Today we’ll take a brief look at the life and work of another one of those characters we can define as unclassifiable, a mix of soldiers, travelers, adventurers, scientists, and scholars, who often fly free. The one we’ll see next was English, named Charles Masson, and both the British Museum and the British Library owe a good part of their Afghan collections to him.
He was born in London in 1800, as if his arrival in this world was closely linked to the century of the birth of archaeology as a science, since his father, George, was a simple maker of dyes and paints for artists, while his mother, Mary, came from a family of farmers from Croughton, Northamptonshire, later turned brewers.
Little is known about Charles’s childhood and youth, which, by the way, was not his name at the time, as that was a nickname he would adopt later; at that time he was James Lewis. We do know that the Lewis family’s business must have been doing well, as they provided their son with a good education at the school in Walthamstow, where he learned Latin, Greek, and French.
After finishing his education, he went to work at the Durant & Co. insurance brokerage, but in 1821 a confrontation with his father led him to leave it and enlist in the British East India Company’s army. That’s how he arrived in Bengal the following year, serving in an artillery regiment, although the Commander-in-Chief Hardwicke assigned him a mission very different from the military nature of his job: gathering zoological specimens.
Of course, this did not prevent him from having to wield arms more than once, such as in 1826, during the siege of Bharatpur, in the Second Anglo-Maratha War (in which Arthur Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, distinguished himself).
In 1827 he was posted to Agra and, deciding he had had enough of that experience, he deserted along with a companion, Richard Potter. It was then that he began to call himself Charles Masson, while the other adopted the identity of John Brown. Both left the territory under British jurisdiction by crossing the Bikaner desert in Rajasthan to the Indus River, then following its course through Sikh territory, which was still independent at the time. From there they separated, with Masson heading towards Afghanistan via Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, the same one where a decade and a half later the famous British military disaster would occur.
That extraordinary solo journey lasted three years, visiting places such as Kabul and Kandahar before returning to India, arriving in Lahore and then continuing to Karachi, from where he embarked for Bushire, a town in the Persian Gulf. There he managed to deceive the British authorities by claiming he was an American from Kentucky who had been traveling the world for ten years. Not only did they believe him, but he also made friends with one, David Wilson, who asked him to write a report narrating everything about the countries he had visited.
The document was sent to the aforementioned British East India Company, which was so satisfied that it ordered its delegate in Persia to provide Masson with funds to lead an archaeological expedition in Afghanistan.
Thus, along with other officers, he worked for ten months on the Iranian border and upon completion traveled to India, passing through several places before joining a caravan that took him back to Kabul in the summer of 1832. The manuscript of his work, which included a study of the now sadly famous Buddhist caves of Bamiyan (where he left his name carved on a wall), is preserved in the British Library.
From the end of that year, we have some descriptions from Masson, provided by British agents, who correctly identified his true nationality but merely said that he was an elegant man but had no servant, horse, or mule to carry his luggage, since he only carried with him two or three books, a compass, a map, and an astrolabe. Another source added that he had gray eyes, a red beard, with well-cut hair. He had no stockings or shoes, [wore] a green cap on his head and a faqir or a dervish blanket draped over his shoulder. Unfortunately, no portrait of him remains.
In 1833, he requested more funds from the Company to continue excavating and, since all reports about him were positive, they granted them for a five-year period. Thanks to this, he was able to find and uncover about fifty sites, including the ruins of Harappa, a city of the Indus Valley Civilization, and another ancient city near Begram which current experts believe was Alexandria of the Caucasus, founded by Alexander the Great.
He also brought to light the enormous monumental heritage that documented Afghanistan’s Buddhist past; caves, monasteries, stupas… In addition, he assembled a vast collection of jewels, arrowheads, fibulas, seals, and other pieces, with special mention of approximately sixty-seven thousand bronze coins from various periods, a numismatic collection very useful for reconstructing the general history of the region.
This good work is what saved him from death, which he deserved for desertion, as his true identity was discovered in 1834. He was too valuable, not only from a cultural perspective but also as a spy, an activity he had to perform in exchange for clemency by providing valuable information about the region in the context of the Great Game (the strategic struggle between the major powers, especially Britain and the Russian Empire, to impose their dominance over that part of Asia).
And despite his warnings about the conditions leading to the First Anglo-Afghan War, which ended in disaster as we mentioned earlier, he expressed harsh criticisms and resigned in 1838.
He then dedicated himself to writing an account of his experiences. During that work, he was involved in the siege of Kalat in 1840. Imprisoned, he agreed to represent his captors by presenting their demands to the British authorities but they once again considered him a traitor and ordered his arrest.
He was released in 1841 and continued studying Indian historical heritage until, by the end of that year, he had to embark for England to rest from that hectic life. He did so, marrying three years later to Mary Anne Kilby, the young daughter of a farmer from Watford, with whom he had a boy and a girl.
Charles Masson, who supported his family with the modest pension paid by the Company, died of pneumonia in 1853, being buried in All Saints Church in Edmonton, north of London. His widow followed him in death two years later, and the legal guardian of the children received one hundred pounds in exchange for the papers, pieces, and coins that were kept at home.
The bulk of what he unearthed was in the India Museum, but when it closed in 1876, its collections, including manuscripts, were transferred to the British Museum and the British Library, although some parts were dispersed to other English institutions. Out of that enormous quantity of coins, only six thousand arrived because the rest were auctioned off by the Indians and today their trail has been lost as they were not properly documented.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on August 27, 2019: Charles Masson, el viajero, espía y arqueólogo que fue el primer europeo en ver las ruinas de Harappa
SOURCES
Charles Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and The Panjab
Elizabeth Errington, Charles Masson
Elizabeth Errington, The Charles Masson Archive; British Library, British Museum and others documents relating to the 1832-1838 Masson Collection from Afghanistan
Wikipedia, Charles Masson
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