My hunt for the truth on the Tartan Turban
100 years: was Gardner a great man or a fantasist?
Keay, who is 75, tells me he was wary about tackling the subject of Gardner when he first started thinking about the book. “The last work that had been done on him was in the 1920s,” he says, “and I was inclined to be very cautious about him. His travels were probably the most remarkable in the whole history of travel in the early 19th century – he covered an enormous amount of ground in central Asia on his own but people have been very suspicious and think he may have invented them or based them on hearsay.”
The facts – according to Gardner – are these. He was born in America to a Scottish doctor and a mother who was half Spanish and half Aztec. In 1817, after the death of his brother, he left home to sign up for the Russian army but instead went wandering in central Asia, where, it is said, he fought off a pack of wolves, and discovered great stone horses standing in the desert and forgotten temples.
Five years later, he was in the employ of a prince fighting for the throne of Kabul in Afghanistan; he was also married to a native women, who was later murdered by enemy forces. Gardner then fled to the Punjab and became a commander in the army of the Maharaja there. As a soldier for hire, he also worked for the vizier of Lahore who ordered him to punish a man by cutting off the man’s nose and hands, which Gardner did, marking him out for many as not only a fantasist but a brutal man capable of doing anything for money.
Keay says much of the detail of this extraordinary account is fuzzy to say the least, but in writing his book he has made progress in adding flesh to the bones. “I don’t think anyone will ever totally authenticate and vindicate his story but we’ve gone a long way in this book,” he says. “I am more or less persuaded that he did go to most of the places he claimed to have been”.
Keay also points out that when Gardner was recounting his stories of adventures, he was an old man and was remembering back about 40 years or more. “We should give Gardner due credit for what I think he did do, but we should also keep an open mind about certain aspects of his life. I’m probably about the same ageasGardnerwaswhenhewas telling his story and when I try to think back to what I was doing 40 years ago, well, you know, there are more gaps than anything else and you tend to invent things. There’s a nice line from Disraeli – “like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I’ve seen.” The fact that I have this long perspective now makes me more sympathetic to his story than I would have been in my 20s or 30s.”
So where does John Keay’s perspective come from? He was born in Ilfracombe in Devon to a Scottish father, master mariner Stanley Keay, and English mother Florence Keeping, but has lived most of his life in Scotland – he currently lives in Edinburgh and Argyll. At university, he read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was the writer Alan Bennett, whom Keay remembers being bored by the whole process of teaching.
“He was my tutor for medieval history,” he said. “It seemed to bore him as much as it did me. I don’t think I’d count as one of his History Boys. He also provided coffee made with milk in a saucepan on his single electric ring. Quite disgusting.”
After university, Keay visited India frequently, attracted at first Career High An eightsome reel at 17,000ft. I was accompanying treks in the Himalayas. We were celebrating cresting the last pass. Career Low Struggling with Eliot’s Four Quartets in a Turkish detention cell. I had nothing else to read by way of distraction. Favourite Music Hank Williams, pictured, Tamla Motown and Alpha Blondy. They bring back the good times. Favourite Film American Graffiti. Not much story but great cars and music. Best Advice “Take your time. Beasts is doing by the fishing, and it was there that he decided on a career in writing, sending articles about the region to many British newspapers and magazines. He then joined The Economist and started contributing to BBC Radio; his first book, Into India, appeared in 1973.
Much of the rest of his writing has also been about India through its great empires and the British colonial period. I ask him if, as a historian, he detects a whiff of old-school British imperialism in the antics of the Brexiteers? “It’s an English imperialism, not a British imperialism, and I have absolutely no sympathy with them whatsoever,” he says. “I think it’s an English phenomenon and it didn’t surprise me at all that Scotland voted to stay in Europe. fine.” The words with which the late George Knight, friend and stockman, defused every crisis on our six-week cattle drive from Skye to Crieff in 1981. Ideal Dinner Party Guests My wife Amanda and my four no-longer children and their spouses. They know what to expect and will help with the washing-up.
“We did play our part in the empire but the belief in the empire was never that strong in Scotland. It was a good deal and a good way of rescuing family fortunes or whatever – it was a great opportunity but I don’t think people much thought of it as a Scottish empire. Scots did very well out of it, but I don’t think they had proprietary feelings about the empire in the way that the English did. The English thought ‘this is our empire’.”
Keay adds that he is just as horrified by Trump as he is by Brexit. “The thing about democracy is that you have to accept that every now and then an election is not going to go the way you wanted or expected and you’re going to be lumbered with a liability. It’s easy to imagine someone like Trump turning into a Hitler. I don’t think that’s hysteria – in a way, the horrific thing is he’s so totally confident and yet is so inexperienced and ill educated.”
In some ways, there are similar factors at play with an adventurer like Gardner – certainly, to many he seemed boastful and self-centred but, after completing his research, Keay sees him in a more benign way, dressed in tartan and telling his stories to tourists. Even the horrific stories about the bloody punishment he handed out on behalf of one of his employers, chopping off the man’s hands and nose, has to be seen in the proper context, says Keay.
“Gardner says he had little choice in the matter – but he took on the responsibility of judicial mutilation, cutting off a man’s nose and hands. Very soon after, the Sikh empire was overrun by the British and when they heard about this so-called American who had inflicted this appalling punishment in cold blood, they were horrified. So Gardner was not only written off as a fantasist but a thorough scoundrel and a nasty piece of work. He says he did it because he was in fear of his own life. You can take that or leave it.”
Keay’s decision is to believe it and see Alexander Gardner as a man whose stories may have become muddled at best, but who ultimately deserves to be seen as a traveller and adventurer in the same league as Marco Polo and the greatest explorer of the early 19th century. Some say Gardner’s life was too outrageous to believe; John Keay says the stories are so outrageous they must be true. The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner is published by Kashi House at £25