Plotting to Stop the British Slave Trade: James Bruce and His Secret Mission to Africa

By Jane Aptekar Reeve

This is an innovative biography about an adventurous, game-changing traveller in Africa during the West’s ‘Enlightenment’ period (when the American and French Revolutions occurred). James Bruce was not what he seemed to be. I can now reveal that although he was notorious in his own day for a variety of interesting reasons (including his alleged theft of his assistant’s art-work), he was basically an espionage agent working with a clique of powerful, mostly British, persons whose secret agenda was: to eradicate slaving. Bruce undertook a ‘subversive’ mission to investigate slave trafficking across the Mediterranean and Red Seas as well as the Atlantic in order to support his friends’ drive to destroy the principal source of their own country’s wealth. This was achieved in 1807. Like Bruce himself, in my book I address neglected aspects of the ancient habit of slavery and the related abuse of —particularly —women.
Bruce’s Travels (1790) is a delightful —although massive —read. Therefore I sketch the geo-historical and faith background to Bruce’s work, convey the ‘feel’ of his book, and add to the known facts of his life a great deal of newly discovered material. This includes the international range of Bruce’s friends and collaborators, from Rome to Cairo to Bethlehem in the newly constituted U.S.A.
Change is agonisingly slow to take hold. It was possibly because Bruce ‘only’ wrote about Africa that he has been trivialised, and his biography has never previously been fully responsibly researched.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728396262

Book preview

© 2019 Jane Aptekar Reeve. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/05/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9624-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9625-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9626-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To my family,

from whom I stole time by going some distance for my book—Rachel and Christopher, Alexander and Kim, Owen, Dylan, Wesley, Angus, and Zéphyr—and with additional thanks to Maud Aptekar for taking some photographs.

frontispiece.jpg

The above portrait of Bruce inside a romantic framework was not drawn from life but from an unknown artist’s imagination. He or she is encouraging readers to visualise the creator of Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile as a myth in himself. Actually, the black-garbed young traveller is studying maps and globes in order to decide which of two routes to take. Bruce was heading for the Source of the Nile. This entity was reputed to exist in a paradise-like location in the mountains of Ethiopia. Some Catholic missionaries claimed to have visited it (a hundred years before Bruce found and documented the site). Bruce proved that it existed. Almost exactly correctly (as modern technology confirms), Bruce entered the Source of the Nile onto the maps he published when he returned to Scotland (see figure 3.1). The local inhabitants will help you, too, to visit Gish Abay if you ask them about it.

This image of Bruce was created late—during the year he died (1794). It suggests that the celebrated traveller was beginning to seem to his contemporaries not so much a comical tale-teller as an almost other-worldly personage—or symbol. For full bibliographical and other information about this image of Bruce as a young man, see figure 2.20 below.

To get where he was going, the ambitious traveller had to choose between two options. He could start from the Red Sea (at the extreme upper right of the cover and frontispiece maps) or he could enter east Africa from the Mediterranean and travel south, along the usual caravan routes, to Lake Tana (at the extreme lower corner of the same map).

CONTENTS

PARTS AND CHAPTERS

Preface

Part I: Introducing James Bruce

Chapter 1 A Brief Biography of Bruce: including an account of his arrival in Ethiopia through the Red Sea Port of Massawa and of his departure through Hor-Cacamoot

Chapter 2 An Annotated Gallery of Portraits, Field Sketches, and Book Illustrations

Chapter 3 The Bruce Discoveries

Part II: Genesis of the Bruce Project

Chapter 4 Values, Faiths, and Commitments: How Bruce Found His Calling

Chapter 5 The Bruce-Balugani Partnership

Part III: Consul Bruce and the Experiment at Algiers

Chapter 6 Routes to Reciprocation by Treaty

Chapter 7 The Mediterranean Cradle of Slaving

Chapter 8 British Passports, Rotting Cargoes

Part IV: Coming Home

Chapter 9 The Bread of Paradise: Injera with Worms

Chapter 10 Lies and Facts, Friends and Allies

Part V: Spreading Out

Chapter 11 Meeting John Antes at Cairo and Olaudah Equiano at Fetter Lane

Chapter 12 Bruce’s Big Bully Role in Britain; and How Latrobe Watched Sophie’s Owner Whip her at New Orleans

Chapter 13 How Home’s Douglas at Edinburgh and London led to Fennell’s Production at Philadelphia of Mrs. Rawson’s Slaves in Algiers

Part VI: Bruce’s Book

Chapter 14 Appetizers from Bruce’s Travels

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Bibliographical Notes and Some Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes

Bibliography

Index 1: Overall Table of Contents, Including List of Subtitles

Index 2: Names of Some of the Cast Members and Some of the Places Where Scenes Are Set

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. Bruce’s baggage being put ashore at Massawa on the Red Sea

Figure 1.2. An elephant hunt

Figure 2.1. James Bruce, the mature writer

Figure 2.2. Slim young Bruce in front of his two horse-minders at the Source of the Nile

Figure 2.3. Two rough sketches of the priest of the Nile

Figure 2.4. The Source of the Nile, showing the church of St Michael on the hill above the ‘head’ of the Blue Nile

Figure 2.5. The Fountain of Life

Figure 2.6. Bruce’s drawings of coins supposedly illustrating the history of Paestum

Figure 2.7. The church of St. Michael Geesh at the source of the Blue Nile

Figure 2.8. Bruce at the source of the Blue Nile with the priest of the Nile and Bruce’s dogs and their handler

Figure 2.9. The booted lynx, which Bruce shot and drew at Ras el Feel

Figure 2.10. The Shum introducing Bruce to his womenfolk

Figure 2.11. Two women.

Figure 2.12. Ozoro Esther and Tekla Mariam.

Figure 2.13a. Portrait of Ras Michael

Figure 2.13.b. Portrait of James Bruce

Figure 2.14. Kefla Yasous, Woodage Asahel, basket work and spears.

Figure 2.15. Woodage Asahel wearing a ceremonial band.

Figure 2.16. An Abyssinian Breakfast by I. Cruikshank

FFigure 2.17. Travells eldest son in conversation with a Cherokee chief

Figure 2.18. Unknown Man, Formerly Known as James Bruce

Figure 2.19. The Abyssinian Traveller. Portrait of James Bruce, by J. G. Weichart

Figure 2.20. Frontispiece honouring James Bruce

Figure 3.1. The marketplace at Sakala and the source of the Blue Nile. (JAR)

Figure 3.2. Map of Lake Tana dedicated to Daines Barrington

Figure 3.3. The battle-field of Wayna Daga. (JAR). The site of the battle is almost exactly half way down the major, central, north-south route west of Lake Tana

Figure 3.4. The Blue and White Niles. French rendering of a map by John Hanning Speke, issued after 1877

Figure 5.1. Sketch of St. Peter’s at Rome from Bruce’s journal

Figure 5.2. Traditional Gojjam church painting

Figure 6.1. Map of the Mediterranean

Figure 7.1. Drawing of a local vessel (at Algiers?) showing a British flag

Figure 9.1. Ensete

Figure 9.2. Farek

Figure 9.3. Kuara

Figure 9.4. Walkuffa

Figure 9.5. Cusso or Bankesia abyssinica

Figure 9.6. Bruce and his fellow diners being fed by their resolute lady friends at an Abyssinian banquet

Figure 10.1. Drawing of an Egyptian tomb painting in Bruce’s notebook

Figure 10.2. The Theban Harp.

