Don Quixote at the Source

 

‘Safety! Where is that to be found? I am obliged to fight for my own life every day.’

                              Ras Michael.

EVEN THE briefest glance at Bruce’s life reveals the great gulf that divides us from the privileged classes of eighteenth century England. He belongs to a world that seems to us now as dead as the dodo: the ancestral arms and the entailed estate, the classical education and the emphasis on manners, the patronage and the violent prejudices. Bruce hated the Papists as some people hate snakes, and if he did not actually believe in the divine right of kings he was certainly monarchist to the core.

Unlike the Victorian explorers who were soon to follow him to Africa, he never takes a moral attitude about such matters as the slave trade or the benefits that civilization could confer on the benighted blacks. He does not even make the pretence of being a reformer or an educator. He accepts the world as it is. Quite simply he is out to do the best he can for himself, and he explores purely for the sake of curiosity and personal adventure.

Even by the standards of his time and his class he was a formidable man. He was six foot four in height and strong in proportion, and he had dark red hair and a very loud voice. He had a reputation as a horseman and a marksman, and wherever he went he seems to have dispensed an air of confident superiority. He felt superior. Even Arabic and the Ethiopian dialects did not defeat his natural fluency in languages, he was an enthusiastic amateur of such subjects as astronomy, he was socially at ease and he was rich. If he was quick to take offence (he describes himself as of ‘a sanguine, passionate disposition, very sensible of injuries’), and was often childishly vain and boastful, he was also a man of imagination, and there is no doubt whatever that he was very brave and very determined.

It is strange that with all his obvious merits one does not like Bruce very much, and stranger still that his own contemporaries should have been so brutal with him. Some vital ingredient was missing in his nature, perhaps it was humanity, and when all his hardships and misfortunes are related one is still left with the cold impression of an intensely self-reliant man, one of the kind who repels sympathy by his own conceit.

He was born on the family estates at Kinnaird in Scotland in 1730, and within three years his mother had died. His father soon married again and had three daughters and six sons by his second wife. Thus from the first Bruce remained a little apart from the rest of the family as the eldest son by another wife, and the heir to property and privileges which dated back, it was claimed, to the ancient kings of Scotland. He was a delicate child who soon outgrew his own strength, yet at the age of 6 he was sent to be educated by tutors in London, a week’s journey away by coach to the south. At the age of 12 he was put into Harrow school, where they thought very well of him as a scholar. Education 200 years ago was pushed ahead much more rapidly and thoroughly than it is today, and at 16 Bruce was sent back to Scotland to continue his studies at Edinburgh University. He would have preferred the church, but his father insisted on the law, and this was a mistake, for Bruce hated it so much that he soon became ill. There followed then several years of idleness and convalescence at Kinnaird, and in the end it was decided that he should go down to London and find a post with the East India Company.

In London, however, he soon fell in love with the daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant, and after the marriage he entered her family’s firm. With wealth and good connections he was now installed in English society, and it seemed that his career might follow more or less upon the lines of his near contemporary, James Boswell, who was also destined one day, for all his love of London, to inherit family estates and set himself up as a laird in Scotland. But within nine months of his marriage Bruce’s wife died of consumption when she was pregnant, and one has to consider just how far Bruce’s toughness and self-sufficiency spring from the sudden disappearance of women from his life, for it was to happen again, and more than once.

They were in Paris on their way to the south of France when the girl died, and there was a grisly scene when Bruce, in a Protestant rage, rejected the attentions of the Roman Catholic priests and at length found a burial ground on the outskirts of the city. She was buried at midnight, and Bruce at once got on his horse and rode all night through a wild storm to the Channel. At Boulogne he collapsed, and it was a day or two before he could continue to England.

He was now 24, and the tragedy appears to have had the effect of revealing himself to himself. From this time forward he never really hesitates. He hungered for solitary travel just as Boswell hungered for social life in London, and he seems to have turned by instinct to Africa and the south. Not even his father’s death in 1758 could bring him back.

