Josiah Harlan

Harlan's childhood

Josiah Harlan was born in Newlin Township in Chester County, Pennsylvania. His parents, Joshua Harlan and Sarah Hinchman, were Quakers, and Josiah and his nine siblings, including Richard Harlan, were raised in a strict and pious home. His father was a merchant broker in Philadelphia and several of his sons would later enter the merchant business.

Losing his mother at the age of thirteen, Josiah delved into reading. A contemporary records that Harlan, at the age of fifteen, amused himself with reading medical books and the biographies of Plutarch, as well as the inspired Prophets. He read Latin and Greek, while speaking fluent French. He also developed a passion for botany that would last his entire life. He also studied Greek and Roman Ancient history, particularly taken by stories of Alexander the Great. A muscular man standing at over 6 feet tall described as being handsome when he was young, Harlan impressed everyone he met as preciously intelligent, brash, ambitious, and more than a little arrogant as he convinced that he was destined to achieve great things like his hero Alexander the Great.

Early travels

In 1820, Harlan embarked on his first travels while joining the Freemasons. His father secured him a job as supercargo on a merchant ship bound for the East, sailing to Calcutta, India, then Guangzhou, China and back. Returning from this first trip and preparing for the next, he fell in love quite "accidentally" with a Miss Elizabeth Swaim, for whom he wrote several verses of poetry to honor. They become engaged and were to be married when he returned from the voyage to India and China. However, in Calcutta he received notice from his brother Richard that his fiancée had broken the engagement and already married another.

Broken by this news, Harlan vowed never to return to America, instead seeking adventure in the East. After learning his fiancee had married somebody else, a heartbroken Harlan used the words solitude over and over again in his writings as the British historian Ben Macintyre noted: "He reached out and grasped a thorn; he would never clasp love in the same way again". Harlan was deeply hurt and heartbroken by Swaim's unfaithfulness, all the more so as she never bothered to tell him herself about what she had broken, had broken her engagement less than a week after he left Philadelphia, and married the other gentleman two months after he had departed for Asia. To cope with the pain and heartbreak, Harlan developed the persona of the aloof, romantic loner, a man of action who lived only for glory that was to last for the rest of his life.

In July 1824, without any formal education, he enlisted as a surgeon with the British East India Company's army. Macintrye noted: "That he had never actually studied medicine was not, at least in his own mind, an impediment". The Company was about to enter a war in Burma, and was in need for qualified surgeons, and Harlan wanted to forget about his heartbreak and to be far away from America as possible; serving in Burma seemed to fulfill both criterion. Relying on his self-studies and some practice while at sea, Harlan presented himself to the medical board for examination and was appointed as surgeon to the Calcutta general hospital. From January 1825 he served with the army in Burma, until he was injured or became ill. Harlan admired the impressive capacity of the Company's sepoys who "consumed nothing, but parched grain, a leguminous seed resembling the pea", and yet kept going. Harlan was trained and worked as a surgeon, but owing to heavy losses suffered by the Company's troops due to disease and war in the jungles of Burma, Harlan sometimes fought with the Bengal Artillery, acquiring military knowledge that was later to serve him well. Harlan was present at the Battle of Prome, where Anglo-Indian forces stormed the city of Prome (modern Pyay) and engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the Burmese. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 ended hostilities.

Once recuperated, Harlan was posted to Karnal, north of Delhi, where he soon grew weary with taking orders from the Company. During this time, Harlan read the 1815 book An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and its dependedencies in Persia, Tartary and India, comprising a View of the Afghaun Nation and history of the Dooraunee Monarchy by East India Company's Mountstuart Elphinstone, who visited Afghanistan in 1809 to meet its King, Shuja Durrani, who wore the world-famous Koh-i-Noor ("Mountain of Light") diamond on his left arm and who was deposed by half-brother Mahumd Durrani during Elphinstone's visit. Afghanistan was for people in the West at the time a remote and mysterious country in Asia, and Elphinstone's book describing his visit to a nation that no Westerner had ever visited before was a best-seller. Harlan began to dream of going to Afghanistan, an essentially medieval country with a feudal economy where tribal chiefs who owned most of the land battled each other for supremacy, inspiring Harlan to write about Afghanistan in his usual purple prose: "Audacious ambition gains by the sabre's sweep and soul-propelling spur, a kingdom and a name amongst the crowned sub deities of the diademed earth". As consolation for his broken heart, Harlan began to fantasize about going to Afghanistan to win himself a kingdom. Throughout his life, Harlan was a martinet who would not tolerate any insubordination from those serving under him, but at same time, he had much difficulty with taking orders from those above him, and Harlan was openly insubordinate towards his superiors in the Company. By this time, Harlan began learning Hindi and Farsi, two languages that were to prove to be very useful to him. In the summer of 1826, he quit his service with the Company. As a civilian, he was granted a permit to stay in India by the Governor General Lord Amherst.

India at this time was a proprietary colony granted by the British Crown to the East India Company. The East India Company had become the world's most powerful corporation, being granted monopolies on trade with India and China. In its proprietary colony of India the Company by the early 19th century ruled ruled 90 million Indians and controlled 70 million acres (243,000 square kilometres) of land under its own flag, issued its own currency and maintained its own civil service and its own army of 200,000 men led by officers trained at its officer school, giving the Company an army larger than that possessed by most European states. The East India Company was not owned by the Crown, but many of its shareholders were MPs and aristocrats, leading to a powerful Company lobby in Parliament. The Company was sufficiently powerful that several British Army regiments were sent out to serve alongside the Company's army. The East India Company was so powerful that it was known simply as "the Company" in India as the corporation dominated the political and economic life of India. Harlan never hid his dislike of the Company, which he charged had no interest in the welfare of the Indians as the Company sought to maximize profits for its shareholders, and had politically emasculated the Indian maharajahs and nawabs, reducing them down to mere ceremonial rulers without power. Harlan had an ambivalent attitude towards royalty, on one hand being fiercely proud that his country was a republic, and on the other having a romantic, sentimental love of the pomp and ceremony of a monarchy. Harlan wanted to go to the Punjab and Afghanistan in part to see lands where the monarchs had real power, instead of the marionettes maintained by the Company.

Entering Afghanistan

After a stay in Simla, Harlan came to Ludhiana, a border outpost of British India on the Sutlej river which formed the border between the Punjab and British India at the time. Harlan had decided to enter the service of Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of Punjab. Though Ranjit Singh was prepared to hire Westerners who could be useful to him, as a general rule he did not allow white people to enter the Punjab as he had seen the way that the East India Company had gobbled much of the Indian subcontinent, and as far he was concerned, the less that whites knew of the Punjab the better, making the Punjab into a rather mysterious region for Westerners. The East India Company's agent in Ludhiana was a Captain Claude Martin Wade, who described Harlan as an enigmatic character who dressed well, knew much about the flora of India and the classics, and whose main interest was working as a mercenary for Ranjit Singh, making him into the first classicist/botanist/soldier of fortune that Wade had ever met. Reflecting his interest with horticulture, Harlan planned to study all of the flora of the Punjab, which were unknown in the West, with the aim of publishing a book about the botany of the Punjab with a special focus on the flowers.