Figure 10.3. A dita, a traditional Ethiopian stringed instrument

Figures 10.4 and 10.5. Egyptian tomb paintings of a harp and harpist

Figure 10.6. A view of one end and part of the side of the Temple of Baalbeck.

Figure 10.7. Portraits of Potatow and Omai by William Hodges

Figure 11.1. View of Sangue and the camp of Ismael Pasha near Sennar

Figure 12.1. Cippus found at Aksum

Figure 14.1. Nisser werk or golden eagle.

Figure 14.2. Black Eagle

Figure 14.3. Abba Gumba or Erkoom

Figure 14.4. First battle of Serbraxos

Figure 14.5. Third battle of Serbraxos

Figure 14.6. Tortoise.

The above images are reproduced with thanks to these institutions, individuals, and friends:

Bodleian Library, Oxford (Figures 1.1, 1.2, 2.4, 2.10, 2.17, 2.20, 9.6, 10.2, 10.4, 10.6, 10.7, and 12.1)

Bruce, Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, 11th Earl of Elgin (Figure 2.12)

Ethiopian Postal Services (Figures 2.5 and 10.3)

Friedlander, Maria José, and Bob Friedlander, Gojjam Unveiled (Figure 5.2)

Lewis Walpole Gallery, Yale University (Figure 2.16)

National Portrait Gallery (NPG) (Figure 2.18)

Royal Geographical Society (RGS) (Figure 2.19)

Shutterstock (Figures 3.5 and 6.1)

Yale Centre for British Art (YCBA) (Figures 2.3, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.11, 2.13 a and b, 2.14, 2.15, 5.1, 7.1, 10.1, 10.4, and 10.5)

Almost all the other figures are from my own copy of the Dublin edition of James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile with its original plates and endpaper fold-out maps (1790); and one is from my own copy of Alexander Murray’s Account of the Life and Writings of James Bruce of Kinnaird (1808). The items concerned are identified as (JAR).

I must apologize for the differences in clarity among the illustrations. They have been captured by various levels of equipment in various environments. Some are from unique or rare sources, which must be respected.

PARTS, CHAPTERS AND SECTIONS

Part I: Introducing James Bruce

Chapter 1 A Brief Biography of Bruce: including an account of his arrival in Ethiopia through the Red Sea Port of Massawa and of his departure through Hor-Cacamoot

A chronological account of Bruce’s life

■  A taste of Bruce in Africa in action

Chapter 2 An Annotated Gallery of Portraits, Field Sketches, and Book Illustrations

■  While they were children

■  Bruce the mature writer

■  Bruce the romantic adventurer

■  A pair of drawings of, presumably, the priest of the Nile

■  The ancient heifer ceremony at Gish Abay

■  The Fountain of Life

■  Imperial Bruce at the source of the Nile

■  The booted lynx Bruce shot and drew at Ras el Feel

■  Bruce and his donkey-minders facing the priest and his womenfolk

■  Two Ethiopian women depicted twice: Field sketches and finished drawings

■  Ras Michael

■  Kefla Yasous and Woodage Asahel

■  Studio portraits of Bruce, the foppish grandee

■  Caricature of kilt-flying Bruce at a Nile water source far above Egypt

■  Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: Coconuts and pineapples

■  Back at Edinburgh, Bruce meets a traveler who grew famous before he did

■  Imaginary images: Bruce as a young geographer and as a mature older man

■  Bruce sits writing his journal, framed by the four corners of the globe

Chapter 3 The Bruce Discoveries

■  The whereabouts of the Abrahamic faiths’ Earthly Paradise or Garden of Eden

■  The Bruce archive and the Jesuit presence

■  How the British interest in Nile mapping began with London’s Royal Society

■  How Bruce’s maps show that the Source of the Nile was a source of slaves

■  Bruce’s pinpointing of Wayna Daga where Ethiopia defeated an Islamic invasion just short of Gojjam

■  The Slave Coast

■  How Speke mapped the source of the White Nile, in Uganda, a hundred years after Bruce pointed toward it in his maps of his Ethiopian travels

Part II: Genesis of the Bruce Project

■  There was no legal slavery in England

■  The vindication of the mallard

■  Some Oxonians and some Scots

■  The slavery of miners in Scotland

■  Did England get halfway toward mounting a Revolution in 1780 before the French did?

■  Did Nelson and Napoleon read Bruce’s Travels?

■  Please to remember

■  Bruce’s Christian upbringing

■  Bruce’s first espionage mission

■  Slavery awareness and some sophisticated Africans in the London of Dunk Halifax

■  John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich

■  John Douglas, political pamphleteer, secret abolitionist, and future Bishop of Salisbury

■  The Dominica slaving scandal

■  Douglas’s attacks on the duplicity of certain Jesuits

■  Freemasonry in Scotland and Bruce’s retrieval of the Ethiopian Book of Enoch

■  The legitimacy of Mental reservations in certain religious contexts

■  Mental reservations about Spain’s entrance into the Seven Years War six years late

■  Where Bruce’s Big Book really Begins

■  Commencing the quest

Chapter 5 The Bruce-Balugani Partnership

■  Naples and archaeology

■  Desirable qualifications for European diplomacy

■  Choosing the right artist to craft a gift for the king

■  Andrew Lumisden: Bruce’s influential friend at Rome

■  Balugani’s qualifications for the task of assisting Bruce

■  The suppression of the Society of Jesus

■  Fiery subterranean rumblings under one of the Blue Nile’s springs

■  The realities of the place from which the idea of Paradise may have sprung

■  Coded communications at St. Peter’s Basilica?

■  Some of Bruce’s feisty women

■  A sacred space for children to thrive and learn in

Part III: Consul Bruce and the Experiment at Algiers

■  Slaving has a long Mediterranean history

■  White and black Mediterranean slaves

■  Information from British consuls

■  British consuls’ duties and expenses and the history of local treaty making

■  The rival French and British presences in Algeria

■  The silence of the British consul

■  Was there collusion between England and France?

■  Bruce’s closing reports to currently lethargically disposed Egremont

■  Bruce was shot in the arm

■  The tangles confronting Bruce, the errant law student

■  The Bruce treaty that Chalmers omitted

Chapter 7 The Mediterranean Cradle of Slaving

■  The Mediterranean galleys

■  Warring, carrying, and trading at and around Menorca

■  Declaring the Seven Years’ War with precision

■  Were Menorca and Gibraltar worth dying for?