For the next few years Bruce’s life is that of the talented young man making the Grand Tour. He studied Arabic manuscripts in the Escurial in Spain, he sailed down the Rhine, he fought a duel in Brussels, he made drawings of ruins in Italy, and eventually George III’s ministers found him a job as British consul among the Barbary pirates in Algiers. It was not an easy post. Ali Pasha, the Bey of Algiers, was a sensual and cruel old man who thought nothing of throwing foreign consuls into gaol and of enslaving the crews of visiting ships. He had disliked the previous British consul very much and had written to ‘the English Vizier, Mr. Pitt’: ‘My high friend . . . your consul in Algiers is an obstinate person, and like an animal.’ Bruce presumably knew what he was in for but already he had vague plans for getting to the source of the Nile—that mystery which for 2,000 years had been, he declared, ‘a defiance of all travellers, and an opprobrium to geography’—and Algiers was a step along the way. In June 1762, aged 32, he arrived at Algiers equipped with two camera obscuras for drawing ruins and a quantity of astronomical instruments to chart his journeys in Africa. He found things much worse than he could have anticipated: the Bey was furious at the seizure of one of his ships by the British and the French and was out for blood. Within the first few months of his consulship Bruce saw the French consul taken away in chains, Forbes, his own assistant, was threatened with ‘a thousand bastinadoes’ and fled into hiding, and Bruce himself scarcely dared to go out. When he did have an audience with the Bey one of the court officials was strangled in his presence. Bruce stuck it for two years before the British Government gave him permission to leave his post and continue with his journey to the east. From Algiers he travelled on along the north African coast to the cities and the great ruins of the Near East, and it was a progress in the Byronic manner, brigands, shipwrecks and hand-to-hand skirmishes besetting him all the way.

The year 1768, when he was 38, finds him in Cairo accompanied by a young Italian secretary named Luigi Balugani, and dressed as a dervish. And now at last he has his great design in view: he will travel up the Nile into the unknown fastnesses of Ethiopia.

There are a number of unusual aspects about the tremendous journey upon which Bruce now embarked. It was, in a way, a journey in a vacuum, not only in the sense that the places he visited were virtually unknown to the civilized world, but also in the sense of time as well. Some seventy years had elapsed since Poncet had been in Ethiopia, and after Bruce’s visit in 1771 another thirty years were to go by before any other European penetrated far into the country. The secretary Luigi Balugani died at Gondar, and so Bruce is the only eye-witness of what befell the two men there; his account cannot be checked by either collaborators or contemporaries. Like Marco Polo he tells an intensely personal story, and the people he writes about so confidently and familiarly were then as strange to Europe and the civilized world as the denizens of outer space are to us today. On his return, says his biographer, Francis Head, he told the public ‘of people who wore rings in their lips instead of their ears—who anointed themselves not with bear’s grease or pomatum, but with the blood of cows—who, instead of playing tunes upon them, wore the entrails of animals as ornaments—and who, instead of eating hot putrid meat, licked their lips over bleeding living flesh. He described debauchery dreadfully disgusting, because it was so different to their own. He told of men who hunted each other—of mothers who had not seen ten winters—and he described crowds of human beings and huge animals retreating in terror before an army of little flies! In short, he told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but . . . the facts he related were too strong.’

There was yet another impediment to the success of Bruce’s journey. He was absolutely fixed in the mistaken idea that the Blue Nile was the main stream and that the White Nile was a tributary. However, this scarcely mattered; every journey in Africa at this time added something to human knowledge, and the Blue Nile was every bit as important as the White.

He set out at first on Norden’s and Pococke’s route up the Nile from Cairo, but at Aswan he found his further progress on the river blocked by local wars, and so he decided to enter Ethiopia by the Red Sea route instead. He turned back to the town of Cus below Luxor, and thence made his way across the desert to Kosseir. Here he embarked on a roundabout trip across the Red Sea to Jedda, where he found a British consul who helped him on his way. In September 1769 he landed at Massawa, which was then in the hands of a piratical gang that was even more rapacious than those he had left behind so long ago in Algiers. It took him two months to extract himself from Massawa, and then in November 1769 he turned towards the interior. Up to this point he had covered ground which was dangerous but fairly well explored. Now he faced the unknown.