Here, while awaiting an answer on his request to enter the Punjab, Harlan met the exiled Afghan ruler Shuja Shah Durrani of the Durrani Empire and eventually entered his service. Harlan heard the story of the deposed King of Afghanistan living in exile in Ludhiana, who rumor had it was fabulously wealthy, and decided to enter his service, sending him a letter offering "a general proposition affecting the royal prospects of restoration". Upon arriving in Shuja's palace, Harlan discovered Shuja was surrounded by a court of grotesquely deformed men as Shuja had a habit of removing the ears, noses, tongues, penises and testicles of his courtiers and slaves whenever they displeased him in the slightest, and all of them had offended him at some point along the line. Harlan commented Shuja's court was an "earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king's service". Harlan knew no Pashto and Shuja no English, so they spoke to each other in a mixture of Hindi and Farsi. Harlan praised "the grace and dignity of His Highness's demeanor", observing the sense of power that Shuja projected, but also that the "years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation." When Shuja went out for a picnic with his wives, a gust of wind blew down his tent. Shuja flew into a rage, and much to Harlan's horror, had his chief slave, an African named Khwajah Mika who arrived in India via the slave markets of Zanzibar, castrated on the spot to punish him for not erecting the tent more firmly. After Shuja agreed to hire him, Harlan had a tailor in Ludhiana sew up an American flag, which he used to imply that he was working for the U.S. government, as he went about recruiting mercenaries to restore Shuja. By fall of 1827, Harlan had recruited about hundred mercenaries, a mixture of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs only interested in loot and plunder.

Writing about Afghanistan's unstable politics where its monarchs were frequently overthrown, and the penchant for sons to intrigue against their fathers, and brothers against brothers, Harlan noted: "The prize was literally handed about like a shuttlecock. The king who in the battle may have dispatched a favorite son in the command of his army would probably before night find himself flying from his own troops". Afghanistan was dominated by a feud between two families, the Durrani and the Barakzai, and furthermore, the men of the Durrani and Barakzai families were just as much inclined to feud with other family members as they were with the rival families. Shuja, who belonged to the Durrani family, had together with his brother Mahmud overthrown and blinded their brother Zaman; Shuja had then desposed Mahmud and had in his turn had been overthrown by Mahmud, who had in his turn had been overthrown by the Barakzai brothers after he had their father Fateh Khan publicly chopped to pieces; and in their turn the Barazkais were now feuding among themselves. There were 72 Barakzai half-brothers now ruling Afghanistan as the Muslim tradition of polygamy where a man could have four wives at once together with an unlimited number of concubines meant that their father had a surplus of sons. Given this history, and the fact that the Afghan tribal chiefs tended to be loyal only to those who paid them the most, Harlan believed that despite the small size of his force that he could topple the Emir, Dost Mohammad Khan, who was the most ablest and intelligent of the fractious Barakzai brothers.

With financial support from Shuja Shah Durrani, Harlan travelled along the Indus and into Afghanistan, first to Peshawar then to Kabul. During his journey, Harlan discovered in Ahmedpur two deserters from the East India Company's Army, James Lewis, better known by his pseudonym Charles Masson and Richard Porter aka "John Brown", who tried to persuade him that they were Americans, but Harlan couldn't help but notice their English accents. Harlan correctly guessed that the only reason why two Englishmen out in the wildness would try to pass themselves off as Americans was that they were deserters. The two deserters joined Harlan's army and maintained the pretense of being two gentlemen from Kentucky who had decided to explore the Hindu Kush. As he entered Afghanistan, Harlan first met the war-like Pashtun tribes, whose principle interest in life was killing each other, and learned about their strict code of Pashtunwali ("the way of the Pashtuns") under which any insult, real or perceived, to a man had to be avenged with swift and blinding violence while at the same time, a man had to be courteous and honorable to all, including his enemies. As Harlan's army was close to mutiny, he decided he would enter Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim dervish (holy man) returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca. Much to Harlan's fury, Masson deserted his army and inspired several others to follow his example. Harlan knew only a few phrases in Arabic, but it was sufficient to convince a Pashtun chief that he was a dervish returning from Mecca. Shuja had followed up Harlan's force with his own troop of mercenaries, seizing Peshawar, the summer capital of Afghanistan, and behaved with such outrageous arrogance towards the Pashtun chiefs who had come to swear loyalty to him out of the expectation of lavish financial rewards that they went back to their loyalty to the Bazakzai brothers, who did not obsessively use court etiquette to humiliate chiefs as Shuja did.

Harlan met in Kabul the man who he had come to depose, Dost Mohammad Khan, at the Bala Hisar fortress/palace. The custom of Pashtunwali ensured that the Pashtun Dost Mohammad chose to treat Harlan as an honored guest. By this time, Harlan had become fluent in Farsi, the lingua franca of the Muslim world, and it was in that language that he and Dost Mohammad talked. Even through Harlan had come to Afghanistan to overthrow Dost Mohammad, upon meeting him, he discovered he rather admired Dost Mohammad, who was a "worthy adversary", a polite, courteous gentleman who was extremely intelligent, a brave warrior, and despite being an Emir, was very modest. Unlike the rulers from the House of Durrani, who used the title of Shah (Farsi for king), the monarchs of the House of Bazakzai used the less grand title of Emir (Arabic for prince)-Pashto had such low status in the Muslim world that both the Durranis and Bazakzais used Arabic and Farsi titles to improve their prestige. Harlan had arrived with the assumption of the superiority of the West over the East, but meeting Dost Mohammad challenged his thinking as he found Easterners could be just as intelligent as Westerners. When Dost Mohammad asked Harlan to explain the American system of government to him, Harlan spoke about the tripartite separation of power between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court, which led the Emir to remark the American system did not sound to him much different from the Afghan system, where there was a tripartite separation of power between the Emir, the tribal chiefs and the Ulama (the Islamic clergy who also served as judges). Harlan also noted that despite being a Muslim that Dost Mohammad was a heavy drinker who had brought prostitutes to his court; Harlan describes them as "promiscuous actors in the wild, voluptuous, licentious scene of shameless bacchanals".

