The Pale Abyssinian: The Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer

CHAPTER 1

THE JACOBITE HANOVERIAN

On a damp evening in April 1794 James Bruce sat gazing from the window of his Stirlingshire dining-room and saw a woman walking unaccompanied to her carriage. Having levered his considerable bulk from a chair, he rushed to her aid to perform what would be his final chivalrous deed. On the sixth step of the staircase, he slipped, fell on his head and was dead by morning. It was an ignominious end to a life of rare adventure.

During the previous sixty-four years, Bruce had crossed the Nubian Desert, climbed the bandit-bedevilled mountains of Abyssinia, been shipwrecked off the North African coast and sentenced to death in Sudan. He had lived with the rulers of undiscovered kingdoms and slept with their daughters, been granted titles and lands by barbarian warlords and had then returned – more or less intact – to the place of his birth, a small town near the Firth of Forth where very few believed he had done what he claimed and many pilloried him as a liar and a fraud. Decades after his death, it began to emerge that most of the time he had been telling the truth. He had travelled in Abyssinia and the Sudan, he had been to the source of the Blue Nile and he had charted the Red Sea. But by then he had lapsed into obscurity and his successors had outdone him in both fame and infamy.

Bruce had great charm but he could also be utterly brutal and cantankerous. He was generous to strangers but they crossed him at their peril. He could tumble down African mountainsides and cheat death at the hands of jihad-inspired potentates, yet in the end his demise was caused by a trivial accident. In the early nineteenth century a few commentators wrote about his life by glossing over its inconsistencies and showering him with praise. His own, five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 & 1773 is packed with invaluable information but should have been published as at least three different books. It has not been published in full for decades.

In spite of his prolixity, it is the things that Bruce left out of his life’s work that make him so fascinating. There are many detectable errors in the book (carelessly, he failed to consult his notes) but there are also eloquent omissions and deliberate evasions which contributed to his not being believed on his return. He failed to address the rumour that he had killed the artist who accompanied him and indeed scarcely refers to him in the book. He makes almost no mention of the Ark of the Covenant when one of the few things then known about Abyssinia was that it was claimed to be guarding the Ark. It was, though, his manner which did the greatest damage to his credibility.

Haughty and proud (the portmanteau word ‘paughty’ might almost have been coined for him), he once forced a visitor to eat raw meat after the unfortunate man had expressed doubt at its being the Abyssinians’ favourite dish. Bruce brooked no criticism and eventually refused to discuss his work with anyone except an adoring audience. He was prickly even to his disciples. Too great a display of amazement at his astonishing stories was often interpreted as disbelief and no one was allowed to accuse Bruce of lying and walk away. An expert swordsman from a long line of pugnacious ancestors, he gained notoriety after challenging his former fiancée’s husband to a duel. It was understood that the same treatment would be handed out to what he called his ‘chicken-hearted critics’.

He was born in 1730, with the blood of the Hays and the Bruces, both families famous for their martial history, coursing through his veins. In a century of almost continuous warfare, however, 1730 was a surprisingly peaceful time to arrive. The Treaty of Seville between France, Spain and England had been signed the year before and had produced a temporary lull in the Catholic – Protestant wars that dominated the period. James’s father, David Bruce of Kinnaird, was a Hay of Woodcockdale (a scion of the better known Hays of Errol), a family that fought with honour at Bannockburn and still one of the oldest in Scotland. David’s father had been forced by contract to adopt his wife’s name – Bruce – which can be traced in a moderately straight line to Robert the Bruce, in order to inherit the estate of Kinnaird. The two great Scottish families had been inextricably linked since before Bannockburn and the marriage was merely another link between them.

For a young Scot with such a surname, born so soon after the Act of Union of 1707, it would seem inevitable that James should support the Jacobites, but this was not the case. His father, David, had endured an extremely close brush with death in the aftermath of the 1715 uprising with which he had been intimately involved. He had been sentenced to death and had only escaped the gallows because of the reluctance of Scottish judges to execute Scots accused of breaking English laws. This had been a chastening experience and he was adamant that his son should not follow in his rebellious footsteps. Having died of a ‘lingering illness’, probably tuberculosis, before James’s fourth birthday, his mother Marion had no influence on his upbringing. Whilst Bonnie Prince Charlie was being brought up in exile, so too was James, the former in Catholic France, the latter in staunchly Protestant England. The Young Pretender and his army actually marched past Kinnaird on the way to the final showdown at Culloden but the young James was not there to witness it, nor the Battle of Falkirk which was fought a few miles away. Instead he was in London being raised as an English gentleman. He was forever to remain one.

Well before the ’45 uprising, David Bruce was showing a vulnerability to the charms of women that his son was to inherit. Having fathered James with Marion Graham, he went on to father six more sons and two daughters with his second wife, Agnes Glen. Preoccupied by this frenzied period of procreation and fearful that his son would be caught up in the Jacobite machinations of their Stirlingshire neighbours, the laird of Kinnaird contrived to send his son as far away from their influence as possible. At the age of eight, James was sent to London where for the next few years he lived with the family of his uncle, William Hamilton. From 1738 he was taught both by Counsellor Hamilton and by a Mr Graham who had a small private school in London, but by 1742 it was decided that he needed more formal education. He was sent to Harrow, where he excelled.

