Military Service and Adventures in the Far East

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.