnes of Montrose, Central Asian superspy murdered in Kabul in 1841 through to Isabella Bird, one of the great travelling Englishwomen (like Lady Franklin), and her adventures in China before the Boxer Rebellion...on and on, leading off in tangent after tangent...

Unified only by the London location of the publisher, and the intuition that somehow, this mass of material all leads back to Byron lunging with his stick at Murray's bookshelves after fencing practice...And now this network of correspondences and correspondances is in Edinburgh. And I get the vertiginous pleasure of exploring it and reporting back, perhaps even coherantly sometimes, on my personal responses to what I find.

Last thoughts on Caroline Lamb

2010-05-11T09:58:00.002+01:00

Caroline Lamb's commonplace books are an extraordinarily interesting glimpse not just of one, let's be honest, troubled mind, but of an entire social construction of selfhood...many women kept these scrapbooks...mostly just with stuff in them that happened to interest them...newspaper cuttings and so on. What Caroline Lamb did with her second commonplace book (there are two in the archive) is to create a kind of fragmented space of self-invention...an open nakedness, as it were...and turn a private document into a public statement of who she was...her public being both Byron and, oddly, herself...so please forgive there being ten entries here...but the whole thing made me feel a bit fragmented myself, and I felt this was the appropriate response.

Englishmen on Ice Part One - The Worst Journeys in the World

2010-04-07T13:46:00.031+01:00

My favourite polar memoir is "The Worst Journey in the World" by Apsley Cherry Garrard, who was a naturalist with Scott in the Antarctic in 1911/2. He starts his book like this: "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."

John Murray had a bit of a line in this kind of thing throughout the nineteenth century...in fact, he more or less invented the literary genre of masochistic derring do...cleanliness and suffering sold a lot of books and inspired generations to follow their countrymen into the waste places of the world. And I thought I might ponder this kind of thing for a week or two.

I've already said that the Quarterly Review, which John Murray II started, was kind of the heart of both the business and the social circle that he forged and defined as a both a locus of thought, and the making of his dynasty. Key to that from the start was Walter Scott, but also key was a man called John Barrow...who wrote no fewer than 195 articles and reviews for the Quarterly Review, unsigned of course, but the nature of the social circle being what it was, people knew when he was contibuting one of his pieces on travel and exploration, and it put an average of a thousand on the sales of that issue.

If Byron was the emotionally intensest correspondent of the epoch, then Barrow was one of the most frequent...and not just because of the stuff he wrote for the Quarterly Review.

Barrow, you see, was the Second Secretary of the Admiralty. Through him, Murray published the Navy Lists...a good steady earner...and through Barrow, Murray got to publish epics of good clean bad times that had been had as British explorers opened up Africa and sought the Northwest Passage...from the first narratives of Ross, Parry and Franklin in 1818-20 to 1859's 'Voyage of the Fox' that found the first written traces of the later, lost Franklin expedition of 1845...it had been Barrow who'd sent them out there, and Murray who published the books.

It is a treasure house of courage and absurdity...and it's where I'm heading now. I'll send back dispatches on a piece of pemmican...

Book of Secrets Part 10 - A Book Written Backwards - Another Treasure Found

2010-04-07T11:32:00.013+01:00

a book written backwards
with torn pages - silences
and cries
and lies
and whispers
that cry, lie and whisper
into silences
and torn pages
and a book written backwards
which was
delivered to a postman
who kept it
for 200 years

and through an archive project
and a restoration.
She came to me.
and bled

This is my new treasure.

Book of Secrets 9 "Oh God Can you give me Up?"

2010-04-07T11:27:00.008+01:00

Alone amid blank pages,
after two pages neatly cut away
SOMETHING lost that she has written
continues in this wise...

"....one only word.

You have raised me from dispair to the joy we look for in heaven

your seeing me has undone me for ever
you are the same
you love me still
I am sure of it
your eyes
your looks
your words
your manners say so

Oh god can you give me up
take me with you take me
my master my friend
take me with you
Byron
my days are paid in vennom
being what I was to you
I wish you had never known me
or that you had killed me
before you went"

Book of Secrets - Part Eight - Heart's Blood

2010-04-07T11:23:00.006+01:00

"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today
Had he thy reason would he skip and play
Pleas'd to the last he crops the flowery food
And licks the hand upraised to shed his blood."

... It says something here that I can't read...

"what you always"...something
repeated?

"what you always repeated!"
(exclamation point)

She might have dreamed he'd see this page
most other pages don't have this much hope
Pure nostalgia
old songs
songs in Italian and French...
petering out into emptier and emptier pages...
intensity exhausted
until...

Book of Secrets 7 - Lost Lamb

2010-04-07T11:19:00.007+01:00

Say on.
We part that little word
farewell
Farewell though spoke in tears may sooth our pain
Does it not chear ye whom it seems to tell
That though we part "we yet shall meet again"

But oh how like the knell of death it falls
upon the heart whose every hope is o'er
How the affrighted fancy it appals
when farewell seems to say we meet no more

Le Livre des Secrets - Sixieme

2010-04-07T11:11:00.008+01:00

es tu bien sur que tu m'aimes
est-il certain que dans tes vastes contrees
aucun objet n'a fixe ton coeur?

je dois etre a tes yeux
sacree comme la faiblesse, l'enfance
ou le malheur

il faut que j'existe pour lui
je suis morte deja la
dit-elle
enposant la main sur son coeur

Book of Secrets 5 - "Bitch"

2010-04-07T11:07:00.014+01:00

There's also an Italian name...Biondetta...
Byron's dog's name
Turns out to be his pet name for her

In her own little box on page 3, she says:

"This was a small spaniel Bitch whom Lord Byron took a fancy for as he saw it bounding along in company with a thousand other dogs...it had the furiousness of a Jaguar or mountain cat when angry...but would nestle like a dove in his bosom when carried. It was so happy when thus favoured, that it grew presumptious and would bite and bark at everyone who approached..."

This is her story, this is true

"one day he drew it from his bosom and gave it back to its former owner, kissing it often and promising with tears soon to return - but Biondetta's faults were remembered and all her truth and kindness forgotten from that hour ...

the dog sat and watched for him and would not feed...till it heard that a new favourite filled its place, and then growing furious, it broke its chains...(wish fulfilment coming) and tried to bite and tear to pieces its rival..."

Lord Byron gives the bitch away

"from that hour it sickened and still watching for one kind word from its master..."

A kind word from Byron?
His kind word could only be a poem

And Caroline thought Childe Harold was for her
She thought he was Childe Harold

She thought he would make a poem of her
The way he'd made a poem of himself
She was wrong
So she wanted to die

"it died...the collar around its neck..."

(this handwritten book, maybe...this is the collar
identifying, demeaning,
this is the way she forces herself on him)

She could not make him make her into a poem
She could not die, meaningfully, and thus make a poem of herself

So what could she do
but make herself into a writer
(which she did...in a novel called Glenarvon
Written dressed in a page boy costume
feverishly
night after night for four weeks)

(if you will not make me a poem
I will make a poem...a book..a spectacle
Of myself)

She wanted to be his poem
That was all

"Lord Byron derided Biondetta, and said it was a whelp, a vixen - but whatever it was, none ever lov'd him so before or since"

So she wants Murray to believe...he was actually the one who received and kept this keepsake

She's always looking for an ending, a dying fall, a conclusion and release

but her tragedy was, that like the rest of us, she woke up again next morning and everything was the same

The Book of Secrets Part 4

2010-04-07T11:03:00.015+01:00

Caroline Lamb lies to herself more than she does to Byron
she could not have expected to be believed
that she really thought this secret book was the opening of a dialogue?
That he'd ever have her back?
That he'd court his certain social ruin?
(not in 1812...he hadn't crossed his personal Rubicon yet...)
But maybe I'm wrong
Did she sense something about him
his suicidal, romantic doomedness
that it was this that was real, threatening them both with ruin
though he didn't know that yet himself
was she psychic?
Or lucky
Or maybe she just knew him better than he did himself
Did she really love him
did she really think he loved her
did she really think she knew
knew him, more than he knew him?
was this because she fell in love
with a fictional version of him
his own fiction, to be sure, but...
She knew, somehow, that it was his destiny
to fulfil his own fiction in his actual self
that his pose of doomed satanic exile
was a prophecy more than a strategy

That might be her story
if she were writing it now

But I'm writing it
and at the moment I'm arguing with her
I'd ask her...if I could
Caroline...
What is it, this secret book?
Was this ever really intended to be delivered?
Isn't this a game?
Isn't this for yourself?
Aren't you playing pretend?
You can't believe John Murray is going to send him this?
That Byron will ever set eyes on these scribblings
and self advertisings?