Dost Mohammad allowed Harlan the freedom to wander and explore Kabul, the "city of ten thousand gardens", which Harlan fell in love with, observing that there were so many gardens in the city full of sweet-smelling flowers and fruits to almost cancel out the smell caused by the human and animal excrement dumped in the streets. Harlan wrote Kabul was a "jewel encircled with emerald with flowers and blossoms whose odors perfume the air with a fragrance elsewhere unknown". Harlan called Kabul a "sweet assemblage of floral beauty" full of "ornamental trees, apple orchards, patches of pearch and plum trees, vast numbers of mulberry of various species, black, white and purple, with the sycamore, the tall poplar, teh sweet scented and the red and white willows, the weeping willow, gren meadows, running streams and hedges of roses, red, white, yellow and variegated". Harlan was also curious about Afghan women who always wore burkas that covered their faces and bodies with none of their flesh to be seen. Harlan observed Kabul had a lively red light district full of "professional courtezans [courtesans] or female singers and dancers, libidinous creatures whose lives are passed in the immodest and secret intrigues of licentiousness". Macintrye wrote that Harlan's disapproving tone suggested considerable experience of the red light district of Kabul.

A difficult moment for Harlan emerged when Hajji Khan, a mercenary working for Dost Mohammad approached him with a plan to assassinate the Emir and restore Shuja to the throne; Harlan was uncertain if Khan was working as an agent provocateur sent by Dost Mohammad to test his loyalty (meaning he would be executed if he agreed to the plot) or was sincere (meaning he would kill Harlan if he refused to join the plot). Harlan suggested that the two should go off and invade the Sindh together; when Khan persisted, Harlan said he could never violate the rules of pashtunwali by conspiring to murder his host, at which point Khan told him that the Emir extended him his thanks for his willingness to observe pashtunwali. Shortly afterwards, a cholera epidemic hit Kabul, killing off much of the population, owing to the feces-ridden water of Kabul. Harlan himself was infected with cholera, and in a desperate state, wandered into a mosque one night which he discovered had become a morgue full of the bodies of cholera victims. As Harlan left the mosque, he tripped over bodies piled up in the streets. At point, an anonymous man told Harlan that the only cure for cholera was to drink alcohol and plenty of it, saying if one consumed enough alcohol that cholera could be survived. The alcohol was not of course distilled from the local water full of feces that spread cholera. Harlan was raised a tee-toiler, but he broke with his Quaker values by drinking as much wine and whisky that had been smuggled into Afghanistan from India as possible to survive cholera. An attack of cholera typically lasts 48 hours, during which the body excretes fluids, causing intense dehydration that leads to death, which can be countered if one consumes enough non-cholera infected fluids such as alcohol. After surviving cholera, Harlan later stated he looked death into the eye, and was never again afraid of death.

In Peshawar, Harlan had met a Nawab Jubbar Khan, who was a brother of Dost Mohammad Khan. Jabbar Khan was important as a possible rival of Dost Mohammad, and thus a possible ally to Shuja Shah. During this time, Harlan first met an Afghan maulvi (Islamic scholar) who also worked as an alchemist and doctor, whose name no-one knew and whom Harlan called "the Moolvie". Harlan discovered much to his amazement that the maulvi "was an enthusiastic Rosicrucian" who was seeking the Philosopher's Stone, and whom kept Jubber Khan happy with the supposed medical secrets that his occult knowledge gave him. Harlan soon discovered that the maulvi was a fraud, who once insisted that his alchemy could only work if he was provided with a large number of unusually large fish from a local river; when after much difficulty the requisite number of big fish were caught, the maulvi only then "remembered" that they all had to be of the same sex for his alchemy to work, at which point the fishing season had passed. Harlan often argued with the maulvi, telling him that modern chemists in the West had firmly established it was not possible to turn lead into gold, much less turn fish into silver, as he insisting that he could. While staying with Jabbar Khan, Harlan evaluated the situation and realised that Dost Mohammad's position was too strong, and that influence from outside Afghanistan was needed. He decided to seek his luck in Punjab. Upon his return to the Punjab, Wade admitted to Harlan that Shuja would never be restored to the throne of Afghanistan, saying "There is now no possible chance for Shua's restoration, unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire in Kabul". Wade's reference to "Russian diplomacy" in Kabul was Harlan's initiation into the struggle for influence in Central Asia between Russia and Britain known to the British as the "Great Game" and to the Russians as the "Tournament of Shadows".

In the service of a Maharaja, Ranjit Singh

Harlan came to Lahore, the capital of Punjab, in 1829. He sought out the French general Jean-François Allard, who introduced him to the Maharaja. Allard had been awarded the Légion d'honneur by Napoleon, and was the Western officer that Ranjit Singh trusted the most, perhaps because Allard wrote poems in Punjabi praising the greatness of his master while calling himself a "slave". Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of Lahore" had conquered much of what is today north-western India and Pakistan, and was considered to be one of the most powerful rulers in the Indian subcontinent, which explained why Harlan sought to work in his service. As a rule, Ranjit Singh disliked taking anybody British into his service as he feared the Company, and was mistrustful of the loyalties of those few Englishmen in his service. Through it was his European, especially his French and Italian officers, who had turned the Dal Khalsa into one of the most formidable military machines in Asia, Ranjit Singh had a low opinion of his European officers, once saying: "German, French or English, all these European bastards are alike". However, Ranjit Singh paid well for the services of his Western officers and Harlan noted that Allard lived in a grand mansion, which he called "a miniature Versailles in the midst of an Oriental bazaar". Allard who felt lonely in the Punjab, being unable to relate to the Indians, and was known to welcome any Westerner, received Harlan as a guest, warning him "It is a very difficult to get an appointment here, but still more to get one's dismissal, when once in office". Allard had written the poem calling himself a happy "slave" of Ranjit Singh because he wanted to visit his homeland, France, with his Kashmiri wife, and Ranjit Singh had initially refused him permission to leave, thus requiring an obsequious poem to being allowed a visit home. When Allard introduced Harlan to Ranjit Singh, Harlan described the Maharaja as an extremely short man with one eye and a face scarred by smallpox who was dressed all in white with a matching white turban who proudly wore the Koh-i-Noor diamond (which he had taken from Shuja) and who radiated an aura of power. As Harlan knew no Punjabi, he spoke to Singh in Hindi.

