afghanistanyoung junior officer, Lieutenant Alexander Burnes, the Assistant Political
Officer in Cutch, who was on his first term in India. 9 The choice of Burnes
was due mainly to the fact that three years earlier his elder brother James, a
physician with no naval, nautical or hydrological training, had undertaken
a medical mission to Sind and his report included a glowingly optimistic
account of the navigability of the Indus. It was Dr Burnes’s report that
had fired Ellenborough with the vision of British merchant ships sailing
up and down the length of the river. Since it was not politically expedi-
ent for it to be known that the British officers were on what was in effect
an intelligence-gathering mission, the survey was disguised as a mission
to the court of Ranjit Singh in order to present the Maharaja with a gift
of a carriage and dray horses. When Charles Metcalfe, who had negoti-
ated the Anglo-Sikh Treaty of 1809, heard of what was planned, he wrote
to Ellenborough condemning it as ‘highly objectionable... a trick...
unworthy of our government’. 10
Burnes’s Indus expedition of 1830–31 included a naval surveyor, who
confirmed earlier hydrological reports, discreetly compiled by British
officials over the years but ignored by Ellenborough, that the Indus was
a shallow, heavily braided river with shifting channels and dangerous
sandbanks. It was also subject to dramatic fluctuations in depth, flow
and course, which made drawing accurate nautical charts impossible. He
concluded that while the Indus was navigable, it was only suitable for the
local, flat-bottomed barges with shallow draught, provided they carried
loads not in excess of 75 tons. Ellenborough’s vision of the Indus as the
Thames-in-Asia was therefore blown out of the water.
There were other difficulties. Burnes’s survey caused considerable
anxiety about British intentions among the rulers who had vested financial
interests in the Indus trade. None of them were fooled by the public justi-
fication for Burnes’s mission and they suspected, rightly, that the survey
was about gathering intelligence. The Amirs of Sind did all in their power
to prevent Burnes from acquiring any information about their kingdom
and showed little interest in the prospects of increased trade, especially as
Britain demanded they reduced customs duties. The amirs eventually let
Burnes proceed to Lahore, but only after Ranjit Singh threatened to attack
them. Then, when Burnes finally arrived at the Sikh capital, he found Ranjit
Singh had little interest in the plodding, plough-pulling drays. What he
wanted were thoroughbreds for his cavalry stud, so the unfortunate beasts
were locked up and eventually died of heatstroke or neglect.
The Indus expedition was but one aspect of a wider political and
intelligence-gathering strategy initiated by Ellenborough’s memorandum.