The Pale Abyssinian: The Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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