Despite being very brave on the battlefield, Ranjit Singh was a maniacal hypochondriac, having doctors see him everyday to treat him for one imaginary aliment after another, and Harlan by emphasizing his claim to be a doctor preyed upon Ranjit Singh's principle weakness, who immediately demanded that Harlan start treating him. Macintyre noted Ranjit Singh was "...a sensualist with a passion for beautiful women and boys, a taste for laudanum, and an addiction to alcohol in the form of his own lethal homemade cocktails. His parties were fantastic bacchanalian bouts, and his sexual stamina legendary..." with a particular highlight being Ranjit Singh's practice of getting his dancing girls drunk and then having them engage in wild catfights for his amusement. The hard-drinking Ranjit Singh made his own wine, called "firewater", whose exact ingredients remain a mystery even today, but was believed to contain among other things grape juice, orange seeds and grounded down gems, which he drank in conspicuous amounts. The more honest of Ranjit Singh's doctors told him to club his drinking and to stop consuming his homemade "firewater" wine, advice that Ranjit Singh never took. Harlan had abandoned the pacifism of his Quaker faith, but as a teetotaler refrained from drinking Ranjit Singh's wine and tried to avoid attending his parties.

Harlan was offered a military position but declined, looking for something more lucrative. This, he eventually found: after lingering at the court for some time he was offered the position of Governor of Gujrat District, a position he accepted. Ranjit Singh told Harlan: "I will make you Governor of Gujrat and give you 3, 00 rupees a month. If you behave well, I will increase your salary. If not, I will cut off your nose". Before giving him this position, however, the Maharaja decided to test Harlan. In December 1829, he was instated as Governor of Nurpur and Jasrota, described by Harlan himself as "two districts then newly subjugated by the King in Lahore, located on the skirt of the Himalah mountains". These districts had been seized by the maharajah of the Punjab in 1816 and were fairly wealthy at the time Harlan arrived. Little, if anything, is known of Harlan's tenure here, but he must have fared well. One visitor noted that given Ranjit Singh's habit of cutting off the noses of those who failed him that "The fact of his nose being entire, proved that he has done well". In May 1832 he was transferred to Gujrat. In Gujrat, Harlan was visited soon after his instatement by Henry Lawrence who later described him as "a man of considerable ability, great courage and enterprise, and judging by appearance, well cut out for partisan work". Harlan later wrote "I was both civil and military governor" with unlimited powers to do whatever he pleased as long taxes were collected and order maintained. While serving the durbar, Harlan often encountered the Akalis, militant and heavily armed Sikh fundamentalists, who Harlan noted were seen "riding about with sword drawn in each hand, two more in the belt, a matchlock at the back and then a pair of quoits fastened around the turban-an arm peculiar to this race of people, it is a steel ring, ranging from six to nine inches in diameter, and about an inch in breath, very thin, and at the edges very sharp; they are said to throw it with such accuracy and force as to be able to lop off a limb at sixty or eighty yards". The weapon that Harlan described as a "quoit" is better known as the Chakram.

One of Harlan's visitors was the Reverend Joseph Wolff, a Bavarian Jew who had converted successively to Catholicism, Lutheranism and finally Anglicism, and was now travelling all over Asia as a missionary. After being ordained a minister at Cambridge, the Reverend Wolff had set off to Asia to find the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and to covert all the peoples of Asia to the Church of England. Wolff had arrived at Gujrat and asked to see the governor, expecting him to be a Sikh sardar (nobleman) and was surprised that the governor was whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy as he introduced himself as: "I am a free citizen of the United States, from the state of Pennsylvania, city of Philadelphia. I am the son of a Quaker. My name is Josiah Harlan". Wolff described Harlan as wearing a very expensive Western suit and who liked to smoke a hookah. Wolff was one of the few people with whom Harlan spoke of his love for Swaim, as Wolff wrote in his journal: "He fell in love with a young lady who promised to marry him. He sailed to Calcutta; but hearing that his betrothed lady had married somebody else, he determined never again to return to America". However, Harlan was not indifferent to women. Besides for paying well, Ranjit Singh rewarded those served him well with beautiful concubines with the most successful being given harems, and Harlan himself if not given a harem, had several concubines given to him by Singh for his sexual enjoyment. Harlan also confessed to Wolff his dream of ruling Afghanistan and Wolff noted: "He speaks and write Persian with great fluency; he is clever and enterprising. Dr. Harlan is a high Tory in principles, and honors kingly dignity; though on the other hand he speaks with enthusiasm of Washington, Adams and Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence".

While appointing a European governor was rare, Harlan was certainly not the only one. His colleague Paolo Avitabile was made governor of Wazirabad, and Jean-Baptiste Ventura was made governor of Dera Ghazi Khan in 1831. Avitabile once had a group portrait done of all the Westerners in Ranjit Singh's service, which depicted him, Allard, Ventura, Claude Augste Court, and Harlan all standing together. Unlike Ventura and even more so Avitabile who believed that violence was the only language Indians were capable of understanding and who terrorized their provinces, Harlan attempted to crack down on corruption and avoided brutality, which caused his relations with Ventura and Avitabile to decline. Harlan was also in turn followed in his position in Gujrat by an Englishman named Holmes, who failed Singh, and lost more than his nose, being publicly beheaded as an example of the fate of those failed the Maharajah. During his time as governor of Gujrat, Harlan's principle friend was the maulvi as the alchemist from Afghanistan unexpectedly showed up at his palace one day. The maulvi taught Harlan about "the traditional lore of Arabia" while the alchemist wanted Harlan to sponsor him to join a Masonic lodge as Harlan noted "My refusal to explain the craft of Freemasonry added to his conviction that in the secrecy of that forbidden region of science lay the Philosopher's Stone".

Joining Harlan in Gujrat was the American adventurer Alexander Gardner who had come down from Central Asia, looking for employment with Singh and arrived at Harlan's palace to seek the company of a fellow American. Gardner, who claimed to have been born in a fur-trading post on Lake Superior in what is now Wisconsin to a Scots father and an Anglo-Spanish mother in 1785, was always very proud of Scottish heritage. Gardner wore a turban and Asian-style clothing that were all tartan-colored, a colorful reminder of his Scots heritage, as Gardner was insistently Scottish-American in his identity during his various adventures as a mercenary in Central Asia, where he had fled after deserting from the Imperial Russian Army in 1819. Gardner claimed that during his childhood on the shores of Lake Superior that the Ojibwe Indians had taught him how to fight-regardless if the Ojibwe were his teachers or not, Gardner was a fighter whose body was covered with wounds, most notably a gaping hole in his throat that required him to wear a neck-brace to drink. Gardner told Harlan he and his followers that "We did not slaughter except in self-defense" during his time in Central Asia. While fighting against Dost Mohammad in pay of the warlord Habibullah Khan, Gardner's wife and his infant daughter had been killed by the Emir's forces after being captured, causing him to head to the Punjab. Gardner, who was known as "Gordana Khan" in Central Asia, recalled: "I remained a few days with Dr. Harlan and on meeting my countryman, I resumed the character of a foreigner, and resumed also the name of Gardner, which I abandoned for so long that it sounded strangely in my ears".