"my very love was a crime towards you, and this if nothing else, requires your pardon"

the wind whistles inside the emptiness of this
you can't possibly think it could mean anything to anyone
is that why it reads, your opening essay, LIKE an essay...
is that why you write your name at the bottom, squashed in like an afterthought?

"your friend and servant, Caro."

You can't have thought this would actually communicate...
except perhaps to me
And it does communicate to me.
I'm reading and shaking while I type.

The Book of Secrets Part Three...This Comes From One That Suffers

2010-04-07T10:57:00.010+01:00

The first page of Caroline Lamb's secret book is empty
But for a pencil written "i"
in the top right corner.

Turn the page

On the next facing page
there is a "ii"

and the mirror writing from the ink on the next
facing page

numbered "1"

Again in pencil
Not in her hand

Not hers then
but an archivist's
some other handler

sometime after 1812

That's from her first line
In her forward sloping confession

"This comes from one that suffers - 1812"

"when you open this book - you will be as far from me in distance as you are now in heart - yet I believe time which softens all resentment will make you forget many of my faults and you will perhaps remember that I was affectionate and true to you..."

(She was then in exile, not him...sent to Kilkenny to scream in the Irish bog)

"Women do not, neither do they ever resent and what you bound to you once will be still yours while it exists however you may think to cut the chains no one knew how to unlock."

toiled in her denial
that he ever dumped her
that she was not what he wanted
that he lied to her
when he said she was himself

ton hypocrite lecteur, ton semblable, ton frere

(yes, some of it's in French)

The Book of Secrets. Part Two.

2010-04-07T10:55:00.014+01:00

The first thing you see
is that the book is back to front
it has been started twice
if you open it the wrong way round,
Is that the pages at the back
or at the front
have been torn
Ripped out

Who by?

There is the curl of a letter Y
There is a faint "I"
on the roughly excised stumps

Why?

Murray burned Byron's memoirs
while hordeing his other souveniers

Byron's Napoleonic nick nacks
Survive

What did else he keep
What was his selection?
What grounds?

What else did he burn?

If it was his hand...
His censorship
Not hers,
it was Byron he protected
always
from her accurate slanders
of buggery and incest.

She would never have pulled her own pages down
and out, with her white hand
this pale, aged
cream paper

eight leaves jutting
but a fifth, perhaps
of the whole book removed

Unless

Unless she started the book the right way up
and ripped out what she's written
as too exposed, too raw?

Or unless it was just an old book
a poor thing

and she was saving money

This thing was probably expensive then
though not nearly as expensive as it is now...

So for reasons of parsimony or censorship
someone is being protected here
by someone.

And she started the book again
backwards
like a Hebrew.

Never got that far...

Perhaps another third of the pages are blank
some ruled, boxed
empty
waiting for wisdom
and truth
and love

for ever

Turn it upside down

The Book of Secrets Part One

2010-04-07T10:50:00.008+01:00

Dark blue leather binding...
gold filigree
Locked with a clasp
Broken

Her secret book
Her book written backwards
The book of her secrets
Her secret places
opened and exposed.

This is not for me
She did not offer this to me

The publisher kept this
He'd said he would send it
Deliver it for her
To a man he could not deliver
To her
To a man who'd not accept it
Pander
Publisher
The tradesman
The money and goods man
Awoke and
Found himself a gentleman
found himself sought out

She wanted him to handle her
send her
reveal her and display her
to Him
Manfred, Don Juan, Child Harold
"NB" - this fictional man.
This gimping Bonaparte, this
fraud, this genius, this Frankenstein
(both maker and monster)
This modern Prometheus.
this fiery self creator

Byron never saw this gift
Never saw her
After he delivered her,
weeping, self-mutilated
back to her mother
into night
into exile from him
Her universe shrunk
to the size of his stolen portrait

Dressed as a page boy
self created
the object of desire
she offered herself
to the world, his world
she thought, at least
to the world where
he was hiding from her

She offered him
yet more disguise
another fictional disguise
she rewrote him,
and wrote herself,
wrote herself above all
hoping they might meet
in the seedy hotel
of celebrity

Calantha and Glenarvon
Caroline and Child Harold.

But he was always ahead of her
ahead of everyone
elusive, a sociable hater
a teasing, raging, secret mourner
for himself, always himself.
No one else could inhabit
his existance
It was already over-crowded
with avatars.

So, storm tossed
wet and weary
she made him a scrapbook
pasted fragments of herself
between blue covers

A commonplace book

Misery is commonplace
Loneliness is commonplace
dissapointment is universal.

Touch it
though he never did
open it
though he never did

This dead letter
this restored, pampered artefact
of failure, of unconsumated lives
this relic
of this saint among romantics
this over reaching rock chick,
broken in the Regency
a butterfly on a wheel

This Marianne Faithfull, drunk,
watching Mick Jagger on a TV show
loss married to relief

I hesitate
I'm hesitating
poised at the gateway
to a pornographic website

Because you can look,
Should you?

Look at it
Pick it up

the weight of it
the fresh paint of it
the new gum of it

someone has decided this is history

time has been taken
artistry employed
money spent

an archive housed and numbered
opened up in Edinburgh

the publisher too
his instinct was for a limited,
privileged exposure
to the scholarly and curious
the prurient and pious

and me. Me too now.

I still hesitate.

the burial horde of Byron and Byronists
yawns

Mad Bad and...

2010-04-07T10:41:00.011+01:00

One can only imagine the tangle of grief and loss which engulfed Murray when Byron, suddenly, was dead of disease in Missolonghi. His guarding of memorabilia of his lost genius, and the destruction of those parts of his Lordship's legacy which for personal, and commercial reasdons, he did not care to contemplate, must both stem from that complex of feeling...as, perhaps, does the archive itself, the Murray's habit of keeping things, storing things, squirreling away letters and memorabilia, (an thus for the existence and extent of the archive itself) perhaps in some gesture of denial that for always, forever, and whatever else, however distinguished, crossed over the desk of the Murrays at 60 Albemarle Street, time stopped with one of their authors only, they were forever defined by one author only...the one Caroline Lamb called "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"

What I'm saying, trying to say, is that Byron's public self invention is an offered confidence to the reader, a gift of vulnerability...you KNOW me...it is saying. This provokes, clearly, in both unhappy intense Caroline Lamb, and solid, ambitious, business like John Murray, a wish to give of themselves in return...they want Byron to know them...but know him as versions of him...they define their best hope of his love as being mirrors of him in which he sees himself.

Again, a curious observation from yet another Byronic outsider from Pop Culture...Ken Kesey, he of The merry Pranksters and 'One flew over the Cuckoo's nest'...went to a Beatles concert, and listened to the screams and thought he heard what all those little girls, and boys, were screaming. Me.

One does not love the celebrity...one loves the feeling of loving them...one loves the experience of oneself...loving...

