THE PALE ABYSSINIAN

A LIFE OF JAMES BRUCE,

AFRICAN EXPLORER AND ADVENTURER

Miles Bredin

DEDICATION

For my father, James Bredin

In memory of James Bredin, Carlos Mavroleon

and Giles Thornton

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Introduction

1 The Jacobite Hanoverian

2 The Calamitous Consul

3 The Enlightened Tourist

4 Into the Unknown

5 All Points Quest

6 Courting Disaster

7 The Coy Sources

8 The Siren Sources

9 The Highland Warrior

10 Astronomical Success

11 Flight to Egypt

12 The Rover’s Return

Epilogue: Great Scot

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAP

INTRODUCTION

James Bruce was one of the world’s greatest explorers. A full century before the age of Stanley and Livingstone, he ventured deep into the African hinterland and added vast tracts of country to the map of the known world. His greatest achievements were in Abyssinia where he discovered the source of the Nile, a riddle that had preoccupied the world since the ancient Egyptians began to wonder where all the water came from. In his success, however, lay his failure. It was the wrong Nile – the Blue rather than the White – and he was so far in advance of any other African explorers that no one believed him anyway. It was another hundred years before Speke and Burton made their discovery of Lake Victoria and finally solved the ‘opprobrium of geographers’ that had for so long obsessed the world. Bruce was of course not the first to discover the source of the Nile; the Ethiopians were, from ancient times, well aware that the source lay in their country.

Bruce has an undeserved and unenviable reputation. He is generally remembered, if at all, as ill-tempered and a liar. And whilst there is a certain amount of truth in both accusations, they also leave a great deal unsaid. He was foul-tempered but only towards the end of his life when, his reputation in tatters, he was suffering from myriad illnesses; and he was a liar, but only in a small way, as were all the explorers who followed him. The main accusation against him – that he never went to Abyssinia – was proved to be a fallacy fifty years after he died, by which time it was too late to restore his reputation. In this book I hope to do that and more. Bruce was a colossus of his age. He inspired Mungo Park to trace the Niger, Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write ‘Kubla Khan’ and generations of scholars to learn about the ancient culture of Ethiopia. He should be remembered for that and not for the envy he inspired in others.

Bruce could not have achieved half that he did had he been the vicious old curmudgeon described in popular folklore. In fact, in his heyday he was considered charming and handsome as well as extraordinarily large: he was six foot four and immensely strong. Women everywhere adored him, from the harems of North Africa to the salons of Paris and the court of the Abyssinian Emperor. Men too loved him, but only a certain kind of man; in them he inspired an almost fanatical loyalty. He could ride like an Arab, shoot partridge from the saddle at the gallop and faced danger with icy calm. These particular manly virtues were all very well in the East where they won him friends and influence but in the eighteenth-century world of Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell they were of little use. His bluff, no-nonsense attitude won him few friends at the court of George III and his rage at having his word doubted only made him seem the more ridiculous.

It is through the eyes of those three men – Walpole, Johnson and Boswell – that most is known about Bruce, and it is their opinions and viewpoints that I hope to redress. Bruce lived for sixty-four years; the first thirty and last twenty were spent in Britain. He was in his prime during the fourteen or so years in between, exploring the unknown world with a sword in his hand and a pistol at his side, leaving weeping women and vanquished enemies in his wake. The painter Johann Zoffany met him soon after his return to the West. He saw Bruce as he should be seen: ‘This great man; the wonder of his age, the terror of married men, and a constant lover.’ This is the Bruce about whom I have written: brilliant intellectual, talented diplomat and fearless explorer but, above all, a magnificent man.

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.

When Bruce arrived in 1753 (he had by then become Bruce and left the James of his youth behind) London was on the very cusp of its most glorious years. The city was changing daily after the political upheavals of the forties. The process began that very year with the founding of the British Museum, initially to house Hans Sloane’s collection. Rivers were still crooked but were slowly being forced to straighten and become canals, industry was ripe for revolt and minds both in London and Edinburgh were yearning for Enlightenment. Samuel Johnson had published his dictionary but had not yet met his biographer, James Boswell. It would be another fifteen years before Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Royal Academy. James Watt had yet to improve the steam engine, the burgeoning iron industry was still reliant on charcoal and the innovations which were to transform the country were still largely restricted to agriculture. The boom years of the 1760s, the canal mania of the 1780s and the mixture of intelligence and patronage that exploded into the Enlightenment all lay ahead. Bruce was one of the first of an extraordinary concentration of Scots who would transform the country and, with the outward looking attitude of which Bruce was a pioneer, the world.

In 1753 Great Britain was still a country unsure of itself. It had only been ratified by the Act of Union in 1707 and was still ruled by a German king who was more fond of his home town than his kingdom and was not entirely comfortable on his throne; he could scarcely speak English. Britain was an acknowledged power but it was still only great in name. Even among the electors of Hanover, our royal family was not in the forefront. Frederick the Great was the successful member of the family, not George II or his young grandson and eventual successor.

It was in this world of as yet unfulfilled promise that Bruce was introduced to the elegant and witty young Adriana Allan. They fell in love and on 3 February 1754 were married. For a few months they lived happily in London. All thoughts of India were discarded and Bruce settled down to learn about the wine trade; part of Adriana’s substantial dowry had been a partnership with her brother in the Allans’s successful wine importing business. Bruce threw himself into his new occupation with gusto but, just as when he studied law at Edinburgh, he soon became preoccupied with learning other, less profitable things. He was fascinated by different languages, countries and peoples and would spend hours studying subjects in which he was interested. His restless curiosity encouraged him to explore many diverse areas of learning: military architecture became a great interest at this point. The study of wine led him to a broader understanding of botany; astronomy led to geography and both became passions. Fast evolving into a man of the Enlightenment, his only lack of interest was in working for a living. What he really needed was a good private income. He was now paying the price of his father’s virility: his small inheritance was dwindling by the day. Indeed he had often been forced to plead with his father to increase his allowance, before the opportunity of becoming a wine merchant arose.

In September 1754 Adriana, now pregnant, set off with her mother for France. Bruce planned to meet them at Boulogne. Adriana was suffering from as yet undiagnosed tuberculosis, and they planned to spend the winter in Provence where Bruce would look at vineyards and Adriana would recover her health. They had spent much of the past few months taking the waters in Bath and Bristol (then a fashionable spa) in the vain expectation of curing Adriana’s consumption. Bruce hoped that a winter spent in the beneficial climate of Provence would effect a similar cure to the one which had strengthened him after leaving university. It was not to be. Healthy living and plenty of exercise was no cure for TB: Adriana died within a week of their arrival in Paris. It was a blow that fell particularly hard on the young Bruce. Motherless, he had spent years away from home while his father produced a new family; he had been sick and had found it hard to indulge his ambitions. At the age of twenty-four he had at last found some happiness and human warmth only to see it taken from him a few months later. Writing to his father in November, Bruce was feeling justifiably downcast.

If I could be susceptible of more grief, I should have been much concerned for my good friend Mr Hay [a recently deceased cousin]; but my distress at present does not admit of augmentation. Death has been very busy among my relations of late. My poor wife, my kind uncle [Counsellor Hamilton had died in March], who had always been a tender father to me, both gone in eight months! God almighty do with me as he sees best!

Adriana’s death had a gruesome aspect. The manner of her demise and the events following had been particularly appalling and had rekindled Bruce’s hatred of Catholics. As Adriana had coughed Gemellus-like in their Parisian rooms, the couple had been assailed by ‘Roman Catholic clergy hovering about the doors’. And when his pregnant love died, Bruce discovered that it was illegal to bury his Protestant wife in consecrated ground. He was only saved from resorting to common land by the intercession of Lord Albemarle, the British ambassador. Eventually Bruce was allowed to conduct the funeral at midnight in the embassy’s private plot.

For an Englishman to harbour a particular malevolence against Catholics in the eighteenth century, over and above that which was normal, was in itself remarkable. The vilification of Catholicism was at its height, helping to gather the country around the Protestant king, and was one of the founding principles of the still new Great Britain. Strangely, however, Adriana’s death did nothing to instil any anti-French feeling in Bruce’s Protestant bosom. Throughout the century and beyond, there was an aristocratic truce between warring nations. In the years to come, Bruce travelled all over Europe not so much as an Englishman but as an aristocrat (he was always known as le chevalier Bruce in France, Signor Cavaliere Bruce in Italy, even by those who understood the British class system and knew that he was a laird and not a knight). He corresponded with French friends, he used French agents, dressed à la mode Française, drank French wine and, like many of his peers, he spoke French with his friends. There were laws banning the import of French lace because it was so expensive that it affected the balance of payments, not because wearing it was unpatriotic. For those who could afford it, imported lace remained de rigueur until the 1850s. Despite his unhappy memories of Paris and indeed his later travels in the lace-making provinces of the Netherlands and Italy, Bruce wore French or Brussels lace when wishing to look smart and would do so all his life.

Immediately after Adriana’s funeral in the early morning of 11 October, Bruce left his mother-in-law in Paris and headed for the coast in a fit of sorrow:

From thence, almost frantic, against the advice of everybody, I got on horseback, having ordered the servant to have post horses ready, and set out in the most tempestuous night I ever saw, for Boulogne, where I arrived next day without stopping. There the riding, without a great coat, in the night time, in the rain, want of food, which, for a long time, I had not tasted, want of rest, fatigue and excessive concern, threw me into a fever.

He eventually arrived back in London a few days later, sick and miserable. ‘Thus ended my unfortunate journey, and with it my present prospect of happiness in this life.’

He had just cause for lapsing into depression. Almost everyone to whom he was close – his mother, uncle, brother and wife – had died and left him with a permanent sense of impending loss. In spite of or perhaps because of this he became profoundly self-sufficient and was genuinely content when on his own. As more of his close friends and relatives died in his twenties, he developed a kingly arrogance that would win him few friends but went a long way towards keeping him alive when he was travelling in parts of the world where unbounded self-confidence was a prerequisite for survival. Bruce developed a bravado in the face of danger which would often tip the balance in his favour at hostile foreign courts. Mungo Park, who was sent to discover the course of the Niger, directly as a result of Bruce’s journeys in search of the Nile’s source, suffered many dangers but combated them with a contrasting subservience:

Though this trough was none of the largest, and three cows were already drinking in it, I resolved to come in for my share [wrote Park in his first book] and kneeling down, thrust my head between two of the cows, and drank with great pleasure, until the water was nearly exhausted, and the cows began to contend with each other for the last mouthful.

This may have been acceptable and successful behaviour (until his untimely death in 1806) in Mungo Park’s West Africa but in more sophisticated Abyssinia and Sudan, Park’s method would have labelled Bruce an expendable slave. Hard though Bruce’s youth was, rather than weaken him it helped him to develop an emotional carapace that little could crack.

In London, he at once dedicated himself to learning, leaving most of the running of the wine business to his brother-in-law. In the next two years he became fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, brushed up his Greek and Latin and learned how to draw. At Harrow, he had been taught basic drawing skills but he wanted to be able to paint the sights he was planning to visit. His interest in the wine business would give him the opportunity to do a Grand Tour like so many of his contemporaries but he wanted to make his journey worthwhile. His constant friend, the artist and engraver Robert Strange, found him a teacher, Maître Jacob Bonneau, whose duty it was not only to teach Bruce how to draw but also to instil in him what the editor of the second edition of Bruce’s Travels described as ‘a correct taste in painting’. The midnight ride after Adriana’s death had done nothing but worsen Bruce’s health and had caused a recurrence of his childhood bronchial problems. For two years he kept himself one part removed from society, coughing and spitting blood whilst studying astronomy, art and architecture and dealing as little as possible with the wine business. It was not until 1757 that he believed himself sufficiently recovered and well enough prepared for informed tourism.

In July of that year, Bruce set sail from Falmouth to embark on a tour of Spain and Portugal, justified by doing some business with the British port families in Oporto. It was an eventful journey. Britain was again fighting with France – indeed, they were set upon by two French ships during the voyage. Bruce was not one to panic. ‘My fellow travellers Messrs Stevenson [sic] and Pawson went down and put each of them on two shirts in case we were taken. I made no preparation,’ he told his commonplace book. He would maintain his courage in the face of danger for the rest of his life but he would change his mind about preparation. By the time he set off on his real travels he would be almost obsessive in his planning.

They landed at La Corunna on 15 July. Bruce and Matthew Stephenson immediately set off to inspect the harbour at Ferrol. Pawson was worried that they might be arrested for what today would be the equivalent of taking photographs of a strategic airport. Bruce, though, had been horrified by a Spanish captain they had met in the port who seemed to know far too much about the state of the British fleet. Imbued with a new talent for military engineering, he wanted to carry out some freelance intelligence work. They mapped the harbour, inspected the fortifications and took copious notes before setting off to do some more traditional sightseeing. Bruce and Stephenson were to spend much of the next few months together, touring through Spain and Portugal, where Bruce’s interest in martial architecture and Masonry would both have been satisfied, for the area they travelled through was rich in Templar history. The castles of the Ordem de Christo, Santiago and Calatrava, built by warrior monks whom Bruce believed to have been the forefathers of Freemasonry, were scattered about the countryside. There was much too of artistic interest, although Bruce did not hold orthodox views on everything he saw:

In the evening we went to see the famous church of Santiago di Compostella the outside is elegant enough … the inside has nothing in it worth notice … The paintings are executed with about as much judgement as they were plann’d. Considerably worse than the worst daubing I ever saw on a country signpost or with a burnt stick upon a wall.

