When Captain Abbott rode through the gates of Khiva, having first changed from his Afghan disguise into British uniform, he found that alarming rumours about his real purpose in coming had already reached the capital. One of these maintained that he was a Russian spy, posing as an Englishman, who had been sent by General Perovsky to report on the city’s defences. Not long before, he was disturbed to learn, two mysterious European travellers, claiming to be British but suspected by the Khan of being Russians, had been tortured with red-hot skewers in an effort to make them confess. This apparently having been achieved, their throats had been cut and their remains tossed into the desert as a dire warning to others. And here was he, also claiming to be British, turning up at a time when Khiva was gravely threatened. It was hardly surprising that Abbott found himself treated with the utmost suspicion.
To add to his predicament, there was considerable confusion, even in the Khan’s mind, as to who precisely the British were. Until news of Eldred Pottinger’s role in Herat’s defence reached Khiva, few if any Khivans had ever heard of them. No Englishmen were held as slaves, and none, so far as anyone could recall, had ever visited Khiva. Many believed them merely to be a sub-tribe, or a vassal state, of the Russians. It was even rumoured that the British, having successfully seized Kabul, were proposing to join forces with the advancing Russians and divide Central Asia between them. In view of these wild tales, the prospect of Abbott persuading the Khivans to surrender their slaves in exchange for a Russian withdrawal seemed remote indeed. It appeared far more likely that he would end up with his throat cut like his unfortunate ‘English’ predecessors, or be thrown into a dungeon like Colonel Stoddart in neighbouring Bokhara.
But if Abbott was anxious about his safety, so too was the Khan about his. Believing the Russians to be advancing still towards his capital with an army said to be 100,000 strong, he was desperate for help from any quarter. He agreed to receive the British officer and consider what he had to offer, although, lest he be a spy, great pains were taken to ensure that he saw as little as possible of Khiva’s defences. At the first of several audiences he was to have with the Khan, Abbott presented his credentials, together with the letter he bore from Major Todd, his superior at Herat. He was uncomfortably aware that these amounted to very little. ‘I had been sent on the spur of the moment,’ he wrote later, ‘without even credentials from the head of the Indian Government.’ The Khan was clearly disappointed by the contents of Todd’s letter, evidently hoping that Abbott had been sent to offer him immediate military assistance, not merely expressions of goodwill. Abbott explained to him that so important a decision could not be made by Major Todd, but only by the British government in London. This would take time, and very soon the Russians would be at the gates. There was only one possible way of preventing this, and that was for the Khan to hand back all the Russian slaves he held, thereby removing the Tsar’s widely proclaimed excuse for advancing on Khiva.
Abbott offered to travel northwards himself with the slaves, or a token party of them, to meet the Russians and try to negotiate a deal with them on the Khan’s behalf. But the Khivan ruler, long versed in treachery, was suspicious of this. After all, although he did not quite say as much, the newcomer might well be in collusion with the Russians. He put it more delicately. What, he asked, was there to prevent the Russians from seizing both him and the slaves and continuing their advance? Abbott was forced to admit that he could not guarantee success. If London and St Petersburg were rivals in Asia, the Khan enquired, then was not Abbott concerned lest the Russians simply murder him? Abbott explained that the two countries were not at war, even if Britain had no wish to see Khiva occupied by Russia, and that each had an ambassador in the other’s capital. The Russians, he added, had too much respect for British military and political power to risk molesting one of her subjects. The Khan pointed out that the Russians had shown no respect for his ambassadors, but had merely arrested them, his own brother among them. Such things, Abbott explained, might happen where retaliation was clearly impossible, but London and St Petersburg lay quite close to one another, and ‘the naval and military force of England were too formidable to be trifled with’.
While the Khan mulled over Abbott’s offer, they turned to other subjects. It soon became clear to Abbott that the Khan had little idea of the relative sizes of Britain, Russia and his own small kingdom. ‘How many guns has Russia?’ he asked Abbott. The Englishman replied that he did not know for sure, but that it would be a very large number indeed. ‘I have twenty,’ the Khan told him proudly. ‘How many has the Queen of England?’ Abbott explained that she had so many that no precise count was kept. ‘The seas are covered with the ships of England, each bearing from twenty to one-hundred-and-twenty guns of the largest size,’ he went on. ‘Her forts are full of cannon, and thousands lie in every magazine. We have more guns than any nation in the world.’
