110 Facts About Josiah Harlan

Josiah Harlan, Prince of Ghor was an American adventurer who travelled to Afghanistan and Punjab with the intention of making himself a king.

Josiah Harlan claimed he was awarded the title Prince of Ghor in exchange for military aid.

Josiah Harlan was born in Newlin Township, in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Josiah Harlan had a knack for languages, as he was able to speak French fluently and could read in both Greek and Latin.

In 1820, Josiah Harlan embarked on his first travels after joining the Freemasons.

Josiah Harlan's father secured him a job as a supercargo on a merchant ship bound for Asia, sailing from Calcutta, India to Guangzhou, China and back.

However, after his fiancee married someone else, Josiah Harlan vowed to never return to America and used the word solitude several times in his writings.

Josiah Harlan was about to enter the war in Burma and needed surgeons.

Josiah Harlan admired the impressive capacity of the East India Company's sepoys, who "consumed nothing but parched grain, a leguminous seed resembling the pea", and yet kept going.

Josiah Harlan claimed he was at the Battle of Prome in 1825, where Anglo-Indian forces stormed the city of Prome and engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the Burmese.

Once recuperated, Josiah Harlan was posted to Karnal, north of Delhi.

Josiah Harlan dreamed of a medieval Afghanistan, where tribal chiefs battled for supremacy.

Josiah Harlan was a strict disciplinarian who would not tolerate any insubordination from those serving under him.

Josiah Harlan had decided to enter the service of Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of Punjab.

Josiah Harlan knew that the East India Company possessed much of the Indian subcontinent, and as far as he was concerned, the less known of Punjab the better.

Josiah Harlan planned to study the flora of the Punjab, which was unknown in the West, and publish a book about the botany of Punjab with a special emphasis on flowers.

At Shah Shujah Durrani's palace, Josiah Harlan discovered a court of grotesquely deformed men.

Josiah Harlan commented Shuja's court was an "earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king's service".

Josiah Harlan spoke no Pashto and Shuja no English, so they conversed in a mixture of Hindi and Persian.

Josiah Harlan praised "the grace and dignity of His Highness's demeanor", observing the sense of power that Shuja projected, but that "years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation".

Josiah 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.

Josiah Harlan knew only a few phrases in Arabic, but with these he convinced a Pashtun chief that he was a dervish returning from Mecca.

Josiah Harlan behaved with such arrogance towards the Pashtun chiefs who had come to swear loyalty to him, expecting lavish financial rewards, that they went back to the Bazakzai brothers, who did not use court etiquette to humiliate them as Shuja had done.

Josiah Harlan met the man who he had come to depose in Kabul, Dost Mohammad Khan, at Bala Hisar Fort.

Josiah Harlan had arrived assuming the West was superior to the East, but meeting Dost Mohammad challenged his thinking, as he found Easterners could be just as intelligent as Westerners.

When Dost Mohammad asked Josiah Harlan to explain the American system of government to him, Josiah Harlan spoke about the tripartite separation of powers between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

Josiah Harlan noted that although a Muslim, Dost Mohammad drank heavily and had brought prostitutes to his court; Josiah Harlan described them as "promiscuous actors in the wild, voluptuous, licentious scene of shameless bacchanals".

Josiah Harlan explored Kabul, the "city of ten thousand gardens", observing that there were so many gardens in the city full of sweet-smelling flowers and fruits they almost covered the smell of human and animal excrement dumped in the streets.

Josiah Harlan wrote Kabul was a "jewel encircled with emerald with flowers and blossoms whose odors perfume the air with a fragrance elsewhere unknown".

Josiah Harlan called Kabul a "sweet assemblage of floral beauty" full of "ornamental trees, apple orchards, patches of peach and plum trees, vast numbers of mulberry of various species, black, white and purple, with the sycamore, the tall poplar, the sweet scented and the red and white willows, the weeping willow, green meadows, running streams and hedges of roses, red, white, yellow and variegated".

Josiah Harlan observed that Kabul had a lively red-light district full of "professional courtesans [sic] or female singers and dancers, libidinous creatures whose lives are passed in the immodest and secret intrigues of licentiousness".

Macintyre wrote that Josiah Harlan's disapproving tone suggested considerable experience of the red-light district of Kabul.