In the eighteenth century Harrow was still outside London and it was a respected school. The few hundred boys with whom James was educated would go on to be ministers, courtiers and landowners. Much more so than today, Harrow and the few schools like it were of immense importance to a child’s future. The really important families like the Cecils, Pelhams and Cavendishes had just started sending their sons away to school rather than having them educated at home by tutors. They sent them to one of five schools – Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Winchester or Westminster. By 1800, three-quarters of the English peerage (who comprised the court and the House of Lords and largely controlled the House of Commons) had been educated at one or other of the latter four. James and his two greatest friends, William Hamilton and William Graham, were all first-generation Harrovians. By breaking with family tradition and sending James away, David ensured that his son would always be a member of the British ruling classes rather than the obscure Scottish laird he was otherwise destined to become.

James was an excellent student and soon learned the basic necessities for a young gentleman in the eighteenth century – Latin, Greek, French, philosophy and arithmetic. He also developed a wide circle of friends which he would retain throughout his life and which would become extremely important to him in later years. By all accounts he was a paragon of virtue. In 1744, his stepmother’s brother described him thus: ‘What I wrote to you about James, is all true, with this difference only, that you may say, as the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon, the one half has not been told you, for I never saw so fine a lad of his years in my life.’ His headmaster at Harrow, Dr Cox, praised him in even more glowing terms: ‘He is as promising a young man as ever I had under my care, and, for his years, I never saw his fellow.’

This was no pandering to wealthy parents; James was neither grand nor well off compared with his fellow pupils. Dr Cox reinforced his claims by asking James to give the annual pupils’ address to the school, which he did brilliantly in Latin, as was the custom. This was heady tribute to any boy at one of England’s best schools, but as his mind grew his health began to fail him. A weak chest, inherited from his mother, combined with his great height (in an age when the average was five feet seven) contrived to make him very ill in his teens. With dark red hair and a body shaken with coughing, at fifteen he must have been a bizarre sight, resembling a victim of the rack.

David’s plan to keep his son James away from their rebellious neighbours had worked well and it became more likely that James would be operating the rack rather than lying upon it. Indeed he became a fanatical Hanoverian, making firm alliances with his new English friends, whilst losing contact with the acquaintances of his Scottish childhood. William Graham (who, interestingly, was also his uncle) and William Gerrard Hamilton were in fact born Scottish but they were enjoying the same privileged English education as he and soon became English too.

The distance between England and Scotland was not only cultural. Travel between London and Stirlinghsire was a dangerous and arduous business over roads that were scarcely worthy of the name. Before the advent of the railway and when turnpikes were still used mainly for connecting rivers, much of the journey would be along rutted drove roads which in even quite mild weather frequently became impassable. Presuming he was not intercepted by a highwayman (Dick Turpin was hanged in James’s second year at school), it would have taken the young Scot at least two weeks to return home. John Macadam, who would eventually transform Britain’s roads, had not even been born and for at least another fifty years Englishmen would only journey far into Scotland for adventure – more exploration than tourism. It was still the subject of gripping, incident-filled travel books in the nineteenth century. The young boy therefore spent his holidays far from his place of birth, staying with his Hanoverian guardian, Counsellor Hamilton, which only served to deepen the division from his Scottish family. It was not the most stimulating of environments: the lawyer was reputed to be one of the dullest men in the union. The inveterate letter writer Horace Walpole described him as ‘the first Scot who ever pleaded at the English bar and as it was said of him, should have been the last’.

This environment, designed specifically to cut the boy off from his Scottish roots, had the required effect on James. Throughout his life, although he became very proud of his ancestry and used it unashamedly when necessary, he described himself as an Englishman. On his later travels, he always had an eye open for any way his exploits might benefit the crown. In the Red Sea he would forge treaties; in Spain he would make invasion plans before admiring the sights. This adoption of England was not as odd as it seems; conditioning and distance from home apart, he was born a Lowland Scot rather than a Highlander. Highlanders were generally more interested in independence than Lowlanders and viewed their more southerly countrymen with contempt. In those days ‘Sassenach’ was not a term of abuse used by Glaswegians to describe Englishmen. It was instead used by Highlanders to describe Glaswegians and other Lowlanders. Lowlanders were often terrified of their savage neighbours who lived far more primitive lives and spoke what many considered a strange, unintelligible language. Not until Bruce was in his fifties was the legend of the proud Highlander created by his much younger acquaintance, the novelist Sir Walter Scott. When Bruce was fifteen the Highlanders were actually fighting the English and any book extolling their virtues would have been seditious.