‘And how often can your artillerymen fire?’ the Khan asked him.
‘Our field artillery can fire about seven times in a minute.’
‘The Russians fire their guns twelve times a minute.’
‘Your Majesty has been misinformed,’ Abbott replied. ‘I myself belong to the artillery, and know such firing to be impossible.’
‘The Persian ambassador asserts it,’ the Khan insisted.
‘Then he is misinformed. No artillerymen on earth are more expert than the British, yet we never by choice fire more than four rounds in a minute. We would not throw away our fire, as must happen when the gun is not freshly aimed each time. We count not the number of shots fired, but the number which take effect.’
Never having seen modern artillery in action, however, the Khivans had no idea of its terrible destructive power against mud-built fortifications or cavalry charges. Some of the Khan’s ministers even seemed confident that they could turn back Perovsky’s force when it approached the capital. Abbott pointed out that if the Russians, who had almost unlimited resources, failed to free the slaves at their first attempt, they would simply return with an even more powerful force which the Khivans, however bravely they fought, would have no hope of defeating. In that case, the Khan’s chief minister replied, ‘if we die fighting the infidels, we will pass straight to paradise.’ For a moment Abbott was lost for an answer. Then he asked them: ‘And your women? What kind of paradise will your wives and daughters find in the arms of Russian soldiers?’ The ministers fell silent at that uncomfortable prospect. Abbott began to feel that he was making some progress towards convincing them that their only salvation lay in freeing the slaves, and allowing him to act as intermediary with the Russians. However, he still had a long way to go yet, and in the meantime he found himself subjected to an endless catechism by the inquisitive Khan and other court officials – questions all too familiar to British officers visiting Muslim lands. The idea of a woman ruler, for instance, never failed to cause amazement and amusement.
‘Is your king really a woman?’ he was asked.
‘She is.’
‘Is your king married?’
‘No, she is very young.’
‘If she marries, does her husband become king?’
‘By no means. He has no authority in the state.’
‘How many cities has your king?’
‘They are too numerous to count.’
And so it went on. Were the King’s ministers all women? Did the English always choose women kings? Was it true that they had telescopes which could see through the walls of a fortress? Was England as cold in winter as Khiva? Did they eat pork? Was it true that they had taken Balkh? Was Russia much larger than England? On this last question, with so much at stake, Abbott felt it necessary to elaborate. ‘This very issue’, he told them, ‘was the subject of a bet between the English and Russian missions at Teheran, which, after the most careful investigation, was decided in favour of the English.’ Queen Victoria, he went on, ‘has absolutely more territory, about five times the number of subjects, and several times more revenue than Russia.’ But in addition to her land empire, there was also the sea. A glance at the map, he said, would show them that the seas occupied three times as much of the earth’s surface as the land, adding that ‘wherever the ocean rolls, there my Queen has no rival.’
By now the Khivans had learned that General Perovsky’s invasion force had been halted by the terrible weather on the steppe, although they did not yet appear to know that the Russians were struggling back to Orenburg. It was assumed in Khiva that once the weather had begun to improve they would continue their advance. After days of prevarication and discussion, Abbott was summoned once again to the Khan’s presence. It had been decided, he was informed, to make use of his services. Accompanied by a number of Russian slaves – as a token of Khivan goodwill – he was to proceed, not to Perovsky’s headquarters, but to St Petersburg where he would negotiate on the Khan’s behalf the return of the rest of the slaves. These would be freed if the Tsar agreed to abandon all military operations against Khiva and to return the Khivan hostages held at Orenburg. Abbott would be given a letter from the Khan stating these terms which he was to deliver in person to Tsar Nicholas.
To undertake such a mission was greatly in excess of Abbott’s instructions from Major Todd, which had simply been to try to persuade the Khan to release his Russian slaves in the hope of preventing Khiva from falling into Russian hands. Abbott had, it later transpired, already exceeded his authority by discussing with the Khan the possibility of a treaty between Great Britain and himself. To be fair, however, there was no way in which he could obtain further instructions or advice from his superiors. Apart from the vast distances involved, he soon discovered that his dispatches to Todd were being intercepted by the suspicious Khan. Abbott therefore decided to risk official displeasure, calculating that were he to succeed in permanently lifting the threat towards Khiva, rather as Eldred Pottinger had done over Herat, nothing more would be said. Moreover, to travel from Khiva to St Petersburg, through the heart of Great Game country, offered the prospect of a rare adventure.