Josiah Harlan was uncertain if Khan was working as an agent provocateur sent by Dost Mohammad to test his loyalty or was sincere.

Josiah Harlan suggested that the two should go off and invade the Sindh together; when Khan persisted, Josiah 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.

Josiah Harlan was infected with cholera and wandered into a mosque one night which was a morgue full of the bodies of cholera victims.

Josiah Harlan was raised a teetotaler, but to survive cholera he broke with his Quaker values by drinking as much as possible of the wine and whisky smuggled into Afghanistan from India.

In Peshawar, Josiah Harlan had met a Nawab Jubbar Khan, who was a brother of Dost Mohammad Khan.

Josiah Harlan discovered much to his amazement that the maulvi "was an enthusiastic Rosicrucian" who was seeking the Philosopher's stone, and who kept Jubbar Khan happy with the supposed medical secrets that his occult knowledge gave him.

Josiah Harlan often argued with the maulvi, telling him about that modern chemist in the West had firmly established it was not possible to turn lead into gold, much less turn fish into silver, as he insisted that he could.

Josiah Harlan came to Lahore, the capital of Punjab, in 1829.

Josiah Harlan sought out the French general Jean-Francois Allard, who introduced him to the Maharaja.

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 is why Josiah Harlan sought to work in his service.

Josiah Harlan 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".

Josiah Harlan was offered a military position but declined, looking for something more lucrative.

In Gujrat, Josiah 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".

Josiah Harlan later wrote "I was both civil and military governor" with unlimited powers to do whatever he pleased as long as taxes were collected, and order maintained.

The weapon that Josiah Harlan described as a "quoit" is better known as the chakram.

One of Josiah Harlan's visitors was the Reverend Joseph Wolff, a Bavarian Jew who had converted successively to Catholicism, Lutheranism and finally Anglicanism, and was now traveling all over Asia as a missionary.

Wolff said Josiah Harlan wore a very expensive Western suit and liked to smoke a hookah.

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, Josiah Harlan attempted to crack down on corruption and avoided brutality, which caused his relations with Ventura and Avitabile to decline.

Josiah Harlan was 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 who failed the Maharajah.

Ranjit Singh, knowing that the feuding Barakzai brothers were as much inclined to fight among themselves as against their enemies and that Josiah Harlan knew the Barakzai brothers, ordered him up to the front to see if he could divide the Afghan leaders.

Under the flag of truce, Josiah Harlan went to the camp of Sultan Mohammad Khan, the half-brother of the Emir, to negotiate the right price for defecting, and he was motivated by his resentment of Dost Mohammad for taking away the dancing girl he desired 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 Josiah Harlan traveled through was littered with corpses.

Josiah Harlan offered Sultan Mohammad a generous bribe on the behalf of Ranjit Singh in exchange for going home with that part of the Afghan host under his command.

Dost Mohammad had heard that Josiah Harlan had arrived in his half-brother's camp.

Dost Mohammad then made a veiled threat to kill Josiah Harlan, reminding Josiah Harlan that when "Secunder" had fought in Afghanistan one of his envoys had been killed under the flag of truce.

The meeting was first of several tense meetings as Josiah 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.

Josiah 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 publicly criticized Josiah Harlan for preventing a battle that he believed he could have won, the beginning of a rift between the two.

In fear of his life, Josiah Harlan left Ranjit Singh's employ in early 1836.

An Indian historian Khushwant Singh called Josiah Harlan "an incredible windbag" who was somehow able to convince Ranjit Singh that he was a "doctor, scholar, statesman and soldier".

In 1836, after a falling-out with Ranjit Singh, Josiah Harlan defected over to the service of Dost Mohammad Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan and the archenemy of Singh.

Josiah 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.

Masson, suspecting that it was Josiah 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, whose flowery style and Americanisms strongly suggested that Josiah Harlan was the real author, asking him to sign an alliance and force Ranjit Singh to return Peshawar to Afghanistan.

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 Josiah Harlan's advice, used their numerically superior reserves to crush the Dal Khalsa in furious hand-to-hand fighting.

Josiah 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, 'Josiah Harlan has avenged himself, this is all his work'".

Josiah 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.

