Adventurer in rebel-rife southern Arabia

From 1959 to 1965, James Nash, who has died aged 86, was an adventurer and political officer in the Western Aden Protectorate in southern Arabia, based in forts in its mountainous hinterland. Living conditions were hard and the landscape magnificent but brutal.

Nash knew each tribe and each family. He even knew most of the rebels, and when a revolt came to an end they would feast together.

He served as political adviser to the rulers of Beihan, Dathina and, most important, the Audhali Sultanate. Its ruler, Sultan Salih, was pro-British and one of few Protectorate chiefs who supported the South Arabian Federation, the successor to the Federation of Arab Emirates of the South.

Nash was based at Mukeiras, at 2,000 metres, the highest village in the WAP. On rare visits to Aden, his ebullience sometimes got free rein.

For an Aden Club party, he arrived with a cartridge belt slung across his bare, dyedin-woad chest and a dagger in his belt. As the evening wore on, a drunken melee necessitated an emergency visit to hospital. There he chased the nurses, brandishing the dagger and yelling tribal war cries.

James Gardiner Nash was born July 30, 1934 in Kent, England.

A spell in the family's paper manufacturing business preceded National Service but an attack of non-paralytic polio left him with a damaged leg.

In 1956 he embarked on a two-year solo walk from Venice to Addis Ababa. He joined the British Colonial Office in 1959.

He was appointed MBE in 1965. Later, he qualified as a building inspector.

In 1988, aged 54, he set off with a horse and cart from Istanbul to Jerusalem to raise money for the Knights of Saint John's Eye Hospital. He bought two horses and recruited Yusuf, a Kurd, as groom. Nash was no horseman, and broke a rib and a wrist learning rudimentary skills.

Progress was slow. One horse bolted, the other had to be dragged out of a quagmire. When they strayed into a military area, Yusuf was arrested.

The people, with few exceptions, were inexhaustibly hospitable.

Several changes of horses and grooms took place through Turkey, Jordan and Syria.

The trek to Israel took eight months and 1,700 km. It is vividly described in his book Quixote in a Cart.

Nash undertook his last big adventure in 2002, with horse and cart and his younger son, walking a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

He settled in a Somerset village.

His wife, Ann Allen, survives him with two sons of his first marriage.