Although Abbott appeared to have allayed earlier Khivan suspicions that he was a Russian spy, even now the Khan was taking no chances. To protect himself from being double-crossed, he was anxious to obtain a hostage in place of the departing Abbott. Under the guise of altruism he proposed a plan for rescuing Colonel Stoddart from the clutches of his neighbour, the Emir of Bokhara, with whom he was currently at odds. He claimed to have information that Stoddart was allowed out of his prison cell each day to take exercise. His plan was to dispatch a small force of horsemen to try to snatch the Englishman from under the noses of his guards. But not only was Abbott suspicious of the Khan’s motives for wishing to rescue Stoddart, he was also doubtful about the accuracy of his information. While it was his dearest wish to see his fellow countryman freed, he strongly opposed the rescue attempt on the grounds that if the Emir got wind of it he would immediately put Stoddart to death. The idea was dropped, but still fearful of being tricked, the Khan and his ministers decided at the last minute to go back on their offer to allow a number of Russian slaves to accompany Abbott. So it was that on March 7, 1840, with a small escort of Khivans, Abbott set out across the desert for Fort Alexandrovsk, the nearest Russian post, 500 miles away on the Caspian Sea, from where he hoped to make his way to the Tsar’s court at St Petersburg.
Meanwhile, having heard nothing whatsoever from Abbott since his arrival in Khiva, and even fearing that he might be dead, Major Todd decided to dispatch a second officer to find out what was happening there, and to try, where Abbott had seemingly failed, to persuade the Khan to release his Russian slaves. The man he chose was Lieutenant Richmond Shakespear, aged 28, an able and ambitious career political, and a cousin of the novelist Thackeray. Unlike the evangelically minded Conolly and Abbott, he was less concerned with introducing the benefits of Christian civilisation to Central Asia than with keeping the Russians out – not to mention advancing his own career. ‘The chances of distinction are so great and the hazards so slight,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘that the heart of a wren would be gladdened by the prospect.’
Wearing native dress and accompanied by eleven carefully chosen Heratis, including seven armed troopers, Shakespear left for Khiva on May 15. Four days out of Herat the party met a rider from the north who told them a wild tale. Abbott, he assured them, had reached St Petersburg where he had not only succeeded in negotiating a Russian withdrawal, but had also persuaded the Tsar to demolish all his forts on the eastern shore of the Caspian. If this was true, then there was clearly little point in Shakespear proceeding any further. But he was not convinced, and anyway had no intention of abandoning such an adventure. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he noted in his diary. ‘At any rate, I shall go on to Khiva.’ Certainly there was no sign of any let-up in the activities of the slave-raiders, for that same day they came upon a Turcoman caravan bearing fresh victims northwards to the market in Khiva. There were ten of them in all, he observed, ‘two females and the rest boys – mere children’. Although Shakespear’s own well-armed party outnumbered the Turcomans, he felt unable to intervene. Such a move, he explained afterwards, would have destroyed all hope of his mission succeeding, and thereby ending ‘this most detestable traffic’. Furthermore, he added, ‘had I turned the poor children loose, they would soon have been retaken.’ Instead he confined himself to lecturing the astonished slavers on the abomination of their ways, while his own men showered curses and abuse on them.
After passing safely through the ancient caravan town of Merv, they entered the most perilous stretch of the desert, on the far side of which lay the Oxus. Even by daylight the trail was hard enough to follow, for wind and sand quickly covered up the tracks of previous caravans. The only clues were the bones of animals, and the occasional skull of a camel which some public-spirited traveller had stuck on a thorn bush beside the way. Yet even at night, in total darkness, their young guide was able to find the trail. ‘It was pointed out to me,’ Shakespear noted, ‘and though I dismounted and tried hard to distinguish it, I failed.’ During the day the heat was extremely severe, and they were haunted by the fear of failing to find each successive well. ‘Had anything happened to the guide,’ Shakespear observed, ‘or had he been less intelligent, the destruction of the party would have been inevitable.’