His studies in art history at least qualified Bruce to criticize the church’s otherwise admired portico della glori by Mateo and its renowned carvings. It was not the only thing he disliked; the entire region offended him: ‘We now took our leaves of Galicia one of the most disagreeable countries ever I saw, upon all accounts the whole face of the country is hideous.’ So did Portuguese inns: ‘We were lodged in one of the worst inns in Portugal which is saying one of the worst inns in the world.’ And indeed the Portuguese themselves: ‘There are many particular customs in Portugal, all of which may be known by this rule, that whatever is done in the rest of the world in one way, is in Portugal done by the contrary.’

Though Bruce loathed Portugal and the Portuguese he was forced to spend some time there inspecting the vines and sampling the vintage for his wine business. His irritation was relieved only by the English people he met. In fact he was being overly harsh on the Portuguese who had just suffered a devastating earthquake that had left the country in ruins. The effects of that great earthquake can still be seen in Lisbon today where the few buildings to survive from before 1750 are those that were built on marshy ground which absorbed the tremors. Unfair or not, Bruce’s was to remain an abiding hatred. Thirty-five years later he would devote a substantial part of his book on the Nile to criticizing and discrediting the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries who had visited the country before him. Throughout his life, he bore grudges with a long-lasting and peculiar malevolence, long after the time when most people would have forgotten the original slight. In later life, he took three separate court cases, involving property disputes, through the entire judicial system to the House of Lords; his extended introduction to the Travels contained a sustained and virulent attack on critics who had offended him fifteen years previously, which he was well aware was likely to work against him. Weakness offended Bruce and he would be blind to the enfeebled Portugal’s merits for the rest of his life.

By November he had shaken the dust of Portugal from his feet and arrived in Madrid. On his way he had learnt how to deal with customs men, a lesson that was to serve him well. He wrote at the border: ‘Here you are asked for your passport by the governor and your baggage undergoes a strict search. If you have no letters to the administrator you must be particularly careful of having no snuff either French or Portuguese not even in your snuff box.’

His writing style was becoming increasingly eccentric. He sounds as though he was writing either a guide book or a letter to a friend. He was in fact merely taking notes in his commonplace book. ‘At the Caldas the Inn is very bad. I would advize all English travellers to go from Aleobaca to St Martinho which is very little out of their way.’

Bruce later formed a policy of never writing for publication unless it was on a subject not previously noted and never, as far as we can tell, showed any inclination to publish a book of his European travels. One wonders, therefore, for whom he was writing these handy travellers’ tips.

Spain, despite being full of Catholics, was fascinating territory for Bruce. He was intrigued by the Moorish and Templar castles of Andalusia and resolved to learn more about them. He started to learn Arabic in the markets of the region and contrived to gain entry to the renowned library of the Escorial (the sixteenth-century monastery built by Philip II for his warrior monks). He made friends with and was even offered a job at court by Don Ricardo Wall, an Irish courtier of the king, but was still not allowed into the Escorial. He thus continued his tour of Europe with his interest in the world beyond it aroused but unsatisfied.

Bruce had left England on an extended business trip but from Christmas 1757 he was travelling solely for pleasure and education. In Bordeaux he became a temporary member of French society – hunting, going to parties and attending the fashionable salons. It was not unheard of for Englishmen to travel in France at times of animosity between the two countries nor vice versa, but it was generally done with the approval of both governments. Bruce was on no government mission yet was allowed to travel regardless. Given that France was at war with Britain at the time and Bordeaux was one of France’s principal ports, this indicates considerable charm on Bruce’s part in addition to his better known curmudgeonliness. He soon, however, tired of polite society.

Bruce resolved to continue his journey through much of France, Strasbourg and up the Rhine to Frankfurt and thence to Brussels, then the capital of Holland. There he bought some books which would transform his life – the works of Job Ludolf, a German, the father of Ethiopian scholarship. They had been written in the sixteenth century when Ludolf – then resident in Rome – had met Gregorius, an Ethiopian monk, and had been fascinated by his stories of his homeland. Their collaboration formed the foundation of all foreign knowledge of Ethiopia and, to this day, Ludolf is still consulted by students of Ethiopic. The books contained a précis of known Ethiopian history, a grammar of the Ethiopian liturgical language, Geez, and a description of Ethiopia’s unique Christian religion. Whilst in Brussels, Bruce also bought many Arabic books from which he managed to teach himself to read the language that he later perfected on his travels.

While nourishing his intellectual interests, Bruce also attended to his more basic instincts. In the next few months he contrived to witness a battle and to fight a duel, challenging his as yet little tested courage. Happily both conflicts were resolved with no loss of Bruce blood. They did though give the budding explorer his first taste of danger. The history of the duel is rather murky, probably due to the absurdity of the episode. In the 1750s duelling was going out of fashion in Britain, and yet more so on the Continent. Two decades later he faced ridicule for challenging someone to a duel; at this time, however, it was deemed only slightly silly. F. B. Head, who had the story from Bruce’s daughter, described the incident in his otherwise laudatory Life of Bruce:

On the second day after his arrival [in Brussels] he happened to be in the company of a young man, a perfect stranger to him, who was rudely insulted. Bruce foolishly remonstrated with the aggressor, who sent him a challenge, which he accepted. They met; Bruce wounded his antagonist twice, and in consequence left Brussels immediately.

He took advantage of this forced departure (he feared a manslaughter charge) to see an army in action.

For at least another fifty years war was to remain a spectator sport which could be watched with relative impunity, even by citizens of the warring factions. In fact, it was a popular pastime for people who wanted a taste of adventure and danger without incurring too much risk to their person. Though of course fictional, it did not seem strange to Tolstoy’s readers when Pierre in War and Peace observed the Battle of Borodino (1812) from his grassy knoll:

Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutuzov and his suite, to compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking at the field of battle as he was, as it seemed to him, with the same feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth of feeling Pierre had noticed the day before.

And thus it was nothing out of the ordinary when Bruce and several shiny-faced fellow Englishmen, then serving with the Dutch army, embarked on a short trip to northern Germany where they watched the Germans and French fight each other at the Battle of Crevelt.

Soon after the excitement of the battle, Bruce received in Brussels the worst of news from home. His father had died in May, joining the long list of Bruce’s recently dead friends and relatives. The twenty-eight-year-old was left with a much reduced inheritance and myriad responsibilities. His many half siblings had drained the family coffers and, coupled with the complications of dividing the estate, Bruce found himself unable immediately to fulfil the ambitions to travel that his Grand Tour had inspired. It was not until December 1762 that he finally resolved the issue by settling with his half-brother, David, who had joined the army. He did well out of the arrangement for it soon emerged that his land was a great deal more valuable than had previously been believed. Kinnaird – ‘a house to be lived in not looked at’ (according to Nimmo in his A General History of Stirlinghsire. The house no longer exists) – was built upon a rich seam of coal that was to make Bruce’s life a financially comfortable one. He was extremely fortunate, however. But for an extraordinary coincidence the money would not have flowed until the next generation.

If, in 1759, coal had been found almost anywhere else in the world it would have languished for another fifty years and thus have been of no use to a hard-up young adventurer. The Bruce family miners (there was an almost serf-like class of people who mined coal in Scotland and were bought and sold with land) had been digging in a desultory way for years but no one had made a decent profit out of the excavations. The Industrial Revolution was not yet under way and there was none of the insatiable demand that was so to enrich such later mine owners as the Lowthers just over the border in Westmorland. In nearby Carron, however, there was a small company part-owned by one of the most brilliant practical scientists of the age. John Roebuck was the first partner of James Watt and had set up a firm at Carron with the businessman Samuel Garbett. The Carron Company was to pioneer a method of smelting iron ore that would transform industry. It involved coke made from coal rather than charcoal and Bruce was the closest supplier of coal. The Carron Company became major cannon makers in an era with an enormous demand for arms and Bruce made a fortune supplying them with fuel. Today, one can still see iron letter boxes made by the Carron Company on the streets of Britain.

It was a heaven-sent opportunity for the young Scot and, although he behaved extraordinarily badly in all his dealings with the company, suing them and disputing their every action on his return from his travels, this association more than any other allowed him to travel the world at his own expense and to have all the adventures that make up the most interesting part of his life. Without the discovery of this new use for coal and the accident of Bruce having it on his land, he would have been compelled to retire to Scotland and live the life of a Scottish laird.

By now almost thirty, Bruce was at last in a position to do something with his life. Since leaving Harrow fifteen years earlier he had amassed a great store of knowledge which he constantly supplemented. Botany had become an interest through his work as a vintner and friendship with the dilettante and patron of naturalists, Daines Barrington; he had studied law, military architecture, astronomy, the Bible, art, Arabic and masonic lore. A great talent for languages meant that he was not confined to English reading matter and this had aroused in him a thirst for news of the world outside Europe. The death of his father and the resulting inheritance would enable him to use all his learning to a more productive end. Thus it was that Bruce embarked on his thirtieth year, prepared for informed exploration but still lacking a mission. One was about to present itself.

CHAPTER 2

THE CALAMITOUS CONSUL

One man was to be the catalyst for Bruce’s new life – the politician, civil servant and former traveller, Robert Wood. Wood had the ear of all the great men of the age. Pitt, Egremont, Halifax, Bute, Grenville and the king himself, all listened to the man who had explored the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek before going on to forge a brilliant career in the service of the crown. As eighteenth-century political alliances were made and dissolved, as administrations rose and fell, Wood, who purposely avoided great office, was one of the few men who consistently kept close to power. Ministers came and went but he managed to outstay them all until his death in 1771. His first significant job had been as Pitt’s secretary at the Irish office where he soon became known as ‘Mr Pitt’s Wood’, but from there he had moved on to greater things, always managing to keep out of the way when governments fell and always reappearing when the new ones arose. It is not certain how the two men met but, although there are no records of either claim, Wood said that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Although they were not contemporaries, Harrow may well have been the link between him and Bruce. Wood recognized the spark of talent in the unfulfilled Scot and ensured that it was kindled and fed. It was through Wood’s efforts that Bruce’s abilities were put to more productive use than that of enlightened land owning.

The two were already friends when British relations with Spain declined drastically once more and it occurred to Bruce that the scribblings he had made in Ferrol a few years earlier might be of some use to the country. He formulated a plan for the capture of Ferrol; from this seemingly impregnable port where he had spent a few days with Matthew Stephenson in July 1757, an invasion could be launched. The plan offered two things Bruce sought: advancement and the opportunity to wage war upon a Catholic country. He wrote to Wood and ‘offered to fix an ensign upon the landing place in the first boat that went on shore’.

Wood took the plan from Bruce and arranged an interview with William Pitt. Secretary of State Pitt – who had yet to become either Prime Minister, Chatham, or elderly – was impressed by Bruce but was unable to accept the scheme since war with Spain, let alone invasion of one of its principal ports, was a catastrophe he was then trying to avoid. Already embroiled with Frederick the Great of Prussia against France, Russia and Austria, another front was the last thing he desired. He would, however, take note for the future, he said. France was by now the principal enemy and Spain was becoming of secondary importance.

It must have been a galling time for Bruce; his contemporaries were making names for themselves whilst he had only just managed to extract himself from the wine business in which he was no longer interested. His affairs in Scotland were still not settled to his satisfaction and until that was done he was unable to plan his future. He returned north invigorated by his flirtation with power but still having achieved little. He threw himself into re-organizing the estate, attempting to remove some tenant farmers and coal miners who were spoiling the view from Kinnaird. He had great plans for the house and park so at the same time ensured that the new collieries being planned to supply the Carron Company would not provide additional eyesores.

Months later, he heard from Wood again and was summoned to London. His Ferrol plan was being revived by Pitt but in a modified form that Bruce believed would doom the project to failure. It was intended that the attack on Ferrol should coincide with an invasion of France through Bordeaux. Swiftly, Bruce composed a memorandum in which he begged the government not to pursue such a course. It had some effect and the original plan was once more adopted and championed by Pitt. Ferrol would be invaded as Bruce recommended and an army landed. It was, however, almost immediately abandoned due to objections from the Portuguese ambassador who, as the representative of Britain’s oldest ally, could not be disregarded. Bruce could not understand why he was being consecutively ignored then fêted by the great men of the day and in high dudgeon he decided to return once more to Scotland and find himself a wife. His ego was not the most important casualty of the plan’s rejection: a furious Pitt went to Bath and resigned over the issue.

