Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with an exciting travel account by a dashing British army intelligence officer.

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A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1876.)

The son of a noted clergyman, Frederick Gustavus Burnaby was born in Leicestershire, England, and educated in that country and Germany. He entered the army in 1859 and remained an officer for the rest of his life, but he also found time to travel widely, to produce a great deal of journalism (reporting from Spain, for instance, on the Carlist War of 1874 for the London Times), and to take up amateur ballooning.

Burnaby’s era was one in which such concepts as “duty” and “adventure” were less ambiguous than they are today. Like many Englishmen—and Russians—Burnaby was concerned with the control of Central Asia, a factor felt by both sides to be the key to the retention of India by the British. Thus it was that, having read in 1875 that Russian authorities had forbidden English travelers to visit the new Russian protectorates in the region, Burnaby determined that he must do that very thing. But, as he explained, his leave began in December, forcing him to travel under the worst possible conditions. His “ride” took him by train to St. Petersburg, where he obtained grudging permission to proceed, and subsequently he advanced by train, sleigh, camelback, and horseback through Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan during what turned out to be an unusually severe Russian winter.

A Ride to Khiva is one of the most compulsively readable travel accounts of the nineteenth or any other century. The master of a graphic, headlong style, Burnaby brings to life everything his pen touches, from wretched Russian hovels to the orgiastic feast that follows the slaughter of a horse to a luxurious Khivan bathhouse. This adventure nearly cost Burnaby his hands to frostbite, but he was able to report extensively on the movements and attitudes of his Russian hosts, who treated him most courteously while assuring him that they would meet him one day on the battlefield.    

If you’re looking for a good edition of A Ride to Khiva, the Century (London, 1983) and Hippocrene (New York, 1984) editions include all of the original edition’s fourteen (!) appendices as well as an introduction by noted travel writer Eric Newby. The Oxford edition (New York, 1997) includes an introduction by Peter Hopkirk but only the first of Burnaby’s appendices. If you’d like to read more by Burnaby, see A Ride across the Channel, and Other Adventures in the Air (1882) and especially On Horseback through Asia Minor (1885). And for more information about Burnaby himself, see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha, 1992).

Works similar in setting or scope include Philip Glazebrook, Journey to Khiva: A Writer’s Search for Central Asia (1994); Fitzroy MacLean, To the Back of Beyond: An Illustrated Companion to Central Asia and Mongolia (1974); and Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia (1994).

The image at the top of today’s post is the cover of the first edition of A Ride to Kiva, and the second is a cabinet card portrait of Burnaby by Thomas Fall of 9 and 10 Baker Street, London. The third image is a wood engraving of Khiva by Hildibrand Sc. dating from about 1885.

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