Lanterna Rally

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2005-05-04

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780374529574

"In the winter of 1838, an adventurer, surrounded by native troops and mounted on an elephant, raised the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan. He declared himself Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, and the spiritual and military heir to Alexander the Great. His name was Josiah Harlan. A Pennsylvania Quaker, Harlan was the first American ever to enter Afghanistan. The Man Who Would Be King is the extraordinary true story of the man who inspired Kipling's classic tale." "Soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist, traveler, and writer, Josiah Harlan was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1799. At the age of twenty-two, after a failed love affair, he set off on what was to become an amazing twenty-year journey through Central Asia. Among his many exploits, he was variously employed as surgeon to the Maharaja of Punjab, revolutionary agent for the exiled Afghan King, and commander in chief of the Afghan armies. He modeled himself after Alexander the Great and followed in his footsteps across the Hindu Kush, where he successfully forged his own kingdom - only to be ejected from Afghanistan a few months later by the invading British. Harlan retired to the United States, where he raised his own regiment during the Civil War and engaged in a variety of harebrained schemes, including the introduction of the camel to the American West as a viable means of locomotion, and the cultivation of exotic Afghan grapes." "Based on the remarkable discovery of Josiah Harlan's own unpublished journals, The Man Who Would Be King tells for the first time the story of a political adventurer who personified an imperialistic impulse fully sixty years before the Spanish-American War. Colorful, exotic, and entertaining, this is also a cautionary tale that echoes down the centuries as the United States finds itself entangled, once again, with Afghanistan."--BOOK JACKET.