There were about twenty men in the little party: Luigi Balugani, a Moor named Yasmine, who acted as a sort of major-domo, and a gang of porters who were mainly occupied in carrying an enormous quadrant and other scientific instruments. Six asses had also been bought in Massawa, but Bruce himself walked. In three weeks he had crossed the coastal plain and had struggled up the mountain paths to Adowa, which was then a place of some 300 houses and one of the principal strongholds of the country. Here Bruce had a warning of what lay before him: several hundred miserable wretches were imprisoned in cages awaiting the day when their families could raise enough money to buy their release. He pushed on to Axum, the ancient capital of the country, where he saw forty obelisks and the ruins of a great temple, and then marched on again towards Gondar, which by now, he learned, was the seat of the government. It was on this stage of the journey that the famous incident of the raw beef occurred. Bruce declared that he saw three Ethiopians throw a cow to the ground and cut two steaks off its buttock. The skin was then pinned back over the wound and covered with clay, after which the beast was allowed to get up and was driven off. The three Ethiopians fell on to the warm meat.

In mid-February 1770, ninety-five days out of Massawa, the party reached Gondar, and Bruce settled into a house in the Moslem quarter. Addis Ababa at this time had not yet been built, and Gondar was the principal city of the country. It was a settlement of some 10,000 families who lived in clay huts with conical roofs, but the King’s palace was a large square building flanked by towers and a surrounding wall. It had a view down to Lake Tana, and its principal reception hall was 120 feet long. For most of the year, however, the court lived in tents and followed the army on its endless meanderings across the Ethiopian plateau.

There is an air of nightmarish fantasy about affairs in Ethiopia at this moment, and in the pages of Bruce’s book they never really achieve coherence or sanity from the day he arrived in the country to the day he left. This is the atmosphere of Grand Guignol, and of mediaeval melodrama: of horror piled upon horror until everything dissolves into a meaningless welter of brutality and bloodshed. Bruce describes it all in the minutest detail: the endless marchings and countermarchings of futile little armies, the pitched battles, the savage feasts, the treachery and the rhetoric. It all very much recalls the Chinese, who in their traditional opera handle this sort of thing very well. The General struts on to the stage waving his sword, and you can judge his importance by the number of flags stuck into his costume. His Grand Vizier and his executioner stand at his side and scowl ferociously while he hurls defiance at the enemy. Then with a crash of drums and cymbals he marches off, to be replaced by the rival chieftain, who is an even more terrible fellow with his black moustaches and his dagger, and he too is full of braggadocio. The battle, when it comes, is like the dialogue, a pattern of stylized rhythmic gestures signifying nothing. There is a great deal of noise, a great deal of rushing about, and in the end one side is the victor and the other the vanquished; and then it all begins again.

There may be a certain entertainment to be had from these things when they are treated as an illusion on the stage, but when they are presented as actual happenings the drama is lost, the horror becomes gruesome and tedious, and one begins to hunt about for reasons why human beings should be as dreadful as this. It almost seems from Bruce’s account that a death-wish was operating among these people, that they were born expressly to hate and destroy one another, and the fact that they maintained an outward show of Christianity and observed a crude ceremony in their manners only made matters worse.

The young king, Tecla Haimanout, and his vizier Ras Michael, who really ruled the country, were away on one of their punitive raids when Bruce arrived, and so he paid court to the Iteghe, the queen mother. She seems to have been an intelligent woman. ‘See! See!’ she exclaimed one day to Bruce when he confided to her the object of his journey, ‘how every day our life furnishes us with proofs of the perverseness and contradiction of human nature: you are come from Jerusalem, through vile Turkish governments, and hot, unwholesome climates, to see a river and a bog, no part of which can you carry away were it ever so valuable, and of which you have in your own country a thousand larger, better and cleaner. . . . While I, on the other hand, the mother of kings, who have sat upon the throne of this country more than thirty years, have for my only wish, night and day, that, after giving up everything in the world, I could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after, if I could only be buried at last in the street within sight of the gate of that temple where our blessed Saviour once lay.’