Josiah Harlan noted that Dost Mohammad had shirrun i huzzoor, the Pashtun quality of modesty and politeness, but that he was an "exquisite dissembler" capable of "the most revolting cruelty", very greedy for gold, and extremely cynical, doubting every motive except for self-interest as a reason for a man's actions.

Josiah 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.

Josiah Harlan observed that Dost Mohammad was stern in his rule as once he was presented with a man and a woman who had been captured when a "nocturnal orgie" had been discovered; the others had escaped, but this couple had been too drunk.

Josiah 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 Josiah Harlan asked why the woman had to be put into a bag before whipping her, the Emir replied, "To avoid the indecency of exposure".

Josiah Harlan wrote that Burnes was "remarkable only for his obstinacy and stupidity".

Together with the pseudo-American Charles Masson, Burnes and Josiah Harlan were the only westerners in Kabul, and all three men hated one another.

Burnes had Christmas dinner with Dost Mohammad, Josiah 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".

In 1838, Josiah Harlan set off on a punitive expedition against the Uzbek slave trader and warlord Muhammad Murad Beg.

Josiah Harlan 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.

In emulation of Alexander the Great, Josiah Harlan took along with him a war elephant.

Josiah Harlan was accompanied by a younger son and a secretary of Dost Mohammad.

Just like his hero Alexander the Great, Josiah Harlan discovered that his war elephant could not handle the extreme cold of the Hindu Kush mountains, and Josiah Harlan was forced to send the elephant back to Kabul.

Josiah 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".

Josiah Harlan's first major military engagement was a short siege at the citadel of Saighan, Afghanistan controlled by the Tajik slave-trader Mohammad Ali Beg.

Josiah Harlan admired the Hazaras, both because of the absence of slavery in their culture and by the gender equality he observed.

Josiah 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.

In return, Josiah 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, Josiah Harlan began a siege and soon his artillery had smashed holes in the wall of the fortress.

Josiah Harlan tracked Murad Beg down to his fortress in Kunduz.

Josiah Harlan's eyes were small and hard as bullets, while his broad forehead was creased in a perpetual frown.

However, when Josiah Harlan returned to Kabul the British forces with William Hay Macnaghten arrived to occupy the city in an early stage of the First Anglo-Afghan War.

Josiah 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 he was when was overthrown the first time back in 1809.

Josiah Harlan quickly became a persona non-grata, and after some further travel returned to the United States.

Once he returned to America, Josiah Harlan was feted as a national hero.

Josiah Harlan 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 honorable and estimable title of American citizen".

Josiah Harlan had been working on a longer book called The British Empire in India, but 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, so Josiah Harlan tried to cash in with his hastily written and published A Memoir of India and Afghanistan.

Josiah Harlan was denounced in Britain, although, as one historian has observed, his book was.

Josiah Harlan began lobbying the American government to import camels to settle the Western United States.

Josiah Harlan convinced the government that camels would be a worthy investment, but it decided that importing them from Africa would cost less than from Afghanistan.

On May 1,1849, Josiah Harlan married an Elizabeth Baker in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

In 1852, Josiah Harlan's wife bore a daughter, Sarah Victoria, whom he greatly loved, being by all accounts a doting father.

Josiah Harlan spent two years working on this venture, but the coming of the American Civil War prevented this.

In 1861, when the American Civil War began, Harlan wrote to the Secretary of War, Edwin M Stanton, declaring that "General Josiah Harlan" was ready and willing to fight for the Union against the Confederate States of America.

Josiah Harlan had no formal rank, no experience of the American army, and had no knowledge of modern warfare.

Josiah Harlan 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.

Josiah Harlan collapsed on July 15,1862, 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 invalided out of the United States Army on August 19,1862, on the grounds he was "debilitated from diarrhea".

Josiah Harlan's remains were buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco, but were moved and his gravesite is unknown.

However, Josiah Harlan proved to be an inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's 1888 short story "The Man Who Would Be King," which in its turn became a popular 1975 film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

However, Josiah 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.

Josiah Harlan appears in George MacDonald Fraser's novel Flashman and the Mountain of Light.

Josiah Harlan is a character in Paradox Interactive's grand strategy video game 'Victoria 3'.