COLONEL ALEXANDER GARDNER.

CHAPTER I.

THE MAN AND HIS WRITINGS.

MR

FREDERICK COOPER AND COLONEL GARDNER SIR LEPEL GRIFFIN MR EDGEWORTH'S ABSTRACT OF COLONEL GARDNER'S JOURNAL-SIR HENRY YULE AND SIR HENRY RAWLINSON-MR NEY ELIAS-SIR HENRY DURAND'S 'LIFE OF A SOLDIER OF THE OLDEN TIME.'

In the hot weather of the year 1864 the Government of India deputed, as was then the annual custom, an officer to the valley of Kashmir to act as referee between the large body of English visitors and the subjects of his Highness the reigning Maharaja.

The officer selected for duty on this occasion was Mr Frederick Cooper-a man well known in his day for a terrible act of severity performed

A

by him in the execution of his duty during the suppression of the great mutiny of the Indian

army.

Mr Cooper was a man of talent and imagination, and while making such inquiries concerning the affairs of Kashmir as seemed to him a desirable preliminary to the performance of his new duties, he heard for the first time of the existence at Srinagar of an old European commandant of the name of Gardner.

Feeling sure that the conversation of this veteran would supply information of great interest concerning the history, manners, and customs of Kashmir, Mr Cooper lost no time in requesting the old adventurer, who bore the rank of commandant or colonel of artillery, to favour him with a visit.

The desired visit was speedily paid, and Mr Cooper's description of his new acquaintance, written down at the time, presents to us the hero of the following narrative of travel and adventure.

"The old colonel," he writes, "while on the verge of his eightieth year, had a gait as sturdy and a stride as firm as a man of fifty. Some six feet in height, he usually wore a tartan-plaid

GARDNER AS HE APPEARED TO MR COOPER. 3

suit, purchased apparently from the quartermaster's stores of one of the Highland regiments serving in India. In consequence of a severe wound in the neck, received in battle many years before, the old commandant had long been unable to eat solid food; he had, moreover, lost from age nearly all his teeth. The photograph "-a copy of which forms the frontispiece of this work-" while indicating the outline of the countenance, gives but a dim idea of the vivacity of expression, the play of feature, the humour of the mouth, and the energy of character portrayed by the whole aspect of the man as he described the arduous and terrible incidents of a long life of romance and vicissitude.

"The English he spoke was quaint, graphic, and wonderfully good considering his fifty years of residence among Asiatics.

"In the course of our first conversation I discovered the stores of experience, adventure, and observation which the old man could unfold; his memory, too, except as to precise dates, I found singularly tenacious. He complained of the loss and abstraction at various times of his manuscripts. A whole volume, which contained an account of his visit to Kafiristan, perished at

Kabul in the destruction of the house of Sir

Alexander Burnes.

"Sir Alexander, whose interest in Kafiristan is well known, had borrowed the book in question from Gardner before starting with the army of the Indus on that march from which he was never to return."

The outcome of this interview was a series of conversations between Mr Cooper and Gardner, in the course of which the latter related those wanderings and adventures, an account of which I have pieced together to the best of my ability in the following pages.

Colonel Gardner had from time to time written down in his quaint, crabbed handwriting many anecdotes connected with his service under Maharaja Ranjit Singh; and these pictures of a bygone conqueror, and of the mighty army which he welded together, possess a unique interest and value.

Mr Cooper unfortunately did not live to complete his history of Gardner's travels, and for some years after his death the unfinished work and Gardner's own manuscripts entirely disappeared.

In a footnote to Sir Lepel Griffin's masterly Life

VICISSITUDES OF GARDNER'S PAPERS.

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of Ranjit Singh occurs the following reference to these papers: "Colonel Gardner . "Colonel Gardner . . . allowed me

to read his manuscript narrative of the later years of the Maharaja, and the events which succeeded his death. These most interesting and valuable papers, which were intrusted to the late Mr Frederick Cooper, C.B., have disappeared, and the loss, from a historical point of view, is considerable."

I will conclude this reference to Mr Cooper's share in preparing the narrative by mentioning the fact that his rough draft of Gardner's travels, as far as the point where Gardner left the Pamirs, was corrected throughout by Gardner himself; and therefore it may be assumed that the traveller accepted the draft as a faithful record of his adventures.

It is perhaps unnecessary to relate to the reader how it was that Gardner's papers came into my hands suffice it to say that this occurred some four years ago, and that the vicissitudes of the papers by no means came to an end with Mr Cooper's death. Two very high authorities on Central Asian geography successively took the papers in hand with a view to investigating their value, and both unhappily died while the papers were in their possession.