■  Misuse of British Mediterranean passes during the Seven Years’ War

■  Aspinwall discovers the cargo of the Prince William

■  Buying slaves with firearms

■  Westminster’s first attempt to re-staff the British consulate at Algiers

■  Passports, passes, and passavants

■  Clerical errors

■  A portion of the history of Gibraltar

■  Cornwallis’s governorship of Gibraltar

■  Halifax, Cornwallis and Bruce encourage the so-called Barbary pirates to capture British vessels carrying invalid passes

■  Bruce’s contribution to the Duke of York’s important Mediterranean cruise

■  Some of the finest horses at Algiers

Chapter 8 British Passports, Rotting Cargoes

■  The Experiment brouhaha

■  Bruce’s prescient deployment of the equipment to carry slaves principle

■  The account Bruce gives his readers of his daily tasks at Algiers

■  The variety of seafaring currencies issued from Menorca

■  The language in the Experiment’s documentation

■  The route the Experiment took

■  Choosing to take the Experiment to Gibraltar

■  The infamous Zong case twenty years later put an even fouler episode on record

■  Shortages of money; shortages of grain

■  Cornwallis prohibits onshore marketing of the Experiment’s contents

■  Some discrimination issues confronted

■  Captain Stefanopoli and the San Vincenzio

■  The presence of Commodore Harrison is expected to calm the chaos at Algiers

■  Going over the consul’s head to get a private message conveyed to George III

■  The probable fate of Roger McCormack

■  The Bruce treaty that was not published

■  Keeping the reading public interested and informed: Lord Halifax

■  The Emperor of Morocco orders his corsairs to sink British slaving ships

Chapter 9 The Bread of Paradise: Injera with Worms

■  How Bruce returned from Paris to London with a great deal of baggage

■  Ensete

■  Myrrh

■  Farek or Bauhinia acuminata

■  Kuara

■  Walkuffa

■  Cusso

■  Teff and injera

■  Women gathering the seeds of bent grass … to make a kind of bread

■  Bruce and the Saphan: the abomination of the scriptures

■  An Abyssinian banquet

Chapter 10 Lies and Facts, Friends and Allies

■  The views of some leading British politicians, musicians, and authors

■  How fast could caravans go?

■  The hostile publicity that met Bruce at London

■  Some of Bruce’s almost equally mendacious friends

■  The harp sketch Bruce gave Burney

■  Welcoming Bruce home with the temple he saw at Baalbek

■  James Boswell, James Bruce, and what the newspapers said

■  Cook’s three voyages, Bishop John’s two editions, and Omai

The terrible news from New Zealand

■  Encapsulating an unimaginable other world into a dolls’ house

■  What emerged from James Burney’s experiences?

Part V: Spreading Out

Chapter 11 Meeting John Antes at Cairo and Olaudah Equiano at Fetter Lane

Bruce’s hot route home revisited

■  Some churches’ impacts on slaving-related change

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

An Interesting Narrative of the Travels of James Bruce

■  Was Equiano as much of a liar as Bruce?

■  Moravians, Quakers, Huntingdonians, Methodists and the C of E

■  Africa was thought of next

■  How Antes met Bruce at Cairo

■  Bruce and Antes at Cairo discover the birth of Egypt

■  They said Bruce never went there

■  Women working to lighten the blood-guiltyness of the slave trade

■  Gathering more younger supporters

■  The real start of the semi-official drive to stop British slave-trading

Chapter 12 Bruce’s Big Bully Role in Britain; and How Latrobe Watched Sophie’s Owner Whip her at New Orleans

■  Silent for 150 years: More Bruce secrets

■  The troubles between Bruce and his young helper

■  Looking at Bruce’s Tot—and at his student B. H. Latrobe

■  Was Bruce lying when he claimed to be a pal of the king?

■  Bruce’s Memoirs as a building block toward the Travels to Discover

■  What Bruce might have given Benjamin Henry Latrobe

■  Did Bruce show Benjamin Henry his unpublished work on Paestum?

■  Building the Capitol, watching Sophie get whipped, and how Latrobe died

■  What Latrobe told Jefferson about Bruce and his disability

Chapter 13 How Home’s Douglas at Edinburgh and London led to Fennell’s Production at Philadelphia of Mrs. Rawson’s Slaves in Algiers

■  Did no one tell Murray about Fennell? or did he just shut up about it?

■  Two new Americans decide to expose Bruce

■  An actor on the London stage raises a storm on the Edinburgh stage

■  How Scottish John Home was driven to London because of Douglas

■  How two noble Scottish mothers wrestled over a brown-skinned French boy

■  Fennell usurps the part of Jafier in Venice Preserved

■  Fennell and Latrobe at the edges of the American theater scene

■  James Fennell’s assessment of James Bruce

■  The failure to kindle cross Atlantic interest in the Bruce phenomenon

■  Fennell spent his life between palaces and prisons, they said

■  The success of Mrs. Rawson’s Slaves in Algiers

Chapter 14 Appetizers from Bruce’s Travels

■  How Bruce and Fennell swapped stories

■  Some of Bruce’s probable tall stories

■  Bruce’s Ethiopian birds

The three battles of Serbraxos

■  Some of the iconic English poetry Bruce quoted

■  Revisiting Massawa, Gish Abay, and the site of the Battle of Wayna Daga

■  The Book of Enoch; the excommunication of women; and Dathan, Abiram and the earth’s opening to take us to hell

■  The death of Balugani and the death of Joas

■  Harps, lyres, and turtles: The background music to Bruce’s Travels

■  From 1761 to 1942: Signpost slavery abolition dates for Portugal, Brazil, and Ethiopia

Mansfield’s conclusion in London of the case of James Campbell of Grenada

PREFACE

Plotting is both a biography of James Bruce and a necessarily selective history of the ethical anxiety that increased in Britain almost as fast as did the nation’s trade in African slaves. Slaving was already embedded in many of the world’s traditional cultures; it was a world-wide habit. Anxiety about the increased use of Africans as slaves during Bruce’s lifetime accelerated until –thirteen years after Bruce’s death in 1794 –a start toward ending the habit was achieved. By a majority vote in the British parliament at Westminster, slave trading on British vessels was prohibited in 1807. Awareness of the monstrous historical trading of African slaves across the Atlantic is now fairly widespread. But although Bruce was a notorious public figure in his own age and, for a variety of reasons, has fascinated many interested persons from his time to ours, Bruce’s covert role in achieving the abolition of the African slave trade has never (extraordinarily) been publicly noticed or honored.