In 1834, the Sikh general Hari Singh Nalwa finally captured the contested city of Peshawar for the Punjab, leading Dost Mohammad Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, to send the Maharajah an insulting letter demanding the return of Peshawar or else face war, leading Ranjit Singh to reply with an equally insulting letter challenging Dost Mohammad to retake Peshawar if he dared. In the spring of 1835, Dost Mohammad, anxious to regain Peshawar, declared jihad on the Punjab and invaded the Sikh empire. The traditional hatred between the Sikhs and Muslims meant there was no shortage of volunteers in Afghanistan to go kill Sikhs, and a huge number of tribesmen rallied to Dost Mohammad's banner. Macintyre noted the devoutly Muslim Afghans had a "fanatical" hatred of the Sikhs, which to a certain extent compensated for the superior training and firepower of the Dal Khalsa. As the Dal Khasla faced off against the Afghans, the no-man's land between the two armies was soon littered with corpses as tribesmen from the Pashtun Ghazi tribe faced off in skirmishes against the Akalis. Gardner observed "the Sikhs sadly lost many lives at the merciless hands of the Ghazis, who, each with his little green Moslem flag, boldly pressed on, freely and fairly courting death and martyrdom". The Akalis, for whom it was the greatest honor to kill a Muslim, were equally enthusiastic in using their quoits to cut down Ghazis.

Ranjit Singh, knowing that the feuding Barakzai brothers were much as inclined to fight among themselves as against their enemies and that Harlan knew the Barakzai brothers, ordered him up to the front to see if he could divide the Afghan leaders. The Emir's half brother Sultan Mohammad Khan had fallen in love with a dancing girl at the court, whom he was planning to take into his harem to make into another of his concubines, but Dost Mohammad who also desired her, had used his right as Emir to take her into his harem, causing much discord between the Barakzai brothers, which Harlan knew about. Viewing the Afghan camp outside of Peshawar, Harlan reported seeing: "Fifty thousand belligerent candidates for martyrdom and immortality. Savages from the remotest recesses of the mountainous districts, many of them giants in form and strength, promiscuously armed with sword and shield, bow and arrows, matchlocks, rifles, spears and blunderbusses, concentrated themselves around the standard of religion, and were prepared to slay, plunder and destroy, for the sake of Allah and the Prophet, the unenlightened infidels of the Punjab". The French-trained Dal Khalsa was a powerful army, but Singh as usual preferred to achieve his goals via diplomacy rather than war if possible, and so sought to find a peaceful way to send the Afghans home.

Under the flag of truce, Harlan went to the camp of Sultan Mohammad Khan, the half-brother of the Emir, to negotiate the right price for defecting, and he used his resentment of Dost Mohammad for taking away the dancing girl he desired from him to turn him against the Emir. Already, many Sikhs and Afghans, anxious to spill each other's blood, had engaged in skirmishes and the ground between the two armies that Harlan traveled through was littered with corpses. Harlan offered Sultan Mohammad a generous bribe on the behalf of Ranjit Singh in exchange for going home with his part of the Afghan host under his command. Dost Mohammad had heard that Harlan had arrived in his half-brother's camp, but after receiving a letter from Sultan Mohammad Khan "stating the fact of Mr. Harlan's arrival, and that he had been put to death, while his elephants and plunder had been made booty". The news was received with loud cheering in Dost Mohammad's camp and it was announced that "now the brothers had become one, and wiped away their enmities in Feringhi blood". After agreeing to consider to accept Singh's bribe, Harlan and Sultan Mohammad Khan rode into Dost Mohammad's camp, where Harlan told the Emir to go home, telling him that despite his 50, 000 men that "If the Prince of the Punjab chose to assemble the militia of his dominions, he could bring ten times that number into the field, but you will have regular troops to fight, and your san culottes militia will vanish like mist before the sun". As Dost Mohammad made a veiled threat to kill Harlan, reminding him that when "Secunder" (Alexander the Great) had fought in Afghanistan one of his envoys had been killed under the flag of truce, a servant brought in some doug (fermented milk) to drink, which Sultan Mohammad refused to drink, believing his half-brother was attempting to poison him. When Dost Mohammad insisted that Sultan Mohammad drink some of the doug under the grounds it was rude to refuse his hospitality, his half-brother insisted that the Emir drink some of the doug first, which he refused under the grounds it too hot of a day to drink a doug, leading to a lengthy argument between the two about who was drink the doug first. Dost Mohammad finally drank some of the doug just to prove it was not poisoned. Dost Mohammad had played a cunning trick on his half-brother as the reluctance of Sultan Mohammad to drink the doug first proved to the assembled tribal chiefs that he had been engaging in treachery, as Dost Mohammad had intended. The meeting was first of several tense meetings as Harlan traveled back and forth between the Sikh camp and the two half-brothers before Sultan Mohammad was finally bribed into switching sides while Ranjit Singh had brought up his heavy artillery, which finally persuaded Dost Mohammad that discretion was the better part of valor, leading him to go home. Harlan had played the role of a diplomat well, seeing off an Afghan invasion with minimal losses to the Dal Khalsa but Ranjit Singh decided after the fact that it would have better to have given battle after all, and publicity criticized Harlan for preventing a battle that he now believed he would have won, the beginning of a rift between the two.

On 19 August 1835, Ranjit Singh suffered a stoke, which left him with slurred speech, and demanded that Harlan use his knowledge of Western medicine to cure him. In the 19th century it was widely believed that running electrical jolts though the body had restorative effects, and following Harlan's advice, an electrical machine was brought to Lahore to pump Ranjit Singh full of electricity, an experience that did not restore his speech. However, Ranjit Singh was always proud of his physical toughness and discovered much to his delight that electricity could pass from one human body to another, which led him to devise a game, where all his courtiers had to hold hands in a line with one man holding Ranjit Singh's hand as he was pumped full of electricity, which caused the others to let go in pain while Ranjit Singh continued to be electrified. Ranjit Singh rather enjoyed this game, through it doubtful his courtiers found much enjoyment being zapped and shocked by the electricity. The final blow to his friendship with Ranjit Singh occurred when Harlan's enemies at the court mentioned to Ranjit Singh that Harlan had the maulvi living with him who was alleged to be able to turn base metals into precious ones (knowledge that Ranjit Singh expected to be shared with him), and that Harlan was allegedly minting counterfeit coins (for which the penalty was death). In some fear of his life, Harlan left Ranjit Singh's employ in early 1836. An Indian historian Khushwant Singh called Harlan "an incredible windbag" who was somehow able to convince Ranjit Singh that he was a "doctor, scholar, statesmen and soldier".

