A Historic Friendship Forged

Hark! Join me for yet another story of my career as I recall my trip to the Afghan frontier at the end of the 19th century and my first meeting with the intrepid Captain Younghusband!

After several years as a junior member of the House of Commons, I decided to travel the world and see the frontiers of Her Majesty’s Empire with my own eyes. So many were content to think of world affairs from the comfort of London—I wanted to see the frontiers of the Empire first hand. I wrote a policy/travel book regarding my journey titled Problems of the Far East, and I dare say that my book was so widely recognized that, after my triumphant return to Great Britain, I was appointed to the position of Viceroy of India in 1898.

But my spectacular imperial career and my noted modesty is not the subject of this writing. Instead, I want to tell you of my trip through India and into the frontier to the province of Chitral (which you may know as Kafirstan or the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan) in 1894. Yes, Chitral. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany!

Of what do I speak? The Mehtar of Chitral had the most depraved Oriental habits. Truly. He fancied women, men, even boys. And yet sitting on the border between India and Afghanistan, his kingdom was of critical importance in the British struggle for Central Asia. This may have been the reason the Mehtar was murdered at the instigation of his own brother while on a hunting trip shortly after I resigned as Viceroy in 1905. As I wrote in a letter to one friend on my departure from Chitral:

At Chitral I fraternized with fratriceds, parricides, murderers, adulterers and sodomites… I start tomorrow for Kabul where a female donkey is the object of favourite solicitude.

Yet one individual stood out from all the rifraf. While in Chitral, I ran into a certain officer of high distinction, a one Captain Francis Edward Younghusband. While on an expedition into Central Asia in 1891, the Captain was intercepted by Russians as they moved into the Pamirs (the full account of that can be read here). They illegally deported him, all while daring to declare Afghan territory as part of the Russian imperium! But they made a mistake in letting him live, as he divulged all the information he knew about the Russian moves in Central Asia and their crafty mapping expeditions.

After the incident, Younghusband took a leave of absence from his position as a soldier to cover, for the London Times, the relief from attack by local tribesmen of the northwestern outpost of Chitral. And it was at Chitral that our historic friendship was forged, and which led to noted expeditions to Tibet and elsewhere of which I have written before.

You can read more of the first meeting between Curzon and Younghusband here, here, and here.

Why am I writing about this now? More on that in a few days.