Military Service and Adventures in the Far East 2 Volume Set

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. The work 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 took part in the decisive battle of Ghazni in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and in all the major engagements of the Anglo-Sikh War, providing eye-witness accounts of the fighting, though his description of the political and diplomatic conflicts which preceded the outbreak of of both wars is somewhat simplistic, and inevitably Anglophile.