James Bruce has traditionally been known as the Abyssinian traveler because of his discovery of the source of the Blue Nile in the country we now know as Ethiopia. Bruce was a great pioneering traveler and geographer, as well as the engaging writer of a perennially popular book: Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, 1773 in five [quarto] volumes (in the Edinburgh edition but in six octavo volumes in the Dublin edition). Both editions were published in 1790).¹ However, the little-known truth is that Bruce gave most of his life to the antislavery cause. It was only after he completed his service with the British government as one of their Mediterranean consuls—and simultaneously as an agent also charged with secret espionage responsibilities that included research into local slavery practices —that he undertook his dangerous mission into the little-known interior of northeastern Africa. He returned to his home in Scotland in 1774.

My readers will have noticed that Bruce’s active contributions were made during the years leading up to what was experienced in Britain as the American Revolution and then to (fourteen years later) what historians still understand to have been the French Revolution. It was a time of change. After his return, Bruce quietly continued to contribute, in coded and unobtrusive terms, to the project of his employers (along with the range of like-minded persons they called their ‘friends’) to get slave trading in British ships prohibited. His material contribution was his publication of his multi-volume Travels in 1790. Even if his book does not, at first glance, appear to have much to say about slaves, it in fact does.

Overall, the self-portrait the author sketches in his big book is fun, complex, and endearing. He presents himself as a robust investigative traveler, hiking through landscapes and cultures that fascinate him and delighting in the many congenial friends he meets—among poorer people belonging to several different faith groups as well as among members of the local ruling elites.

James Bruce and his colleagues began to issue hints about their long-term intention in 1762. Their undercover plot to organize international support for their anti-slavery project—including from Scottish and Irish associates, some Roman Catholic European nations and some of the inhabitants of Britain’s American colonies—was initially only a whisper among sympathizing friends. Some twenty years later, it became possible for William Wilberforce and his militant Protestant Christian and other groups of English supporters openly to carry forward the campaign. Their aim was to encourage the general public and to pressure both of the houses of Parliament towards achieving the demise of slavery. The drive to win a majority vote for stopping the British slave trade was launched during the 1789/90 sessions of Parliament. It was continued until Wilberforce and his militant followers won the long debate, and the vote; and their Slave Trade [prohibition] Act was passed in 1807. Bruce’s Africa-friendly Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin during the winter of 1789 / 1790—precisely while Wilberforce was presenting his motion for debate in Parliament on the first of many (almost yearly until 1807) unsuccessful attempts, during rapidly changing historical events and public perceptions.

William Wilberforce frequently had to reconsider the wording of the original motion he put before Parliament, proposing the outlawing of British citizens’ slaving activities. These activities were highly financially successful; it was hard to get the nation to agree to relinquish them. It is not yet universally understood that, towards at the close of Theresa May’s incumbency as Prime Minister (2016-2019), in the English portion of the United Kingdom the wide general anxiety about how to manage current and pending ecological and population imbalances (perceived as a north-south divide) had dominated British political discussion for more than four years. Resolution of the Brexit issue did not solve –but entailed deep discussion of –these issues.

Of particular interest to readers of this book must be the fact that –when James Bruce visited Ethiopia –this historically very significant kingdom (or empire) at the extreme of north-eastern Africa was suffering disruptions and wars stemming from its many centuries’ experience managing differences at that cusp of north-south interrelations. Metropolitan Ethiopia had been long influenced by its Ottoman and Portuguese connections; and southern Ethiopia remained in two minds about how to handle growing population pressures in its more equatorially disadvantaged environment. Bruce’s stories of his adventures in the company or one another of the warring factions active in Ethiopia during his time provide the tensions and excitements at the core of his encyclopedic Travels.

Bruce’s return to Britain from his travels in African (and other) lands coincided with the rising tide of debate within Britain about the use and abuse of African slaves. Wilberforce was the ardently Christian member of parliament whom a handful of friends encouraged to head the drive to stop Britain’s lucrative involvement in slave-trading. The leadership had to organize alliances within and outside Parliament before a majority vote for what was to become, in effect, worldwide relinquishment of property in slaves could begin to be established. (A brief calendar of the dates of successive nations’ outlawing of slavery is given at the end of the closing chapter of this book, the. Its subtitle is From 1761 to 1942: Signpost Slaving Abolition Dates for Portugal, Brazil and Ethiopia.)

My readers will, surely, also be intrigued by my discovery that two young Londoners whom Bruce mentored at different times turned out to be mildly anti-slavery activists after they migrated to the new United States. Both were interested in theatre; and both went on to build notable careers in the recently British colonies. Benjamin Henry Latrobe (famously, the architect of the capitol building at Washington) was one of them; the other was less well known. He was the writer and actor James Fennell. He had visited France during the Revolution and published a book about the conditions there. As an actor, he was particularly known for playing the lead in Othello.

The essentials of Bruce’s biography are surveyed in chapter 1. Although James Bruce has interested many cultural and other historians, many of the aspects of his life and interesting related pieces of information about him are discussed here, in Plotting, for the first time. And the slightest decipherable hint about the basic truths of the Bruce story has –to the best of my knowledge –never been dropped. Myself, I came upon the socio-political facts rather easily. A little humanitarian concern, a little knowledge of eighteenth-century historical backgrounds, and a degree of old-fashioned curiosity about some unfamiliar words and names that came up in connection with Bruce in the public record sparked my interest when I was in Oxford. I went on to explore key archives meticulously held at London, Edinburgh and New Haven (in Connecticut –on the other shore of the northern Atlantic).

Certainly, among the many books in which Bruce and his Travels are studied or mentioned, a range of topics has been discussed. These include, for instance, aspects of African history, and aspects of anthropology, art, architecture, theology, and hypothetical psychological problematics. In this book, I address most of these and other familiar points of interest. The principal Bruce concern raised here is the degree to which the facts have been obscured by camouflage, espionage and plotting. Bruce’s alleged inauthenticity— his lies—have often been attacked.² His contemporaries accused him of being an unreliable observer who spun traveler’s yarns, and a self-promoting boaster, and—reluctantly—the kind of hero in a Greek tragedy who falls into misery from the heights of his blind kingship. But what Bruce really believed and did was so far outside the range of imagination of most of his similarly educated, moneyed, and talented contemporaries (and even of more recent interested persons) that views of Bruce have been projected in a variety of colors and flavors. In my opinion, we are now in a position to answer the essential question recently revived by a South African researcher: Would the real James Bruce please stand up?³ I argue that a real and extraordinarily interesting truth about Bruce and a set of his British contemporaries did exist behind the camouflage balloons intrinsic to the work he undertook.