As Bruce made his preparations to leave, however, one of his conspicuously more successful friends – William Hamilton – contacted him and, acting as Lord Halifax’s secretary, asked Bruce to come and see the great statesman. Hamilton and Bruce had remained friends since Harrow but, while Bruce had battled with illness and spent rather too much time hunting and changing careers, Hamilton had only deviated once. He had trained as a lawyer and then changed course to become a politician. By this time, he even had a nickname – ‘Single Speech’ Hamilton – an epithet he had earned following his spectacular fifteen-hour maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1754. The speech was said to have been written by Samuel Johnson but, since Hamilton rarely spoke in public again, this charge was never proved. His reticence, however, earned for him a great reputation as a thinker, although perversely he also retained his standing as an orator. Hamilton was thus by this time – seven years after the speech – an important player in the corridors of power. (This would be the apex of his career. He would later be described by Lord Charlewood as ‘a man whose talents were equal to every undertaking; and yet from indolence, or from too fastidious vanity, or from what other cause I know not, he has done nothing’.) Lord Halifax sympathized with Bruce – who had wasted much time commuting between Scotland and London only to be left languishing in anterooms by busy ministers – and told the industrious laird that he had work for young men of initiative. Acting under Wood’s influence, Halifax offered Bruce the consulship at Algiers. It was just the kind of employment that he both wanted and needed.

The two men talked long about the possibilities that the posting could offer a man of Bruce’s enterprise. Halifax expected Bruce to perform his consular duties but he also hoped that he would use the post as a platform from which he could explore and record what he saw for the benefit of the new Britain. Robert Wood had discovered and recorded many of the art treasures of the ancient world but there were hundreds of other sites that required classification. Algiers would be the perfect place from which to mount expeditions and his role as consul would give Bruce the authority to travel in style and safety. The menial work, claimed Halifax, would be handled by a vice-consul, who could stamp all the forms and deal with the day-to-day running of the consulate. Then as now, embassies and consulates in Africa were rather more involved in promoting trade than extending the hand of interracial friendship. Someone more knowledgeable would engage in affairs of business whilst Bruce would appear at official functions and travel. Halifax’s plans, however, were foiled and Bruce was compelled to learn the art of diplomacy on the hoof. Algiers was an important, though unprestigious, posting where angering the ruling Dey could result in the enslavement of many British sailors and merchants who sailed in the Mediterranean under a protective treaty with the city state. The Dey was considered little more than a pirate by Britain yet he was in a position to be a serious threat to trade. Bruce would later be condemned for his diplomatic ineptitude although he had been employed for a completely different purpose.

Halifax’s principal wish, claimed Bruce, was ‘that I should be the first, in the reign just now beginning [George III had become King in 1760], to set an example of making large additions to the royal collection, and he pledged himself to be my loyal supporter and patron, and to make good to me, upon this additional merit, the promises which had been held forth to me by former ministers for other services.’ (Bruce claims to have been offered a baronetcy and a pension for his plan to attack Ferrol. There is no record of this but it would have been a perfectly natural offer.) He continued:

The discovery of the source of the Nile was also a subject of these conversations; but it was always mentioned to me with a kind of diffidence, as if to be expected only from a more experienced traveller. Whether this was but another way of exciting me to the attempt I shall not say; but my heart in that instant did me the justice to suggest, that this, too, was either to be atchieved [sic] by me, or to remain, as it had done for the last two thousand years, a defiance to all travellers, and an opprobrium to geography.

The deal struck, Bruce headed back to Scotland with a new spring in his step. He was at last a man with a purpose. But he must first settle his affairs. The estate had to be put into the hands of lawyers and factors, the bank must arrange for him to be able to draw money in Cairo and other points east and he must prepare himself for what was destined to be a long journey. On 18 February 1762, he received official notice from Robert Wood that the consulship was his, and moreover, Wood had managed to arrange matters such that Bruce would be able to spend time in Italy on the way. There he would finish his artistic education in order that he might be able better to appreciate the antiquities of the ancient world.

At the age of thirty-two Bruce’s professional life had at last come together. His love-life followed suit: he had fallen head over heels for a sixteen-year-old neighbour – Margaret Murray – who promised to wait for him whilst he was in foreign parts. (We know nothing of his relationships with women between the death of his first wife and his engagement to Margaret. He never wrote about this period, but judging by his later behaviour we can presume that he had mistresses and women friends.) Prepared and cocksure in both his private and public lives, he went to London where he was presented at court and given details of the task that awaited him.

The king had, in fact, initially objected to Bruce’s appointment. With the good sense which he would retain, for the most part, until much later in his reign, he had ventured to Halifax that it might be wiser to appoint a consul who knew something of the Barbary States. It was true that Bruce spoke Arabic, an unusual accomplishment, but since none of his predecessors had done so, and all consuls were provided with an interpreter, this was not seen as an advantage. Other than this, Bruce had no qualifications for the job. The appointment was, and was intended to be, a sinecure. Wood, though, had not only the ear of the prime minister, but also that of the king. Only two years later he would be made Groom Porter to the Royal Household, a role which had nothing to do with brushing or carrying and everything to do with influence. Already, in 1762, he was in a position to calm the king’s anxieties and ensure that his protégé was well-received. In April Bruce, by then ‘a man of Herculean physique and more than ordinary strength of mind’ (according to Nimmo in his History of Stirlingshire), left Britain for France. It would be twelve years before he returned.

In his baggage he had hundreds of books and instruments to which he would add on his travels. Ludolf’s History of Ethiopia would have been near the top of the pile with Herodotus, Cosmas Indicoplustes and his mentor Wood’s 1753 publication The Ruins of Palmyra. These would come to a sad end in Cairo:

To reduce the bulk as much as possible, after considering in my mind what were likeliest to be of service to me in the countries through which I was passing, and the several enquiries I was to make, I fell, with some remorse, upon garbling my library, tore out all the leaves which I had marked for my purpose, destroyed some editions of very rare books, rolling up the needful parts, and tying them by themselves. I thus reduced my library to a more compact form.

Bruce had measuring rods, three telescopes from François Watkins in Charing Cross, another made for Edward Wortley Montagu by Adam, quadrants and charts of the stars so he could use them correctly. (Edward Wortley Montagu, the supremely eccentric son of Lady Mary and a later critic of Bruce, had been unable to collect his telescope for at the time he was penniless in Italy, reeling from the news that his mother, who had just died, had left him only a guinea in her will.) Bruce was extremely interested in astronomy but would also be using the equipment for navigational and charting purposes. He did not merely wish to discover the source of the Nile; he wanted to put it on the map. The telescopes had been troublesome to obtain since all the worlds’s astronomers were preparing for the transit of Venus expected in June 1769. Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had set off to view it from the South Seas and their European counterparts were preparing to go to Armenia where it was expected to be especially visible. Bruce also wanted to see the phenomenon but was not sure where he would do so. He had guns aplenty with which to fight and bribe his way around Africa. Most came from Heriot Row – some ‘silver mounted and richly wrought’, others, like the three ships’ blunderbusses, more practical than attractive. He had snuff boxes and shoes from London, ammunition and swords, wine and cutlery and £66 worth of new clothes from one shop alone. He was as well-prepared as Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot in Scoop in all but one respect: he had no cleft sticks, for it was Bruce who discovered that they are used in the Ethiopian highlands by message bearers.

The putative consul had managed to receive permission to travel through France despite it being the sixth year of the Seven Years War. None the less, fuelled by pride in his new office, he rushed directly to Rome to receive his orders. The king had given him a mission in Malta so Bruce was able to visit Italy rather than embark immediately for the Barbary States. King George believed himself to have been slighted by the Catholic Grand Master of the chivalric island state, who had been far too friendly to the French. Knowing that diplomacy moves slowly, Wood had already arranged that Bruce should deliver the ultimatum, before it had even been decided upon, let alone written. When it was completed it would be delivered by warship to Bruce in Italy. Wood’s purpose was to allow Bruce time in Italy to learn about antiquities. Neither of them, however, realized quite how long the visit would be. Bruce eventually had to kill time for eight months before he continued on his way, a period that he spent profitably, improving his mind and making contact with people who would later be of assistance.

In Rome Bruce studied the paintings and sculptures in the Vatican and in the houses of the fashionable set. Doubtless, he was inspired by his surroundings as he walked around the ancient capital which, millennia earlier, had sent out its own adventurers to seek the head of the Nile. Writing only two years before Bruce’s arrival, the German art historian and resident of Rome, Johann Winckelmann, had said of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers:

The unknown sources of the Nile are ingeniously represented in the figure of this river on the fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome by a garment with which he seems to be trying to conceal his head. This symbol is still true today, for the sources of the Nile still have not been discovered.

Bruce observed the ancient ruins and continued his studies but still no news came from England. He whiled away his time seeing friends at the Caffé degli Inglesi and sitting for the fashionable painter Pompeo Batoni in an expensive bid to make sure Margaret Murray did not forget him:

I begin sitting to-morrow to the best painter in Italy; but as he only paints in oil, I am obliged to sit for a head, as it is called … and the miniature is to be copied from that picture by the best painter of miniatures in Italy, who is a lady [the society artist Veronica Stern]. This is as certain a way of your having as good a picture as the subject will admit of

In the absence of instructions, most of August was occupied with the strenuous task of sitting still in the studio of the eighteenth-century’s equivalent of Snowdon.

For six months he travelled around the various nation states of pre-unification Italy on a short but busy Grand Tour. Bruce took his visit seriously; according to his first biographer, Alexander Murray, who edited the second edition of the Travels, much of Bruce’s time in Florence was spent attending art lessons.

Although amateur archaeology had been enjoying a great vogue among Britain’s Grand Tourists since the 1747 discovery of Pompeii, Bruce also studied the ruins in more detail than was the norm. At Paestum he made some architectural drawings which he even hoped to publish but the project never progressed further than the plate-making stage. The then British Resident and Walpole’s correspondent Horace Mann (later to delight in the title of Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany) had him to stay in Leghorn (Livorno) and Florence where Bruce, like many other visitors had an audience of the Grand Duke. In Bologna he met the artistic patron the Marquis di Ranuzzi and renewed friendships with his distant cousin Andrew Lumisden and with Robert Strange.

These last two were great Jacobites who were in cautionary exile but eventually returned to Britain before Bruce. Strange and Lumisden – as exiled brothers-in-law – were extremely close. They used to reply to each other’s letters and eventually merited a joint biography. Lumisden had been the Young Pretender’s private secretary; Strange, a fine artist, was denied membership of the Royal Academy because of his Jacobite leanings and thus did not receive his deserved knighthood until 1787. His exile was expensive and it stifled his real artistic leanings by forcing him to concentrate on the more profitable task of making engravings of the classics, which sold in huge numbers. He is now more famous for his financially necessary engravings, particularly his Stuart bank notes which would have become the currency of Scotland and England had the ’45 rebellion succeeded. Strange, more of a thinker than a fighter, had been coerced by love into fighting for the Jacobites at Falkirk and Culloden. Had he not, he would never have won the hand of Andrew’s sister, the fervently pro-Stuart Isabella Lumisden. Even then, the romance did not truly blossom until Strange found himself being hounded around the Highlands by Cumberland’s soldiers. He escaped detection only by hiding under Isabella’s skirts, whilst she steadfastly insisted to the officers searching the building that she had not seen the fugitive. Brought together in adversity, they had a long and happy marriage and were charming enough to overcome Bruce’s Hanoverian instincts. The Stranges became Bruce’s closest lifelong friends.

It was January of 1763 before Bruce was ordered to Naples, where his very arrival prompted the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta to send an ambassador to the Court of St James’s, seeking absolution for appeasing the French. Sadly for Bruce, the ambassador in Naples was still Sir James Grey rather than the great collector, dancer and cuckold Sir William Hamilton but he did not have to stay long. The apologies of the Maltese Grand Master were promptly accepted and in February Bruce received orders to proceed to his posting aboard the British warship Montreal. These were the days of scurvy, powder monkeys, imprecise longitude measurements and colossal, top heavy, wooden sailing ships – dangerous enough for sailors but especially miserable for Bruce who suffered severely from seasickness. We know this from the letters of friends. James Turner, a trader in Cyprus, wrote to him in 1767 saying, ‘the calms you had at sea must have been disagreeable to you who suffers so much at sea’. Bruce’s willingness to jump on and off boats in the Travels, never mentioning his acute discomfort, is admirable. One wonders what other rigours he silently endured.

