India & Punjab – Rare Memoirs of Ranjit Singh’s Colonel of Artillery First edition of Soldier and Traveller: Memoirs of Alexander Gardner, Colonel of Artillery in the Service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Ed., By Major Hugh Pearse, 1898, First edition, 345pp, Original brick-red cloth lettered in gilt on the spine and in black on the upper cover. Frontispiece photogravure portrait of Colonel Gardner in a tartan Sikh uniform with matching turban. One other plate and two maps. Alexander Gardner (1785-1877), was an American adventurer and mercenary of Scottish extraction. He travelled Afghanistan, joining the rebel Habibullah, and then to the Punjab commanding units of Ranjit Sigh’s artillery forces. He recorded his adventures in contemporary diaries recounting them, apparently with embellishments, as an elderly man to Major Hugh Pearse. They have since gone down in literary folklore. His memoirs gives biographical details of around 40 European Soldiers in Ranjit Singh’s service during the Sikh Kingdom