The truth is that the many silences in the Bruce record are connected to the devious maneuvers of the early slavery-awareness campaign. And the way Bruce wrote his Travels—as though he walked through Africa as a solitary wanderer, alone—is largely due to a second (although not in the least racist) set of prejudices and fears at that time. The mores of Bruce’s homeland during that period did not tolerate openly gay behavior; sodomy was punishable by death. Bruce almost totally omits Luigi Balugani, the Italian artist who was his traveling companion, from his ample, six-large-volumes-long book. Bruce’s original Travels publication is tellingly illustrated with etchings of almost fifty of the drawings that he and Balugani made in the field. There is evidence in surviving manuscripts that at least the botanical drawings in the Bruce archive at New Haven were definitely executed by Balugani. Balugani seems also to have contributed to the initial cartographical work. Several explanations have been offered to account for Bruce’s silence –even though Bruce does often drop hints about his virtually invisible companion in Travels. The images that Bruce commissioned an engraver to produce from the field-drawings add to the appeal and scientific value of the book. The general view on the question seems to be that Bruce had a right to use Balugani’s work—and by doing so was not robbing his heirs (Balugani never married; but he did have family in Italy). Balugani was Bruce’s employee; Bruce paid all his assistant’s expenses. And there are hints in the Bruce archive held at New Haven that the fellow-travelers had implicitly agreed that the survivor would be responsible for getting all their joint notes, productions and acquisitions back to Europe. When Balugani died in course of their dangerous travels together, it was Bruce who ensured that all the artwork was taken to where it could be made publicly available to a fairly wide international audience.

A related consideration has, however, passed unmentioned. Like any other British citizen of that day, Bruce would not have wanted it whispered that the pair of Europeans traveling together in distant Africa was carrying on a reprehensible homosexual relationship. Further, although Bruce shows that he had no difficulty making friends with the many Muslims and animists whom he met during his travels, he probably anticipated that the respectable majority of his contemporary, fellow-Protestant British countrymen would perceive his working partnership with a wandering Catholic as being obnoxious—or at least alienating.

However, I need incidentally to clarify that when I mentioned that I was writing a book about James Bruce and Ethiopia to John Chesworth (a lay reader at my local Anglican church who has worked in East Africa and studied Islamic culture), he asked me to write an entry on Bruce for the volume of the massive Christian/Islamic encyclopedia he is co-editing. A substantial entry about Bruce is now included in it.⁴

As it happens, the links between the three principal Abrahamic faiths began to interest me long before I visited and began to study Ethiopia. My seventeen-year marriage to an American Jew whose family had escaped the holocaust broke down for a variety of reasons. Both of us thought ourselves, at that time, to be rational, scientific atheists in spite of our early schooling in our respective faiths. It was not religious difference that drove our separation. Later, I went on to consider (superficially; I do not have command of the required languages and scripts) the remarkable manuscripts Bruce discovered and was able to bring home samples of. He found one –the apocryphal Book of Enoch written in Ge’ez –in Ethiopia and some others (mysterious Gnostic religious manuscripts written in Coptic) in Egypt.

Bruce’s biography was originally laid down, eleven years after his death, as the Life that his fellow Scotsman, Alexander Murray, wrote as the introduction to his great annotated edition of Bruce’s Travels. Murray was a largely self-educated scholar of Semitic and related languages. He was naturally drawn towards Bruce because Bruce, was interested in languages. As well as the items mentioned above, in the course of his travels Bruce collected manuscripts and books written in the traditional Ethiopian Ge’ez script and samples of different local African languages and dialects. Ethiopians from various backgrounds spoke differently. As time went by, some of them came to use Amharic characters (developed from Ge’ez), for secular purposes. Traditional stories of saints’ lives and deaths, and chronicles of successive Ethiopian kings’ and emperors’ reigns, and legal documents and proclamations were written and read in Ethiopia. Murray was as excited as Bruce had been to find that an African country had more than one, greatly valued, written as well as spoken language.⁵ Murray, though, was not interested in Bruce’s additional theory that, because some of the letters in the Ethiopian alphabet can seem to resemble shapes in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the true lines of descent must have included not only northern Armenian Christian influences but inspiration from the ancient civilizations of neighboring Egypt. It has always been recognized that among the fossils, and shot-and-stuffed birds, and papers that Bruce brought home from his African travels were several documents written largely in the Coptic script. Coptic characters were developed, in association with Greek, to represent (and succeed) the language of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although outsiders could not decode these Gnostic [Knowledge] documents in Bruce’s time (and continue to have difficulty in ours), the informants who initially helped Bruce to find and purchase them probably told him they included Gospels that were illegitimate offspring from Christian writings. In fact, some of this Egyptian material is now known to precede the birth of Christianity. Bruce was supposedly the first European to recognize the significance of these documents, to bring samples into a northern country, and –for that reason as well as many others –to be suspected of having scandalous tendencies and anti-traditional intellectual interests. (For the fact that Bruce was following in a path pioneered by Richard Pococke, an Irish bishop and scholar see, in chapter 10, the section titled Some of Bruce’s almost equally mendacious friends). Whether Pococke or Bruce was the first to discuss his Gnostic manuscript with library curators is not recorded.⁶

A great deal more will be said in later chapters about the Scottish Prime Minister of Britain who is commemorated by the naming of more public buildings and erecting of statues north of the border, than south of it.

Not only does Murray neglect to mention that Bruce’s travels commenced during Bute’s premiership, but he never points out –to what he must have assumed or hoped would be a largely London-centered readership –the almost mythological significance of the name Bruce in Scotland. Robert the Bruce (King Robert, 1274-1329) was the national hero who established the independence of a Scotland still bound to England.

Alexander Murray, the definitive expert in Bruce studies, was a minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He knew his Bible—including its Hebrew ancestry and the rough relationship between Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and (as proved by the evidence Bruce brought home) Amharic, too. But Murray apparently knew nothing whatever about London, or the British Parliament’s political concerns and intrigues at Westminster. That is the main reason the compiler of James Bruce’s definitive biography says nothing about his subject’s socio-political activism, or his acceptance into the governmental circles that, at the start of Bruce’s career, happened to be led by a Scottish First Minister (during only 1762 and 1763). different scattered Scottish communities, deployed his forces with brilliant military strategy so as to expel most of the English, and topped his successes by fixing a canny marriage settlement between a child descended from the Scottish royal family and an English royal child.

Murray never mentions, either, the closeness between his own near-contemporary Bruce and a certain influential Londoner named Douglas who was nine years older than the African traveler. John Douglas wrote political pamphlets, helped Bruce edit and publish his Travels, and was appointed Bishop of Salisbury in time to vote in favor of Wilberforce’s anti-slaving Bill. By an elegant turn of fate, a Sir James Douglas was the right-hand man of King Robert (the Bruce). At about the time when, in England, Chaucer was publishing his Canterbury Tales, in Scotland John Barbour was writing his great poem about the deeds of The Bruce.⁷ Notwithstanding the glory of valiant Robert Bruce and the significance of Scottish freedom, it is arguably –in the historical record as well as in Barbour’s epic –Sir James Douglas, the close friend of the Bruce,, who is the poem’s leading man. After King Robert dies, Douglas takes his heart to Spain to keep temporary company with the branch of the Crusades initiated by an Islamic invasion that was still under way there. Murray apparently did not know, or took no interest in, the coincidental existence, in the background of James Bruce’s adventurous life, of a significant writer, priest and perhaps manager named John Douglas.