On 20 March 1763 Bruce arrived in Algiers as His Majesty’s Consul and Agent to Algier’. One senses that Bruce had been all but forgotten in the preceding eight months and that it had taken the prompting of his friend Wood to have him sent to Algiers at all. It would not be long before Whitehall had to sit up and pay attention. The world’s most unsuitable diplomat had just arrived on station in a posting that he was most unlikely to understand and was even less likely to tolerate. The historian of the Barbary States, Sir Godfrey Fisher, later lambasted Bruce:

Official indifference at home, complicated doubtless by naval wars, corrupt practises at Gibraltar and Minorca, and the active hostility at Algiers of Aspinwall [Bruce’s predecessor] and Bruce, contributed to the extinction of British interests, commercial and maritime along the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

The Barbary States on the northern littoral of Africa were a motley conglomeration of city states, separated by warring tribes who relied almost entirely on systematic piracy for their livelihoods. In their glory days the city’s corsairs had performed such memorable feats as the sack of Barcelona, but by this time in their history – nominally under the control of the crumbling Ottoman Empire – they were in precipitous decline. They were still known, however, as the ‘Scourge of Christendom’. Bruce’s job in Algiers was to maintain the treaty that had been forged in 1682 which allowed Britain to trade in the area without fear of molestation by the pirates of Algiers. Occasionally he would be asked to intercede on behalf of people who had been captured and taken into slavery but his main role – and the most important one in the eyes of his government – was that of maintaining the treaty. This was something that he managed to overlook in his treatment of the Algerians and it was to land him in a great deal of trouble. Believing, as he did, that Britain was the greatest country in the world, he tended to ignore the importance of maintaining the treaty when he was petitioning for the release of slaves or the compensation of widows (something that took up more and more of his time). To the British government the treaty was all, but to the inadequately briefed Bruce, the recipient of constant begging letters from the relations of enslaved Europeans, the treaty was of secondary importance to his humanitarian role. Moreover, he and the equally unprepared vice-consul William Forbes had no one to show them the ropes. An Irish merchant, Simon Peter Cruise, the man who should have been most helpful, had been consistently defrauding the unfortunate petitioners for years. As soon as Bruce discovered this, the pair became mortal enemies. For the first year, though, all was relatively peaceful.

The new consul kept himself occupied by perfecting his grasp of the Arabic language and Arabic customs. He gave the occasional dinner party for Aga Mahomet, the Dey’s brother, and his then friend Mr Brander, the Swedish consul. He also learned modern Greek from Father Christopher, a Greek Orthodox monk, who, having fallen upon hard times, came to live in the consulate as a chaplain-cum-tutor. He met with the traders to whom he had special access through Masonry (Algiers would become even more of a hotbed of Masonry in the early nineteenth century). Now and again he sued an Algerian for the return of enslaved Englishmen. It was a pleasant start to his term of office. He wrote long, chatty letters to his friends Strange and Lumisden and even to Mr Charron, a caterer in Leghorn who kept Bruce’s larder stocked with cases of wine and huge quantities of Parmesan cheese. It was not long before he forgot young Margaret Murray. Indeed, he seems to have made no contact with her in all his travels. Within a few months of his arrival, he was complaining to Charron about the lack of women, a predicament with which Charron sympathized:

I am sorry that you are so badly off for your carnal callings [replied the victualler] but comfort yourself in your thoughts to make it up with interest when you return to Christendom. But if you should tarry longer in that cursed country then you ought to write to your friends to send you a pretty housekeeper.

To Bruce, this seemed a magnificent idea and soon came news of just such a housekeeper wending her way towards Algiers. Amazingly she had the same name as his former mother-in-law – Bridget Allen – but judging by the ‘fondest wishes’ that are sent to her by Bruce’s many correspondents with whom she stayed on her way to Algiers, she was somewhat more winsome. Her presence was brief. She died in childbirth (we can only guess who had fathered the child), in November 1765, and Bruce was once more left on his own.

He devoted the time to preparation. Dr Richard Ball, the consulate’s surgeon, spent many hours teaching his ever-curious superior the rudiments of medicine so that he would be able to look after himself in the interior. Bruce also decided that he was going to need someone to help him record the things he saw. Accordingly he wrote to Andrew Lumisden and Robert Strange – the latter having just been made an academician in Bologna – asking them to find a suitable young artist who could accompany Bruce on his travels. A search began throughout Italy for someone willing to drop everything to go travelling with an irascible Scot in unexplored country. Unsurprisingly, it took a long time. Meanwhile, Bruce was encountering problems in Algiers. He had intended to put the consulate in ‘the hands of a vice-consul, who is very able, and much esteemed’, but Forbes never had the opportunity, for Bruce was never given permission to travel whilst still consul, a source of great irritation to him since that was his sole purpose in accepting the £600 a year position in the first place. The only real difficulty in his first year would be his relations with his predecessor.

Simon Peter Cruise had been acting consul in the years between the departure of the previous office holder and Bruce’s arrival. Most of the community had united behind Cruise in his opposition to Bruce and he spent his days persuading friends to lobby for Bruce’s removal in London and spreading rumours about him in Algiers. Bruce received little support for he refused to indulge in the corruption that had enriched Cruise and the other merchants. This was a society where everyday corruption oiled the wheels of business: Bruce’s moral stance thus had a stagnatory effect on trade and met with a hostile reception from almost everyone. He took on Cruise over what most would have regarded as a trifle: a debt owed to the widow of a merchant captain which had gone missing during Cruise’s period of office. Cruise tried to fend off Bruce’s ever more virulent letters on the subject.

I said, and now repeat it to you, that if you do not furnish me with an account, or if you furnish a false one, the consequences will fall upon yourself or, as it is oftener called, upon your head. The consequences of false accounts, Mr Cruise, are not capital, but whatever they are, do not brave them. Remember what your behaviour has been to His Majesty’s consul, and to every British subject here in Algiers. In consideration of your family, I give you warning not to begin shuffling with me.

In one of Cruise’s many replies, he revealed that Bruce had challenged him to a duel: ‘I receiv’d your letter which you may believe surprised me much, as it contains nothing less than a challenge to fight you at your or my garden.’

Worse was to come. The previously peaceful posting was about to dissolve into anarchy.

As has been mentioned, Algiers was ruled by a Dey – on behalf of the Turks – and under him was a divan (a type of cabinet of advisers). In previous centuries, the Dey had been an all-powerful figure – obeyed on pain of death and utterly ruthless in his dealings – but as the strength of the city state began to ebb away, so too did the power of the office. By Bruce’s time the Dey was as good as subject to the wishes of the divan and the divan, whilst still high-handed, was at least conscious of the wishes of the people. At this time, the people – already victims of famine – were growing increasingly angry with the British. Britain conducted a great deal of trade in Algiers and the Mediterranean but by virtue of the treaty of 1682 they paid very little for the privilege. British ships were issued with passports (known as passavants) that were recognized by the Algerian corsairs. Any ship that could not produce a passport was legitimate bounty for the pirates. The French and Spanish, however, had found a way around this and thus the people of Algiers, who survived primarily on piracy, were earning less and less every year.

In 1756, the French had briefly captured Mahon, then a significant British port. Admiral John Byng was executed for failing to hold it, thus inspiring Voltaire’s joke in Candide: ‘il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres’. The French captors discovered some passavants in the commander’s office, copied them and gave them to their own and their allies’ ships. Spanish and French sailors had been sailing unmolested under British passavants ever since. Each time a French or Spanish ship was stopped by pirates or boarded in port they would produce their British passavants and the Algerians would grudgingly have to let them through. It was soon noticed, though, that none of them spoke English.

One such ship was brought to Algiers under tow and Bruce told the Algerian corsairs that indeed they were right, this was not an English ship, thereby condemning the entire crew to slavery. This he described as a ‘disagreeable necessity’ but it was not disagreeable enough to stop him from repeating it twice. His actions drew the attention of the Algerian mob – already irritated by the little revenue they were earning from the British – and conflict loomed. Not comprehending the depth of the enmity between France and Britain, the Algerians suspected that the British were giving passports to anyone. At the same time the British Admiralty decided to act. Their solution was to change the design of the passavants and issue British ships with new and different ones. It had not occurred to the sea lords that the old ones were recognized by sight rather than by being read by the illiterate corsairs. With the famine crazed mob baying for blood and the divan divided as to what should be done, Bruce swaggered upon the scene, behaving as though, should the Algerians not obey his wishes, the entire might of the British Navy would be brought down upon their unfortunate heads.

There were two schools of thought within the divan: the doves were led by Aga Mahomet, who liked Bruce and realized that challenging the British was not a very safe course of action even if he did suspect that the consul was all bluster and no bellows. The Dey himself, with the backing of the mob, was hawkish. The merchants in the European community at Algiers were also less than helpful, having been manipulated by the embezzler Cruise, and soon Bruce was mired in trouble. In May 1764, Bruce had asked leave to resign and been turned down: he could therefore not be dismissed. In June the Dey pricked Bruce’s pride and gave him the impetus to carry on. The Dey, Bruce was informed, had appointed a slave to act as British consul and had sent a pithy missive to Mr Pitt in which he insisted that Bruce be replaced: ‘Your consul in Algiers is an obstinate person and like a b—; and does not regard your affairs,’ it said.

Bruce dared not walk the streets, and the Foreign Office, preoccupied with rather more important matters, gave him no guidance. In July the situation became worse when the Dey announced that all British shipping would now be subject to pillage and the crews enslaved. Bruce managed to get messages to the other ports in the Mediterranean, warning British merchants not to approach Algiers, but it was too late for one ship. He wrote to Halifax, pleading for instruction:

This morning early, the master of the above-mentioned vessel, and the supercargo, were carried before the Dey, and in order to extort a confession if they had secreted any effects, were bastinadoed over the feet and loins in such a manner that the blood gushed out, and then loaded with heavy chains: The captain, it is thought, cannot recover. I have likewise received from a friend some insinuations, that I am in danger and advice to fly; but as it was not the prospect of pay, or want of fortune, that induced me to accept of this employment, so will I not abandon it from fears or any motives unworthy a gentleman. One brother has this war already had the honour of dying in his Majesty’s service [Robert Wood had told Bruce in a letter to Horace Mann’s consulate at Leghorn that ‘I am sorry to acquaint you that Mr Bruce died of his wounds at Havanna’], two more are still in it, and all I hope is, if any accident befall me, as is hourly probable, his Majesty will be favourable to the survivors of a family that has always served him faithfully.

Still no word came from Whitehall despite repeated letters in which Bruce called for task forces to be dispatched and a decision to be made about the new passavants. A month later, on 15 August, the Dey ordered Bruce to leave on pain of death, no idle threat in a state where the prime minister had been strangled in front of Bruce on the orders of the divan and consuls of less favoured countries were often whipped and made to pull carts through the streets.

Bruce was, however, soon restored to his post. The consul’s bluster combined with Aga Mahomet’s lobbying on his behalf produced a change of heart in the divan. Aga Mahomet was not convinced by Bruce’s threats but he was aware that the city state was vulnerable to attack from the powerful British Navy and convinced the allies of the danger.

After their prayers, the whole of the great officers went to the king, and openly declared to him that the dismissing of me was a matter of too great consequence to be determined without their consent; all of them put him in mind of the constant good behaviour of the English, and of their inability to resist our force, and the impossibility of thinking of peace after I was gone.

In September Bruce received a letter from Halifax commending him on his conduct of the crisis. With better communications, the proud diplomat would undoubtedly have been fired for putting such an important trading route in jeopardy but instead he managed to save his skin – literally – and solve the problem before he could be dismissed. Halifax would allow Bruce to resign as soon as a replacement could be found and the relationship between the two could remain cordial, even affectionate. Halifax went so far as to write the letter himself rather than dictating to a secretary.

I cannot close my letter without giving you the satisfaction of knowing, that the prudent and judicious manner in which you have conducted yourself throughout the whole of the disagreeable circumstances you relate in your several letters, and the measures you took to prevent the ill consequences that might have resulted from them, have met with the king’s gracious approbation; and it is not doubted but you will continue to exert your utmost diligence and abilities for his majesty’s service.

I have not omitted to lay your request before the king [to resign], and shall not fail to provide for your return to England as soon as it can be done consistently with the good of his majesty’s service.

This episode was really the last time Bruce had to act on behalf of the crown. It was almost a year before he left Algiers but, soon after Halifax’s letter of September, Bruce received notice that he would be replaced by Robert Kirke who would answer – unlike Bruce who had been neglected by him – to Captain Cleveland, the ambassador to all the Barbary States. Another treaty would be drawn up but Bruce would not be invited to help formulate it.

Slighted and beginning to believe the rumours that Cruise’s friends and Consul Duncan, the Dey’s representative at St James’s, had succeeded in blackening his name at home, Bruce devoted his days to hunting, training his gun dogs and getting himself properly equipped for the travels upon which it seemed he would now have to embark in a private capacity. He spent many hours interviewing traders and sailors, trying to find out all he could about the Red Sea and, when possible, Abyssinia. He studied his books and wrote to the Foreign Office seeking leave to depart his post, but even his most sycophantic letters received either no reply at all or replies that ignored his requests. By November he was engaged in undignified begging:

But as I hope your lordship thinks, from my attention to late transactions, I am not wholly unworthy of a small vacation, so I know it not to be unprecedented. Mr Dick, consul at Leghorn, received this permission while I was in Italy, though his journey had no other motive than that of pleasure, and I hope mine will not be unprofitable to the arts. There is, in this country, ruinous architecture enough to compose two considerable volumes. If, after obtaining this leave of absence, I could obtain another favour from your lordship, I should beg that I might have the honour to dedicate the first volume to the king, and that, from your lordship’s further goodness, I might have liberty to inscribe the second volume to your lordship.