To Afghanistan

In 1836 after a following-out with Ranjit Singh, Harlan defected over to the service of Dost Mohammad Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan and the arch-enemy of Singh. Even through Harlan had in the service of Singh and Shah Shujah had fought against Dost Mohammad in the past, the Emir was sufficiently impressed with Harlan's ability to accept his former enemy into his service. In the treacherous world of Afghan politics, where today's enemy was likely to be tomorrow's friend, and today's friend to be tomorrow's enemy, Dost Mohammad had learned not to hold grudges. Arriving in Kabul, Harlan ran into Charles Masson who had deserted his earlier expedition to Afghanistan, an act that Harlan had not forgiven him for. Harlan sent a letter to the East India Company telling them that Masson, the "American" explorer and amateur archaeologist of Central Asia, was actually the Englishman James Lewis, a deserter from the Company's army sentenced to death in absentia. Captain Wade used this information to blackmail Masson into working for a spy for the Company, promising him a pardon if he agreed to work as a spy, and to have him extradited back to India to be executed if he refused his offer. Masson was a most unwilling player in the "Great Game", not the least because he knew Dost Mohammad would have him executed if he found out he was working as a spy for the Company. Masson, suspecting that it was Harlan who had denounced him to the Company, started denouncing him to the Company as a "violent and unprincipled man".

In March 1836, Lord Auckland, the governor-general of India, received a letter in English purportedly from Dost Mohammad (who did not know English), whose flowery style and a number of Americanisms strongly suggest that Harlan was the real author, asking him to sign an alliance and force Ranjit Singh to return Peshawar to Afghanistan. Writing as Dost Mohammad, Harlan declared: "The field of my hopes, which had before been chilled by the cold blast of the wintry times, has by the happy tidings of your Lordship's arrival become the envy of the Garden of Paradise", going on to ask the British to force "the reckless and misguided Sikhs" to return Peshawar to the Afghans. Lord Auckland replied: "My friend, you are aware that it is not the practice of the British government to interfere with the affairs of the independent states", a statement that Macintyre noted was highly ironic given that two years later it was Lord Auckland who decided to depose Dost Mohammad in favor of Shah Shuja.

Dost Mohammad wanted Harlan to train his tribal levy (Afghanistan had no army) how to fight in the Western style of war. The French had traditionally excelled at artillery, and as befitting an army trained by French officers, the Dal Khalsa had excellent artillery, which had been repeatedly used to decimate the Afghan tribesmen in various battles. Singh had pushing steadily into the "badlands" that make the modern border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in 1837 he recalled the best of the Dal Khalsa for a parade to honor his son's wedding in Lahore, which Dost Mohammad took advantage of by attacking the Sikhs. Under the banner of jihad, about 10,000 Afghan tribesmen swept down the Khyber Pass under the command of Dost Mohammad's son Wazir Akbar Khan to attack the Sikhs, accompanied by Harlan as his special military adviser. On 30 April 1837, the Afghans defeated the Sikhs at the Battle of Jamrud. At Jamrud, the Sikh artillery blasted holes in the Afghan ranks, with a single cannonball killing or wounding dozens of men, but when the Sikh infantry advanced through the gaps in the Afghan line, the Afghans following Harlan's advice used their numerically superior reserves to crush the Dal Khalsa in furious hand-to-hand fighting. The Afghans lost about 1,000 killed while the Sikhs lost about 2,000 dead, including General Hari Singh Nalwa, Ranjit Singh's favorite general. Harlan wrote that Singh must had been besides himself with fury, imagining that "The proud King of Lahore quailed upon his threatened throne, as he exclaimed with terror and approaching despair, 'Harlan has avenged himself, this is all his work'". Singh reacted by sending his best general, the French mercenary Jean-François Allard to avenge the Sikh defeat while the Afghans-unable to take the fortress of Peshawar-retreated back beyond the Khyber Pass, starting on 9 May 1837. Feeling his hold on Peshawar was weak, Singh appointed the Neapolitan mercenary General Paolo Avitabile the new governor of Peshawar with orders to terrorize the city into submission, using methods that Harlan called barbaric.

Harlan liked and admired Dost Mohammad, whom he called a hard-working, self-disciplined and efficient emir who always got up early every morning to pray towards Mecca and read the Koran before receiving tribal chiefs except on Thursday, which was the only day of the week that Dost Mohammad took a bath. After discussing the affairs of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad would have his breakfast at 11 am, to be followed by new meetings before retiring to his harem to enjoy his concubines, to be followed by a ride around Kabul in the afternoon to hear the complaints of his subjects. After he turned thirty, Dost Mohammad ceased drinking and having orgies with prostitutes, becoming a more much pious Muslim than he had been when he was younger. Harlan noted that Dost Mohammad had shirrun i huzzoor, the Pashtun quality of modesty and politeness, but that he was also an "exquisite dissembler" capable of "the most revolting cruelty", very greedy for gold, and was extremely cynical, doubting every motive except for self-interest as a reason for a man's actions. Harlan noted that Dost Mohammad was a hypocrite who denounced slavery as a great evil, but who owned slaves himself and did nothing to shut down the slave markets of Kabul, where Uzbek slavers were always bringing in Hazara slaves captured in their raids. Harlan observed that Dost Mohammad was stern in his rule as once he was presented with a man and a woman had been captured when a "nocturnal orgie" had been discovered; the others had escaped, but the couple were too drunk to manage their own get-away. Harlan observed that Dost Mohammad "listened to the charges of licentiousness and immorality", and with a wave of his hand ordered the man's beard to be burned off while the woman was to be put into a bag and given 40 lashes with a whip. When Harlan asked why the woman had to be put into a bag before whipping her, the Emir replied "To avoid the indecency of exposure".

As part of the "Great Game" between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia, on 20 September 1837, Alexander Burnes, the Scotsman who had been appointed the East India Company's agent in Kabul arrived, had immediately become Harlan's rival. Harlan wrote that Burnes was "remarkable only for his obstinacy and stupidity". Together with the pseudo-American Charles Masson, Burnes and Harlan were the only westerners in Kabul, and all three men hated one another. In Afghanistan, the Emir was expected to reward loyal chiefs with gifts, which given the poverty of Afghanistan meant the Emirs expected equally lavish gifts from foreign ambassadors, and Harlan recorded that Dost Mohammad was greatly offended when the only gifts that Burnes brought with him were two pistols and a spyglass. Joining the three quarreling Westerners in Kabul in December 1837 was a Polish orientalist in Russian service, Count Jan Prosper Witkiewicz, who had arrived in Kabul as the representative of the Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. With Witkiewicz's arrival, the "Great Game" entered an intense new phrase, and Burnes was visibly disconcerted by Witkiewicz's presence in Kabul, believing Afghanistan was falling into the Russian sphere of influence. Burnes had Christmas dinner with Dost Mohammad, Harlan and Witkiewicz, writing about the latter: "He was a gentlemanly and agreeable man, of about thirty years of age, spoke French, Turkish and Persian fluently, and wore the uniform of an officer of the Cossacks".