Three days later they were through the worst of it, and before long found themselves on the banks of the Oxus. From there it was only a hundred or so miles to Khiva, which they entered on June 12. They had covered some 700 miles in a little under a month, a day or two faster than Abbott. In Khiva Shakespear learned of the misadventure which had befallen his brother officer after setting out on his long journey to St Petersburg. Betrayed by his guide, Abbott had been attacked in the desert by raiders. He himself had been wounded, robbed of all his possessions and taken captive, while his men were carried off for sale. By a miracle, however, a messenger sent after him by Todd, carrying money and letters, caught up with him. Finding that he was being held by men who were nominally subjects of the Khan of Khiva, the messenger warned them of the terrible consequences when word of their treachery reached the capital. Abbott’s captors had become even more alarmed when they learned that he was carrying a personal letter from the Khan to the Tsar of Russia, fearing retribution from the latter as well. The Englishman was hurriedly released, with profuse apologies and excuses. His men were freed, and his horse, uniform and other possessions were restored to him.
Abbott now continued his journey to Alexandrovsk, a tiny military fort on the Caspian, where he hoped to get his wounds treated before proceeding to St Petersburg. However, wild tales that he was leading a 10,000-strong force against the post had preceded him, and at first he was refused entry. Once it was realised who he was, and that he was injured, the gates were immediately opened, and he was welcomed by the Russian commandant and his strikingly beautiful wife, who saw to it that his wounds were carefully treated. When he was fit enough to travel again, Abbott set off for Orenburg and from there, bearing his letter to the Tsar, for St Petersburg. But in distant Khiva, Shakespear had no way of knowing any of this, or even whether Abbott was still alive. One thing was certain though. Abbott had clearly failed to persuade the Khan to surrender any of his Russian slaves. Here lay the ambitious Shakespear’s chance.
On the evening of his arrival in Khiva, Shakespear was summoned to the Khan’s presence. ‘His Highness received me very graciously,’ he reported, and the two men appear to have hit it off from the start. Shakespear was favourably impressed by the Khan’s lack of ostentation. ‘There is no pomp or show about his Court, no guards whatever, and I did not see a jewel of any sort,’ he wrote. The tall, extrovert Shakespear – a handsome, commanding figure, according to contemporary accounts – appears to have cut more of a dash with the Khan than the rather shy and earnest Abbott. Certainly the outcome of his visit seems to suggest this. In fact, Shakespear had not chosen a particularly auspicious moment to arrive and seek to persuade the Khan to free his Russian slaves. For by now the full magnitude of the Russian disaster in the snowfields to the north had reached the capital, and the Khivans were cock-a-hoop over what they claimed as a monumental victory. Privately, however, the Khan himself was less sure, being anxious about what the Russians might do next. Abbott’s warning that, even if they failed at their first attempt, the Russians would return in immensely greater strength, clearly worried him, thus making Shakespear’s task of persuasion that much easier.
In his subsequent account of his mission, Shakespear gives us few details of his negotiations with the Khan, or of the arguments he employed to achieve his purpose. What does emerge, however, was that, like Abbott, he greatly exceeded his authority by holding out the bait of a treaty between Britain and Khiva. It was neither the first nor the last time that players on either side in the Great Game took the name of their government in vain to win advantage over their adversaries. But whatever the inducements used by Shakespear to persuade the Khan, he gradually found him more and more receptive to the argument that the best way to protect himself from Russian wrath would be by surrendering all his slaves. Finally, on August 3, Shakespear was able to record in triumph in his diary: ‘The Khan . . . has made over to me all the Russian prisoners, and I am to take them to a Russian fort on the eastern shore of the Caspian.’
He at once set up his headquarters in a garden outside the capital, lent him for the purpose by the Khan, where the slaves were brought to him for documentation as Khivan officials rounded them up. By the following day he had counted more than 300 males, 18 females and 11 children. On average, he discovered, the men had been in bondage for ten years, and the women for seventeen. ‘With one exception,’ he observed, ‘they were all in fine health.’ Most of the men had been seized while fishing in the Caspian, while the women had been taken from around Orenburg. ‘They all seemed poor people, very grateful, and altogether it was one of the pleasantest duties I have ever executed,’ Shakespear noted that evening. But his problems were far from over yet. Despite the Khan’s edict that all Russian slaves were to be surrendered to him, there was a marked reluctance to comply with this among those who had paid a high price for their bondsmen. A sturdy male slave, after all, changed hands for £20 or more – the equivalent of four thoroughbred camels, Shakespear recounts. Word began to reach him via those who had been freed that a number of their countrymen were still being detained.
