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Updated: May 2, 2025
The Q.M.G. being at once set to work to make the necessary arrangements for our final start for Cashmere, we paid a hurried visit to the Tomb of Runjeet Singh and the Fort and City of Lahore. These were worth seeing, but they abounded in sights and perfumes, which rendered the operation rather a trying one, considering the very high temperature of the weather.
September 3. The Directors are much afraid of the Russians. So am I, and the Russians begin to threaten us. They hint that they have open to them the route to Bagdad, and they announce the presence in Petersburg of an Afghan Chief, and of Ambassadors from Runjeet Singh.
Honigberger, a German physician in the employ of Runjeet Singh, has an account of a fakir of Punjaub who allowed himself to be buried in a well-secured vault for such a long time that grain sown in the soil above the vault sprouted into leaf before he was exhumed.
There was an interlude at Ferozepore of reviews and high jinks with the shrewd, debauched old Runjeet Singh; of which proceedings Havelock in his narrative of the expedition gives a detailed account, dwelling with extreme disapprobation on Runjeet's addiction to a 'pet tipple' strong enough to lay out the hardest drinker in the British camp, but which the old reprobate quaffed freely without turning a hair.
It is said that in one of our most recent acquisitions, the Punjab, the people have deteriorated under our rule. Runjeet Singh had no prisons. Thieves caught in the act were maimed and allowed to go their way. Murderers and other great offenders were at once put to death.
In 1808, the English government decided upon sending a new mission to the Punjab, then under the dominion of Runjeet Sing. The anonymous narrative of this expedition published in the "Annales des Voyages" offers some particulars of interest, from which we will extract a few.
High civilisation has been attained without steam engines; education, as we use the term now, is superfluous Runjeet Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, could neither read nor write; the human race has prospered and multiplied without the knowledge of iron; but we know of no time when man did without domestic animals.
At Suharunpore he visited the well-known botanist Dr Royle, the curator of the Company's botanic garden there, then engaged in those labours on the Flora of the Himmalayas which have been since given to the world; and at Boorea, leaving the British territory, he entered that of the protected Seik states, whose petty chieftains are secured in their semi-independence by the treaty with Runjeet in 1809, which confined the ruler of Lahore to the right bank of the Sutlej.
In 1823 his former kingdom passed to Dost Mohammed, who in 1826 governed Kabul, Kandahar, Ghazni, and Peshawur. The last-named place fell into the hands of Runjeet Singh, the "Lion of the Punjab." Dost Mohammed then applied to England for aid in recovering Peshawur, failing in which he threatened to turn to Russia.
Our alliance with Runjeet Singh was solid, and the quarrel between Dost Mahomed and him concerning the Peshawur province was notoriously easy of arrangement. On whose memory rests the dark shadow of responsibility for the first Afghan war?
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