Masson was in the field before Burnes. In the month of September 1830 the Resident in the Persian Gulf writes to the Chief Secretary to the Government of India[10] that "an American gentleman of the name of Masson" arrived at Bushire from Bassadore on the "13th June last," and that he described himself as belonging to the state of Kentucky, having been absent for ten years from his country, "which he must consequently have left when he was young, as he is now only about two-and-thirty years of age." The same letter says that previous to the breaking out of the war between Russia and Persia in 1826 Masson "appears to have visited Khorasan from Tiflis by way of Mashed and Herat, making no effort to conceal his European origin," and that from Herat he went to Kandahar, Shikarpur, and Sind.
Masson appears to have furnished some valuable information to the Indian Government regarding the Durani occupation of Herat and the political situation in Kabul and Kandahar, which, according to his own account, he subsequently regretted, as he obviously regarded the British attitude towards Afghanistan at that time in much the same light as certain continental nations regarded the British attitude towards the Transvaal previous to the last Boer war. "About the same time," says the same letter from the Resident at Bushire, Masson was much in the Bahawalpur country (Sind), after which he proceeded to Peshawar, Kabul, Ghazni, etc. Extracts from his reports of his journeys are forwarded with other information. In his book (_Travels in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab, and Kalat_, published in 1842) Masson opens his story with the autumn of 1826, when he was in Bahawalpur and Sind, which he had approached through Rajputana, and not from Afghanistan. He has much to say about Bahawalpur which, however interesting and valuable as first-hand information about a foreign state in 1826, no longer concerns this story. From Bahawalpur he passed on to Peshawar and Kabul, from Kabul to Kandahar, and thence to Shikarpur. As the incidents of his remarkable journey between Kandahar and Shikarpur, described in the letter of the Bushire Resident, are obviously the same as those in his book, the inference is strong that the journey from Tiflis to Herat and Kandahar (which is not mentioned in the book) has been somehow misplaced in the Resident's record.