One such case, involving two young children, was brought to his attention by their desperate mother, who herself had just been liberated. It transpired that the two children, a 9-year-old girl and her younger brother, were in the service of a powerful lady at the Khan’s court, who was determined to keep them. After much negotiation she was induced to free the boy, but insisted on keeping the girl. On hearing this the distraught mother told Shakespear that rather than leave without her child she would prefer to stay behind in bondage. ‘She then taunted me’, he wrote, ‘with the promise I had made to obtain the child’s release.’ This was too much for him, and ordering his horse he rode to the Khan’s palace. There the chief minister was anxious to know the reason for this sudden and unannounced visit, but Shakespear thought it wise ‘to lead him astray on this point’. He was painfully aware that his request for this one child’s release might put the entire operation at risk. It was imperative therefore that he spoke to the Khan in person, rather than through an intermediary, on so sensitive an issue.
On being ushered into the Khan’s presence, Shakespear asked that the girl be allowed to go with her mother. The Khan assured him that she had no wish to leave her comfortable home in the palace, but Shakespear insisted that she was too young to know her own mind. The Khan remained undecided for a moment. Then he turned to the chief minister and ordered rather crossly: ‘Give him the child.’ Shortly afterwards she was produced and handed over to Shakespear. ‘I have seldom seen a more beautiful child,’ he wrote that night in his diary. It seemed clear that she was intended for the Khan’s own harem. When she set eyes on Shakespear, who was in native dress, she at once mistook him for a slave-trader and began to scream. Nothing, she swore, would make her go with him. But fortunately Shakespear had with him a man she knew and trusted, and finally she was persuaded to accompany him, being lifted up behind him on his saddle. The following morning both children were brought to Shakespear by their grateful mother to thank him.
Even now, however, the party was not complete. Twenty or so Russians had still to be handed over, and once again Shakespear had to protest to the Khan that his edict was being defied. Showing him the list of those whom he knew to be detained, he argued that unless he could take all the Russians with him he would have to call the whole thing off. So long as any of the Tsar’s subjects remained in Khivan hands, he pointed out, the Russians would have a pretext for invading their territory. ‘His Majesty was astounded at my plain speaking,’ Shakespear recounts, ‘and gave his minister an order in a tone which made him shake.’ Anyone found detaining a Russian slave, he declared, would be put to death. The next day seventeen more Russians were handed over, some still in chains. This now left only four unaccounted for, and finally just one. The headman of the village in which the latter dwelt came to Shakespear and swore on the Koran that the missing man was dead. But his father, also a slave, insisted that he was still alive and being held against his will. In the end, after a thorough search of the village, the Russian was found hidden in a vault beneath the granary.
On August 15, two months after Shakespear’s arrival at Khiva, the party was ready to leave on its 500-mile march across the desert to Fort Alexandrovsk on the Caspian. In addition to the freed slaves – 416 of them in all – Shakespear was to be accompanied by an armed escort provided by the Khan. Although the latter had decreed that from now on the seizing of Russians would be punishable by death, Shakespear had no wish to see the slaves merely fall into the hands of the lawless Turcomans once again. The close shave of Abbott and his party a few months earlier on this very same route was a reminder of the need for both armed protection and extreme vigilance.
As it set out from Khiva the caravan must have presented an extraordinary spectacle. ‘The plain was so open’, wrote Shakespear, ‘that the camels crowded together and marched en masse, the children and women riding on panniers, singing and laughing, and the men trudging along sturdily – all counting the few days which remained ere they should rejoin their countrymen.’ Shakespear must have been feeling understandably pleased with himself, for he had achieved single-handed what a heavily armed Russian force had so abysmally and humiliatingly failed to do. His boldness and directness in dealing with the all-powerful Khan, risky though this was, had enabled him to succeed where Abbott too had failed. ‘The release of these poor wretches has surprised the Turcomans amazingly,’ he observed, ‘and I humbly hope that it is the dawn of a new era in the history of this nation, and that ultimately the British name will be blessed with the proud distinction of having put an end to this inhuman traffic, and of having civilised the Turcoman race, which has for centuries been the scourge of Central Asia.’ He appears to have forgotten, however, as the Khan clearly had not, that the Khivans still retained their far more numerous, if less valuable, Persian slaves.
