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The Man Who Would Be King The First American in AThe following report compares books using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
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Aftersleep Books - 2005-06-20 07:00:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.aftersleep.com () | sitemap | top |
Harlan first sailed to Calcutta and Canton in a commercial venture in 1820. On a subsequent voyage, while he was in Calcutta, he learned that his fiancée back home in Philadelphia had married another. Emotionally adrift, hearing that the British were about to go to war against Burma, he signed on as a surgeon to the East India Company. Macintyre writes, "That he had never actually studied medicine was not, at least in his own mind, an impediment." His service over, he signed on with an exiled king to lead an army to reclaim Afghanistan, but he had plenty of intrigues and shifts of alliances before that could happen. Eventually he would meet up with the Hazara tribe, which in turn wanted him to create their own invincible military. Of course, he had a price; the prince "transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute forever." Harlan had indeed become a king. He also imagined himself a sort of reincarnated Alexander the Conqueror, following Alexander's trails. He even took on his conquests an elephant, the symbol and mascot of the Macedonian conqueror, but it could eventually take no more of the mountain cold. Harlan took comfort in that having to send back the elephant, he was once again emulating Alexander, who had had to leave his own elephant troops behind for the same reason.
Harlan's enterprising assumption of command and kingdom was only put to an end by the Great Game between Britain and Russia in their struggle over the area. He tried to play along, with the plots and shifting alliances that he used for all his fifteen years in the region, but eventually the British booted him out, or in his version, he was disgusted by how the British treated the Afghan natives and sent himself home. He remained active, and was on hand to advise the American government in 1854 about the feasibility of the introduction of camels into the west. Harlan admired the beasts, and it is safe to say that no American knew more about them, but he did not take into account that American horses, not raised with camels, would be unmanageable around them and that cattle would stampede when they saw them. He also tried to become the government advisor on the introduction of Afghan grapes into America; he adored the produce of the region, but any plans of return to the area for agricultural efforts were cut short by the Civil War. Always horrified by slavery, he raised a Union regiment, 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. He wound up in San Francisco, working as a doctor, dying of tuberculosis in 1871. He was essentially forgotten. His rediscovery, in this fast-moving and entertaining biography, is now especially welcome as a timely illumination into the beginnings of dealings between the mysterious Afghanistan and the U.S.