In April 1746 James completed his studies at Harrow but the Highland purges continued in his homeland and it was deemed unwise for him to return. He was thus sent briefly to a finishing school. By April 1747, Bonnie Prince Charlie had completed his dash through the Highlands and had effected his escape to France; the bloody Duke of Cumberland had entered London as Handel termed him the ‘conquering hero’ and northern Britain was safe once more. James was able to return to Kinnaird and attempt to insinuate himself into the bosom of his father’s new family. He spent the summer hunting, a sport at which he excelled, and which would become a lifelong love. He thrived on the fresh air and his health saw a marked improvement. For six months he roamed the fields around Kinnaird, indulging his passion for blood sports; at the age of only sixteen he departed, revived, for Edinburgh University to study for the Bar.

James’s first preference had been to become an Anglican priest. Although it was a vocation for which he became entirely unsuited – he became far too combative – at this time his guardian believed him well suited to the cloth. Writing to David Bruce in 1746, William Hamilton had said:

He very modestly says, he will apply himself to whatever profession you shall direct; but he, in his own inclination, would study divinity and be a parson. The study of the law, and also that of divinity, are indeed both of them attended with uncertainty of success. But, as he inclines to the profession of a clergyman, for which he has a well-fitted gravity, I must leave it to you to give your own directions, though I think, in general, it is most advisable to comply with a young man’s inclination, especially as the profession he proposes is in every respect fit for a gentleman.

James’s ancestor, the Rev. Robert Bruce, had been a guiding light of the early Kirk; indeed in Scotland he still receives a great deal more recognition than his descendant. It would not have been seemly if the Rev. Robert’s great grandson had become a cleric of an opposing faith. This, when combined with the fact that James’s maternal grandfather was the dean of the law faculty at Edinburgh, probably led to David’s decision to overrule James and make him study for the Bar. Law – and Scottish law at that – seems an unlikely career but it was essential that James did something that would support him in later life. The family’s wealth was too thinly spread for James to live off the proceeds of the estate and, if it was necessary for him to work, the law was one of the few respectable options.

So it was that James spent the next few months reading up on the law and attending dry lectures at the university rather than studying the lives of the saints and learning how to deliver sermons. As the heavily annotated margins of the law books which he was supposed to be studying testify, he spent rather more time in the extra curricular study of Italian than on his articles. By the spring of 1748, however, he was too ill to continue. This was to mark the end of his formal education but the lust for knowledge that his studies had instilled in him would be a lifelong preoccupation. Due to the state of medical learning in the eighteenth century it is hard to know what was actually wrong with him: this was still an age when bleeding was considered a cure-all. He could have had asthma, he could merely have been growing too fast, but the symptoms which eventually led to his being forced to leave the university were a constant weakness, wheezing and shortness of breath.

In 1747, at the age of seventeen, he retired to the country and went back to his former pastimes of hunting and shooting. For five years, the weak young man wandered the moors slaughtering the local fauna, reading the Bible and teaching himself modern Romance languages. It was not until 1753 that his sojourn with nature came to an end and his character began to change. He had been heading speedily towards a life of indolent dilettantism but his physical recovery fed his ambition. At last he began to take on some of the characteristics that would help him survive in later life and to behave in a manner more suited to a man destined to become one of our greatest explorers. He recovered his health and filled out. Towering above his contemporaries and with a burly chest to match, he decided to seek his fortune in India. Though brave (fewer than half the writers who went to India returned) this was not particularly unusual. With Robert Clive in his prime, the subcontinent was already well-trodden ground. It was, however, at least a step in the right direction.

Just before he left Edinburgh on 1 August, he and William Graham were initiated into Canongate Kilwinning Lodge No. 2. The smart Edinburgh branch of the Mother Lodge at Kilwinning, Canongate – despite its secondary title – was the most influential masonic lodge in the world, a fertile sanctuary of the Enlightenment which would soon be frequented by Robert Burns, the Adam brothers, James Boswell and Sir Walter Scott. This was a significant moment in James’s career. From it stemmed his great intellectual interest in astronomy and the Arab world, his remarkable ease with foreign bankers and his almost encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure biblical works. For the time being, though, it gave him access to a vast and influential network of people who could help him in his career. He set off for London full of good intentions.

He was by then too old to join the East India Company by the traditional route as a Writer (a clerk with prospects) but had influential acquaintances and money enough to become a licensed trader. He petitioned the directors for a free trader’s permit but before it was granted he fell in love and the course of his life was once more changed. Meeting Adriana Allan, the beautiful daughter of a London wine merchant’s widow (who came with an excellent dowry), was to set him on the route which would eventually lead him by a much meandering course to ‘the coy fountains’ of the Nile.

In the mid-eighteenth century London was an influential capital but it had not yet taken on the glorious trappings of Empire. There was not a square foot of pavement in the entire city; indeed, there would not be until after Bruce returned from his travels. William Hogarth was at the height of his powers and the streets of the capital were much as he depicted them. The sale of gin had only just been restricted and rakes progressed down streets lined with harlots and steeped in ordure. The inhabitants of the city were debauched, diseased and for the most part mired in the most hideous poverty. Even extreme wealth – which at that point Bruce did not possess – could not protect the visitor from the horrors of everyday life.