Between them, Byron and Murray invented celebrity, and Caroline Lamb fell victim to it. So...in a sense...did they.

Byron's body returned to England in July of 1824...and Caroline watched the parade...pretending to the last it was an accident, perhaps hoping to wring from serendipity a last connection to a meaning beyond that of two people who had a brief and painful affair. She wrote to Murray on the 13th of July
CAROLINE
Will you write and tell me every particular of what has passed since I saw you. Lord Byron's hearse came by our gates Yesterday. You may judge what I felt, Pray write to me
Ever your sincere friend
Caroline Lamb

Every Day of My Life! - My Second Treasure

2010-04-07T10:25:00.014+01:00

Here's things from some later letters from Murray to Byron, when things were going wrong...the intensity is, I think, between publisher and poet, extraordinary. The pain is very real.

25 September 1822

"With regard to my reception of Mr John Hunt whom I was not aware that your Lordship had even seen, he sent up word that a "gentleman" wished to deliver into my own hands a letter from Lord Byron and with instantaneous joy I went down to see him...there I found mr Hunt, and a person obviously brought there as a witness. He delivered the letter in the most tipstave formal manner to me starting me fully and closely in the face as if, having administered a dose of Arsenick, he wished to see its minute operations...if you knew the insulting behaviour of this man...A friend of yours!!! My heart and soul are and ever have been with any and every friend of yours...These have now been sent to him...
READER
I love "tipstave formal manner"!
Murray lists the works of Byron that Hunt has demanded from him, and encloses a rather vulgar, crowing advertisement that Hunt has circulated, boasting that he is now Byron's publisher. Murray continues,
MURRAY 2
I inclose specimens of two editions of your Lordship's works which I am printing in the most beautiful manner that Modern Art can effect - the best proof of MY honouring of your writings..."
READER
and in his next letter, he is actually angry. 11 October 1822
MURRAY 2
Dear Lord Byron
READER
Not, My Lord but
MURRAY 2
Dear Lord Byron

I entreat as a particular favour that you will not place me in personal intercourse with Mr John Hunt, for I have invincible reasons for not wishing to know him. As for my giving myself airs, I can assure you that no one can charge me with any alteration in this respect since I first had the good fortune of seeing you...
READER
And now his very sentence structure falls apart with the passion of his outraged feelings
MURRAY 2
I beseach you not to set me down for such an incurable blockhead as not to think of you with everyone around me as far superior as a man of genius to any man breathing that that (to ?) all the other work together which I publish as a matter of business would keep in the balance of my mind, with yours...this is my opinion from the bottom of my heart and soul...and do what you please...misconcieve my real character...nothing can eradicate this opinion nor anything alter my firm devoted dutiful and respectfully affectionate friendship for your Lordship
READER
He is saying do Byron, who do you think I am? What do you think I am? Wwhat was I to you?
MURRAY 2
"Pray don't attend to what evil tongues tell you come over and see the truth....
READER
and finishes, wearily, and vents his other troubles...offering scraps of himself
MURRAY 2
Poor Godwin
READER
(Mary Shelley's father)
MURRAY 2
has been suddenly called upon for four hundred pounds of rent, which would ruin himn...Shelley would have paid it. There is a committee of which I am one for raising the sum. I have given 10 Gs - I dare say you will give your Lordship's name for 25 pounds. Poor Gifford was very nearly dead three days ago - he is now out of danger - he ever continues your firm admirer

There is a review of Cain in the next quarterly - which I will inclose

I am and ever shall remain Dear Lord Byron
Your grateful and faithful
friend and servant

John Murray

Every day of my life I sit opposite to your Lordship's portrait!"

READER
The words "every day of my life" are underlined.

This is my second treasure

Coming soon: a series of illustrated posts about Caroline Lamb's day book, an amazing private document that is now in our sweaty little hands!

First Treasure - A Forgery

2010-03-30T12:45:00.006+01:00

I mean it's nothing much to look at
Look at it.

A rectangle of greyish card
that's been written on by three different people.

It's been smudged

The ink at the end of the letter
has bled onto the facing page

Or some of it's been written over, crossed out.

It's a letter written at the end of 1812
that Lady Caroline Lamb brought in to Murray's office
that goes like this:

"Once more my dearest friend,
let me advise you that I had no hand
in the satire you mention,
so do not take affront about anything but call where I desired
- as to his refusing you the picture - it is quite ridiculous -
only name me or if you like it, shew but this note
and that will suffice - you know my reasons for wishing them
not to allow all who call the same latitude.
Explain whatever you think necessary to them and take
which picture you think most like but do not forget to return it the soonest you can -
for reasons I explained. My dearest friend take care of that picture...."

and it's signed:

your friend, Lord Byron"

Well, so what. Byron is writing to a friend who is to show this letter to John Murray, so she can take away, perhaps for copying purposes, a portrait of Byron. The friend, in this case, is Lady Caroline Lamb, who Murray knows perfectly well has had a torrid affair with his Lordship lately, but which is now over...so (as I'm sure she charmingly explained to him) it was natural that she wanted a souvenier of this liaison...Murray will surely understand.

And Murray does...and he gives her the picture...

which brings us to the second of the writers on
this undistinguished bit of card.

Who in darker pen but very SIMILAR handwriting says

"This letter was forged in my name by Caroline L. for the purpose of obtaining a picture from the hands of Mr M.
January 1813

Byron"

Caroline wrote the letter to herself...it's a forgery! In one object, you can see the whole relationship between poet, lover and publisher

But the third set of handwriting is interesting too; it says in pencil on the blank half of one side

"forged letter
by
Lady Caroline Lamb"

It's been named. Kept. Catalogued. Collected. Obsessed over.

I think that to understand the collecting impulse that I think gave rise to the very existence of the archive itself, as with so many other things with the JMA, you have to try to understand a bit about the relationship with Byron not of his lovers, but of his publisher. There is probably no single item anywhere in the 12,000 odd items pertaining to Byron and his circle that says quite so much as this one about the curious love triangle. Or which speaks more directly to the theme of that relation ship...which was the reinventing of the self.

So this is my first treasure.

The Quarterly Review - First Principles

2010-03-30T11:29:00.005+01:00

I've done some reading in the early days of the Murrays' mainstay...the Quarterly Review...but first, a principle.

You don't read a book review magazine
Because you're interested in buying books
The whole point of reading these articles
is NOT to have to read the books
but still be able to talk about them

That, it seems to me,is the practical difference
between a review and a critique and criticism

The review tells you
whether or not
to read the book or see the play

The critique means you don't have to
It's been read for you by someone like you

(Criticism is a dialogue with the book
or play...an entirely different art
Folk who write for the papers are rarely critics)

Where the Elite Meet to Aesthete (part the last)

2010-03-30T11:28:00.007+01:00

The next article (by Walter Scott…(that's him downstage right in the picture...talking to Byron)...though nothing is ever signed in the Quarterly, which means they have to give no Quarter…I bet somebody made that joke already, and it got just as big a laugh then…)is a review of a book called
"Reliques of Robert Burns"

So, I suppose, it's proved again
that every book radiates outwards
and reaches every other book
every theme

It also brings us close to these writers
and their audience
when we hear them chat

Chat...in the present tense
opine, argue, criticize

(The book of Burns holds nothing new, says Scott)

The Quarterly Review is dependent on what happens to be new

But it is new in itself that so much is being published
that a rival to the Edinburgh Review can be sustained
a thousand pages of book reviews a year
for two hundred years

The editors also offer
for our gentlemanly consideration:

A new book of anecdotes from the lives of English painters;
a slagging off of a new Gothic Novel from Miss Owenson;
a Grammar of Sanskrit
(Indian Sanskrit...
intellectual loot from an Empire
which does not yet call itself an Empire
This latter article recommends that a full translation of the Vedas
should be made,
so we may cease from puerile comparisons with the glories
of the Hebrew scriptures,
and reveal Hindu culture as
"an unmeaning chaos of grave but fantastic nonsense...
[They] should be given to Europe in the languages
familiar to everyone...
that we may not be blinded by the erroneous admiration
of credulous and misjudging enthusiasts");
A worthy new translation of Virgil's Georgics,
(which comments on the decline of classical education these days
"an indifference to classical education seems
to be gaining ground in this country");
memoirs of Sir Phillip Sidney;
a defence of the historical truth of the Biblical Account
of Exodus against some remarks of Edward Gibbon and the Edinburgh Reviewers;
an attack on John Curran, the Irish Nationalist politician
and lawyer who defended the United Irishmen in treason trials
"no beauty of diction or manner
could have made the ideas contained
[in his speeches] tolerable in the mouth
of a leading member of
the English House of Commons...
he owed much to his clients
but still more to the laws of the country
by which he lived...we expected
therefore, to have found SOME disavowal
of the principles under which
those misguided men were associated,
SOME expression of attachment
to those laws which afford a fair trial
even top the blackest of traitors"
We demand that you condemn yourself!
Is everything in here familiar?
What does it mean that everything is familiar?;
"theorie de l'action capillaire"
by the great Frendch mathematician
Ferdinand Laplace,
book ten of his "Celestial Mechanics"
...which has got far too much algebra in it
"we are persuaded, on the contrary,
that those who enter with ardour
on a life of science, copuld not
p[ursue a more eligible path...
from the academical study
of the great BRITISH mathematicians";
an essay on Greek, Roman and British
coins and medals, fun for the collector;
a book of Gossip haughtily dismissed;
Robert Southey's translation of
Il Cid;
a book of minerology, more hobbies;
a life of Swift;
a tourist guide to Scotland
(trashed...again by Scott);
Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionary Society
By Robert Southey…apparently he was supposed to do the stuff on Spain, but landed poor Murray with THIS instead
(every issue must have something that NO ONE
is going to read);
and last, back to Spain and the war,
"Narrative of the siege of Zaragoza"

Okay, that's a fairly substantial list
but a gentleman would not be expected
to read the whole thing.

Current events top and tail it,
(everybody wants to know about the war)
and special interests fill the rest.

The tone is decidedly Tory,
sceptical, patriotic,
pragmatic, dismissive of cleverness
and foriegners in general

It's entirely recognizable,
in fact.

(What does it mean that the past is recognizable?)

And like our journals of opinion now
will seem quaint and funny soon,
my favourite bits are quaint and funny.

It contains no masterpieces of the critical art
but you're not reading it for that
oh mighty customer,
oh magpie playwright.
You're reading it, actually,
because second rate minds
will give far more accurate impressions
of their times
than a genius ever could.

The editors want you to feel included
in a conversation
and you do.

And feeling a bit superior
is part of the fun of that.

But seriously,
you could read the history of England
in almost real time
by reading the Quarterly Review...

Not what happened
that's not history...

But what people thought, talked about, shared
with people just like them
That’s history
As well as facebook

They're not writing it for me
They're not writing for the ages
They're writing for right now
But back then

And that can tell you more and differently
than any prose ambitious for eternity
that the past is a foriegn country
where human possibilities
are exactly the same.

Where the Elite Meet to Aesthete (part the third)

2010-03-30T11:26:00.007+01:00

In the manuscripts room
in the National Library of Scotland
like decorations in a hotel
the complete 200 years
of the Quarterly Review
are collected in volumes
on open shelves in the manuscripts room
published by the Murrays
The oldest volume, collecting
the numbers
For February and May 1809
was itself published in 1827

So the second draft of history
(newspapers are the first draft)
became itself history
quite soon

The Murrays were great collectors of themselves...

So in that very first collection
what did Murray think that people would be talking about?

What does he lead off with?

Current events. This is wartime
let us not forget

"as the intelligence from Spain is daily increasing in volume,
as well as in importance
we are glad to avail ourselves of these materials
while they are of a manageable bulk
and whilst facts are too recent and notorious to be disputed (!)
...we are almost tempted to doubt whether
we are reading events of real history.
A king surreptitiously removed
from the centre of his dominions...
directed to abdicate his throne in favour of an alien upstart
...Even those who were most familiarized
with the singular caprices of Buonoparte's despotism
...had by no means expected...
such a theatrical and fanciful display
of his unbounded power"

Byron was in Spain then,
his sympathies divided
It was the theatrical and fanciful
he liked about Napoleon.

"It has been contended
by one class of writers
that the Spaniards have forfeited
their whole claim to the sympathy of free nations,
by making the restoration of a foolish prince
the ultimate object of all their efforts...
that now they will be totally subdued
and trampled on by Buonoparte
and will deserve their fate...
Now this is to argue that Spaniards
should act and feel like Englishmen,
which is not quite reasonable"

This is a conversation ABOUT conversation
...It is the argument in England that is interesting...
to the writer and the reader
and if Spaniards fall short
of the clarity and courage of the English
it is only to be expected

But the value of this writing NOW
is that it reminds us that history
is a succession of present tenses.

As 1809 begins, the retreat from Moscow,
Waterloo, Napoleon's exile in Saint Helena
are unguessable. Napoleon is a terror,
a fact of nature, the man of his age.
For some, like Byron, a hero because a villain.
For some, like Beethoven, a hero
then a villain,
for the English Tory, monarchist Quarterly Review
he is "Napoleon, the boldest, the most politic and the wealthiest
monarch of his time."
They hate him, but he might win.
England might have to come to terms.
His occupation of Europe may be a regrettable fact
but it is a fact for the moment
for practical men to negotiate.

Then,
As now, in the British Expeditionary Force
which has been sent to Spain

"under Sir John Moore and Sir David Baird,
we confess ourselvers unable to discover
any practicable and determinate object...
we question the wisdom or policy of the measure
The victories of Buonoparte
have been great and rapid
and he will and must pursue his blow"

Like a London Review of Books Article today
about Afghanistan, Iraq...
Except, being a Tory Paper
The Quarterly Review lacks guilt.

"But it is far easier to over-run a country
than to secure the conquest"

Just as this history is made present
by the writer not knowing the eventual result,
so he himself calls on history
to assure us that French Hegemony is doomed

And uses, amazingly, the example
of the Scottish Wars of Independence against England to prove
that...

"Armies may be defeated by superior discipline or by superior numbers;
generals may be corrupted;
but that the whole active population of a great country
in which the strongest passions of the human heart
have been excited almost to madness
can be terrified into quiet and permanent submission
is, we think,
extremely improbable"

Where the Elite Meet to Aesthete (part two)

2010-03-30T11:24:00.006+01:00

The Quarterly Review
is a gathering place
for sceptical, practical
conservative gentlemen
Gentlemen who write and read and talk

In here is what to talk about this month...
If you are the right kind of person
who reads The Quarterly Review.

All marketing defines us like this...
We are the kind of people who drink this wine
And use this shampoo

And read the Quarterly Review.

If all writing is for Company,
and all reading is conversation
Then reading a genius
is a conversation with eternity.
But reading a periodical
identifies you
as being like the other folk who read it.

So to sell itself,
the Quarterly has to take a line
strike a tone
They are telling us who they are
what they're like,
who's invited and who's not...
Geniuses don't do that.

These days, the London Review of Books
is a bit like that...reading it is like joining a club
for guilty non aligned liberals...
that Alan Bennett is a member of
(Alan Bennett for example)
You look at who is who on the letters page...
And that's you
Reading it makes you part of that company.