Murray does drop one shadowy hint that Bruce’s book was fueled by the same cause as the various other contemporary efforts supporting Wilberforce. But none of the many subsequent biographers whose books have depended on Murray’s work mention the coordinated anti-slavery plotting going forward in the background during Bruce’s lifetime.⁸

Bruce has been perceived as a modern figure (for changing reasons) by almost all the biographers who have used and followed Murray. The fairly recent detection of Bruce’s implicit interest in Jewish mythologies (in particular, in the tradition of the apparently mysteriously lost Ark of the Covenant) has rightly attracted a great deal of attention.⁹ For myself, I try to follow old-fashioned Murray in respect, at least, that I revert to appreciation of Bruce’s linguistic, cartographic, and art-and architecture-related contributions. And it must be acknowledged that Murray is almost as engaged with ecological and wildlife concerns as Bruce passionately is. But Bruce’s view of the importance of history and political change seems to have been alien to Murray. Bruce’s premier biographer seems unaware that it was Britain’s Parliament in London that sent Bruce on his mission to discover the source of the Nile (and of trafficked slaves). ¹⁰

Although the Scottish parliament was to some extent involved in the seating of Scottish representatives at Westminster, it was virtually out of the question that a Scottish cabinet member could become the prime minister of Britain (united England and Scotland, at that time). In 1762 a Scottish peer did achieve this elevation. But Murray seems unaware of the presence of Lord Bute in Bruce’s political background. Although Bute was a familiar figure at the court of George II and a long-term favorite of Frederick, the Hanoverian Prince of Wales, Bute did not move into parliamentary power until Frederick died and his son (famously proclaiming I am a Briton) was crowned George III. It was at that time that Bruce began to take a noticeable interest in parliamentary affairs. Shortly after Bute was appointed first minister (the 1st Lord of the British Treasury), Bruce was appointed consul to Algiers –the Mediterranean African port city that, in light of the existing war conditions, was Britain’s key consulate in that area.

After Murray’s massive editorial coverage of Bruce’s original edition, a number of other Bruce books largely dependent on Murray’s were written about or threw light on Bruce. I am able to discuss here, for the first time, several less celebrated but arguably more sprightly and interesting books that combine editors’ accounts of Bruce’s life with their hugely shortened versions of his Travels. These are discussed here for the first time. But all Bruce’s admirers must depend on Murray. I refer to most of the known books connected with James Bruce to in my text, footnotes, and bibliography. I shall not, however –Murray, legend, and romance notwithstanding –call Bruce by the name that amused his contemporaries. Bruce was not just the Abyssinian or even the Ethiopian traveler. Following the lead of eccentric James Cundee,¹¹ slightly jingoistically patriotic Francis B. Head,¹² and modern-minded Miles Bredin,¹³ I shall often refer to Bruce as the African traveler

It is amazing—and indeed shocking—that the timing of the publication of Bruce’s Travels (1789/90) to coincide with the opening of the Wilberforce-led antislavery struggle (1789/90) has gone unnoticed for so long. I am now in a position to cement this connection by disclosing what, in fact, Bruce was really doing while he appeared to be incompetently causing pointless trouble as Britain’s consul at Algiers.¹⁴

Overall –and particularly in the introductory chapters to my Plotting and its closing chapter, 14, "Appetizers from Bruce’s Travels, I aim to persuade my readers that Bruce’s art and his literary skills are in themselves worth our considered attention. The lies, and the prevarications (and silences) which Bruce’s friends" collaborated in maintaining alongside him, and the medley of fact and fiction he wrote into his Travels, are so copious and absorbing that the name Bruce and the title of his now classic book have continued to influence almost worldwide thinking about Africa. During 2018, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in Japanese.

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PART I: INTRODUCING JAMES BRUCE

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CHAPTER 1

A Brief Biography of Bruce: including an account of his

arrival in Ethiopia through the Red Sea Port of Massawa

and of his departure through Hor-Cacamoot

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A chronological account of Bruce’s life

Since the next chapters in this book sometimes follow thematic as well as chronological threads, I am beginning with a very brief account of the hero of Plotting. James Bruce was born at Kinnaird, near Falkirk in Scotland, in 1730. The family estate included a dilapidated mine. His mother died, and his father married again. The eight-year-old was sent to a Scottish uncle in London for his schooling. This uncle, William Hamilton, was a high-ranking lawyer, whose friends in the Westminster government included Britain’s chief justice Lord Mansfield and probably also two of the most active long-serving members of the British cabinet, Lord Halifax and Lord Sandwich. Bruce married the daughter of a London wine merchant. When he visited Europe on wine business, he also went on undercover errands for his government. After the death of his young wife—and then the death of his father—he improved his mine at Kinnaird. In 1761, he arranged to sell his coal to the Carron Iron Works.

In 1762, the group in government to whom Bruce had been supplying information during the Seven Years’ War came into power and appointed him British consul at Algiers. The most publicly visible member of this group was Scottish John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. Algiers was a key Mediterranean post; the port city was close to the Spanish Balearic Islands. The French seizure of Menorca had started the war. When the peacemaking Treaty of Paris was made in 1763, that strategic outpost was returned to its immediately previous occupier—Britain. Bruce’s job, when he was sent to Algiers in 1762, was to smooth the way for the transfer of power. He had to: calm down old attitudes and hostile relations between Britain and France; encourage harmony among the European and North African states; and combat illegal shipping practices, including the covert transporting of slaves under British flags (see figure 7.1).

In 1765, Bruce acquired the Italian architect, Luigi Balugani, to help him; moved on from Algiers; and, with Balugani, traveled through North Africa and Syria, recording Roman architectural remains. These were destined to be a gift for George III. Since Bruce had promised the secretary of state, Lord Halifax, that he would try to penetrate interior Africa as well as investigate the Source of the Nile, he and Balugani returned from their researches in Syria back to Africa (in 1768). They were following in the footsteps of Pedro Páez and Jerónimo Lobo—the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries who were the last Europeans known to have been active in, and to have written about, Ethiopia—more than one hundred years earlier.

Bruce and Balugani entered Ethiopia by the Red Sea route. They landed at Massawa. Political changes since Bruce’s time have made modern Massawa the major port in independent Eritrea. With some difficulty, Bruce and Balugani eventually arrived at the then capital of Ethiopia, Gondar, during a period of local wars and political turmoil. Nevertheless, they were welcomed by King Tekle Haymanot. They immediately set out towards their goal—the reputed source of as much of the River Nile as was known to geographers at that time –and returned to Gondar at the end of the same year (on November 5, 1770). The Ethiopian Source of the Nile is at the innermost springs of the Blue Nile. It is at the village of Gish Abay in the province of Gojjam. The wars for local dominance were continuing; the king and his advisors declined to help Bruce leave the country. Balugani died of dysentery at Gondar on 3 March 1771, and Bruce was given an escort towards the frontier with Sudan shortly before 25 December that same year. (In Ethiopia, the birth of Jesus is celebrated later than in western Christianity –at Epiphany.)

