Navigating The Nile
Scots explorer James Bruce learned medicine and languages to help in his daring travels to reach the source of the Blue Nile
Read the story of explorer James Bruce and his tale of discovery on the River Nile
“I triumphed here, in my own mind, over kings and armies” their
HE suffered danger, deprivation, a shipwreck, several battles and disease, but 250 years ago this November, James Bruce finally achieved the ambition he had spent years striving for.
The well-born Scotsman, whose estates lay thousands of miles away in Stirlingshire, had discovered the source of Blue Nile in modern-day Ethiopia.
It was November 1770, and the fact that Bruce had got there at all, travelling through countries uncharted and rarely visited by Europeans was astonishing.
Using his wits, intelligence, good looks and phenomenal language skills, he had reached the humble beginnings of the world’s mightiest river. He should have been exultant – but instead he had a small wobble at seeing the fountain source.
“The fountains, upon comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight,” Bruce later wrote in Travels – a five-volume account of his adventures, published in 1790.
“I remembered that magnificent scene in my own native country where the Tweed, Clyde and Annan rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty.”
But it was a momentary deflation. “Though a mere private Briton,” he wrote, “I triumphed here, in my own mind, over kings and their armies.”
Bruce was born in 1730 in Kinnaird in Stirlingshire and was educated at Harrow, then Edinburgh University. He married the daughter of a wine merchant and entered his wife’s family’s business, a trade which saw him travel Europe, picking up languages as he went.
But when his father died in 1758, his inheritance of the estate of Kinnaird, including the coal which fired the prosperous new Carron Iron Works, meant he had the means to pursue other ambitions – and his prime ambition was to reach the source of the Nile.
By now a widower, in 1762 he became consul-general of Algiers, with the additional task of documenting the remains of ancient architecture. He drew and noted classical arches and ruins in North Africa, as well as picking up riding skills from the Arabs.
Eating lion didn’t impress him – “it had the taste,
“It had the taste, I imagine, old horseflesh have” would
which, I imagine, old horse-flesh would have” – and he succumbed to disease in Aleppo, although the medical skills he picked up there were to stand him in good stead. He also had to swim to the shore at Benghazi when the boat he was on was wrecked.
In 1769, however, came the opportunity to leave his duties and travel to Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known, where it was believed the source of the Blue Nile lay. This would mean journeying to a land few Europeans had ever visited – and fewer still had left alive, its policy at
the time being to slay white men after an ill-fated attempt by Portuguese missionaries to convert the country to Catholicism.
Tall, athletic, and possessing a way with words, and with women – Bruce had luck on side. When he arrived in Gondar, the Abyssinian capital, all the men were out on a military campaign.
By the time they arrived back, he had cured several young princes and princesses of the smallpox, including the favourite child of a powerful princess, and had charmed the queen mother, who had furnished him with a house in thanks.
His language skills meant he quickly picked up Tigrinya, the language of court at Gondar, and when the young king arrived back, he made Bruce lord of the bedchamber, despite getting into a fight with one of the king’s generals on the army’s first night back.
After serving as head of the king’s bodyguard in battle, he was given Geesh as a reward – the village next to the source of the Nile – his ambitions being well-known at the court. But to make the journey, he had to avoid both the rainy season, when rivers were unfordable, and the battles of a bloody civil war, which took place during the dry season.
After the Battle of Serbraxos, however, Bruce got his chance and set off with a party of guides and servants.
In November 1770, he arrived at the spring which was the source of the Blue Nile. He dipped a half coconut shell in its waters and toasted the king.
He had achieved his ambition and, following the Blue Nile back, he became the first European to see the confluence of the Blue and White Nile.
But his return journey was to be filled with peril. He was forced to camp in a village of the dead, use the eclipse as a way of escaping an angry sheikh and he nearly died of thirst crossing the desert.
Bruce crossed the final stretch to Egypt with his camels slain, his feet so lacerated he was leaving bloody footprints behind him, and all his work and equipment abandoned in the sand.
When he made it back to Marseilles there was astonishment, as he had been given up for dead long before. At first he was feted, including an audience with the Pope, Clement XIV. But back in Britain, London society found his tales – people who cut steaks from living cattle and wore the entrails of animals as ornaments – too fantastical. Bruce retired, hurt, to his Scottish estate.
Twenty years later he published his five-volume
Travels, which again saw some critics pouring scorn on the idea that he had even been to Abyssinia at all.
While it is true he underplayed the role of his artist Luigi Balugani at the source and some said Portuguese missionaries had made it 150 years earlier – modern day historians now believe that is true – time has vindicated his tales, and his legacy of drawings and notes have proved invaluable.
Above all, his role was inspirational. As Edward Ullendorff said in the Scottish Historical
Review in 1953, “With Bruce the ‘classical age’ of African discovery opens. He was the first great scientific explorer of Africa, the first to go there with a different purpose: neither for trade, nor for war, nor to hoist a flag, nor for the glory of God but from curiosity – to find out the truth about the source of the Nile.”
All this, however, was too late for Bruce. He died of a fall down the great staircase at Kinnaird in 1794. As he himself said, “My paths have not been flowery ones.”