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CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_eeabeea8-11c8-5711-9496-ba7caf60f676)
THE CALAMITOUS CONSUL (#ulink_eeabeea8-11c8-5711-9496-ba7caf60f676)
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 (#ulink_4b0c0855-3caf-513d-9c4a-cd531dc35baa)
THE ENLIGHTENED TOURIST (#ulink_4b0c0855-3caf-513d-9c4a-cd531dc35baa)
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’.