He must desperately have been seeking leave to depart to have written so uncharacteristic a letter. But by now he was longing for travel and – rich enough to attempt it alone – he was as prepared as he ever would be. Throughout his time in Algiers he had acted in a dignified and resolute manner. It may not have been to the Dey’s liking from a commercial point of view but he could not help but admire the bluff Scotsman who refused to be bribed or intimidated. Thus he gave Bruce letters of introduction to his counterparts around the region which would make his tour of North Africa a great deal easier. Bruce’s friends Strange and Lumisden had also come up trumps: after much searching an artist had been found who would accompany Bruce for a year (he eventually stayed for six). Two others had considered the job but Lumisden had found it hard to persuade someone to ‘depart an easy life’ and embark for unknown shores. Strange wrote to say that Luigi Balugani – a fellow academician at Bologna – would accept the job.

This young man will be able to serve you in your present undertaking. He is certainly the best qualified of any I can find here. He has lived several years in Rome in the house of Conte Ranuzzi of Bologna. This gentleman gives him the best of characters to private life as well as diligence [an excellent recommendation since Bruce had met and liked Ranuzzi in Rome] … Balugani engages to serve you a year at the rate of 35 scudi a month. What he seems most defective in is figures, in which you must assist him yourself or have them afterwards retouched.

Balugani arrived in Algiers in March 1765 and in April Bruce was relieved of his duties. Cleveland came to Algiers with Robert Kirke and the pair ignored all Bruce’s advice to them, declining to meet him and even reappointing Cruise as vice-consul. It was a humiliation for the proud consul but he could not protest overmuch as it was what he himself desired. George Lawrence, the consul at Mahon, wrote to him: ‘Congratulations on getting rid of an employment which had so long become disagreeable to you.’ He had not been a very good consul though later commentators have been unnecessarily harsh.

The consulate was conferred on James Bruce solely to study antiquities in Africa [said Godfrey Fisher] and he was sent through France under a safe conduct to examine classical remains in Italy before reaching Algiers after the war. In spite of some likeable qualities, he was arrogant and irascible and, judging by his letters there may be some reason to question his mental stability. While he frantically summoned warships to his aid, he speaks in high terms of the Dey’s treatment of him … his successor complained that he had left ‘everything relative to publick affairs in much confusion and strangely neglected’.

This may be true although the British government, which had sent Bruce to study antiquities, surely had some share of the responsibility for his failure in a task he was neither trained for nor inclined to do. At least he was treated somewhat better than his predecessor and did well enough to get paid. The previous consul, Stanhope Aspinwall, spent five years in penury before he secured his pension, writing to Egremont (Halifax’s predecessor) in 1763:

Having been removed from being the King’s agent and consul at Algiers (in reaction to a letter from the Dey that I was unacceptable to him) without any the least previous notice, and left to get home as well as I could with a wife and numerous family, in winter and in time of war, I was many months in England soliciting the Earl of Bute but in vain …

Those following fared little better, for Algiers was a notoriously difficult post. The Dey often contrived to have consuls dismissed so as to leave him free to appoint his own. Kirke was soon recalled to Britain after Commodore Harrison, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean, reported him for corruption and dereliction of duty. Sir Robert Playfair (consul general in Algiers 100 years later and a Bruce enthusiast) wrote of the fate of Kirke’s successor, LeGros, who was driven to suicide by the difficulty of the posting: ‘He “met with a misfortune that made it impossible for him to execute that employment”, and the last we hear of him is that “he was sitting on a bed, with a sword and a brace of pistols at his side, calling for a clergyman to give him the Sacraments that he may die contented”.’

Bruce made sure that Halifax knew what he thought of his treatment: ‘I only very heartily regret with shame to myself that with my utmost diligence and attention I have not been able to merit of your Lordship the same marks of confidence constantly bestowed upon my predecessors in office,’ and in August he gave up diplomacy for good to set off on his travels. It was a chastened Bruce who left Algiers to record the ruins of ancient civilizations in which Halifax and the king had shown such interest: the merchants of Algiers heaved a collective sigh of relief.

The erstwhile consul first made for Mahon – just opposite Algiers, in the Mediterranean – where he had to attend to some ‘business of a private nature’. If, as seems likely, this was to do with Bridget Allan’s child it would have required all of his meagre diplomatic skills. His ‘housekeeper’ having died in quarantine on a visit from Algiers to Minorca, a man called Giovanni Porcile, who had been looking after the child, was demanding payment. Bruce was soon on his way back to Africa where he visited only a few ancient sites before going on to Tunis. He had learned the advantage of establishing credentials whilst in Algiers and wanted to meet the Bey before he started his exploratory tour. Carthage only occupied him for a few hours, since he knew he would be able to return with the Bey’s help whenever he wished. In Tunis, Barthélèmy de Saisieu, the French consul, provided him with a guide and ten ‘horse-soldiers, well armed with fire-locks and pistols, excellent horsemen, and, as far as I could ever discern upon the few occasions that presented, as eminent for cowardice, at least, as they were for horsemanship’. This small army proved to be quite useless when it was actually needed a few weeks later.

It was a fair match between coward and coward. With my company, I was enclosed in a square in which three temples stood [at the ruins of Spaitla], where there yet remained a precinct of high walls. These plunderers would have come in to me, but were afraid of my firearms; and I would have run away from them, had I not been afraid of meeting their horse in the plain. I was almost starved to death, when I was relieved by the arrival of Welled Hassan and a friendly tribe of Dreeda.

Bruce also had ten servants, two of whom were Irish slaves – Hugh and Roger McCormack – given him as a going away present by the Dey of Algiers (though formerly soldiers in the Spanish army, he was still referring to them as slaves a year later). He was also given a covered cart in which to put his astronomical instruments and other equipment; it was quite a caravan that made its way from Tunis inland, back towards Algiers. Bruce’s plan was twofold. He wanted to test his safari equipment – amongst which he doubtless included the artist Balugani – and he wished to record as many ancient ruins as he could. Thomas Shaw – an adventurous Oxford don and author of Travels or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant – had written about some of the ruins on the north coast of Africa but had missed out a great many others. Bruce wanted to venture where Shaw had not, paint pictures and then present the whole to the king, thus satisfying his own curiosity and simultaneously securing a peerage or a baronetcy for his dotage. They had permission to travel anywhere and took full advantage of it. They had two camera obscura, mirrored boxes, used contemporaneously by Canaletto, which by reflecting the scene on to paper allowed artists inside to trace exactly the outlines of the ruins they observed. It is astonishing how many paintings the two made: three bound volumes were given to George III on Bruce’s return. He kept some and gave others to friends. He quarrelled constantly with Dr Shaw’s artistic opinions: ‘There is at Thunodrunum a triumphal arch, which Dr Shaw thinks is more remarkable for its size than for its taste of execution; but the size is not extraordinary; on the other hand, both taste and execution are admirable,’ and criticized his work: ‘Doctor Shaw, struck with the magnificence of Spaitla, has attempted something like the three temples, in a style much like what one would expect from an ordinary carpenter or mason.’

Always contrary, Bruce was happy to have differences of opinion but he went out of his way to defend Shaw’s honour in the Travels, relating a story he knew would not be believed in order to show solidarity with his peer. At Sidi Booganim he came across a tribe which ate lions’ flesh. At the first opportunity, he tucked in: ‘The first was a he-lion, lean, tough, smelling violently of musk, and had the taste which, I imagine old horse-flesh would have … The third was a lion’s whelp, six or seven months old; it tasted, upon the whole, the worst of the three.’

Bruce was being deliberately provocative when he wrote about this in the Travels. Shaw had told a similar story when he had returned to Oxford twenty years earlier and no one had believed him. Now Bruce was doing the same. By the time of writing Bruce had also been severely criticized by those who did not believe him and, although he disagreed with Shaw on points of taste, he wanted to show solidarity on points of belief. This was an age when most people did not know what a lion looked like, save possibly in heraldry. Twenty-five years later Stubbs was to portray male lions stalking and tearing chunks out of horses – anatomically correct but not behaviourally so. Lions were still more mystical than real – they could only be seen by prisoners at the Tower of London – and no one could believe that men would or could eat the king of beasts. Thus, no one believed Bruce when he returned. Some of his stories – which seem unremarkable to us now – were judged too outlandish to be true. Bruce thus laboured the point in his book: ‘With all submission to that learned university, I will not dispute the lion’s title to eating men; but, since it is not founded upon patent, no consideration will make me stifle the merit of the Welled Sidi Boogannim, who have turned the chace [sic] upon the enemy.’

They continued their march up and down the Medjerda valley, through wheat fields that had fed ancient Rome, visiting Hydra and Constantina across lands which had seen Caesar and Hannibal, the Ptolemies and Pompey. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians – all had been there before him and left impressive traces in what, though described in ancient texts, was now the unknown world. Bruce noted all the ruins until the great amphitheatre at El Gemme, confident that the king would be grateful to his loyal subject. After all, it was not long ago that court painters and sculptors had been in the habit of depicting their kings in the guise of Roman emperors. Given the royal preoccupation with the lives of the ancient emperors and the current fascination with archaeology, these were ruins in which regal interest should be guaranteed and, accordingly, he did a thorough job: ‘I believe I may confidently say, there is not, either in the territories of Algiers or Tunis, a fragment of good taste of which I have not brought a drawing to Britain.’

They continued along the coast to Tripoli through territory that was disputed between the Basha of Tripoli and the Bey of Tunis. It was Bruce’s first taste of real desert travel and the journey, full of incident, was good training for the years ahead. In Tripoli they were met by one of Bruce’s myriad distant cousins:

The Hon. Mr Frazer of Lovat [After the débâcle of the suicidal consul at Algiers Archibald Campbell Fraser would eventually succeed Bruce.], his Majesty’s consul in that station, from whom I received every sort of kindness, comfort and assistance, which I very much needed after so rude a journey, made with such diligence that two of my horses died some days after.

Interestingly, whilst Bruce writes only about the death of two horses in his book, in a letter to Robert Wood he claimed that on the ‘night of the third day we were attacked by a number of horsemen, and four of our men killed upon the spot’. The version in the book is probably closer to the truth for in the letter (which he knew was not only for Wood’s eyes) he wanted to show what hardships he had suffered whilst painting the king’s pictures. He was no longer travelling on official business, of course, but he wanted the king and others to know that he had suffered for his art. Either way, the journey had been hard but also productive. They were not yet in uncharted territory but this was country where travellers had to look after themselves, thriving or withering according to their talents rather than their riches. On the expedition, Bruce learnt the rudiments of command, the dangers of travelling when the sun was high and had the need to be sufficiently prepared reinforced. They had encountered trouble because of Bruce’s impatience in not waiting for a letter of introduction to a tribal chief. He would not make the same mistake again.

From Tripoli, Bruce had to return by boat to Tunis where he stayed with the British representative, Consul Charles Gordon, another distant cousin. He doubtless saw his good friend Maria – an Italian in Tunis – about whom we know little but who continued to write her carissimo love letters for years afterwards. This was a convenient relationship for Bruce since Maria wrote that she had a jealous father and that Bruce should therefore never reply to her letters. He received the correct introductions to the Basha of Tripoli before setting off once more in August 1766 for Tripoli and Benghazi. Before doing so, however, he made sure that his paintings and notes from the first part of his journey were sent to Smyrna (Izmir) in the care of an English servant. He was now embarked on strenuous travels and did not want the extra burden of the hundreds of pictures he had completed. The future Libya was in a pitiable state: internecine warfare and famine made it a much more formidable destination than Tunis and Algiers. In Benghazi ‘ten or twelve people were found dead every night in the streets, and life was said in many to be supported by food that human nature shudders at the thought of’.

The general lawlessness exacerbated by famine meant that travel was not easy and Bruce only managed to see the principal sites of ancient Pentapolis, the ruin-bedecked area around Tolmeita and Benghazi that borders the Mediterranean. They too were recorded and written about with his usual fierce debunking of myth and legend. Soon, however, it became too hard to travel for so little reward – the ruins were more ruined even than those he had visited hitherto – and so in November they ‘embarked on board a Greek vessel, very ill accoutred’ for nearby Crete. It soon emerged that it was the captain’s first voyage and that he had no idea what he was doing. Within a few hours they were wrecked. Bruce described the mishap in his Travels: ‘We were not far from shore, but there was an exceeding great swell at sea.’ They tried to reach safety in a tender but that was soon swamped so Bruce threw himself into the sea crying, ‘We are all lost; if you can swim, follow me.’

‘A good, strong and practised swimmer’, he soon reached the surf but that was only the beginning of his problems; there was a riptide and he was beaten about by the waves for a good few minutes before he finally trod ground.

At last, finding my hands and knees upon the sand, I fixed my nails into it, and obstinately resisted being carried back at all, crawling a few feet when the sea had retired. I had perfectly lost my recollection and understanding, and after creeping so far as to be out of the reach of the sea, I suppose I fainted, for from that time I was totally insensible of any thing that passed around me.

