Preface

Preface

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Endless praise is due to that God who made Joseph of Canaan ruler of Egypt and brought Yusuf of Sulaiman [TN: the author, Yusuf, then in the service of King Nasir-ud-Din Haidar, whose title was Sulaiman Jah] into the land of England; who granted frail-built man the rank of nobility and, by giving him the power of speech, set him above all the animals. If every hair of the body became a tongue, it would still be impossible to tell His praise. A verse:

He truly is such a God to worship
That whatever the pen may write, He is more.

Be that as it may, it is best that I adorn the garden of speech with the flowers of praise of the Prophet. Every kind of praise befits that Messenger who brought the lost from the lane of error onto the highway of guidance, and by the light of his guidance showed the beauty of the beloved goal, the knowledge of God and of His oneness. A verse:

Who is the Prophet? That is, the noble Messenger,
The matchless pearl of the ocean of prophethood.

Since the praise of the sovereign of the age is the centre of this weak one's thoughts, I now turn the rein of the steed of my pen towards her. Glory be to God! What a wonderful monarch she is, through whose justice the lion and the goat drink at one watering place! Her subjects pass their days and nights in ease in the shade of her kindness. The thief has taken up guarding the city, and the lion has taken up shepherding in the forest. The rose of pleasure is watered by her justice; the thorn of hardship is nowhere to be found in the garden tended by her compassion. Her generosity puts the pearl-raining cloud to shame, and Hatim of Tai takes pride in being likened to her. She is the rising point of glory and greatness, Queen Victoria, ruler of England, giver of crowns to the kings of the world; may God make her reign last to the end of time. After the praise of God and of the Prophet, the hopeful seeker of the mercy of the Lord who covers faults and hears excuses, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, says that this humble one has spent much of his time travelling in many countries and has seen the wonders of the age with his own eyes. He told the story of his travels to many friends. They were greatly delighted and eager, and pressed me to write and set it down. So, to please them, this beggar wrote in detail in this little book whatever he had seen on his journey. I hope that its readers will kindly forgive me if, as human beings will, I forget something here and there, and will not be angry with this sinner full of sins; for man is not free of slips and forgetfulness, and the creature of dust has no claim to high rank. A verse:

Reader, do not be so angry with me
If some mistake has crept into the book [Persian].

Since this book tells everything that happened to me, I have named it *Tarikh-e-Yusufi* (The History of Yusuf). *Al-ihtimamu minni wal-itmamu min Allahi ta'ala* [Arabic: "The effort is mine, and the completion is from God Most High"].

The Beginning of the Author's Story

In the year eighteen hundred and twenty-eight of the Christian era (1828), that is the year twelve hundred and forty-four of the Hijra, this beggar left Hyderabad, his own native place, and, seeing Azimabad, Dhaka, Machhli Bandar, Madras, Gorakhpur, Nepal, Akbarabad, Shahjahanabad [TN: Agra and Delhi] and other places on the way, reached Lucknow, the seat of the kingdom. Here, with the help of fortune and the support of Captain Mumtaz Khan Mainkins Sahib Bahadur, I was honoured with service under King Nasir-ud-Din Haidar. King Sulaiman Jah showed such kindness and generosity to my troubled state that I have no power to describe it and no strength to speak of it. He gave me the post of *jama'dar* (junior officer) in his own Sulaimani cavalry regiment. After some days he gave me the rank of *subahdar* (senior Indian officer) of the same regiment and raised my monthly pay. Your servant lived in comfort and gave thanks to the true Giver of blessings. Suddenly a longing to learn English took hold of me. I worked very hard and learned it in a short time. After that I read many books of history and enjoyed learning about cities and the ways and customs of countries. All at once, in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-six of the Christian era (1836), my heart longed to travel the world, and above all to see England. I told King Sulaiman Jah of this and asked for two years' leave. The king, whose court is as high as heaven, gave his permission with great kindness and a reward. This humble one made his salaams and set out towards the goal of his wish. After a short time I reached Calcutta, the seat of government, and spent five or six months seeing the sights there.