So
For two hundred years,
reading the Quarterly Review
has made you a member
of John Murray's club
at 50 Albemarle Street
(You and Walter Scott)
(Walter Scott for example)

So if we read it NOW
we are eavesdropping the conversation
of a Gentleman's Club
In London
in February 1809
We are not reading
We are overhearing.

Where the Elite meet to Aesthete Part One

2010-03-30T11:23:00.005+01:00

The Quarterly Review...issue number one

(Like the address in Albemarle Street
and the memory of Byron
The QR is a constant for the House of Murray)

When John Murray awoke and found himself a gentleman,
he bought a house where gentlemen could meet

(on the proceeds of Child Harold
he bought the house from John Miller
at Albemarle Street.
Miller had turned Byron down...
it's all a bit like Decca
and the Beatles...)

But he already had a meeting place
for gentlemen

The Quarterly Review

Where the reading of the best kind of people
went public every month
Or as public as a cost of 1 s every quarter year
could be

And I'm looking at number 1
The number printed for February 1809
As printed by C. Roworth
Of Bell Yard, Temple Bar.

...a dense journal in quarto pages
260 of them?

Who is going to read it now? Why?

Well...
who was reading it then?

What does what it says tell us
about when "Then"
was "Now"

The end of the affair

2010-03-30T11:20:00.008+01:00

READER
Lady Caroline paid Murray a visit in December of 1816,. They are like two ex wives of the same husband getting together to talk about the man who has just got married again....she writes to Murray...

CAROLINE
It is strange but my visit to your house today has made me miserable. After all what a life mine has been and how irregular our aquaintance. You must show me the seal when it is done. Is not life strange? Whatever he is, and however I have abused him, if I believed him at any hour unhappy, would not I go thropugh the fire to serve him. That child of his. Will it be like him? But what is all this to me? Your room speaks of him in every part of it, and I never see you without pain. I think you have been a sincere, upright and manly friend to him and me.

Doomed Love Letters and Strange Enclosures

2010-03-30T11:04:00.002+01:00

First, illustrated, the most beautiful of the letters as an object...Caroline writing on her best paper in her best handwriting...when love was new...but foredoomed...it's all about the death of a rose...March 1812...

CAROLINE
The rose Lord Byron gave Lady Caroline Lamb died in despite of every effort made to save it, from regret at its fallen fortunes.
READER
an undated letter from between April and June shows Caroline in sentimental mood, but also that she was not above using Byron as an entree into the world of high literature to which she now felt, perhaps, destined
CAROLINE
as you like curiosities, I send you a relic of Lady Caroline Ponsonby (her maiden name and maiden hair) and I request that you keep it for her sake. I saw Walter Scott last night. He did not remember me at first, I think. I much wish him to name some evening within these 14 days and will engage some persons who wish to meet him to come here. I trust you will be of that number...
READER
anxiety is already creeping in, and is perhaps full blown trauma, when less philosophically, and far more famously than pressed flowers, in the letter of 9 August, Caroline enclosed a cutting of her pubic hair

CAROLINE
Next to Thyrza dearest
and most faithful - God bless you
own love - ricordati di Biondetta

READER
This is in code...lovers code...but according to Fiona MacCarthy, "Thyrza" was a boy named John Eddleston...Byron's lover in Cambridge...who had died...so Caroline is saying that she... "Biondetta"...is next to him...that is, if she knew, if he'd talked...

and we know that he must have told her something of his homosexual activity...she was going to use it against him later...

cross dressing was very much part of their relationship. Not only did she dress as a boy, she had herself painted as one...

and signed the pubic hair enclosing letter

CAROLINE
From your wild antelope

I asked you not to send blood but yet do - because it means love, I like to have it - I cut the hair too close and bled much more than you need. Do not you the same o pray, put not scissors point near where quei capelli grow - sooner take it from the arm or wrist - pray be careful, and Byron, tell me why a few conversations with the Queen Mothers always change you. I think tou would make a bad minister and a worse ambassador. You would be always acting from pique and resentment, [then] soft words and pretty lips would make you another Duke of Buckingham. I must one night be in your arms, and now not even see you but in presence of a witness? Newstead bears your unkindness in sullen silence. I will kneel and be torn from your feet before I will give you up

8.6 on the Wierd #### -o-meter

2010-03-27T14:33:00.002Z

One of the things about browsing in the Tower of Babel is that the vagaries of computer catalogues throw up stuff you just can't keep your hands off. For example, the other day I was looking up stuff by and about doomed polar explorer and Murray author Sir John Franklin, whose expedition to find the NW Passage disappeared without trace in 1846, and I came accross a book called

"A practical investigation into the Truth of Clairvoyance

containing

Revelations of the fate of Sir John Franklin

and

some enquiries into the mysterious rappings of the present day

by

An Unprejudiced Observer"

Victorians. You've gotta love 'em.

Serendipity

2010-03-25T09:40:00.001Z

That's a key principle for me in this job.

Here's a for instance: my very first day in the cages, I picked up a silver grey box at random...this was before a lot of the material had been properly catalogued. The box was marked "R" , and contained mid nineteenth century correspondence from people whose name began with "R".

I pick up a letter from Lord Raglan.

Now Lord Raglan, at the time he wrote to Murray, has just been appointed commander in chief of the joint Anglo-French expeditionery force which is going to the Crimea to protect (supposedly) Catholic shrines in Turkey from the encroachments of the big bad Russian bear.

His Lordship was later to become famous for a) forgetting that the French were on the same side, b) sending the Light Brigade up the WRONG valley at Balaclava...

And what's he writing for?

He wants a guidebook to Turkey.

Really.

That's archive serendipity...the congruence of personality and history captured in the moment of writing a thouroughly incongruous letter...and then, 150 odd years later, me coming along and snickering.

I'll be on the lookout for stuff like that. Let you know what I find.

Caroline Lamb's first fan letter

2010-03-22T14:08:00.002Z

Childe Harold

'I have read your book and cannot refrain from telling you that I think it beautiful. You deserve to be and you shall be happy. Pray take no trouble to find out who now writes to you. As this is the first letter I ever wrote without my name, will you promise to burn it immediately and never to mention it? If you take the trouble you may very easily find out who it is, but I shall think less well of Child harold if he tries - though the greatest wish I have is one day to see him and be acquainted with him...'

Byron sent her no reply...She sent him a poem two days later

CAROLINE
Oh that like thee child harold I had power
with master hand to strike the thrilling Lyre...
then all confidsing in my powerful art
even I might hope some solace to impart
To sooth a noble but a wounded heart
READER
Wounds...wounded hearts...she had a wounded heart...she told us so very often...Reading Byron opened her way into her own feelings
CAROLINE
Admiration interest is free
And that child harold may recieve from me

Delacroix does Byron

2010-03-22T10:49:00.001Z

It's hard to imagine now the impact that Byron had on European culture. How much he was adored. How much everyone wanted to be like him.

And how deeply his exotic conjurations of the East, The Giaour, The Corsair etc...

Which are now scarcely regarded as his best

How these images permeated early modern consciousness...

And colonialism. How they shaped the understanding of Europeans towards the great, ambiguous, fascinated,evangelising and eroticized project of the white man penetrating the "dark" world of the East and South.

Here's some images from the great Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix to illustrate the above. The images come from Wikimedia Commons.

Celebrity as Sacrifice

2010-03-22T10:29:00.006Z

We know now that what we call celebrities are in some way sacrifices, martyrs to attention, that their exemplary self destruction for the crime of being is always, always intrinsic to the plot. They're doomed from the start...it's one reason for our fascination...they are ghastly...another good word that means more than "really bad"...or used to...

Anyway, there is something of death about them...they are mad, bad, and dangerous to BE...one reason why we are content, nay eager, to live through them vicariously , to watch them. They are us, we feel, if only we dared...but we don't dare...we are profoundly GLAD we don't dare. Look what happened to THEM.