Having prevailed against the sea and storm, he now had to prevail against the inhabitants who, like their Cornish contemporaries, saw a good shipwreck as manna from heaven, particularly when the victims were Turks as they suspected Bruce and his bedraggled, but miraculously alive, servants to be. Roasting in the hot sun, the semi-conscious Bruce had been stripped and bastinadoed before it occurred to him that he could speak his captors’ language – Arabic. As soon as he explained that he was a Christian doctor he was given succour by the local sheikh. It was, however, a sick and disconsolate Bruce who arrived back in Benghazi two days later. He was lucky that he had sent his earlier paintings on to Smyrna but even then it looked like his travels would be finished before he had even started. Much of his most essential equipment had been lost in the wreck.

I there lost a sextant, a parallactic instrument, a time-piece, a reflecting telescope [for astronomy], an achromatic one [for terrestrial observation], with many drawings, a copy of M. de la Caille’s ephemerides down to the year 1775, much to be regretted, as being full of manuscript marginal notes; a small camera obscura, some guns, pistols, a blunderbuss, and several other articles.

Without all these instruments Bruce would become the kind of traveller that he despised. He needed the equipment to legitimize his wanderings and give a purpose to his travels. In the age of Enlightenment it was no longer thought desirable to discover places unless they could be given co-ordinates and drawn on a map.

CHAPTER 3

THE ENLIGHTENED TOURIST

Disgruntled and frustrated, Bruce arrived in Syria a few months later. His brush with death on the Barbary coast in 1766 was still bothering him the next year: he had done himself more harm than he had initially realized and the weak chest of his childhood was beginning to affect his life again. When he had eventually arrived in Crete on a more reliable vessel, he had been confined to his bed for months. Malaria, near drowning and the terrible buffeting he had received in the African surf were all conspiring to undermine his physical health. His mental state was none too good either. In the past few years he had failed as a diplomat and foundered as an explorer; if things did not look up soon he would have to steal back to England and marry Margaret Murray, then a child, now a mature woman, whom he had left behind with a miniature of himself for solace. He knew that Margaret was still waiting for him since he received the occasional letter from his friends in Rome giving him independent information about the lovesick girl. ‘I shall only add that little Murray and all your friends here remember you most affectionately,’ he had been told in a recent letter from Robert Strange.

In between bouts of ill health, he made the occasional trip with Balugani to see the sights of Syria, Cyprus and Turkey though most of the time he was seeing places already well-documented by others. This was, after all, Latin Syria where crusaders, pilgrims and latter-day knights had been living for centuries. His expeditions could do little other than satisfy his own curiosity and add more pictures to his already bulging portfolio. None of this adventuring was really worthwhile without the appropriate scientific instruments and they were very hard to come by. He had written to all his friends in France and England but they all encountered the same difficulty: ‘Everybody was employed in making instruments for Danish, Swedish, and other foreign astronomers; that all those which were completed had been bought up, and without waiting a considerable and indefinite time, nothing could be had that could be depended upon.’

This was depressing enough but he also received news that wild rumours about his travels were doing the rounds in England. It seemed he had become a laughing stock in his absence. To a man as proud as Bruce, this was worse than failure. ‘One thing only detained me from returning home; it was my desire of fulfilling my promise to my Sovereign, and of adding the ruins of Palmyra to those of Africa, already secured and out of danger.’

If he had known how completely uninterested George III was in the pictures he had been promised, he would have taken the first boat back to Dover. There were more important matters on the royal mind: this was the year when Clive departed India, leaving it in a state of complete chaos. Paintings would not have been uppermost in George’s thoughts. Bruce embarked for Syrian Tripoli where he went shooting and bought two hunting dogs – Juba and Midore – which, when not kennelled with Consul Charles Gordon, were to become devoted companions. In Tripoli he was told that to visit Palmyra he should approach from Aleppo which advice he immediately followed. After every journey he relapsed into ill health, but thankfully Aleppo was the best place in the Levant to do so, for there lived Patrick Russel, an English doctor who cured him, taught him medicine and became a lifelong friend. A plague specialist who had spent many years living in the Levant, he was well-versed in tropical illnesses and prepared a vast medicine chest for Bruce, which he then instructed him how to use. Russel and his brothers were excellent violinists who would play long into the night, and as Bruce danced with the local consuls, the French merchants and their wives, he began to recover. He also struck up new acquaintances: the Bellevilles and the Thomases, who were local traders, became firm friends. Bruce left Aleppo ‘in perfect health, and in the gayest humour possible’.

Palmyra had been visited before, most notably by his friend Robert Wood, but there was more work to be done both there and at nearby Baalbek, so having arranged the appropriate letters of introduction he set off to more adventures in the desert. He had an enjoyable and instructive time – it was ‘all classic ground’ – but he wrote little about it for fear of repeating the work of earlier travellers. More importantly, he disagreed with Wood. Not wanting to contradict his friend, he therefore set up his camera obscura, made some very beautiful paintings with Balugani, and returned to Aleppo two months later. Whilst he was away, exciting news had arrived from Europe. Patrick Russel’s brother Alexander had found him ‘an excellent reflecting telescope’ in London and also an achromatic one. Two time-pieces needed for taking longitude measurements had been sent from Paris to await Bruce’s arrival in Alexandria. They were not as good as his original Ellicott – a copy of Harrison’s 1760 chronometer which, through its ability to maintain accuracy over long periods, transformed navigation – but they would do. (Ellicott was one of the greatest clock-makers of the day, and among other things horologist to Catherine the Great.) This was great news indeed but Bruce recorded that it ‘still left me in absolute despair about obtaining a quadrant, and consequently gave me very little satisfaction’. In spite of this he decided to go to Egypt to visit the pyramids. The pyramids – a powerful image on all Masonic paraphernalia – were of special interest to him. It is a central tenet of Masonic lore that their founders built the pyramids.

Before he left, however, he received news he could never have anticipated. Abandoned by officialdom in his own country, it seemed that France was anxious to provide him with the necessary instruments to continue his travels. The fact that France and England were scarcely friends seems to have been overlooked when set against the aristocratic and masonic links that encouraged Bruce’s friends to help him and the lust for Enlightenment which was so much more entrenched in France than in Britain. His principal benefactor – the naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who was a member of the same lodge as Voltaire – managed to persuade the French government that the discovery of the source of the Nile was more important than whether the feat was achieved by an Englishman or a Frenchman.

The Comte de Buffon, Mons. Guys of Marseilles, and several others well known in the literary world, had ventured to state to the minister [the Duc de Choiseul who became a friend and had provided Bruce with his laissez-passer to travel through France on his way to Italy], and through him to the king of France, Louis XV, how very much it was to be lamented, that after a man had been found who was likely to succeed in removing that opprobrium of travellers and geographers, by discovering the sources of the Nile, one most unlucky accident, at a most unlikely time, should frustrate the most promising endeavours. That prince, distinguished for every good quality of the heart, for benevolence, beneficence, and a desire of promoting and protecting learning, ordered a military quadrant of his own military academy at Marseilles, as the nearest and most convenient port of embarkation, to be taken down and sent to me at Alexandria.

Bruce now had all he needed. In fact, he was rather better equipped than he had been in the first place, for he had just been given one of the best quadrants available – ‘reputed to be the most perfect instrument ever constructed in France’. He could straightaway devote himself entirely to discovering the source of the Nile; he had the money and the knowledge and he now had what money could not buy, the equipment with which to record his anticipated discoveries. He spent the winter with his friends in the Levant, preparing for his first venture into uncharted territory. He had learned the error of his ways and would not leave until he had all the permissions he could possibly need. His friend Murray, the ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, managed to secure a firman (a letter of recommendation similar to a passport) from the Grand Signor at Constantinople which would prove invaluable; Bruce even acquired a letter to the Khan of the Tartars in case he became really lost. He had to solicit firmans for every eventuality and obtain letters of credit from his bankers in London as well as learn as much as he could about this momentous undertaking. He would still have difficulties if his firmans were not recognized or if he could find no one to honour his letter of credit, but the Arabic banking system was sophisticated and he could rely on it until he arrived in Abyssinia. His former colleagues, the British and French consuls in the area, were extremely helpful in this regard. He thus spent much of the winter writing bread and butter letters whilst others prepared the way for him.

Bruce planned to visit Alexandria, pick up his equipment and take it on a trial run to the pyramids. Then he would set off for Abyssinia through Massawa. Abyssinia’s littoral, including the Red Sea port of Massawa, was loosely under the control of the Sublime Porte. The only other way to reach the country was a long march via Sennaar in present-day Sudan. Having heard what had happened to the French ambassador du Roule in 1705, he was shy of going by way of Sennaar. Du Roule, the last man ever to have attempted an unannounced visit to the court of the King of Kings, took the Sennaar road and was murdered in the capital of the Fung kingdom. Massawa was an unknown quantity, unvisited by Europeans for 150 years, and Bruce would not go there until he was exhaustively prepared. As Bruce sat, dressed in the costume of a Barbary Arab, in the prow of a boat en route to Alexandria via Cyprus, he saw a high bank of clouds that he conjectured had come from the mountains of Ethiopia and would water the Nile. He was well-satisfied with his precautions.

Nothing could be more agreeable to me than that sight, and the reasoning upon it. I already, with pleasure, anticipated the time in which I should be a spectator first, afterwards an historian, of this phenomenon, hitherto a mystery through all ages. I exulted in the measures I had taken, which I flattered myself, for having been digested with greater consideration than those adopted by others, would secure me from the melancholy catastrophes that had terminated those hitherto unsuccessful attempts.

He first must needs make friends with the rulers of Egypt – the Mamelukes. Egypt was nominally ruled by the Turks but, under the recent onslaught of Catherine the Great, and after centuries of decadent rule, the Ottoman Empire was slowly crumbling. The Mamelukes were originally installed as a slave caste by rulers too lazy to govern themselves and as such had fought nobly against the crusaders and their descendants, but they had enjoyed greater and greater autonomy over the previous centuries. Indeed, Ali Bey, the present ruler, would declare himself an independent sultan the following year. Bruce was to be disappointed in the Mamelukes: ‘A more brutal, unjust, tyrannical, oppressive, avaricious set of infernal miscreants there is not on earth, than are the members of the government of Cairo.’

On 20 June 1768, after a five-day voyage, he made his first acquaintance with the Nile. At the mouth of the delta, by the ancient port of Alexandria, he was initially impressed by the near legendary city: ‘It is in this point of view the town appears most to advantage. The mixture of old monuments, such as the columns of Pompey, with the high Moorish towers and steeples, raise our expectations of the consequence of the ruins we are to find.’

To a man who had devoted so much of his life to learning about ancient civilizations, this must indeed have been a wonderful sight. He was at last seeing the things that he had heard and read described so many times by the ancients. Warming to his task, he surveyed the old port and gazed at the magnificent ruins. It was not long, however, before he resumed his customary sang-froid. Before he had even set foot on Egyptian soil, Alexandria had disappointed him.

But the moment we are in the port the illusion ends, and we distinguish the immense Herculean works of ancient times, now few in number, from the ill-imagined, ill-constructed, and imperfect buildings, of the several barbarous masters of Alexandria in the later ages … There is nothing beautiful or pleasant in the present Alexandria, but a handsome street of modern houses, where a very active and intelligent number of merchants live upon the miserable remnants of that trade, which made its glory in the first times.

Dressed as an Arab so as to be allowed where Europeans dared not tread, Bruce walked around the town, imbibing the atmosphere and providing inspiration for Richard Burton, who a century later would follow his example by donning Arab dress to visit Mecca and the Abyssinian Muslim stronghold of Harar. Despite being a very tall, red-haired man, Bruce managed, by wearing a turban and speaking perfect Arabic, to convince everyone that he was a peasant from the Barbary States. He was in good spirits. Two days before he arrived, an epidemic of the plague had petered out and, a few weeks earlier, Bruce’s astronomical instruments had been delivered. The Nile beckoned and at last he was able to respond: ‘Prepared now for any enterprise, I left with eagerness the thread bare enquiries into the meagre remains of this once famous capital of Egypt.’

With his entire band of servants dressed, like him, as Arabs, Bruce set off towards Rosetto on horseback – ‘We had all of us, pistols at our girdles’. Rosetto, midway between Alexandria and Cairo, was the embarkation point for travellers venturing up the Nile. The delta was dangerous and ‘besides, nobody wishes to be a partner for any time in a voyage with Egyptian sailors, if he can possibly avoid it’.

He arrived in Cairo on one of the Nile’s typical small sailing boats, a felucca, which were then known as canjas. Despite his appearance, he immediately set up house with a trader, M. Bertran, in the French quarter. By night he would dress as an English gentleman; by day he would venture, disguised, through the large gates which enclosed the foreign merchants’ street and patrol the bazaars of Cairo, buying manuscripts at Arabic prices and trying to find as much information about his route as was possible: ‘I never saw a place I liked worse, or which afforded less pleasure or instruction than Cairo’.