Prince of Ghor Province

In 1838, Harlan set off on a punitive expedition against the Uzbek slave trader and warlord Mohammad Murad Beg. He had multiple reasons for doing this: he wanted to help Dost Mohammad assert his authority outside of Kabul; he had a deep-seated opposition to slavery and he wanted to demonstrate that a modern army could successfully cross the Hindu Kush. Taking a force of approximately 1,400 cavalry, 1,100 infantry, 1,500 support personnel and camp followers, 2,000 horses, and 400 camels, Harlan thought of himself as a modern-day Alexander the Great. In emulation of Alexander the Great, Harlan also took along with him a war elephant. He was accompanied by a younger son and a secretary of Dost Mohammad. Dost Mohammad sought to collect tribute from the Hazara who were willing if the Afghans also ended Murad Beg's raids. Before leaving Kabul to hunt down Murad Beg, Dost Mohammad knowing of Harlan's fascination with ancient Greece, gave him a gift of a piece of jewelry found at Bagram, the site of the ancient Greek city of Alexandria ad Caucasum, depicting the goddess Athena, which greatly moved him. Just like his hero Alexander the Great, Harlan discovered that his war elephant could not handle the extreme cold of the Hindu Kush mountains, and Harlan was forced to send the elephant back to Kabul. High up in the Hindu Kush at the pass of Khazar, a good 12,500 feet above sea level, Harland had the Stars-and-Stripes raised on the highest peak with troops firing a twenty-six-salute as Harlan wrote: "the star spangled banner gracefully waved amid the icy peaks and soilless rugged rocks of the region, seeming sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity". Harlan then led his army down "past glaciers and silent dells, and frowning rocks blackened by age", battling rain and snow as "these phenomena alternately and capriciously coquetted with our ever changing climate".

After an arduous journey (which included an American flag-raising ceremony at the top of the Indian Caucasus), Harlan reinforced his army with local Hazaras, most of whom lived in fear of the slave traders. The Hazaras are the descendants of the Mongols who conquered Afghanistan in the 13th century, which made them different both culturally and to a certain extent linguistically (the Hazaras speak a distinctive sub-dialect of Dari, which itself is a dialect of Farsi) from the rest of the Afghan peoples. Harlan himself noted the Hazaras are East Asians who did not look at all like other Afghans. Because the Hazaras are Asians and are Shia Muslims, the Sunni Muslim Uzbeks and Tajiks liked to raid their lands in search of people to enslave. Harlan noted that because of the fear of Uzbek slavers, the houses of the Hazaras were "half sunk into slopes of hills" under "a bastion constructed of sun-dried mud, where people of the village can resort in case of danger from the sudden forays of the Tartar robbers." Harlan further noted the brutality of the Uzbek slavers who sewed their victims together as they marched them off to the slave markets, observing:

"To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of course horsehair is passed by the means of a long crooked needle, under and around the collar bone, a few inches from its junction at the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed to which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle. The captive is constrained to keep near the retreating horseman, and his hands tied behind his person, is altogether helpless".

Harlan's first major military engagement was a short siege at the Citadel of Saighan, controlled by a Tajik slave-trader Mohammad Ali Beg. Harlan's artillery made short work of the fortress. As a result of this performance, local powers clamored to become Harlan's friends as various Hazara chiefs asked to see Harlan, the man who had brought down the walls of the mighty fortress of Saighan, and who promised to end the raids of the slavers.

One of the most powerful and ambitious local rulers was Mohammad Reffee Beg Hazara, a prince of Ghor, an area in the central and western part of what is now the country of Afghanistan. He and his retinue feasted for ten days with Harlan's force, during which time they observed the remarkable discipline and organization of the modern army. They invited the American back to Reffee's mountain stronghold. Harlan was amazed by the working feudal system. He admired the Hazaras both because of the absence of slavery in their culture and by the gender equality he observed (unusual in that region at the time). Harlan observed that the Harzara women did not wear veils, worked out in the fields with their husbands, loved to hunt deer with their greyhound dogs while riding horses at full gallop and firing arrows aside their mounts, and even went to war with their menfolk. Writing about relations between the sexes among the Hazaras, Harlan noted: "The men display remarkable deference for the opinions of their wives...The men address their wives with the respectful and significant title of Aga, which means mistress. They associate with them as equal companions, consult with them on all occasions, and in weighty matters, when they are not present, defer a conclusion until the opinions of their women can be heard". A strong feminist who believed in sexual equality, Harlan was greatly impressed with the Hazara women who were the equals of the Hazara men, and whom he also praised as most beautiful. Macintrye noted that Harlan's purple prose tended to be at its most purplest when he was in love, and in his descriptions of the Hazarjat, Harlan's flowery style was at its most florid, leading Macintrye to speculate Harlan found love with a Hazara girl. At the end of Harlan's visit, he and Reffee came to an agreement. Harlan and his heirs would be the Prince of Ghor in perpetuity, with Reffee as his vizier. In return, Harlan would raise and train an army with the ultimate goal of solidifying and expanding Ghor's autonomy. At another fortress, that of Derra i Esoff, ruled by an Uzbek slaver Soofey Beg, who had recently enslaved 300 Hazara families, Harlan began a siege and soon his artillery had smashed holes in the wall of the fortress. Harlan sent his Hazara tribesmen into the breach, writing: "In the storming of Derra i Esoff these men were amongst the first to mount the breach, along with their regimental colours. Their firmness and bravery, and, more especially their fidelity to their officers, were creditably displayed on many occasions". After taking the fortress, Harlan found about 400 Hazara slaves, whom he promptly had "released from a loathsome confinement in the dry wells and dungeons of the castle and sent home to their friends".

Harlan tracked down Murad Beg to his fortress in Kunduz, who dragged out the only cannon at his fort, an old Persian gun left over from the days of Nadir Shah to try to intimidate Harlan. A great amateur horticulturist, Harlan was offended that the Uzbeks were much more interested in raiding for slaves than in growing flowers, noting "Little attention is bestowed upon the elegant in horticulture. Their flowers are, consequently, few and not of a pleasing variety". As soon as Harlan reached Kunduz, Murad Beg sent out emissaries to resolve a diplomatic solution as Harlan noted: "The Uzbecks [Uzbeks] have a great horror of bloodshed, and think that prudence is the better part of valor". Harlan further noted that Uzbek armies always fought the same way: "a few individual sallies of vaunting cavaliers are made in advance, the parties uttering unearthly yells of defiance, and assuming threatening attitudes. A parley ensures, an interview between the leaders follow, and the affair terminates with the harmless festivals of a tournament." As Harlan surrounded Kunduz, Murad Beg, who was terrified of giving battle, chose to make a treaty with Harlan recognizing Dost Mohammad as the Emir of Afghanistan and to stop slave raiding in exchange for being allowed Kunduz. Harlan described Murad Beg as: "A great bear of a man with harsh Tartar features. His eyes were small and hard as bullets, while his broad forehead was creased in a perpetual frown. He wore no beard and was no more richly dressed than his followers, except that his long knife was richly chased, as was the smaller dagger with which he toyed with while talking".

