Note 28 — Chapter III

“I shall send,” wrote Major Malcolm, “Mr. Pasley with the Hadjee’s body, which will not only be considered a high compliment, but be useful in a thousand ways. It will preserve this transaction from the touch of Mr. Manesty and Mr. Jones. It will enable me to convey a correct state of the feeling here on the subject to many respectable Persians, and I shall obtain from Mr. P. a true account of the manner in which the transaction is received in Persia. He will give Lovett information which will secure him from error at the outset, and be of the highest utility to him during his residence in India.”—[MS. Correspondence.] It is not certain, however, that the high compliment here designed was duly appreciated by the Persians. Sir Harford Jones (from whose “touch” the transaction was to be preserved) says that “it seems to have escaped Marquis Wellesley that that which might be considered a compliment at Calcutta, might in Arabia, Turkey, and Persia, be regarded as so improper as almost to become an insult..... The Persian moollahs as well as the Persian merchants at Bagdad, were shocked, and on my applying to old Sulemein Pacha for certain honours to be paid to the corpse, when removed from Bagdad to be carried to Nejeef, he said, ‘Very well: as you desire it to be done, it shall be done: but Hadjee Khalil Khan lived an infidel, and with infidels, and was, therefore, destined to hell; he was, however, murdered by infidels, and so became a shahyde (martyr); but his former friends have robbed him of this chance, by deputing an infidel to attend his corpse to the grave; his fate, therefore, is now fixed, and you may carry him to the devil in any manner you like best.’”—[Sir Harford Jones’s account of the transactions of H. M.’s mission to the Court of Persia, &c. Note vii.] It is curious, but somewhat humiliating, to read the different versions of the same transactions put forth by Jones and Malcolm, and their respective adherents. For example, Sir Harford Jones says that when the Hadjee’s body reached Bagdad, Mr. Day, a Bombay civilian, who had been deputed to accompany it into the interior, took fright at the plague, and abandoned his charge. “Mr. Day’s alarm was so great,” he says, “as to become most tormenting to himself, and most ridiculous and troublesome to us, who had stood the plague the preceding year. I, therefore, re-shipped him for Bussorah as soon as possible, and undertook to receive and execute such wishes as the Khan’s relatives expressed to me.” Now the account given of this matter by one of the gentlemen of Malcolm’s mission, sets forth that “Jones had frightened away Mr. Day by alarming accounts of the plague.”-“On this subject,” it was added, “I need make no remarks to you, who know him so well. This might be improper, and would, I imagine, be perfectly unnecessary.” I have dwelt upon these personal matters at greater length than they deserve, because they illustrate the feelings, on either side, with which Jones and Malcolm, at a later and more important period, were likely each to have regarded the parallel but antagonistic mission of the other to the Persian Court. The bitterness which then overflowed was the accumulated gall of years.