Death in the Morning
The story of George J. W. Hayward
Great news! Tim Hannigan's Book on
Hayward
will
be published in the Spring of 2011
You
can Pre-Order HERE! |
England's
Royal Geographical Society lives in a staid but formidable old
building in London. The hallways and rooms are covered with the
memorabilia of famous expeditions and explorers of the 18th,
19th, and early 20th Century. Speke, Livingstone, Burton, Scott
and Shackleton are all there, portraits lining the massive entry
hall. For all of them, formal portraits are shown, head and
shoulders all, studio shots, most posed for well after their heroic
deeds had won them the Society's vaunted Gold Medal. |
|
But
of all the dozens of paintings and photographs, one stands out
for its complete dissimilarity from the rest. A lone explorer,
bearded and be-turbaned, dressed in native cloth and armed to the teeth,
glares out at the visitor with resolute firmness. It is
George Hayward, one of the RGS's most illustrious members, and, of all
the explorers of Central Asia in the 18th and 19th century, the
only one actually sponsored by the Society. |
His
brief career, shrouded in doubt, immersed in shadows, is not
well documented anywhere. As of early 2002, a search of the
Internet, and even the official Royal Geographic Society's web
site, revealed not a single specific reference to him.
(Hopefully, that will change now)...
In 1859, he was an ensign,
commissioned in the 89th Regiment of Foot, stationed in India.
He was probably Irish by birth, born around 1840. In 1863 he
purchased a commission as a Lieutenant, and in 1864 transferred
to a Scottish regiment, the famed Cameron Highlanders. In 1865,
he ended his short and undistinguished military career by
selling his commission. In those days, it was not uncommon for gentlemen to buy and sell appointments like this, but
the practice was soon ended by the British Army. |
Nothing
is known about Hayward's travels in the next few years, except
that he evidently loved to hunt, especially the giant horned
ibex and Markhor goats of the western Himalaya, for when he
briefly returned to England he knew Kashmir and the Baltistan
area of the northern Punjab well. In 1868, he approached Sir
Henry Rawlinson, vice president of the RGS, and pronounced
himself "desirous of active employment" as an explorer
on the next expedition to central Asia and the western
Himalayas. |
This
was just short of folly, as the one area of the world where the
RGS was not so interested in, was Central Asia. The British Lion
and the Russian Bear had intensified their sabre-rattling over
suspected intrusions by one side or the other into the lands
between the huge empires, and tensions were as high or higher
than they had ever been. Much of Chinese Turkistan and Tibet was
still officially off limits to all non natives, and foreigners
were harassed, chased out, or worse. The native rulers still
wielded an iron hand over their subjects, quaint though their
practices had started to become by the second half of the 19th
century. Murder, robbery, and kidnapping were standard
avocations. The RGS had been steering clear of the area for over
a quarter century.
|
It's
a wonder, then, why, within just days, Hayward was given the sum
of £300, a mass of surveying instruments and map making gear,
and packed off on the next boat to India. Of all the other
questions about Hayward's life, apparently the most puzzling is
why the RGS had anything to do with him at all. It was as
if an unkempt, unknown roustabout had shown up at Cape Canaveral
in 1960 and announced he wanted to be an astronaut. But
deeper study suggests a motive. Rawlinson was a
distinguished soldier and traveler himself, had advised
the Governor General of India on many subjects, and had a
specific interest in exactly the area Hayward wanted to
explore. Rawlinson was one of the foremost proponents of
the "forward policy", a hawkish and reactionary
position with regard to the Russian threat to India, and spent
much of his time beating the drum for increased military and
intelligence spending in the area. Rawlinson no doubt knew
that there could be little difference between scholarly
exploration and political knowledge in the area, and felt little
anxiety about possibly sullying the Society's non-political
stance. |
According
to the RGS, his official destination was the Pamirs,
specifically the source of the Oxus River. The Pamirs, the
"Roof of the World" are a chain of mountains and
valleys, in the far western Himalaya chain. Remote,
inaccessable, unknown, yet the crucible of Anglo-Russian
interaction, they cried out for mapping, surveying and
intelligence-gathering on both sides. Marco Polo went across
them in the 1300s. A rather bizarre and unknown British
naval Lieutenant, John Wood had gone several hundred miles up
the Oxus in 1841 to explore. And Hayward would be the
third European in 500 years to see the area.
Rawlinson was under some pressure from the new Conservative
government in Whitehall to provide information about this blank
spot on the map. Britain and Russia were soon to either go to war over it, or
establish a frontier boundary somewhere in the area. Even
the northern boundaries of the Afghan territory and the Indian
states of Jammu and Kashmir and the Sind had never been
formalized. Hayward was sent there to find out what was
where, who was who, and report back to Rawlinson. Hopes were
that the decades-old conflict could be cooled off. |
|
In
India, after repeated attempts to cross the borders were denied,
he managed to hook his little caravan up with a larger one,
headed by an English tea planter named Robert Shaw. Shaw
had been laying out a journey through the mountainous country of
Ladakh and then northwest into Turkistan, in the hopes of
establishing a market presence in that land of over a million
tea drinkers. Shaw was not overly pleased to see him,
fearing that Hayward's brash, sometimes intemperate, and always
dangerous mission might endanger his own. They agreed to
travel just far enough apart so that, given the circumstances,
Shaw could claim that Hayward was not associated with his
caravan, and Hayward could claim that he WAS associated
with Shaw. After numerous fits and starts, with Hayward
carefully measuring and mapping all that he could across Ladakh
and the western Himalayas, Shaw, and then finally Hayward,
arrived in Kashgar. Held under house arrest by the current
local despot, one Yakub Beg, they didn't see much of each other,
the rest of the country side or anything at all. Visions of
Stoddart & Connelly must have run through their minds, as
those two erstwhile representatives had shown up, more or less
uninvited and unwanted, in Bokhara just 30 years earlier.
However, it must be noted that Shaw and Hayward were not
mistreated or made to suffer in any way - they just weren't
allowed to do anything or go anywhere. Each time Hayward tried
to sneak out of the city, he was met with sword wielding guards
and turned back.
|
Ultimately,
though, Yakub Beg released both men and they made their way
safely back to India - Shaw with the beginnings of a trade
agreement, and Hayward with a volume of notes and letters back
to the RGS. Awarded the prestigious Gold Medal, Hayward
instantly became as famous an explorer as Livingstone (still
missing in Africa) or Burton. His failure to capture or record
any really useful information about the Pamir and the lands
around them was overshadowed by the amazing news that he'd
managed to get to Yarkand and Kashgar at all. Rawlinson was
overjoyed at the information he did get, and quickly sent
Hayward instructions to continue across the Karakorams and head
for western Turkistan.... |
On to Part Two - Across
the Pamir |
|
|