This was something else for Murray and Byron and Caroline Lamb to discover, that for celebrities, love is always more than half resentment...

January 1816 - Murray gets it Wrong with the First Man on the Moon

2010-03-22T10:27:00.005Z

Not that Murray always got it right. Here is an exchange where Murray got it wrong...but that also reveals the intensity of Murray's feelings.

READER
The next year, Murray 6 tells us...

JM6
"The Siege of Corinth arrived at Albemarle Street on November 4th 1815 as a fair copy MS in his wife (shortly to be deserted) Annabella's handwriting...Byron wrote to Murray "publish or not as you like I don't care a damn - if not put it in the fire"

READER
Murray misread the tone as ironic, and sent two drafts amounting to 1000 guineas...
Byron refused the money Jan 3rd 1816
BYRON
"Your offer is liberal in the extreme, and much more than the poems can possibly be worth, but I cannot accept it, and will not. You are most welcome to them as additions to the collected volumes without any demand or expectation on my part whatever
READER
Weariness, already...weariness of self when self is now huge...we don't believe this of celebs...maybe it's true...maybe it is an impossible thing to be
BYRON
"I have enclosed your draft torn for fear of accident by the way. I wish you would not throw temptation in mine"
READER
It was suggested by Byron's pals Samuel Rogers and Sir James Mackintosh...both rich men...richer than Murray or Byron, that Murray give the money to William Godwin, the radical, He is being treated with aristocratic high handedness, but listen to Murray as he responds to Byron's insult...the tone now wholly different, more human...jilted, actually
MURRAY
"Your lordship will pardon me if I cannot avoid looking upon it as a species of cruelty...to take so large a sum - offered with no reference to the marketable value of the poems, but out of friendship and gratiutude alone, to cast it away on the wanton and ungenerous interference of those who cannot enter into your Lordship's feelings for me, upon persons who can have so little claim upon you, and whom those who so interested themselves might more decently and honestly enrich from their own funds than by endeavouring to be liberal at the cost of another...what would be the most grateful pleasure to me if likely to be useful to you personally, becomes merely painful if it causes me to work for others for whom I can have no such feelings"
READER
My money is my love for you...that is the meaning, plain as day...and you have spurned me, you torment me...
to which Byron replied
BYRON
"Had I taken your money, I might have used it as I pleased, whether I paid it to a whore or a hospital"
READER
The sexual insult is well aimed, I think. Of course, Byron was in debt...so withdrew his objection, and paid off some other tradesmen. But the politics of the gestures , of money as shit and sex...of poetry as shit and sex...are established.
Bewildered as they both seem to have been by their joint ranimation of the Frankensteinian Creature of public self hood, he and John Murray had by now discovered the first law of Personality...that there is no such thing as bad publicity. That celebrity is amoral. The worse his reputation got, the more books Murray sold and he printed anything Byron felt like throwing him...and his output was dazzled as well as dazzling, volcanic more than considered...uneven, even for his biggest fans...he was, after all, very young...and no-one had been where he was now before him. He was the first man on the moon.

Man in the Mirror 7th July 1818

2010-03-22T10:25:00.003Z

READER
Is Murray attempting to remake himself in the Byronic mode?...it feels like that sometimes Letter 110 Tuesday 7th July 1818
JOHN MURRAY 2
"as usual you are very lenient with my sins of remissness ...which arises from a love of ind
olence which is suffered too much to encrease
READER
We get a momentary flash of of the unlikely image of Murray reclining exhausted from sensibility, wrapped in a dressing gown and puffing on a hookah...

Now, when talking about Byron's work, he affects Byron's affected carelessness
JOHN MURRAY 2
"May I hope that your lordship will favour me with some work to open my campaign in novemeber with - have you not another lively tale like Beppo - or will you give me some prose in three volumes - all the adventures that you have undergone, seen, heard of or imagined with your reflections on life and manners..."

As if he's reinventing himself AS Byron...the kind of man Byron might like, get on with...He has grasped the poet's narcissism, and is making himself into a mirror...

Murray Make Over

2010-03-22T10:19:00.003Z

JOHN MURRAY 2

7 september 1812

"your Lordship will readily believe that I am delighted to find you thinking upon a new poem for which I should be proud to give a thousand guineas - and I should gratefully remember the fame it would cast over my new establishment, upon which I enter at the close of the present month

I am ashamed to see how long I may have trespassed upon your Lordship's patience
I am ever my lord
your faithful humble servant
John Murray.
READER
IS there a hint of irony a year into their relationship? of a shared joke at the deference. Of flirtatiousness? I think there might be. The letters become lighter...retaining the forms...this is not a democracy, after all...but treating them EASILY

Ease is, after all, the surest mark of gentility

15 October 1812, discussing the Meyer portrait of Byron for use in publication...
JOHN MURRAY 2
"As for the plate itself, as I had not the courage to violate your Lordship even in effigy, I trust that I shall be pardoned for evading this part of your commands by sending it to your own custody, trusting that you will consent to banish it to the family archives, there to rest until a happy occasion can draw it forth agasin.
READER
This, is think, we can safely describe as banter. Banter happens between people who are, provisionally, equals. So Byron must have charmed him. Byron must have permitted his printer to bandy words with him...we know that the most important skill any politician or salesman must have is the quality of at least appearing to listen. Of treating each accidental encounter as the most important thing that could possibly be happening right now, and their constituent as the most interesting person they could hope to meet. Whether this is an aristocratic or democratic skill...Byron had practiced it on Murray, and Murray was now his man. One can specualte about whether Byron NEEDED affection from everyone, as politicians do, as rock stars do. I'm thinking of Hunter Thomson's characterisation of the fatal weakness of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election campaign. The politician must not only turn on the crowd, he must be turned on by the crowd. Political success is impossible, says Thomson,

THOMPSON
"without some dark kinky streak of Mick Jagger somewhere in your soul"

Love at First Write - Sept 4th 1811

2010-03-22T10:17:00.003Z

Here's an early letter, Murray to Byron sept 4th 1811...before publication of Childe Harold, before they reivented themselves in each other's company. Leave alone for a moment that Murray is asking Byron to tone down his satire a little...just feel the tone...

JOHN MURRAY 2
"I send the proof of your Lordship's poem which is so good as to be entitled to all your care as to render perfect. Besides its general merits, there are parts, which i am tempted to beliecve, far excel anything that your Lordship has hitherto published, and it were grievous indeed if you do not condescend to bestow upon it all of the improvement of which your Lordship's mind is so capable"
READER
Two years later, Byron wrote The Corsair in 12 days. Murray him offered a thousand guineas for it, but Byron said that was too much for two weeks work...

Murray to to Byron Feb 13th 1814 on The Corsair
JOHN MURRAY 2
"Never in my recollection has any work excited such a ferment - a ferment which I am happy to say will subside into lasting fame. I sold, on the day of publication - a thing quite unprecedented - 10000 copies. My only regret is that you were not present to witness it"
READER
Already, fame had its first victim, and Byron was now in the paradoxical position of perpetuating his legend even as he tried to run away from it.

We can chart their relationship, not so much by the content of the letters, but by Murray's tone, by his reinvention of himself as the kind of man Lord Byron might actually LIKE.

When Byron met Murray...

2010-03-22T10:15:00.004Z

JM 6
The first time that my ancestor actually met Byron was when Byron and his friend John Cam Hobhouse called; then, while Childe Harold was being prepared for press, Byron would call frequently, and straight from fencing practice with Angelo and gentleman Jackson, and while Murray read passages from the poem with occasional ejaculations.
READER
(good word)
JM 6
of admiration, Byron would say "You think that's a good idea, do you, Murray?" and then he would choose a group of specially attractive books and fence and lunge into them with his walking stick.