As the caravan approached the Russian fortress at Alexandrovsk, Shakespear sent ahead one of the ex-slaves, bearing a letter in English from himself, to alert the commandant. At first the messenger was received with the gravest suspicion by his fellow-countrymen inside the fort, just as Abbott had been, for they clearly feared a trap. They had difficulty, too, in understanding Shakespear’s letter, while news of the freeing by the Khan of all his Russian slaves was, the British officer noted, ‘too astounding to be credited’. It took the Russian garrison a whole night to overcome their suspicions. This fear of treachery, however, was not confined to the Russians. When the party got to within six miles of the fortress, the Khivan escort and camelmen refused to advance any further lest they be taken captive by the Russian troops. They pointed out that in accompanying the caravan so far they had already exceeded the Khan’s instructions. But it was still too far for some of the smaller children to walk, and many of the adults had possessions which they were unable to manage by themselves. Finally the nervous camelmen agreed to provide twenty animals for the final leg of the journey, while they waited at a safe distance for their return.
So it was that the slaves reached Alexandrovsk, and liberty at last. Their reception, Shakespear observed, would have made a most memorable painting. ‘The worthy commandant’, he wrote, ‘was overpowered with gratitude.’ He even gave Shakespear an official receipt for the rescued slaves, on which he scrawled: ‘They expressed themselves unanimously grateful to you as their Father and Benefactor.’ That night, writing to his sister to break the news to her, Shakespear declared triumphantly that ‘not a horse nor even a camel has been lost’. The following evening the Russians laid on a banquet in his honour at which they drank to the health of Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas, as well as to that of their English guest. Shakespear’s own men were much alarmed at the ceremonial firing of guns and the cheering, not to mention the consumption of alcohol. Indeed, all devout Muslims, they were horrified by some of the infidel customs which they encountered for the first time at Alexandrovsk.
On the day after their arrival one of them came rushing to Shakespear in distress. He had just seen the Russian soldiers feeding their pet dogs – unclean creatures to Muslims – and thought that they were being fattened for eating. ‘There was a woman there too,’ he told Shakespear, ‘whose face and neck was uncovered.’ Worse still, he went on, her legs were bare, ‘and I saw up to her knee!’ He and his companions had also peered into the garrison chapel. ‘They worship idols,’ he exclaimed. ‘I saw it. All of us saw it.’ Muttering ‘Repentance . . . Repentance’, he begged to be allowed to depart without further delay with the dispatches he was to carry back to Todd at Herat. The following day, amid vows of undying friendship, they set out on their long homeward journey. ‘Never had a man better servants,’ wrote Shakespear in his diary.
By now three vessels had been found to take Shakespear and his charges further up the coast, from where they continued overland to Orenburg. There, having shaved off his beard and exchanged native dress for European clothes, Shakespear was warmly received by General Perovsky, who thanked him profusely and immediately ordered the release of the 600 Khivans being held at Orenburg and Astrakhan. Not a man to overlook such an opportunity, Shakespear kept his eyes open for any signs of a second Russian expedition being mounted against Khiva. He was relieved to see none, although his hosts were careful to ensure that he observed as little of military value as possible while he was at Orenburg. On November 3, 1840, six months after setting out on his mission from Herat, Shakespear arrived in St Petersburg en route for London. There he was officially welcomed by Tsar Nicholas who formally thanked him for rescuing, at grave risk to his own life, so many Russian subjects from their heathen captors. It was no secret in court circles, however, that privately the Tsar was infuriated by the young British officer’s unsolicited but now widely publicised act. For just as Shakespear’s superiors had hoped, it effectively removed any excuse which St Petersburg might have had for advancing again on Khiva, seen by many strategists, both British and Russian, as one of the principal stepping-stones leading to India.