However, when Harlan returned to Kabul the British forces accompanying William Hay Macnaghten arrived to occupy the city in an early stage of the First Anglo-Afghan War. The British had restored Shuja-who was just as cruel as ever-and Harlan heard a proclamation read by Shuja's herald from the Bala Hisar fortress: "Everyone is commanded not ascend the heights of the vicinity of the Royal harem under the pain of being disemboweled alive. May the king live forever!". Harlan commented that Shuja's "harsh barbarity" had not changed, and he was going to be just as hated by his people now that he was restored as much as he was when was overthrown the first time back in 1809. Harlan, who was not an admirer of the British, quickly became a persona non grata and after some further travel returned to the US. Harlan disapproved of the British occupation of Afghanistan, writing in his flowery style as he sailed away on a streamer from India:

"Kabul, the city of a thousand gardens, in those days was a paradise. I have seen this country, sacred to the harmony of hallowed solitude, desecrated by the rude intrusion of senseless stranger boots, vile in habits, infamous in vulgar tastes, callous leaders in the sanguinary march of heedless conquests who crushed the feeble heart and hushed the merry voice of mirth, hilarity and joy...To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe..."

Homeward bound

After leaving Afghanistan, Harlan spent some time in Imperial Russia. A woman he knew in England sent letters to Russian nobility in which she claimed that Harlan was an experienced administrator who could help the Russian peasantry better itself. Though he was well liked by Russia's society women, Harlan made no important government contacts and soon decided to go back to America.

Once he returned to America, Harlan was feted as a national hero. He skillfully played the press, telling them not to dwell on his royal title, as he "looks upon kingdoms and principalities as of frivolous import, when set in opposition to the honourable and estimable title of American citizen". His glory quickly faded after the publication of A Memoir of India and Afghanistan − With observations upon the present critical state and future prospects of those Countries, published in Philadelphia. Harlan had been working on a longer book called The British Empire in India, but the news of the almost total annihilation of the British force retreating from Kabul in the Hindu Kush in January 1842 attracted much media attention in the United States, causing Harlan to try to cash in with his hastily written and published A Memoir of India and Afghanistan. Harlan attacked his old British enemies from Afghanistan and called the British imperial system despicable. Most alarmingly, he wrote about the ease with which Russia could, if it so chose, attack and seriously harm the British Empire. Harlan was denounced in Britain, although, as one historian has observed, his book was "officially discredited, but secretly read, under the table, by historians and British strategists". The American press did not pan him, but the controversy ensured that he would never publish another book. The writer Herman Melville appears to have read A Memoir of India and Afghanistan as the references to the First Anglo-Afghan war in Moby Dick seemed to be based on Harlan's book.

With his funds dwindling, Harlan began taking on new tasks. He began lobbying the American government to import camels to settle the Western United States. His real hope was that they would order their camels from Afghanistan and send him there as purchasing agent. Harlan convinced the government that camels would be a worthy investment (Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was particularly interested), but it was decided that it would be cheaper to import them from Africa than from Afghanistan. When the US Army discovered the resistance of American horses, mules, and cows to the aggressive camels, the Camel Corps was disbanded in 1863. Camels were set free in Arizona. On 1 May 1849, Harlan was finally married, to an Elizabeth Baker in Chester Country in Pennsylvania. As Miss Baker was a Quaker like Harlan, who abandoned the pacifism of his faith during his time in Asia, her family were scandalized to have her marry a man who had fought in wars. In 1852, Harlan's wife bore him a daughter, Sarah Victoria, whom he greatly loved, being by all accounts a doting father. However, Harlan's massive unpublished manuscript telling his life story only mentions his wife once and very briefly at that, and he always carried with him a poem he had written in 1820 for Elizabeth Swaim until the day of his death.

Harlan next decided that he would convince the government to buy Afghan grapes. He spent two years working on this venture, but the coming of the American Civil War prevented this. Harlan then proposed to raise a regiment.

In 1861, when the American Civil War began, Harlan wrote to the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, declaring that "General Josiah Harlan" was ready and willing to fight for the Union against the Confederate States of America. Macintrye noted: "The man who had trained the Afghan army and humbled the slaving warlord Murad Beg saw no reason why he should not go into battle, once more, with a private army. Bizarrely, nor did the authorities in Washington, and permission was duly granted for the formation of "Harlan's Light Calvary". Harlan had no formal rank, no experience of the American army, and had no knowledge of modern warfare. He was also sixty-two years old, but gave his age as fifty-six". Always horrified by slavery, he raised a Union regiment 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry of which he was colonel, but he was used to dealing with military underlings in the way an oriental prince would. This led to a messy court-martial, but the aging Harlan ended his service due to medical problems. Harlan collapsed on 15 July 1862 while serving in Virginia from the effects of a mixture of fever, dehydration, and dysentery, was ordered to give up command of his regiment, and was reluctantly invalidated out of the United States Army on 19 August 1862 under the grounds he was "debilitated from diarrhea".

He wound up in San Francisco, working as a doctor, dying of tuberculosis in 1871. He was essentially forgotten. His remains were buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco (now defunct), but were moved and his gravesite is unknown However, Harlan, a man who detested the British Empire lives on as an inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's 1888 short story The Man Who Would Be A King, which in its turn became a popular 1975 film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Many critics have noted a close resemblance between Daniel Dravot, the hero of The Man Who Would Be King and Harlan as both were ambitious adventurers full of a burning desire to conquer a kingdom in Central Asia and other similarities such as the Afghan settling, both entered Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim holy man, both were Freemasons, both wanted to emulate Alexander the Great, and both were granted Afghan titles of nobility. However, Harlan had no counterpart to Peachey Carnehan, Dravot's sidekick, but the character of Carnehan was created by Kipling to explain to the narrator of The Man Who Would Be A King how Dravot was killed in Afghanistan. Kipling, who was a Freemason himself, had always said he received the inspiration for The Man Who Would Be A King while working as a journalist in 1880s India, saying that an unnamed Freemason had told him the stories that gave him the idea for The Man Who Would Be King, which suggests that Harlan's adventures in Afghanistan were still be retold in Masonic lodges in India in the 1880s.

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