Slight Bias

A.H. · August 22, 2013

I am related to Col Sir Thomas which is why I wanted to read this book but I soon fell for his descriptive style. It wasn't written that long ago but its already a world we would find hard to recognise..Holdich was Superintendent of Frontier Surveys, India. He served in the Afghan War (1878-1880) and with the Bhutan expedition, 1865. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1887. The maps in this important survey include a General Orographic Map of Afghanistan and Baluchistan showing Arab trade routes, and a map of the Hindu Kush passes.His first campaign was in Bhutan in 1865, a hard country to map in his estimation but one that was for him to be the first of many such. This led to his permanent appointment to the Survey Department from which he was lent to the Abyssinian expedition from 1867-68, working in extremely difficult and exhausting circumstances.A year at home working on the Abyssinian maps at the India Office was followed by eight years in what he describes as “the survey business” in India, passing the cold weather in the field and the hot weather at Mussoorie in the Himalayas completing the computations and making fair copies of the maps for reproduction in Calcutta. He clearly enjoyed the work enormously despite all the difficulties. He loved sports, particularly shooting, he was fascinated by the country, especially by the then largely unknown parts of India to which his work took him. He was a keen observer of Indian life and had a marked awareness of landscape and natural beauty. All his working life he sketched and painted in watercolours the scenery around him, indeed an artistic ability was an essential skill in a military surveyor of nineteenth century India, where photography was impossible but it was frequently necessary to make a visual record of the typography.While working in Central India he contracted malarial rheumatism and returned to Harrogate to recuperate. When recovered Holdich returned to India and in 1878 began his long connection with the North West Frontier and with the Southern Afghanistan field force. He served with distinction in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-8) serving with Sir Frank Robert’s forces. Roberts was keen to get a map of the hostile country and amongst others Holdich was out in the wilds all over Northern Afghanistan venturing as far as the Hindu Kush, returning just in time to Kabul, where he was under attack at the siege of Sherpur.At the end of the war he remained on the Frontier serving in the Mahsud Waziri Expedition of 1881 engaged in the tough work, as he described it, of mapping the rugged and dangerous mountains of Waziristan during active fighting.After this fairly strenuous work he was appointed for duty as Surveyor to the historical Boundary Commission which was to settle the boundary between Russia and Afghanistan. A task that was considered to be urgent as the British Government in India took the view that Russia was extending her influence unacceptably far south into Afghanistan and perceived this as a threat to British interests in the area. He describes these two years as the time of his life, his party worked their way, escorted by 500 cavalry and infantry, from Baluchistan to the Helmund River, coming into confrontation with a Russian force of 40,000 (or so, in his words, they claimed) and being forced to retire rapidly into Persian territory during an extremely cold winter. As the possibility of conflict with Russia increased Holdich was ordered by the Government in London to enter Herat and make the best defence he could until assistance could reach him from India. In the event the Russians, as he puts it, “came to their senses” and a serious situation was avoided. He went on to survey the boundaries of Baluchistan with the Zhob Field Force, moving into the Makran, on the border with Persia, going as far as Basra; where he used a period of leave to explore north into the area that is now Iraq.From the brief descriptions above you will see that he knew the country well and was able to make sense of the different and constantly altering political situation.