He did not have to stay in the source of his displeasure for very long, for yet again he was uncommonly lucky. The governance of Cairo lay all in the hands of one man, Ali Bey, whose closest confidant was an astrologer called Maalem Risk. The secretary of the Bey was ‘a man capable of the blackest designs’ but he was also most impressed by Bruce’s telescopes and quadrants. He passed Bruce’s baggage through customs, charging no duty, and introduced him to the Bey – ‘his turban, his girdle and the head of his dagger all covered with fine brilliants’.

Here Bruce’s expertise at dealing with Eastern rulers – learned at some risk in Algiers – came triumphantly into play. The correct amount of haughty arrogance combined with respect for the office and person of his host always seemed to come naturally to him. This and subsequent meetings allowed Bruce to make a few astrological predictions (something he did not believe in and usually disapproved of), and, by using Western medicine, to cure the Bey of a stomach upset, thus disposing the potentate towards him. Within a few weeks, he had been given his own house in the grounds of the seventh-century St George’s monastery outside the city and had been supplied with letters to the Naybe of Massawa, the King of Sennaar and the leaders of all the tribes he would encounter on his journey up the Nile. The Sardar of the Janissaries – chief of the mercenaries who policed the Turkish sultan’s vast empire – and the Greek Orthodox patriarch both gave him introductory letters also. It was a well-satisfied Bruce who cast off from Cairo on 12 December with his large retinue of servants and his friend Father Christopher, the former chaplain from Algiers, who had reappeared unexpectedly as an aide to Patriarch Mark of Alexandria.

Bruce had spent an unaccountably long time in Cairo considering he claimed to dislike it so. This goes unexplained in either his book, letters or journals. If he looked at the pyramids, he wastes less than a page on them in his book and feigns disinterest. They had, of course, been previously described by other travellers but even the most disenchanted tourist tends to write more than a postcard’s worth about them. His only comment in the Travels is that he thinks the stones for building them came from a more local source rather than the Libyan mountains, as was usually claimed. This is an odd omission and a mysterious, lost six months.

Bruce had rented himself a very beautiful felucca with ‘an agreeable dining room, twenty foot square’ for his cruise up the Nile. It did not quite rival that of the Ptolemies 2000 years earlier which boasted five restaurants, but it had an excellent captain, Abou Cuffi, who had been threatened with all sorts of horrors by the Bey if anything should happen to the good Hakim Yagoube (Doctor James). He had been made to leave one of his sons with the Bey ‘in security for his behaviour towards us’. Bruce’s successful treatment of the Bey had made him more ready to practise his medical skills and they became invaluable to him, not just for keeping himself and his servants healthy but also for gaining favours. He still acknowledged their value in his published thanks to Patrick Russel twenty years later – ‘My escaping the fever at Aleppo was not the only time in which I owed him [Russel] my life.’ From this point on, he always travelled as a doctor who practised for no payment – thus winning many friends – and in the words of the sultan’s firman as ‘a most noble Englishman and servant of the king’.

The voyage up the Nile was by necessity a leisurely one. Abou Cuffi, though skilled, was often drunk and the wind was, at that season, ill-suited to their journey. Many mornings they had to employ people to tow them against the current. Bruce was enjoying himself, however. He made friends with the Sheikh of the Howadat, a local tribe, and on the first two days went off on archaeological excursions, returning to the boat at night. This qualified him to do something he loved – argue about the findings of his predecessors: ‘Mr Niebuhr, the Danish traveller, agrees with Dr Pococke [about the location of Memphis]. I believe neither Shaw nor Niebuhr were ever at Metrahenny’.

Bruce was not a man to worry about libel or speaking ill of the dead so he carried on for another twenty pages. It is the one point in the Travels when he realizes he might be over egging the pudding: ‘Our wind was fair and fresh, rather a little on our beam; when, in great spirits, we hoisted our main and fore-sails, leaving the point of Metrahenny, where our reader may think we have too long detained him’.

The journey had started in earnest. From Cairo onwards, every night Balugani would calculate the temperature and Bruce would take the longitude and latitude. They would record detailed notes of everything they did, things they saw and customs they observed. Until now they had been on an extremely well-organized painting tour but from the moment they left Cairo they were on a scientific expedition, measuring, weighing and recording everything they came across. The tables on which they measured the weather and distances they travelled are amazing documents in themselves, not merely for the information they contain. Even when they were sick from tiredness or seriously ill, Bruce would take the readings and Balugani would enter them. Bruce even charted every twist and turn of the Nile, inserting the names of the villages along the way, marking accurate longitude and latitude measurements that had never before been available. He was determined that his journey should not merely be a jaunt. This was not a sponsored expedition, but neither was it that of a rich young man going off to find himself: Bruce wanted it to be useful. It was to be a well-documented voyage of discovery, of value to people who followed in his footsteps. For he was quite sure of one thing: follow they would.

Every night they had to post guards, for the villages they passed through were teeming with robbers, notorious for swimming out to anchored boats and stealing anything they could lay their hands on. They encountered trouble only when Bruce broke his own rules and tried to visit some ruins in a place where he had no introduction to the locals.

Abou Cuffi’s son Mahomet went on shore, under pretence of buying some provision, and to see how the land lay, but after the character we had of the inhabitants, all our fire-arms were brought to the door of the cabin. In the meantime, partly with my naked eye and partly with my glass, I observed the ruins so attentively as to be perfectly in love with them.

Bruce was destined to venture no closer. Mahomet came racing back to the boat – his turban stolen – with the entire village chasing after him. A few shots were fired at the boat and they cast off hurriedly whilst Bruce ranted at the villagers.

I cried out in Arabic, ‘Infidels, thieves, and robbers! come on, or we shall presently attack you:’ upon which I immediately fired a ship blunderbuss with pistol small bullets, but with little elevation, among the bushes, so as not to touch them. The three or four men that were nearest fell flat upon their faces, and slid away among the bushes on their bellies, like eels, and we saw no more of them.

Their progress was unhurried but they were covering a lot of ground and learning a great deal: ‘I was then beginning my apprenticeship, which I fully completed,’ remarked the explorer. One minute he would be drawing pictures of irrigation methods in his commonplace book and measuring the height of the wheat growing in the thin strip of land between the mountains that run parallel with the Nile, the next he would be exposing myths for future publication: ‘I was very pleased to see here, for the first time, two shepherd dogs lapping up the water from the stream, then lying down in it with great seeming leisure and satisfaction. It refuted the old fable, that the dogs living on the banks of the Nile run as they drink, for fear of the crocodile’. He never entirely cured himself of these bizarre asides which, though irksome to the scholar, are a delight to the general reader (for whom, in the end, he wrote). The running dogs of the Nile, now unheard of, were evidently well-known to eighteenth-century audiences.

Each day they would stop at whichever ruin happened to be next and from studying them Bruce came to many conclusions, some of which were correct, others less so. He guessed the location of Memphis correctly, but when he visited Cleopatra’s and Caesarian’s temple at Dendera, he decided that the ancient Egyptians must all have lived in caves because he could only find the remains of temples and graves. He also came to some rather startling conclusions about the Egyptian language which he drew from his study of the hieroglyphics: that it grew out of Ethiopic. All these, though, must be taken in context for his was a rapid progress of the Nile and he had no time to do any detailed research. He does not claim to be an oracle on these points.

At Thebes, however, Bruce made an important discovery; important not only because he was the first person to describe an intriguing facet of Egyptian life, but also because it led to his being disbelieved when he returned to London. In the tomb of Rameses III he discovered a painting of a ‘man playing upon a harp’ thus dating anew the origins of music. The occupant of the tomb was not known at the time. Until this was verified, it became known, after his death – through the respectable medium of Murray’s guide book of Egypt – as Bruce’s Tomb.

The whole principles on which this harp is constructed, are rational and ingenious, and the ornamented parts are executed in the very best manner.

The bottom and sides of the frame seem to be fineered, and inlaid, probably with ivory, tortoise-shell, and mother of pearl, the ordinary produce of the neighbouring seas and deserts. It would be even now impossible, either to construct or to finish a harp with more taste or elegance.

Everything which Bruce wrote and said about this harp and its player is true. The fresco is still there, complete with Bruce’s graffito upon it. It was, however, greeted with incredulity by many of his compatriots on his return to London. He described the harp to Doctor Burney, the musicologist, who then asked Bruce to write an article about it for his forthcoming History of Music. It was Bruce’s first published writing and the reaction to it gave Bruce a chastening introduction to public criticism. Fanny Burney, Dr Burney’s daughter, was quite wrong in her expectation of how Bruce’s letter and paintings would be received when published. She wrote in her diary:

Mr Bruce, that Great Lyon, has lately become very intimate with my father, and has favoured him with two delightful original drawings, done by himself, of instruments which he found at the Egyptian Thebes, in his long and difficult and enterprising travels, and also with a long letter concerning them, which is to be printed in the History. These will be great ornaments to the book; and I am happy to think that Mr Bruce, in having so highly obliged my father, will find by the estimation he is in as a writer, that his own name and assistance will not be disgraced, though it is the first time he has signed it for any publication, with which he has hitherto favoured the world.

Within days of the History’s publication, the cataloguer of the Theban lyre and the musical instruments of Ethiopia became known as the Theban liar. The ever acerbic Horace Walpole wrote to his friend, the Rev. William Mason,

It is unlucky that Mr Bruce does not posses [sic] another secret reckoned very useful to intrepid travellers, a good memory. Last spring he dined at Mr Crauford’s, George Selwyn was one of the company; after relating the story of the bramble [which we will hear later] and several other curious particulars, somebody asked Mr Bruce, if the Abyssinians had any musical instruments? ‘Musical instruments,’ said he, and paused – ‘Yes I think I remember one lyre’; George Selwyn whispered his neighbour, ‘I am sure there is one less since he came out of the country.’ There are now six instruments there.

It is extraordinary that when Bruce was being scrupulously truthful he was disbelieved, for when he is genuinely glamorizing his account or being economic with the truth, he invariably gets away with it. It must have made him wildly angry in the early years after his return and could well have allowed him to justify to himself his embellishments, on the basis that no one was going to believe him anyway. Walpole’s otherwise erroneous judgement on Bruce’s character was, however, correct in one respect: he was not a man to be trifled with. He added a proviso in his letter to Mason: ‘Remember this letter is for your own private eye, I do not desire to be engaged in a controversy or a duel.’

Bruce and Balugani had set up their easels to paint as many of the frescoes as they could but their guides were frightened of attack by the grave-robbers who lived in the surrounding hills and thus refused to stay. They extinguished all the torches and left Bruce and Balugani in the dark, forcing them to leave.

Very much vexed, I mounted my horse to return to the boat. The road lay through a very narrow valley, the sides of which were covered with bare loose stones. I had no sooner got down to the bottom, than I heard a great deal of loud speaking on both sides of the valley; and, in an instant, a number of large stones were rolled down upon me, which, though I heard in motion, I could not see, on account of the darkness; this increased my terror … I accordingly levelled my gun as near as possible, by the ear, and fired one barrel among them. A moment’s silence ensued, and then a loud howl, which seemed to have come from thirty or forty persons. I took my servant’s blunderbuss and discharged it where I heard the howl, and a violent confusion of tongues followed, but no stones.

Bruce was learning quickly about how to deal with dangers on the road. ‘When in doubt – shoot’, was his policy, though he was careful about whom he shot at. When it seemed impolitic to harm an adversary he merely terrified them with bloodcurdling exhibitions of firepower. On this occasion Bruce and Balugani made it back to the boat with no casualties and believing ‘it would be our fault if they found us in the morning’, cast off and floated down to Luxor ‘where there was a governor for whom I had letters’. He was impressed by the ‘magnificent scenes of ruins’ at Luxor and nearby Karnak although he did not purchase anything. Already, it seems, rapacious Westerners were buying up the best bits of ancient Egypt and taking them home. A row of sphinxes ‘had been covered with earth till very recently, a Venetian physician and antiquary bought one of them at a very considerable price, as he said, for the king of Sardinia. This has accused several others to be uncovered, though no purchaser hath yet offered.’

The day before they arrived in Aswan, Bruce went to see the chief of a tribe of desert Arabs, Sheikh Nimmer. Bruce and the sheikh’s son had met in Cairo where Bruce had dispensed some medicine for the old man. He had promised at the time that he would come and check on his patient later which, with an eye on the main chance, he was now doing. By prescribing some more drugs and teaching the servants how to make a special type of lime juice for the old sheikh, Bruce managed to extract a sincere oath of loyalty.

The great people among them came, of about two minutes long, by which they declared themselves, and their children, accursed, if ever they lifted their hands against me in the Tell [the cultivated part of Egypt], or field, in the desert, or on the river; or in case that I or mine, should fly to them for refuge, if they did not protect us at the risque of their lives, their families, and their fortunes, or, as they emphatically expressed it, to the death of the last male child among them.

