Military Service and Adventures in the Far East: Including Sketches of the Campaigns against the Afghans in 1839, and the Sikhs in 1845-6

This two-volume work, published in 1847 by cavalry officer Daniel Henry Mackinnon (1813-84) describes his military service in India, in the campaigns against the Afghans in 1839 and the Sikhs in 1845-6. In the first edition, reissued here, the author is referred to only as ‘a cavalry officer’, but in the second edition of 1849, Mackinnon, a career soldier and writer, abandons his anonymity. Volume 1 begins with a lively account of the Andaman Islands, before ‘arrival in India’ at Calcutta and a long march past the foothills of the Himalayas to the North-West Frontier province. Mackinnon fought at the decisive battle of Ghuzni in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and provides an eye-witness account of the storming of the city, though his description of the political and diplomatic conflicts which preceded the outbreak of the wars is somewhat simplistic, and inevitably Anglophile.