It is not surprising that Russian historians, whether Tsarist or Soviet, have ignored the role of Abbott and Shakespear in the freeing of the Khivan slaves. Their liberation by the Khan is attributed solely to his growing fear of Russian military strength, and the fright he received on learning of the first expedition launched against him. Russian historians, however, have had plenty to say about Abbott and Shakespear. Both, they claim, were British spies, sent into Central Asia as part of a grand design for paramountcy there at the expense of Russia, whose influence they aimed to destroy. The Afghan city of Herat, according to N. A. Khalfin, a leading Soviet authority on the Great Game era, was at that time ‘a nest of British agents’. It served as the controlling point, he argues, for ‘a wide network of British military-political sources of intelligence, and a system of communication for British agents.’ There was, of course, an element of truth in this, although he credits the British with being far better organised in Central Asia than they really were. Indeed, Macnaghten, Burnes, Todd and other politicals would have been surprised, not to say flattered, by this Russian view of their omniscience.
Like Abbott before him, Khalfin claims, Shakespear was sent to Khiva to reconnoitre routes and fortresses along the Russian frontier between Alexandrovsk and Orenburg. ‘As an excuse for entering Russia from Khiva,’ he declares, ‘Shakespear put forward the “necessity” of accompanying the Russian slaves. Taking advantage of the fact that the Khivan government was obliged by Russian pressure to free these prisoners, Shakespear travelled with them, passing himself off as their liberator.’ In order to be allowed to proceed to Orenburg – ‘the terminal point of his mission’ – he represented himself, like Abbott before him, as a mediator between the Khivans and the Russians. Aware that both officers were really there as spies, General Perovsky had them placed under strict surveillance until they were safely out of the country.
Khalfin further alleges that the British even had a spy network in Orenburg itself. This was centred, he tells us, on the mission station there of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which had changed its name in 1814 to the Russian Bible Society. Its purpose, he quotes an earlier historian as having discovered, was to engage in espionage and to establish relations with Khiva and Bokhara, if possible turning them against Russia. Shakespear, Khalfin claims, had orders to make contact with the missionaries of this station. In fact, he adds, what neither Shakespear nor his superiors appeared to realise was that the mission had already been closed down by the authorities. He concludes, however, that possibly ‘some remnants of the Society remained, and that it was these whom Shakespear was to enlist in subversive activities in Orenburg.’ Needless to say, neither Shakespear nor Abbott make any mention of the mission in their own narratives.
Khalfin’s claims are largely based on a cache of faded letters and other papers said to have been seized from the Turcomans in 1873, and to be found today in the Soviet Military Archives (file no. 6996). The letters, written between 1831 and 1838, together with the other papers, are believed by Khalfin to have belonged to Lieutenant Shakespear (although nowhere do they bear his name) which he somehow lost during his visit to Khiva. But as Colonel Geoffrey Wheeler, the British scholar who first reported Khalfin’s allegations in the Central Asian Review in 1958, points out: ‘It is difficult to believe that any responsible person would proceed on an allegedly secret mission to Central Asia carrying with him a collection of confidential letters, the latest of which had been written two years previously.’
The letters, which are unsigned and appear only to be copies, deal mainly with British policy – or naked ambition, as Khalfin sees it – in Central Asia. However, it is from the papers found with them, some of which bear the words ‘secret and confidential’, that the Russian scholar largely makes his deductions about the real purpose of Shakespear’s and Abbott’s missions. His article, which appeared in the Soviet journal Istoriya SSSR, 1958, No. 2, includes no facsimiles of these documents, and therefore, as Wheeler points out, cannot be verified. Nor, without access to the originals in the Soviet Military Archives, can the accuracy of the quotations, or Khalfin’s selection or use of them, be checked. If the papers and letters are what he claims, regardless of his interpretation of them, it is possible that they belonged to Abbott rather than Shakespear, and that they were taken from the former when he was attacked and robbed on his way to Alexandrovsk.
But whatever the Russians may have felt (and, apparently, still do feel) about Shakespear, his superiors were delighted by the way he had so skilfully spiked the Tsar’s guns by liberating his subjects. On his return to London he was to receive a wild and enthusiastic welcome reminiscent of that accorded to Alexander Burnes eight years earlier. Although still in his twenties, he was knighted and promoted by a jubilant Queen Victoria, who, only 21 herself, was already showing signs of Russophobia. As for the modest Abbott, who had paved the way for Shakespear’s feat, he was to receive scant recognition. His rewards were to come much later in his career, though. Not only was he knighted and made a general, but a garrison town – Abbottabad, today in northern Pakistan – was named after him.
All that lay far in the future, however. Both Shakespear and Abbott were now eager to get back to India, for during their long absence things had begun to go seriously wrong for the British in Central Asia.