Her daughter, Ozoro Esther, who was married to Ras Michael, also attracted Bruce’s sympathy, for she was a beautiful girl and she was driven half mad by the violence around her. Hardly so much could be said for Tecla Haimanout and Ras Michael; when Bruce first met them they were busy putting out the eyes of a dozen captives. Of the king’s appearance Bruce tells us very little, but Ras Michael emerges as a fairly well-defined figure, a terrible, white-haired old tyrant in his seventies, who adopted the airs and manners of a mediaeval baron. He rode into Gondar wearing a cloak of black velvet with a silver fringe, a page marching at his right stirrup carrying a silver wand. Behind him came the army, each soldier who had killed a man bearing on his lance a shred of scarlet cloth and the testicles of his victim.

Bruce was received in audience a day or two later, and he found Michael sitting on a sofa, surrounded by his followers, his hair hanging in short curls, a gaunt, authoritative figure, about six foot in height, with very intelligent eyes. Bruce made the customary obeisance by kissing the ground at his feet and was well received. After warning him of the dangers of moving about the country alone, Michael gave him the command of a troop of the King’s horse.

It is wonderful that Bruce should have survived and have even been honoured among these violent men whose first instinct was to kill a stranger and then rob him of his goods. He had a certain value as an oddity, of course, and he carried with him a formidable portfolio of letters from the Sultans in Constantinople, Cairo and Mecca, but they hardly counted for much in this barbaric Christian world. He tells us that the Ethiopian warriors were greatly impressed by the power of his modern rifle, especially when he galloped about on a black charger potting at the mountain kites. His skill as a doctor also made him very welcome, since plagues like smallpox were endemic; and it was useful that he had learned to speak both Geez and Arabic. But in the end probably it was his commanding presence and his air of assurance that really saved his life. Explorers in Africa tend to fall into two groups: the sophisticates and romantics who absorbed the protective local colouring of the country, and who went about in disguise pretending to be merchants, couriers or even pilgrims on their way to Mecca; and the practical men who boldly announced their identity and who disarmed opposition by marching ahead to their objectives with a show of perfect confidence. Bruce was no fool in the arts of persuasion, and he tells us that in Ethiopia he got himself up in chainmail, cloaks and bright cummerbunds stuck with pistols like any other chieftain, but he tends on the whole to belong to the practical group. He also possessed a good eighteenth-century knowledge of court intrigue and the soft word that induces patronage. ‘Man is the same creature everywhere although different in colour,’ he wrote. ‘The court in London and that in Abyssinia1 are in their principles the same.’And so, when he had cleared the queen mother’s palace of smallpox and had flirted with Ozoro Esther and had flattered Ras Michael, they were ready enough to take him off on the next expedition at the south of Lake Tana, where a rebel chief named Fasil was raising an army against the throne.

This was precisely the direction in which Bruce wanted to go, and it was a great disappointment to him that Fasil should have surrendered before he could get to the Little Abbai, which he believed to be the true source of the Nile. He did, however, reach the river close to its outflow from Lake Tana, and here he turned south-east to the Tisisat Falls. ‘The cataract itself,’ he says, ‘was the most magnificent sight that I ever beheld. The height has been rather exaggerated. The missionaries say the fall is about sixteen ells, or fifty feet. The measuring is indeed very difficult; but by the position of long sticks, and poles of different lengths, at different heights of the rock, from the water’s edge, I may venture to say, that it is nearer forty feet than any other measure. The river had been considerably increased by rains, and fell in one sheet of water, without any interval, above half an English mile in breadth, with a force and noise that was truly terrible, and which stunned, and made me, for a time, perfectly dizzy. A thick fume, or haze, covered the fall all round, and hung over the course of the stream both above and below, marking its track, though the water was not seen. It was a magnificent sight that ages, added to the greatest length of human life, would not efface or eradicate from my memory; it struck me with a kind of stupor, and a total oblivion of where I was, and of every other sublunary concern. It was one of the most magnificent, stupendous sights in the creation, much degraded and vilified by the lies of a grovelling fanatic priest.’