The John Murray Archive is a Love Story!

2010-03-22T10:12:00.003Z

I have known Byron all my life; one of my first childhood memories is the bust of Byron standing on the landing below my nursery....Byron is therefore a little on my mind.
READER
English Association 1976 - John Murray 6, known to all as Jock, is making a lunchtime speech

John Murray 6
Ah me what perils do environ
the man who meddles with lord Byron

These perils have continued without interruption since his death: the burning of his memnoirs - indeed, quite a number of burnings throughout the 19th century (and beyond)...and now the quieter controversy about the relative importance to us of his life or of his work which divides the present day critics..
as though they were not two sides of the same coin, of the same personality; and now also the warmer, fashionable
controversy of whether Byron was homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, ambisexual - or perhaps just all embracing".
READER
Not the point, I think. and I don't think our curiosity about Byron's sexuality is just prurience...whether we're being curious about a poet, a general, an axe murderer or a more conventional celeb, we're doing something human. We are experiencing ourselves DIFFERENTLY through these figures, through heroes and villains...we explore the limits of who it is possible to be, how it is possible to act...readers recreate THEMSELVES through the work in relation to the personality of the author. It's ourselves we are interested in when we construct an image of a writer...or an actor...who we imagine to be our friend, who we imagine to have found something interesting in US.

How did Caroline Lamb, John Murray, re-experienced themselves with Byron...I think that's the point...I think that's what was new...I doubt if anyone changed their life because of George Herbert.

The close identification of Byron with his heroes...Childe Harold, Cain, Manfred, Don Juan...provoked a peculiar intensity.

The John Murray Archive is a Love story!

Lord Byron has a quiet night in

2010-03-19T12:40:00.003Z

Actually this is Delacroix's painting of Sardanapolous, one of Byron's Eastern Epics...Edward Said would have LOVED it.

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

2010-03-19T12:17:00.004Z

It was the advent of the Edinburgh Review in 1809, soon followed by Murray's own Quarterly Review, of the commercial potential for journals of opinion, that provoked Byron into the public sphere. He had already published some minor and largely forgettable lyrics, but it was a bad review of these that first ignited the volcano of his splenetic talent...it was in derision that Byron first found a public voice, and came into the view of John Murray.

From 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers'

BYRON

Still must I hear? --- shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl
His creaking couplets in a tavern hall,
And I not sing, lest, haply, Scotch reviews
Should dub me scribbler, and denounce my muse?
Prepare for rhyme --- I'll publish, right or wrong:
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
Laugh when I laugh, I seek no other fame;
The cry is up, and scribblers are my game.
I too can scrawl, and once upon a time
I pour'd along the town a flood of rhyme,
A schoolboy freak, unworthy praise or blame;
I printed --- older children do the same.
"T is pleasant, sure to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

READER
Byron sets about the literary world with careless violence, poets and critics and publishers...

BYRON

And think'st thou, Scott ! by vain conceit perchance,
On public taste to foist thy stale romance,
Though Murray with his Miller may combine.
To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line?

READER
I wonder whether Byron thought of HIMSELF as a poet at this point, thought of poetry as the arena where he would live his life. We must remember that "being a writer" was not then what it is now. It was an accomplishment of Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps...or it was a grubby little job of public entertainer. Poetry as existential vocation is an invention of the romantic age, and in temprement, at this point, Byron seems like a man out of his time...he belongs more to the world of Addison, Pope and Steele, than to that of Southey and Wordsworth...whose choice of vulgar subject matter is held up to withering aristocratic scorn.

BYRON
With eagle pinion soaring to the skies,
Behold the ballad-monger Southey rise !
Immortal hero ! all thy foes o'ercome,
For ever reign --- the rival of Tom Thumb !

Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule,
The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favorite May,
when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot boy;"
A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,
And like his bard, confounded night with day;
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the bard the hero of the story.

READER
I must confess that as a student, when I first encountered this Byron, Byron the classical reactionary, I was little inclined to read further. I loved Wordsworth...I loved his conscience...his seriousness...I was as serious as a deacon myself...which I suppose makes the point, that Byron the poet could not exist for me, until my existence was open to him...

For one thing, these days, as a public writer myself, I can enjoy his advice to critics...

BYRON

Fear not to lie, 't will seem a sharper hit;
Shrink not from blasphemy, 't will pass for wit;
Care not for feeling --- pass your proper jest,
And stand a critic, hated yet caresss'd.

READER
But if Byron had stopped here, as was entirely possible before his discovery of himself as a poet on his European journey soon after, then he would be remembered as an critic, albeit an unusually witty and careless one.

BYRON

Sonnets on sonnets crowd, and ode on ode;
And tales of terror jostle on the road;

What varied wonders tempt us as they pass;
The cow-pox, tractors, galvanism, and gas,
In turns appear, to make the vulgar stare,
Till the swoln bubble bursts --- and all is air !

These are the themes that claim our plaudits now;
These are the bards to whom the muse must bow;
While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot,
Resign their hallow'd bays to Walter Scott.

READER
But it was Byron's having a pop at the Edinburgh review, that Whiggish success story to which Murray put up a Tory , rival and competitor, that first brought his Lordship to Murray's attention, perhaps prompting him to read the manuscript that Byron produced when he returned from his travels, and which transformed both their lives. Partly for local reference, here's a sample...

BYRON
Dark roll'd the sympathetic waves of Forth,
Low groan'd the startled whirlwinds of the north;
Strew'd were the streets around with milk-white reams,
Flow'd all the Cannongate with inky streams;

Arthur's steep summit nodded to its base,
The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place.

For long as Albion's heedless sons submit,
Or Scottish taste decides on English wit,
So long shall last thine unmolested reign
Nor any dare to take thy name in vain.

READER

I think Murray probably enjoyed that. But no more thought than Byron did that they were shortly to create something quite unprecedented between them...

Bad Lord Byron

2010-03-19T11:47:00.006Z

The immediate occasion of today's overcoming of inertia and self hood predicates on an attempt to say something about the literary love triangle of Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and their mutual friend and publisher, John Murray, whose archive is the recent prized acquisition of this crusty but ambitious institution, and to which purchase I owe my presence here as Writer- in-Residence.

"Writer"

There's that word again. What is that exactly? Well, since the romantics, a writer has been an invention. A second self. The one who writes the poems.

The self- created personality of the Poet. The wind swept Satanic hero gazing into nature, seeing things that no one else can see, creating a self who can do that seeing for him, a second self that exists only in the books...the poet...THAT is the one who gets the fan mail and the nut mail and the stalkers...but it's the other one, the creator of the creator, who has to negotiate with them all, as well as with their own bloated, and eventually unrecognizable avatar. "It is him, the other Borges. He is the one things happen to," says Borges, from his labyrinthine desk in the National Library of Argentina, confessing at the last in self estrangement that "I do not know which one of us has written this page"

Lord Byron, very archetype of the Writer as Public Personality...do I HAVE to use the word celebrity...do I? Can't I not?...as commodity, as phenomenon...I WON'T say celebrity , I won't ...the word is meaningless, pounded by over use into a flatness...killed...words can be killed...oh yes they can...and television especially is an ecological disaster for words...

(It started with sport you know. It did. Sports commentary, where fantastic, phenomenal, brilliant, extraordinary, superb...yes, even superlative...have all come to mean EXACTLY THE SAME THING... "Very good".... and not much else. May I suggest transcendent, numinous and hermaneutic as newbies for the next World Cup...His left foot...is hermaneutic!)

Celebrity never used to mean a PERSON at all...it was a quality...something that someone had...somewhere between popularity and fame...they were celebrated...the fact of their existence was felt to enhance our own...they reflected well on human possibility...in any case they represented..something

Does that mean Byron? Does that mean Jordan? Well, maybe it means both...and perhaps it is interesting to think of both of them in terms of the human possibility they share even if it's no more than the disposition to make a fool of yourself in public...