The two travelers produced a vast quantity of sketches, journals, and scientific data. When the king of Ethiopia gave Bruce permission to depart, he needed to take home his purchases of valuable Ethiopian books, including four copies of the scriptural Book of Enoch (which had been lost for about fifteen centuries) along with his expedition’s paperwork and their botanical and other results. Choosing to take what he believed was the least problematic route home—through Sudan and Egypt—the African traveler was discourteously detained by the authorities at Sennar, had an unpleasant journey through the desert and was eventually able to take a boat down the Nile to Cairo.

Bruce reached Marseille in March 1773. While recuperating in Italy and France, he shared his botanical specimens and other items among interested European colleagues. He reached London in June 1774. Although he was warmly welcomed and highly appreciated in Europe, his reception in Great Britain was cold. In England, he was mocked and accused of fabricating his colorful tales of his adventures and achievements in Africa. When he reached Scotland, he sued his stepmother (who had supposed he was dead), to regain possession of Kinnaird. After winning his suit, Bruce married his Scottish neighbor’s daughter in 1776. They had three children before she died in 1785.

It was while Bruce was desolated by his wife’s death that his friends urged him to write his book. Travels was published in 1790. Bruce died at Kinnaird in 1794.

The Bruce architectural drawings are at Windsor Castle. Many of his Ethiopian manuscripts and books are at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and his cippus from Aksum is at the National Museum of Scotland.¹⁵ The massive Bruce archive is at the Yale Center for British Art at New Haven.

A taste of Bruce in Africa in action

Bruce’s Ethiopian adventures began as soon as he arrived at Massawa on the Red Sea. In Bruce’s day, the territory was occupied by the Turkish authority locally represented by a naybe. The naybe and the emperors of Ethiopia had negotiated a flexible customs deal. The African traveler arrived at Massawa seven years after he first took on the range of tasks to which he had more or less firmly committed himself. Bruce had first visited Italy to take an educative grand tour—at an unusually advanced age—of its art and architecture treasures before serving his two grueling years as the British consul at Algiers. That core period was followed by Bruce and Balugani’s fifteen-month, almost equally grueling expedition to find, draw, and write descriptions of the many surviving remains of the camps, the triumphal arches, and the temples the Romans had built in the parts of North Africa they occupied. Then the pair took time off for a holiday in French-dominated Syria. They needed a break for recuperation and for Bruce to study tropical medicine with a significant Scottish doctor employed at Aleppo.

Three years later, master and servant sailed to Alexandria, went to Cairo, and did some sightseeing along the lower Nile. From there, they traveled overland to the Red Sea and did some surveying and mapping. Then they spent some time traveling east along the sea’s northern Arabian shore. Finally, they crossed back southwest and arrived at Massawa on September 19, 1769. Twenty-one years later, Bruce published Travels. As I argue later, in chapter 11, Bruce did not begin seriously to write his book until 1786. By that time, he had been back at his home at Kinnaird for sixteen years, while a certain amount of background publicity accrued to his name. In 1790, interested readers could start in on his book.

Bruce’s Travels does not begin with the scene of Bruce’s first arriving at Massawa, accompanied by both Balugani and the linguistically adept Greek servant, Michael. Bruce had probably acquired Michael from a Coptic priest in Cairo. Bruce’s Travels begins with an account of how he got the job of British consul at Algiers in the first place. But at this point we shall look closely at the scene to which the naybe of Massawa and his nephew Achmet treated Bruce when he first arrived in Ethiopia. The Bruce expedition had taken a ship from Jeddah—the principal port for Mecca—to what was then understood to be Ethiopia’s major port.

Bruce’s account of his arrival at Massawa is supported by an illustration—by an unknown hand—showing Bruce’s baggage being put ashore by slaves (figure 1.1). I have stylistic reasons for believing that the artist was the Edinburgh-born cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank. Cruikshank was a close personal friend John Douglas; Douglas was both a friend and an editorial adviser to Bruce. Revd. Douglas was elevated to a bishopric in time to vote in favor of Wilberforce’s anti-slaving bill (in the House of Lords, in 1807). This particular illustration is published in both of James Cundee’s two abbreviated editions of Bruce’s Travels. These were probably published in 1807. It was during that year—a little more than ten years after Bruce’s death—that Parliament voted Britain’s Slave Trade Act into law.¹⁶

From Bruce’s original Travels we can deduce that what Bruce brought with him onto the Massawa dock was a weighty quantity of luggage. It included telescopes and the large quadrant the French government had—in peculiar circumstances that will be discussed later—given him to support his direction-finding and map-making requirements. Books and maps were also needed. So were both conventional European clothes and what Bruce took to be the correct Turkish-style garb for traveling through Arab and African regions. He also needed to carry generous presents for key Ethiopian notables and chests of medicines. These were required not only to keep himself and his expedition healthy but also to further enable him to provide the doctoring the locals assumed—somewhat correctly—he was qualified to do.¹⁷

Bruce’s story of his reception at Massawa is connected with the extraordinary story of his earlier encounter at Jeddah with Captain Boswell, who Bruce claims spread the rumor that the African traveler was a rich and important diplomat. We shall have occasion to return later to this Captain Boswell. He was thought to have been a relative of the James Boswell who befriended and famously wrote the exhaustive biography of Samuel Johnson.

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Figure 1.1. Bruce’s baggage being put ashore at Massawa on the Red Sea by slaves of the naybe’s nephew. This image appears in Travels [of James Bruce] between the years 1765 and 1773, London, n.d., p. 133 and also in Travels between the years 1768 and 1773., London, n.d., p. 154. See Appendix, ‘Bibliographical Notes’, for details. Image used with the permission of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford. The ‘1765’ version is in the Oriental Institute Library and bears the shelf-mark 761.1 Bri S. The shelf-mark of the ‘1768’ version is 207e.169.

Figure 1.1. Bruce’s welcome to Ethiopia at the port of Massawa on the Red Sea. Bruce is greeted by the nephew of the naybe. This image is in both of Cundee’s versions of Bruce’s Travels. (Bodleian)

Bruce writes that, on the advice of his servant, he aborted his first attempt at a courteous approach toward kissing princely Achmet’s hand. Achmet and his visitor instead touched one another’s hands, carried our fingers to our lips, then laid our hands cross our breasts. The servant acquainted with local customs was presumably neither Balugani nor Michael, but Yasine. Yasine was a Muslim traveler who happened to be going from Jeddah to the Ethiopian court in the interior highlands at the same time as Bruce. He was glad to join forces with him and give advice.

After the correct exchange of greetings between Achmet and Bruce was achieved, the host ordered coffee. As his immediate offering of meat and drink is an assurance your life is not in danger … and, our coffee being done, I rose to take my leave, and was presently wet to the skin by deluges of orange water showered upon me from right and left, by two of his attendants, from silver bottles.