The passage is revealing; in fact, it provides a valuable key, not only to Bruce’s nature but also to the account of his journey which he was eventually to publish in England. There is first of all his inaccuracy, and it is very puzzling. One cannot altogether blame him for exalting the scene before him—after all, most of the explorers were guilty of exaggeration, and the Tisisat Falls are indeed very fine. But such phrases as ‘one of the most magnificent, stupendous sights in the creation’, are perhaps a little too much; they smack of the story-teller and the supernatural. Then when he gets down to facts he makes the Falls much wider than they really are, but less than a third of their true height; the actual drop is not forty feet but a hundred and fifty. The references to the missionaries and the ‘grovelling fanatic priest’ are even more disturbing.

These were the two Portuguese priests, Pedro Paez and Jerome Lobo, who were in Ethiopia early in the seventeenth century, that is to say about 150 years before Bruce. Paez was the remarkable man who, after being for many years a captive in Arabia, made his way to Ethiopia and (in 1621) converted the emperor Susenyos to Roman Catholicism. The ruins of a large and beautiful church at Gorgora at the north end of Lake Tana are a witness to Paez’s ability as an architect and a builder. Father Lobo, who followed Paez to Ethiopia, left an account of a journey to Tisisat. In it he declared that he clambered on to a ledge of rock that was below the falls and between them and the precipice. From this perch he says he looked out through the falling water and saw rainbows in the gorge. Bruce makes great play with this: the whole story, he says, is ‘a downright falsehood’. No man could have reached that spot through the thundering, boiling water. ‘And, supposing the friar placed in his imaginary seat, under the curve of that immense arch of water, he must have had a portion of firmness more than falls to the share of ordinary man, and which is not likely to be acquired in a monastic life, to philosophize upon optics in such a situation, where everything would seem to his dazzled eyes to be in motion, and the stream, in a noise like the loudest thunder, to make the solid rock (at least as to sense) shake to its very foundation, and threaten to tear every nerve to pieces, and to deprive one of other senses beside that of hearing.’

In this tumble of words Bruce overlooked the fact that while he himself visited the falls when they were in flood Lobo arrived at Christmas, which is the height of the dry season. And in point of fact Colonel Cheesman, the chief geographer of the river in modern times, actually sat under the falls just as Lobo says he did, when he (Cheesman) was prospecting the river in May 1926. On the way down the cliff-face one of Cheesman’s men grasped the tail of a python, thinking it was the branch of a tree, and very nearly came to grief.

But Bruce, where his own explorations were concerned, was as jealous and as prickly as a lover, and his hatred of the Jesuits was a special hate. This attack on Lobo was the prelude for another and much stronger onslaught which was to follow shortly afterwards.

For the moment, however, he was thwarted in his attempt to reach his main objective, the source of the Little Abbai, and he returned with the army to the intrigues at Gondar and the mutilation and massacre of the prisoners there. For a while he was ill with fever (no doubt malaria), and it was not until October 1770 that he was able to set out again. This time he travelled with his own small party, which included Balugani and a Greek named Strates, and porters carrying the quadrant as before. For the moment the country was at peace, and Bruce had so far got himself into the good graces of the King and Ras Michael that he had been nominated governor of Ghish, the territory around the source of the Little Abbai. It was hardly more than a nominal appointment, since Bruce had neither the means nor the intention of residing there, but it provided a sort of passport for his journey, and it enabled him to impress the local chieftains he met along the way. He passed around the west side of Lake Tana and then moved up the valley of the Little Abbai towards Ghish Mountain, which is about seventy miles south of the lake. The final march was made on November 4, 1770, through charming country filled with flowering shrubs and tropical birds and with a view of vast mountains in the distance. Late in the afternoon, when they had climbed to 9,500 feet, they came on a rustic church, and the guide, pointing beyond it, indicated a little swamp with a hillock rising from the centre; that, he declared, was the source of the Nile.

‘Throwing my shoes off,’ Bruce says, ‘I ran down the hill, towards the little island of green sods, which was about two hundred yards distant; the whole side of the hill was thick overgrown with flowers, the large bulbous roots of which appearing over the surface of the ground, and their skins coming off on treading upon them, occasioned me two very severe falls before I reached the brink of the marsh; I after this came to the island of green turf, which was in the form of an altar . . . and I stood in rapture. . . .’

There was no actual flow to be seen—the water merely appeared to seep through the swamp from several different springs to a point on its downward side where it combined into a tiny brook—but there was clear, cold water in the well and to Bruce at that moment it was sacred.