Anyway, the romantic poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats et al...pioneered the creation of a poetic self...a particular state of being...of originality, sensibility, and courage...as a self made muse or intermediary presence which would allow them to both experience and express experience in an individual way...that involved, inevitably, if only accidentally, exposure of that self to public gaze.

Lonely pioneers they were, most of them. Their second, poetic souls were made in private. Not Byron. Byron did it all in public. Quite by accident, he created a new kind of human being. The Personality. When I was a kid, that word meant the same as Celebrity does now...The private self in public. We used to use that word. Whatever happened to it. Well, if words can get worn out, maybe they can also be brought back...Personality, then...the self created self...created yet again...by reading...It may be said the person writing down words becomes a poet only when they are read...that this second self, the poet, only exists at all with the aquiescence of the reader...when the reader remakes themselves when they are reading, then the scribbler may be said to become a poet. A personality

It may be that it was the advance of the technology of printing and of the business of publishing itself, (so well documented in the archive) that made someone like Byron possible in 1812 and not before...one might think of an earlier English poet whose claim to fame was his badness, madness and dangerousness...the Earl of Rochester...but unless you're a scholar of 17th century English poetry...(Rochester ain't that good) or you're a really serious fan of Johnny Depp, you've never even heard of him.

Everyone has heard of Bad Lord Byron. The genius as Satan...the beautiful vampire. And his successors are legion...I can't even be bothered making a list. I've already mentioned Johnny Depp. Nominations for Byron clones welcome.

The Burial Horde

2010-03-15T18:19:00.003Z

Here's recent and dead good Byron biographer Fiona MacCarthy

"Chief colluder in Byron's fame was, of course, his publisher, the second John Murray, whose successor, John Murray 7 commissioned this new biography...All my journeys in pursuit of Byron have begun and ended at 50 Albemarle Street off Piccadilly, the dignified house purchased by John Murray 2 in the wave of prosperity following the success of Childe Harold. Teasing contemporaries defined this as the moment at which the one time tradesman bookseller became a gentleman, and certainly, Murray's literary and social status advanced in relation to his author's meteoric rise.

"Your room speaks of him in every part" wrote the besotted Caroline Lamb to Murray in 1816. The Byronic reverberations are still there...the archive (now here) does not consist simply of manuscripts and letters but also includes objects; portraits and miniatures, clothes and medals, accumulated memorabilia; a collection of adoring letters from women of all classes, many quite unknown to Byron, who wrote in desperation, seeking contacts, assignations...; a macabre assortment of hair, donated by the late Lord Byron, who had his magpie side; a little slipper thought to have belonged to Allegra, Byron's daughter by Claire Clairmont, who died aged five in a convent at Bagnacavallo....the resources of the Murray archive can only be described as a burial horde...

Those are the voices you hear first and loudest here.

Byron is where the modern idea of the writer STARTS...

It's also where you have to start when you think about
the house, the dynasty, the collected memories
of John Murray, Publisher, Albemarle Street
John Murray, the unmatched literary archive
John Murray...a dynasty of seven of them
all called John Murray...
JM 6 even going so far as to change his name
by deed poll when he took over the firm...

Wierd, huh? Makes me wonder if that urge to continuity is not unnconnected to the very existence of the archive...itself a gathering of personal and public history...and that this unusual degree of control over memory has its initiating impulse in some other than institutional imperatives…

It’s probably got something to do with Byron. If I’ve found out anything so far about the archive itself, it’s that everything starts with Byron

The House of Murray

2010-03-15T15:40:00.003Z

I know what the John Murray Archive means for researchers and historians. It's a source of information and evidence on the extraordinary rosta of writers the firm published over 250 odd years, and on the history of publishing itself.

What it is for me, however, is a collection of voices, some familiar, most not...some of them bogglingly alien.

(I'll be doing a piece later on about a scientific Dictionary of the Bible published at the same time as Murray published Origin of Species that seems to me to speak volumes about the crisis of faith that was already well underway by the time Darwin exploded his time bomb...)

What's more, these voices are noises happening inside a space, a particular location. And that location is the former home of the archive, the amazing house at 50 Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, that John Murray 2 bought on the crest of a wave of success occasioned by the publishing sensation of 1812...namely Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

(A pleasing footnote to that purchase was that Murray bought the house from his rival John Millar, who had turned Byron's manuscript down...the Regency equivalent of Decca knocking back the Beatles...)

This is the most amazing place. Though the firm of John Murray was sold in 2002 and amalgamated with Hodder, John Murray 7 and his wife Ginny are still there. They are the most charming people imaginable, and meeting them there was a slightly surreal experience, like dropping in on the set of some literary adaptation, like finding your self having tea with the Cheeryble brothers. I was at a reception there last year to mark 150 years since Origin of Species, and the place was full of pigeons...fantails and carriers and all sorts...pooping quietly to themselves as living metaphors of unnatural selection while original portraits of Scott and Byron and Livingstone looked down on them.

The upstairs drawing room looks now much as it did when Byron was doing fencing practice with the bookshelves, or when a grief stricken Murray sat in a conclave with other mourners and burnt Byron's (presumably scandalous) memoirs.

It's like wandering round Darwin's greenhouses at Down...being in those rooms gives you the unmistakable feeling that you're in a place where some rather wonderful things happened.

And it's impossible to understand the treasures of the archive, it seems to me, without that sense of event, a sense of those rooms being a theatre of possibilities. Because it was inherent to the strategy that Murray 2 adopted that he have these rooms, that these rooms were opened to literary and social nobility at 4 in the afternoon.

It was a gathering place, a club, a social hub. Murray was, in modern parlance, interfacing with both his writers (or at least the respectable ones) and his customers, the "opinion formers". It wasn't just that they might buy some books in the shop downstairs on the way out (aristocratic customers, then as now, rarely actually pay for things). It was more like those rooms full of goodies for filmstars in LA hotels around Oscar time. Murray wanted these ladies and gentlemen to include him in the social round. He wanted people to know (people always KNOW) that Lord and Lady such and such were reading his wares, because in this way he could advertise those wares and himself. His social and commercial presences were engineered in those rooms.

Murray 1, the founder, had been a bit of a cad. Scottish, which was a bad start in an era when Scotsmen on the make were even less popular in London than Gordon Brown is now, and a womaniser, a financially reckless ducker and diver, the first Murray has been memorialised in by Bill Zachs (an exceptional collector of 18th Century publishing who lives right here in Edinburgh) in his biography. He had also died when his legitimate son and heir, JM2, was only 14, recovering from an accident that had blinded him in one eye....

Murray 2 had struggled for control over his father's firm, and once he had it, he wanted to make more of it than a bookselling business. Hence the bright and hospitable rooms at Albemarle Styreet, hence also, three years earlier, the Quarterly Review, which was not simply a commercial proposition (a Tory counter and rival to the whiggish Edinburgh Review...) but also a place for gentlemen to meet and talk about the issues of the day. Political and diplomatic, military, scientific, religious...

Byron famously said that he awoke one morning to find himself famous...and wags commented that his publisher, John Murray, simultaneously awoke and found himself a gentleman. I don't think that's entirely accurate or fair. I think that the gentleman project, the making himself known as the social centre of an intellectual elite predated when Murray met Byron...and that their unusually close relationship, which I've written about elsewhere, was as much a danger to Murray's hard won status as it was an asset commercially and socially.

To wrap this bit up, it was the second John Murray who invented the publishing house as a "house", as a place full of voices. Just as it was he who’s close, perhaps obsessive relationship with Byron, his hording of Byron's friendship and memory, became the documentary cornerstone of the archive itself.