Arthur Conolly, Victorian Spy

In September 1840, intelligence officer Captain Arthur Conolly set out from Kabul for Central Asia. His orders were to persuade its rulers to unite to resist Russian advances and open their markets to British goods. Conolly, a devout Christian and abolitionist, had a higher agenda: to free thousands of slaves. Writing to a fellow officer, he described his mission as part of a “ great game.” Quoted by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim, historians would use the phrase to describe the geopolitical rivalry between the two nineteenth century superpowers— Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia— in a vast area from Persia to Tibet. The khans of Khiva and Kokand warned Conolly not to travel to Bokhara, where the emir had imprisoned a British officer suspected of spying. Conolly went anyway, was arrested and thrown into prison. Eighteen months later, sketchy accounts reached London that the two officers had been executed, but were contradicted by reports that they were rotting in a cell in the emir’ s palace. It would take an expedition from England by an eccentric, multilingual clergyman to learn the truth.