Bruce noticed (and drew) the awkward route vessels had to follow in order to arrive at the small, sheltered offshore island of Massawa. In conjunction with the facing part of the mainland’s shoreline, the situation of Massawa provided an ideal harbor. As we shall see in more detail later, one of Bruce’s specialties was providing his government with potentially useful strategic maps. Acquiring offshore islands had been a long-standing—and inevitably problematic—British specialty; the Falklands, Gibraltar, and Hong Kong are cases in point. Bruce inserts the first of his book’s maps at this point.¹⁸ It is a large-scale, foldout chart of the harbor at Massawa. He probably commissioned a cartographic engraver to produce it from his drawing as soon as soon as he could. Lord North, the then prime minister, is known to have received Bruce when the explorer got back to London. North was overloaded with priorities at that time—headed by the pending breakdown of peaceful relations with the American colonies. He did not follow up on the document, which Bruce presumably offered him. The document itself does not survive. Bruce copied it into the last chapter of his printed Travels narrative, making it available to all. By this document, favorite nation rights at the port at Suez are accorded to Britain. This quasi-treaty was negotiated and signed by the ex-consul with a certain ex-bey of Egypt, who understood Bruce’s appreciation of the potential of canals.

Having mentioned that at Bruce’s meeting with the naybe’s nephew, the guest was drenched with orange water from silver bottles, I need to mention that Bruce had just informed us that this Red Sea port was so short of fresh water that the residents’ supply must, at great expense, be carried in from other regions.¹⁹

The orange water routine having been done with, there was talk of a pair of good English pistols being an acceptable gift. Achmet wanted them given to the person that brings you dry dates in an Indian handkerchief and an earthen bottle to drink your water out of. After all this secretive pseudo-Masonic coding and signaling, Bruce continues, On the 20th of September, a female slave came, and brought with her the proper credentials, an Indian handkerchief full of dried dates and a pot or bottle of unvarnished potter’s earth, which keeps the water very cool. I had some doubt about this change of sex; but the slave, who was an Abyssinian girl, quickly undeceived me, delivered the dates, and took away the pistols destined for Achmet, who had himself gone to his uncle [the Turkish naybe] at Arkeeko.

Presumably the artist responsible for figure 1.1 has correctly interpreted Bruce’s account by drawing, into the background of his Massawa scene, something like a shower of orange-scented, splendidly hatted Ethiopian maidens who were expert at reversing expectations.

But although Cundee’s artist does not put leg irons or iron chains on any of the porters, he implies—as indirectly, but as definitely, as Bruce does in his original text—that, at Massawa, Bruce is entering a polity dependent on slave labor. For one thing, the hauler at the lower right of the picture seems ready to pick up an entire wall or pyramid. For another, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the fancy pants worn by the laborer at the front left, who is about to be struck by the overseer. Incidentally, the manner in which the hand of the child shouldering a clean sack in the right background is drawn is characteristic of Isaac Cruikshank’s work; indeed, it is almost his signature.²⁰

More presents were demanded and given. The naybe let Bruce see that he did not like the small bottle of cinnamon water his visitor gave him. On the 15th of October he peremptorily told me, that unless I had 300 ounces of gold ready to pay me on Monday … he would confine me in a dungeon, without light, air, or meat, till the bones came though my skin for want. At the entrance port to Christian-Islamic Ethiopia, the visiting reputed grandee was in danger of being scrunched into a corpse. However, a smallpox epidemic intervened—along with local appreciation of the efficacy of Bruce’s dependable medicine, the Peruvian bark that was usually deployed against malaria.

Bruce did not die.²¹ He carried on and went through with his own secret, coded, and dangerous slavery-observing mission to its end.

Bruce and Yasine, with their respective servants and locally hired porters, arrived at Gondar nearly three months later. The king of Ethiopia was grateful to Bruce for—almost as soon as he arrived there—successfully doctoring the royal family through yet another smallpox outbreak. Tekle Haymanot (the king) tried to express his thanks by giving Bruce the governorship of the province of Ras el Feel. But, Bruce wrote, he asked the king to give, instead, that large province to Yasine, his good Muslim friend who had helped him get to Gondar.²² Therefore, the king gave Bruce, instead, the currently disturbed area at the source of the Blue Nile, which the visiting doctor was, the king intimated, so inappropriately interested in seeing. But Tekle Haymanot’s mother provided a guide for Bruce. And the king told him he could have the tax revenue in honey, which was annually due from the villages at Gish Abay and Sakala—if he could get hold of it.

Skirmishes and wars were in progress in the Ethiopian highlands. Bruce wanted to record the astronomical coordinates of the purported source as soon as possible and then return to Cairo by a route that would not force him into back into the Naybe’s hands. Tekle Haymanot’s gifting of Ras-el-Feel to Yasine—who had links with Sudan, to the west, and who was already Bruce’s friend—must have seemed a godsend for Bruce. Yasine’s new province lay across the route that connected the interior of Ethiopia to the lower Nile valley; from there it was supposedly easy to continue down to the Mediterranean. Bruce’s Islamic contacts in Syria had given him letters that were often effective; these supposedly guaranteed him a welcome and money-changing facilities at most of the Arab-dominated regions he was likely to go through during his travels in northeastern Africa. Alexander Murray reproduced in his Account of the Life and Writings of James Bruce of Kinnaird a number of documents evidencing this arrangement.²³

And yet Yasine betrayed Bruce. Yasine was away hunting when Bruce reached Ras el Feel and he did not reappear during the whole time Bruce remained in the province, which Yasine had acquired the governorship of at Bruce’s request.

Bruce was treated to a farewell party by some of the younger generation of the Iteghé’s family. Several of these had become his friends during his two years in Ethiopia. They maintained a hunting lodge at Tcherkin in Ethiopia’s western borderlands.²⁴ One would suppose that its banqueting hall and so forth would not much resemble the small hunting lodge among the lochs and hills north of Kinnaird, which the Earl of Atholl was to give Bruce when he returned to Scotland. Toward the end of his life, Bruce loved this country retreat. We shall pay Bruce a brief vicarious visit there in chapter 13.

In the Ethiopia of Bruce’s time, the kings had only fairly recently settled their capital at Gondar. In former years, when provisions in their current location became depleted, the king, his army, and much of the dependent populace moved, again and again, to a new site at which they could all live, for a while, off the produce of these successive peasant communities. The royal family was accustomed to taking up its housing and moving its necessaries somewhere else. In a modified form, this was still what happened every year during the campaigning season. Bruce knew that his invitation to the elephant hunt represented a parting gift that he would probably not like—but which his hosts valued highly (figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.2. An elephant hunt. Travels [of James Bruce] between the years 1768 and 1773, London, n.d., p.369. Compare caption for figure 1.1, above. Image from Bodleian 207e.169 used with the permission of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

The modern reader is likely to