Bruce could not know how useful this would prove in the future. He sailed on down to Aswan with not a worry in his head. He had a letter of credit on a trader there and one of introduction to the head of the garrison and the ruler of the town He was sure of a good reception and a comfortable night’s rest. Both of these he received before going to visit the first cataract, just above the town (no longer there due to the construction of the dam). After five days they began their return up the Nile towards Cus where they would strike out across the desert for the Red Sea and Abyssinia. It would be more than three years before Bruce saw Aswan again and it would be in markedly different circumstances. At Cus, he made his final preparations.

As I was now about to enter on that part of my expedition, in which I was to have no further intercourse with Europe I set myself to work to examine all my observations, and put my journal in such forwardness by explanations, where needful, that the labours and pains I had hitherto been at, might not be totally lost to the public, if I should perish in the journey I had undertaken, which, from all information I could procure, every day appeared to be more and more desperate. [This journal no longer exists. The Yale Center for British Art owns Bruce’s letters, diaries and notebooks and a book which purports to be the journal of his travels. It is, however, transparently something which he transcribed on his return, for the writing is too uniform and it is in far too well-preserved a state to have been the journal that accompanied him on his travels.] Having finished these, at least so far as to make them intelligible to others, I conveyed them to my friends Messrs Julian and Rosa, at Cairo, to remain in their custody till I should return, or news come that I was otherwise disposed of.

On 16 February 1769, well aware of the dangers ahead, Bruce consigned himself to the desert. He had made friends with a group of Turkish pilgrims from Anatolia and an Arab to whom he had given transport up the Nile. The Turks had an odd claim on Bruce for they came from ‘a district which they call Caz Dagli, corruptly Caz Dangli, and this the Turks believe was the country from which the English first drew their origin; and, on this account they never fail to claim kindred with the English wherever they meet, especially if they stand in need of their assistance’.

They were all part of a larger caravan but they distrusted their travelling companions, so they made plans with Bruce and his group to protect each other and fight as one if threatened by others in their caravan or by the local Atouni tribe. The Atounis made it their business to set upon and plunder such caravans as theirs. Bruce was to be in charge and all the valuables were put in his immediate baggage:

I cannot conceal the secret pleasure I had in finding the character of my country so firmly established among nations so distant, enemies to our religion, and strangers to our government. Turks from Mount Taurus, and Arabs from the desert of Libya, thought themselves unsafe among their own countrymen, but trusted their lives to and their little fortunes implicitly to the direction and word of an Englishman, whom they had never before seen.

Anticipating that he would see no more of his countrymen for some time, Bruce was suffering an attack of the kind of patriotism usually only inspired by the sight of a British consul from behind the bars of a foreign jail. The allies arranged passwords for use during the night, and set off into the desert ‘full of terror about the Atouni’.

It was on this eight-day desert crossing that Bruce first succumbed to a temptation which his family would be unable to resist in generations to come: ‘On each side of the plain, we found different sorts of marble, twelve kinds of which, I selected and took with me’.

The selection and removal of marbles when in foreign parts was to become something of a tradition among Bruce’s descendants, reaching its apogee in his cousin twice removed, the 7th Earl of Elgin. His own interest in marble – though not on such an industrial scale: he only collected small stones – seems almost obsessive. The glowing mountains that punctuate the route to Cosseir are indeed impressive, eight miles of ‘dead green, supposed serpentine marble’ but Bruce describes them in intricate detail, even for him, from the verde antico – ‘by far the most beautiful kind I had ever seen’, to the ‘red marble, in prodigious abundance, but of no great beauty’. It is almost as though he planned to return and start a quarrying enterprise to complement his coal mines.

It was not long before their fears of banditry were realized. An Arab was apprehended trying to steal from Bruce’s tent and was beaten to death by his guards before the Scot could intervene. This was an unfortunate incident, the more so because the Arab worked for Sidi Hassan, the caravan leader. Relations only worsened from then on. After much negotiation, the two leaders had a cagey meeting in the desert at which their respective retinues squared off against each other but no blood was spilled: an uneasy truce was called. It was in this atmosphere that, after ten days, they arrived in Cosseir where Bruce wreaked his revenge. He reported Sidi Hassan to the Bey who promised to discipline him. ‘Now Shekh,’ said Bruce to the Bey, ‘I have done everything you have desired, without ever expecting fee, or reward; the only thing I now ask you, and it is probably the last, is, that you revenge me upon this Hassan.’

Before the Bey could take action, however, Hassan was set upon by the Turks who had allied with Bruce in the desert crossing:

The whole party drew their swords, and … they would have cut Sidi Hassan in pieces, but, fortunately for him, the Turks had great cloth trousers, like Dutchmen, and could not run, whilst he ran very nimbly in his. Several pistols, however, were fired, one of which shot him in the back part of the ear; on which he fled for refuge to the Bey and we never saw him again.

The fashionably hobbled Turks soon left on the boat that Bruce was to charter for his journey to Jiddah (Jeddah).

This was not the only drama that occurred in the ‘small mud-walled village’ that was their embarkation point on the Red Sea. Abd-el-gin, one of Bruce’s servants, was kidnapped and the explorer unwisely charged off alone into the desert to negotiate for his return. ‘I had not got above a mile into the sands, when I began to reflect on the folly of my undertaking. I was going into the desert among a band of savages, whose only trade was robbery and murder, where, in all probability, I should be as ill treated as the man I was attempting to save.’

In a stroke of luck that showed the benefit of his medical training, the kidnappers turned out to be kinsmen of Sheikh Nimmer. He was able to claim protection and rescue Abd-el-gin with the noose, as yet untightened, around his neck.

The Bey soon left Cosseir to continue his tour and Bruce, as the most important person remaining in the town, moved into the fort. While waiting for the boat which would take him to Jiddah, Bruce hired a smaller boat and sailed off to investigate the emerald mountains which, according to Pliny, were supposed to be in the vicinity. Unsurprisingly, they were not made of emeralds. It was another unnecessary brush with death. As he described it in his commonplace book: ‘Nothing but a belief of pre-destination should make a man embark in such vessels they are loaded till within ten inches of the water’s edge after which two planks are added to the waist of the vessel and over these mats are fixed tarred at the joinings and this is all we have to rely upon to keep out the waves.’

They were on their way back to Cosseir after a peaceful voyage during which they had eaten shellfish and made maps of the rocks along the shore, when a storm blew up. It was soon discovered that the sail was nailed to the mast thus making it impossible to take down. The boat started to heave and was in imminent danger of sinking when the captain gave up and consigned their fate to Allah. Incensed, Bruce raged in fury.

‘What I order you is, to keep steady at the helm,’ shouted Bruce over the roar of the wind:

mind the vane on the top of the mast, and steer straight before the wind, for I am resolved to cut that main-sail to pieces, and prevent the mast from going away, and your vessel from sinking to the bottom … D—n Sidi e Genowi, you beast, cannot you give me a rational answer? Stand to your helm, look at the vane; keep the vessel straight before the wind, or by the great G – d who sits in heaven … I will shoot you dead the first yaw the ship gives, or the first time that you leave the steerage.

With that, he lurched across the boat, having ripped off most of his clothes – in case it became necessary to swim – and tore the mainsail to pieces with a machete. When they eventually made it back to the tiny port at Cosseir, they discovered that three boats from that village alone had been lost that day.

On 5 April they were able to set sail for Jiddah in the boat which Bruce had previously chartered. This had canvas sails which could be furled and ‘though small – was tight and well-rigged’. The ship’s captain was experienced and trustworthy though he had an uncanny likeness to an ape, which Bruce found endlessly amusing. He was indeed known by everyone as Ali the Ape. Not one to go on a leisurely cruise when there was work to be done, Bruce decided that he must chart the Red Sea while he was there and hence spent much of his time taking measurements and hurling plummets over the side of the boat. Marine navigation was not something he had studied, yet his chart of the Red Sea was used and valued for many years afterwards. Owing to the plethora of treacherous reefs in the narrow sea, it had previously been impossible for larger boats to travel its entire length. Combined with a treaty with the Bey of Cairo which he managed to forge on his way home, Bruce’s soundings changed all that. He also made an exhaustive survey of where drinking water could be procured, where it was safe to land and which languages were spoken at which ports.

In his Original Portraits, first published forty years after Bruce’s death, John Kay gave an example of how thoroughly Bruce had done the job: ‘Sir David Baird,’ he reported, ‘while commanding the British troops in the Red Sea, publicly declared that the safety of the army was mainly owing to the striking accuracy of Mr Bruce’s chart.’

Baird was a great popular hero who had been captured by Tipoo Sahib in India in 1780 and held captive for four years when he was in his early twenties. In 1801, by then promoted to general and knighted, he led a relief force from the Indian army to help in the removal of Napoleon from Egypt. He sailed up the Red Sea, using Bruce’s chart, marched from Cosseir, using Bruce’s map, and then sailed down the Nile – arriving in Alexandria with plenty of time left to assist in its capture.

The Red Sea inspired Bruce in many way, yet though he succeeded in much that he set out to do there a few of his ambitions proved too challenging. He did chart the sea and open it up to British trade but failed in his desire to solve the riddles of the Bible and the classical writers. He had tracked down and rejected the emerald mountains; he now set himself the formidable task of discovering how Moses parted the sea when being pursued by the Egyptians: ‘If the Etesian wind, blowing from the north-west in summer, could heap up the sea as a wall, on the right, or to the south, of fifty feet high, still the difficulty would remain, of building the wall on the left hand, or the north. Besides, water standing in that position for a day, must have lost the nature of fluid.’

After much time spent in these bizarre musings he eventually came to a conclusion he deemed satisfactory:

This passage is told us, by scripture, to be a miraculous one; and, if so, we have nothing to do with natural causes. If we do not believe Moses, we need not believe the transaction at all, seeing that it is from his authority alone we derive it. If we believe in God that he made the sea, we must believe he could divide it when he sees proper reason, and of that he must be the only judge.

The captain of the ship had various cargoes which needed collecting and depositing around the Red Sea so Bruce received a guided tour on his way down to Jiddah. He stopped off in Yambo, where the inhabitants were engaged in civil war and where he watched a savage battle which halted only because of a lack of ammunition, and he stretched his legs on islands whose wildlife he decimated in order to vary the constant diet of fish. The voyage gave him time to prepare his mind for Abyssinia and to ponder which towns corresponded with the ones he had read about in the works of the geographers Herodotus and Cosmas Indicoplustes. It was 3 May before they ‘anchored in the port of Jidda, close up on the key, where the officers of the custom-house immediately took possession of our baggage’.

When Bruce had set off to Cosseir across the desert he had been excited by the fact that it was the last of civilization he would see for some time. He had forgotten about Jiddah where British ships from India came to trade with Arabia. They could go no further thanks to insufficient treaties and the treachery of the waters but they were firmly ensconced at the Red Sea port. There was a factory and a small community of British working for the East India Company who had to loiter there in between journeys, waiting for the monsoon trade winds to turn to their advantage. There were nine British merchantmen at anchor when Bruce arrived and paid negotiators were busy making deals in a manner which fascinated him:

They sit down on the carpet, and take an Indian shawl, which they carry on their shoulder, like a napkin, and spread it over their hands. They talk, in the meantime, indifferent conversation, of the arrival of ships from India, or the news of the day, as if they were employed in no serious business whatever. After about twenty minutes spent in handling each other’s fingers below the shawl, the bargain is concluded, say for nine ships, without one word ever having been spoken on the subject, or pen or ink used in any shape whatever. There never was one instance of a dispute happening in these sales.

As a show of good manners as well as a way to ease his passage, Bruce always wore a native costume, usually that of a nobleman. When he went to the Bengal-house to meet his compatriots, however, he was dressed as a Turkish mariner.

I desired to be carried to a Scotchman, a relation of my own, who was then accidentally leaning over the rail of the staircase, leading up to his apartment. I saluted him by his name; he fell into a violent rage, calling me villain, thief, cheat and renegade rascal; and declared, if I offered to proceed a step further, he would throw me over the stairs.

Bruce’s disguise was obviously more effective, considering his size and manner, than one might otherwise have thought. The surly captain and relation was later claimed by James Boswell to be their mutual cousin, Bruce Boswell. He is not named in Bruce’s Travels but, for some unfathomable reason, Boswell made this assertion in an article about his adventurous countryman that he wrote for the London Magazine. Bruce Boswell was indeed the kind of man to behave in such a manner. He was a famously appalling captain and was later cashiered before being accepted back as a trader after his influential cousin had interceded with the board in London. He was at this time only twenty – too young to be a captain – and according to well-kept East India Company records, employed in China. Whoever the man was, he did not give Bruce the reception he had hoped for. The insulted traveller decided to remain incognito and take the measure of the other captains at Jiddah. These captains were a glamorous lot, given to wearing tight, bright breeches, much gold braid and exotically coloured turbans. They adopted the manners of both East and West and were much respected by both. Bruce, however, did not initially warm to them: ‘I thought within myself, if those are their Indian manners I shall keep my name and situation to myself while I am at Jidda’.

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