‘It is easier to guess than to describe the situation of my mind at the moment,’ he says, ‘standing in that spot which had baffled the genius, industry and inquiry of both ancients and moderns, for the course of near three thousand years. . . . Though a mere private Briton, I triumphed here in my own mind, over kings and their armies.’

But then, almost at once, he tells us, a reaction set in. For well over a year through tremendous hardships and dangers he had struggled to reach this goal, and now suddenly, having won the battle, having achieved what had so often seemed impossible, the impetus and the inspiration of his journey were gone; now he faced the long way home. ‘I found,’ he says, ‘a despondency gaining ground fast upon me, and blasting the crown of laurels I had woven for myself. I resolved, therefore, to divert myself till I could, on more solid reflection, overcome its progress. I saw Strates expecting me on the side of the hill. “Strates,” said I, “faithful squire! Come and triumph with your Don Quixote, at that island of Barataria where we have most wisely and fortunately brought ourselves! Come, and triumph with me over all the kings of the earth, all their armies, all their philosophers, and all their heroes!”

‘ “Sir,” says Strates, “I do not understand a word of what you say, and as little what you mean; you very well know that I am no scholar. But you had much better leave that bog . . .”.’

Determined to be merry, Bruce picked up a half coconut shell he used as a drinking cup. Filling it from the spring he obliged Strates to drink a toast to ‘His Majesty King George III and a long line of princes,’ and another to ‘Catherine, Empress of all the Russias’—this last was a gesture to Strates’s Greek origin, since Catherine just then was attacking the Turks in the Aegean. There was still another toast. ‘ “Now, friend,” ’ Bruce said, ‘ “here is to a more humble name, but still a sacred name, here is to—Maria!” ’ Strates asked if that was the Virgin Mary and Bruce answered, ‘In faith, I believe so, Strates.’ We are to hear more of this lady later, on Bruce’s return to Europe.

It was a strange scene, full of delusions, more to be likened to Lear and the fool on the blasted heath than to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. If Bruce was looking for the source of the Nile he was on the wrong river. The true source was in Lake Victoria, a thousand miles away. He was even on the wrong part of the wrong river, since, as Cheesman says, from an engineer’s point of view, the overflow from Lake Tana near Bahardar should be considered as the source of the Blue Nile.

There was an even more serious delusion than this: Bruce was utterly mistaken in thinking that he was the first European to reach this spot. Pedro Paez had been here in 1618, and his account of his experiences is very clear and very similar to Bruce’s: ‘On April 21 in the year 1618,’ Paez says, ‘being here, together with the king and his army, I ascended the place, and observed everything with great attention; I discovered first two round fountains, each about four palms in diameter, and saw, with the greatest delight, what neither Cyrus, the king of the Persians, nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Caesar, could ever discover. The two openings of these fountains have no issue in the plain on the top of the mountain, but flow from the foot of it. The second fountain lies about a stone-cast west from the first. . . .’

And he goes on to give a detailed and accurate description of the swamp and the surrounding country. It is useless for Bruce to claim that all Paez’s distances and place-names are wrong, and that Paez’s whole account is based upon hearsay. There can be no doubt whatever that Paez had been here 150 years earlier, and Bruce’s attack was both spiteful and ungenerous. This was a pity, because Bruce was to make a tremendous contribution to the knowledge of the Nile and of north-east Africa, he was a genuine pioneer, and he had no need to filch others’ spoils or discredit their reputation. He in his turn was soon to know the full bitterness of such unfairness when it was directed upon himself.

The whole argument, of course, is very trivial—who really cared about this discovery of a remote spring in Ethiopia?—and yet it was true that from Cyrus to Julius Caesar the kings of the ancient world had occupied themselves with this matter in vain; and it is also true that the history of the river is compounded not out of calm deductions and wise decisions but out of just such petty disputes and jealousies as this. It is a story that unfolds through rivalry, pride, greed and finally bloodshed. ‘Peace,’ Richard Burton says somewhere, quoting an old proverb, ‘is the dream of the wise, war is the history of man.’ 

The Blue Nile

Alan Moorehead