Hippisley Cunliffe Marsh

ISBN 1590481577

Seldom does an equestrian travel tale require its readers to exert more intellectual caution than this superbly written book. For herein lies a story whose message of intolerance is once again afoot in the world. True enough, young British officer Hippisley Cunliffe Marsh evaded plenty of danger in the way of Turkoman slave traders and other villains as he made his wary way from Turkey to India. Moreover, being a keen horseman, the Bengal Lancer made sure to note the equestrian practices of the countries he rode through.

“The Turkoman horses are specially trained on little food and less water for a month previous to an expedition; and once they start the horse gets large quantities of a mixture of one-half barley, one quarter maize, and one quarter sheep’s fat, all made into a soft mass of eight pounds, on which the horse is able to do a hundred miles a day for several days,” Captain Marsh noted.

With the decline of the Turkish, Persian, Afghan and Mughal kingdoms, the military might of the British Raj was in its ascendancy. With this rise in power, officers like Marsh harbored a corresponding belief in their personal superiority. The result was a long slide into religious and cultural bigotry.

On arriving at the holy city of Meshed, Persia, for example, Marsh was detained at the gates by guards intent on inspecting his saddlebags. Adhering to the belief that Europeans were exempt from local legalities, the author, “struck the rascal holding my horse with my whip, leaving him bellowing on the ground.”

Throughout history, the world of equestrian travel has been peopled by wise men and women. Their journeys taught them that custom and appearance count for little and that the perils of equestrian travel unite all Long Riders as they attempt to survive hunger, cold and danger. Such a bond of equestrian brotherhood has no room for the religious and political bigotry found in this book.

Yet in this time of global woe, when the Islamic world is being devalued by a new generation of Sahibs who cherish the myth of  their national superiority, Marsh’s “Ride through Islam” reads like a warning from the grave.

Harry de Windt

ISBN 1590481305

Blame it on the Czar !

If Harry de Windt, that dashing 19^th century Long Rider, had been allowed to follow his original plan, he would have galloped to India via the Central Asian satraps of His Imperial Russian Highness.  When suspicious St. Petersburg put a halt to Harry’s Russian route, the intrepid equestrian explorer determined to reach his goal via the Shah’s empire instead.

What followed was a ride to remember as Harry de Windt, lecturer, author, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and equestrian explorer par excellence, saddled up in 1890 and set off to examine the forgotten corners of Persia and Baluchistan.

The resultant journey was literally one for the record books as the redoubtable Harry proved time and again that he wasn’t going to be put off by a few minor inconveniences such as the weather, which ranged from an arctic storm in Persia that froze his cigar to his lips, to a howling desert wind in Baluchistan with temperatures nearing 120 degrees Fahrenheit!

Neither was handsome Harry bothered by the less than ideal accommodations he discovered.

“The floor was crawling with vermin but in Persia one must not be particular,” he casually observed.

Nor was our author overly concerned about his physical safety, dismissing the fact that the last foreign traveler who attempted this route had been “waylaid, robbed, tied to a tree, and left to starve.”

Though it reads like a mounted Jules Verne novel, “A Ride to India” is replete with the author’s scientific observations and appendices, including details from his exact route, “road overgrown, much camel thorn,” to Harry’s “Table of Languages in Baluchistan.”

Part science but all adventure, “A Ride to India” takes the reader for a canter across the Persian Empire of a romantic and bygone age.

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Frederick Burnaby

ISBN 1590480198

A Mounted Medical Mission in 1891

Kate Marsden

The author was a nurse in Bulgaria during 1878, caring for the wounded of the war between Russia and Turkey. While there, she saw for herself the plight of lepers, and decided to make a 2000-mile journey to the leper colonies of Yakutsk in the depths of Siberia. She hoped to find a herb which was said to grow there and which was allegedly a cure for leprosy. Although originally she set out to improve the lot of the lepers of India, she ended up trying to help the Yakutsk lepers, and attempted to raise funds to build a hospital for them.

Even though she had the support of Queen Victoria, the Empress of Russia and her Lady in Waiting, the Countess Tolstoy, not to mention a pastoral letter from Bishop Meletie of Yakutsk, nobody believed that anyone could make such a journey, least of all a woman!

This immensely readable book is a mixture of adventure, extreme hardship and compassion as the author travels the Great Siberian Post Road. “More struggling and floundering through marshes and bogs, more pitch-dark forests, bear-alarms, and frightened horses, and then a terrific thunderstorm,” she writes casually.

Kate Marsden became one of the first women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892.

Anna Louise Strong

Madame de Bourboulon

ISBN 1590480538