After that, on Thursday the thirtieth of March in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-seven of the Christian era (1837), I boarded a ship and set out for London, the capital of England. The ship's name was the *Isabella*; her captain was Mr Dabid Bran [TN: the name as spelled in the Urdu], who had his wife with him. The ship, of six hundred tons' burden, had come up to the bank of the Ganges. A steamship was appointed to help her from there until she reached the salt sea. In a few days the steamer pulled our ship *Isabella* by its own power out of the Ganges into the sea, and from there our ship set off. On both banks of the Ganges the fresh green growth was waving, and here and there stood the rare and handsome houses of English gentlemen. The scene from the moving ship was wonderful beyond description. Seeing that greenery, my heart grew sad at the thought of whether I would ever come here again or not. On Friday the thirty-first of March we reached Khejuri, and the ship stopped. At midnight a violent storm came up; everyone's heart was afraid and the ship rocked, but by the power of God the anchor chain did not break, and no living soul was freed from the cage of its body. A half-line:

A calamity had come, but it passed off well [Persian].

At long last, on the third of April, our ship passed out of the Ganges into the sea. A favourable wind began to blow, the captain opened the sails, and the ship ran like an arrow. My servant Nanku, frightened by the speed of the ship, began to say, "Let the captain furl the sails, or the ship will overturn." I paid no attention to what he said; he sat down in the ship in terror, saying, "I brought myself here for nothing. If I had not come, why should I suffer these hardships?" The captain was so kind to all of us that we suffered none of the discomforts and troubles of a ship. Every kind of food and drink, fruit, milk, meat, champagne and so on was to be had. Through the captain's kindness every door of discomfort was shut in every way. On Sundays and Thursdays, as is the settled custom of the English, more dishes of every kind and sweets were cooked, and everyone had a share. In short, there was comfort of every sort, such as one does not get even at home.

On Tuesday the fourth there was no wind, and a wonderful sight and spectacle appeared. Thousands of turtles were swimming about on the water, rising and falling with the waves. The captain ordered the sailors to get into a boat and hunt them. As ordered, the sailors got into a boat, wounded the turtles with iron hooks, and then lifted them out of the water and laid them in the boat, just as someone gathers dried cow-dung cakes in a field. In this way they had good hunting for two or three *gharis* (a *ghari* is about twenty-four minutes). In that time they caught twenty-four turtles weighing two maunds each [TN: a maund is about forty kilograms]. I saw a strange thing: under the neck of each one a small fish was clinging like a leech. The captain had their flesh cleaned from the bone and shell and shared it out among the people. I felt disgust and loathing for that meat; however much the captain pressed me, I did not eat it. The others ate kebabs and broth made from it with great relish for two or three days. It was a curious thing that on any day when the wind stopped, the herds of turtles, sunk in the sleep of heedlessness, came boldly up to the surface of the water. Then anyone who wanted could catch them easily.

The ship was under way when on the seventh of May a great storm came up. The water leapt up with such force that it came up to the ship's rail. In the end, from its blows, both sides of the ship were broken, and eleven sheep, several hens and ducks and many goods were lost in the water. All the people despaired of their lives, wept, and humbled themselves in prayer at the court of God Most High. On the ninth it eased a little. The captain opened the sails; on the tenth it came on worse than before. The flag and the sails were torn to pieces by the force of the wind and fell into the water, and the ship's mast broke. A table that was fixed in the ship was torn out by the roots by the force of the wind and sank in the water. On both sides of the ship the water leapt up like a mirror close above our heads, but the grace of God saved us from that blow. Everyone was terribly afraid and utterly bewildered by this disaster, crying, "O God, we have no helper but You, and none of us has the power to save himself!" On the eleventh God Most High in His kindness took the storm away. The king of the east [TN: the sun] showed his shining face on his golden throne in the sky. I was so overjoyed when the sun came out that my tongue cannot describe it. As a lover parted from his beloved longs to see her, so the people on the ship looked at the sunshine on every side with the greatest longing. At last, with God's help, the ship escaped these calamities and went on her way.

On Saturday the third of June, at noon, an ill-omened owl swooped down from high in the air towards the ship and settled on the roof of the cabin where all our food was kept. The captain asked me what this sign meant. I said, "It is not good. We have only just escaped one calamity; may it not be that some other disaster comes upon us and drags us into trouble."