A ride to Khiva

British army Capt. Fred Burnaby on traveling from Kasala to Petro-Alexanderovsk in January 1876:

“The result was, I found that for myself, whose only personal luggage consisted of a change of clothes, a few instruments, and my gun, and for my Tartar servant, I could not do with less than three camels and two horses.

“It will be easy from those few details to imagine the preparations when General Perovsky had to make in the year 1839, when he attempted to take Khiva in the winter, and why he failed. Intense frost, heavy snowstorms, and want of provisions compelled him to retire when only half-way from Orenburg, having lost two-thirds of his men, nine thousand camels, and an immense quantity of horses, from illness, cold, and hunger –the expense of the expedition amounting to six and a half million roubles. The sum for those days appears a large one, but it is not so if we consider that the invading column consisted of three and a half battalions of infantry, two regiments of Ural, and four sotnias, or 750 Orenburg Cossacks, besides twenty-two guns and a rocket battery. In all, four thousand five hundred men, accompanied by a large intendance, and, in addition to horse transport, ten thousand camels, with two thousand Kirghiz drivers.”

(So, even Russians can be defeated by winter.)

Or, maybe the 1839 campaign was less a disaster than Burnaby described:

“In November 1839, General Vasily Alexeevich Perovsky (1794–1857), commander of the army garrison at Orenburg, marched from Orenburg to Emba (present-day Kazakhstan) and on to Khiva with a detachment of some 5,000 men, 10,000 camels, and 2,000 horses. His object was to extend Russia’s frontiers at a time when Britain was entangled in the conflict that became known as the First Afghan War (1839–40). The campaign was a disaster. Lacking warm clothes, short of fuel, and poorly armed, Perovsky’s troops faced one of the most severe winters on record. Without fighting a single battle, the detachment was forced to turn back at the beginning of February 1840. Perovsky arrived in Orenburg in May, having lost 1,000 men and most of his camels to cold and disease.”

http://www.wdl.org/en/item/6890/view/1/1/#

Every source other than Burnaby says Russian dead totaled 1,000. Of course, the dead do not care whether they were twenty percent or sixty-seven percent of Perovsky’s total.

In Burnaby’s day, an Englishman could go anywhere he had the funds and wherewithal to go. Not all such returned to England, but the world was theirs for exploration.