TO PERSIA
In April 1873, two years after his return from India, Lieutenant William Gill set out on his first major expedition. He joined Colonel Valentine Baker on an eight-month journey to Persia. Colonel Baker was a cavalry officer who had served in the Kaffir and Crimean Wars.
The party travelled to Tbilisi (Tiflis) in Georgia, thence to the port of Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. They crossed the Caspian and travelled inland some 300 miles to Ašchabad in Turkmenistan, among the foothills of the Kopetdag Mountains which form the frontier with Iran (then Persia).
Baker and Gill had intended to explore the Atrek valley, which runs from these mountains to the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea. Unable to do so, they headed more than 400 miles southwest to Tehran in Persia. Searching for ibex and moufflon (wild goats and wild sheep respectively) the party explored the Elburz Mountains that lie between the city and the Caspian Sea. They crossed the range by a pass 12,000 feet above sea level and William Gill described the scene:
The tops of these mountains are covered with loose stones. In the winter the cold is of course intense at these immense altitudes, the water in the numerous course freezes, and the expansion bursts the rock into innumerable fragments. In these solitudes (where down below lies the vast and arid plain stretching towards the horizon, invisible, in the dim haze of the desert) is the home of the ibex and moufflon; and often when no other sound is to be heard but the scream of an eagle astonished at the unwanted sight of a human being, the metallic ring of the loose stones rolling down the mountain-side attracts the sportsman’s notice to a herd of these animals, dashing up what would appear an almost impassable precipice.
The party next skirted Mount Demavand, which reaches half as high again. They then descended into the dense Mazanderan forests, recrossed the mountains to Damghan and followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo along the northern edge of the Khorasan desert to Mashhad.
Baker, Gill and their companions had now travelled more than 500 miles east from Tehran. Heading north, they next visited Kila’t, a place then shown in two different locations on British military maps. This had been the stronghold of Nadir Shah, who before his assassination in 1747, briefly controlled a Middle Eastern Empire including Iran, Afghanistan, western Turkistan and northern India. William Gill was clearly impressed:
Kila’t is one of the most remarkable places in the world; it is a natural fortress, and if anything in the world can be impregnable, it is certainly Kila’t. The description of the Happy Valley in the romance of ‘Rasselas’ [by Samuel Johnson] might almost be taken for it. It is a large valley, surrounded on all sides by mountains absolutely inaccessible from the outside. At the tops of these mountains can be seen perpendicular cliffs, some 200 or 300 feet high. There are five entrances to the valley, through narrow gorges only two or three yards wide, the cliffs on each side towering up like walls. The valley, beside a stream that runs through it, is plentifully supplied with water from springs … The inhabitants have their herds, and cultivate their corn all in the valley, and consequently they could not be starved out.
The party then trekked to Darreh Gaz in the Kopetdag Mountains, about 60 miles southeast of Ašchabad. This was a fertile area on the northern edge of the mountains, looking down onto the steppes of Turkmenistan. It was home to an old but flourishing colony of Kurds, led by their hereditary chief, Hayar Khan. The best British maps showed this place merely as a town or village, rather than a large and thriving autonomous district. Here William Gill was lucky to survive an accident with his gun. Expedition leader Valentine Baker described the incident in his book Clouds in the East:
The hillside was broken by steep and rocky ravines, and one had to descend very carefully, creeping down over sloping slabs of rock. Gill, it appears, was making his way down one of these places with his gun loaded, but on half-cock, and he had rested it for a moment on a projecting ledge, when, to his horror, it suddenly slipped, and, sliding down muzzle upwards, went off, the discharge being straight at him within three yards. … One of his boots (high brown leather riding boots), was cut all to pieces by the shot, and it was an anxious time until we got them off and examined the injury. … Neither vein nor artery had been injured. It was a most merciful escape.
Recrossing the range, Baker and Gill finally fulfilled their ambition of exploring the upper Atrek valley. This revealed again that the existing British maps were very inaccurate. Gill and Baker’s survey work here was to be of great importance in settling the disputed boundary between Persia and Russia, as it enabled Britain to support the Shah’s position on a factual basis. Finally, travelling southwest via Jajarm and Emamshahr (Shahrud), the party rejoined the main road from Mashhad to Tehran.
Colonel Baker was greatly impressed by the young Lieutenant Gill and his survey work during the expedition. Baker published Clouds in the East, his account of the journey, in 1876. Gill read his own brief account to the British Association at Belfast in 1874, which was published that October in the Geographical Magazine, accompanied by a map embodying his own route surveys. The expedition was judged to have made ‘a substantial addition towards a correct knowledge of the Geography of Persia’. It contributed significantly to the new map of Persia then being compiled at the India Office.
On 17th June the following year, Baker was on the Portsmouth to London Waterloo train when he met a buxom lady named Rebecca Dickinson. After making small talk with her, and as the train approached Woking, he made advances that progressed to sexual assault. He was arrested at Waterloo, convicted at Croydon Assizes on 2nd August and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour in Horsemonger Lane jail. But being a well-connected and widely respected officer, he had complete liberty in prison. He was allowed to wear his own clothes, send for food from outside and receive friends.
After release, he served the Turks as Baker Pasha during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8. He later commanded the police in Egypt after the British took control there in 1882.
Places visited by Baker and Gill
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