David Alexander Driscol is the son of a retired regimental sergeant major of Anglo-Irish and Danish descent and presently an Ensign in the 52nd (Oxfordshire) Light Infantry. He volunteers for secondment to the Indian Army for four years. It is his wish to become an explorer and not a light infantryman like his father. He meets with a Persian professor to heighten his knowledge of this language. While learning from the Professor, he meets with Lieutenant Donald Perkins, a Madras sapper detached to the East India Company Great Trigonometrical Survey. Lieutenant Perkins is forming an expedition to explore Independent Tartary (modern Central Asia) and Driscol is the first man recruited for the 'stroll'. Driscol then journeys to his family in Eccles, Lancashire, before continuing to London to gain his passage east. In his journey south to London, he meets Marquerite with whom he begins a correspondence. Driscol equips himself in the Capitol for travel to the Orient while experiencing several low and high adventures in the city.

Ensign Driscol takes a steamship to Gibraltar and arrives after several undertakings, meeting another young lady named Millicent and her two sisters, and several other people of note. He is separated from Millicent and to continue his voyage, takes a native boat to Ceuta then Malta, fighting off a piratical attack near Algiers. This is where Driscol has his first action and is much dismayed by the loss of friends and killing a man. Driscol and Perkins appear to conduct, and the record is unclear here, an outrageous prank on the Royal Navy and Ensign Driscol then makes his way to Alexandria on a French sailing ship. Heading south from Alexandria they go by canal boat to Cairo where Perkins takes up with a local courtesan. The gentlemen also assist a Maltese friend in investigating the selling of Jews in the slave market of Cairo and visit the Pyramids at Giza. The two then travel to Suez where they become passengers on His Majesty's Indian Navy Steam Sloop Atalanta. They recruit the third member of their expedition, Ensign Alexander Anton Horne of the Bombay Artillery.

The first volume of four to chronicle his movement to India and participation in a British Expedition into Central Asia known then as Independent Tartary.