I
A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, a man six feet four inches in height, sitting on “the largest horse ever seen in Scotland.” “Mr. Bruce ... is the tallest man you ever saw gratis,” said laughing Fanny Burney. Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish gentleman.
The children of the folk who lived upon his estate used to stare at the huge man on the giant black horse. Their fathers had told them that the laird had visited the strangest kingdom in all the world, and that he had loved a great queen who was fair as the lady of Sheba in the Bible, and wore a golden crown. Sometimes at the “great house,” he would sit for hours in a chair, clad in magnificent robes, and the serving folk would whisper among themselves that the master was thinking of the old days and the great queen.
Sometime in the middle years of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary letter arrived at the house of His Majesty’s Prime Minister. It was addressed to “Mr. Pitt, Vizir of England”; its sender was the Dey of Algiers, and its message was terse and to the point. “Your consul in Algiers,” said the missive, “is an obstinate person and like an animal.” “Dear me,” said Mr. Pitt, “who is His Majesty’s consul at Algiers?”
A look at some great ledger, full of the brim of clerkly penmanship, and a question or two among the staff, soon elicited an answer. The consul at Algiers was Mr. James Bruce, a young Scot of excellent family, who had been recommended to the post by the honourable Lord Halifax. This young man was the son of David Bruce of Kinnaird in Stirlingshire, he had had an English education from tutors in London and at Harrow school, and he was interested in travel and archæological research. “Humph,” says Mr. Pitt, “anything else.” Yes, there was more to the story; he had married the daughter of a prosperous London wine merchant, taken over the business and then resigned it to his brother on the death of his wife scarce a year after the marriage. He had travelled in Spain, studied Arabic at the Escorial, was said to be “extremely good tempered and a good scholar.” And here was the Dey of Algiers saying that he was “like an animal.”
JAMES BRUCE
The angry phrase of the Dey, however, was quite natural. As master of a piratic kingdom cravenly humoured by the European powers, he had grown accustomed to obedience of the most servile kind from all Christians resident in his territories. If there is one supremely discreditable episode in the history of what is ironically called Western Christendom, it is surely this matter of the relations of the European powers and the Barbary pirates. Great European nations faint-heartedly directed their consuls to submit to incredible degradations,—the French consul in Bruce’s time had been loaded with fetters and harnessed to a cart for venturing to protest at some exaction, and another consul with gouty feet threatened with the bastinado—many thousands of unhappy European sailors were allowed to pass into the living death of Moorish slavery, and the cut-throat authors of these outrages timidly flattered and paid. The bare historical account does not tell the story; the reality of it is a ship’s crew of weary, thirsty and cruelly-beaten men standing fettered in the white glare of the Algerian sun, hearing “Christian dog” hurled at them like a stone meant to wound.
With the arrival of his British Majesty’s new consul, Mr. James Bruce of Stirlingshire, a brave spirit had appeared in this world of fatuous pusillanimity. The tall, composed Scot was decidedly not the man who would submit to degradation or any filthy foolery. When he had to fight, he fought, whether the case in hand was the rescue of some poor tar from his Moorish chains, or the protection of some minor official of the consulate. His composure and good humour,—there is a kind of good humour secretly rooted in the quality of courage—discomfited his pirate neighbours, for they knew that he knew that his life was in danger. The ferocious old shark of a Dey, being thus put out, had then addressed his complaint to the “Vizir” of England.
History does not record what Mr. Pitt did or said on this occasion, but it does mention that the tall consul who annoyed the Dey of Algiers by looking him squarely in the eye decided to waste no more time among these uninteresting sea jackals and slavers. He had taken the post of Algiers, not because he sought the haven of political office, but because he hoped to make his position a passport to North Africa. There were Roman ruins about, in Bruce’s own words “the large and magnificent remains of ruined architecture ... of exquisite elegance and perfection” and Bruce was a true son of a century that went in for ruins and elegance.
Now comes his resignation from the post at Algiers and his appearance in a new rôle. He will roam the coast in the character of an itinerant Christian physician, a dervish of the art of healing. At Algiers he had prevailed upon the naval surgeon attached to the Consulate to teach him a little eighteenth century medicine, and had been quite successful with his “purgings, vomitings and bleedings.” This quasi-knowledge was to be of the greatest use to him in after life. “I flatter myself,” said he, “no offence, I hope, I did not occasion a greater mortality among the Mohametans and Pagans abroad than may be attributed to some of my brother physicians among their fellow Christians.” When the parson of the Consulate left, he took on the marrying and baptising.
In 1765, the year of his resignation from his post at Algiers, this paragon of consuls was thirty-five years old. He had some resources of his own, he was alone in life, and he had seen just enough of the world to make him wish to see more. A thirst for travel, like appetite, grows with indulgence. The mental fire driving him to his future of extraordinary adventure was an intellectual curiosity, and as one reads his own account of his vagabondage, one feels that he was far more interested in the human world than in the natural. He wanted to see people and events, and he went to strange countries because events and people there would be supremely worth while. This point of view again is decidedly of the eighteenth century. Just now, however, Roman ruins are on his mind, and he is gathering together an expedition.
A notion suddenly checks him. The Dey has resented his demeanour, and may possibly take revenge by refusing him an authorisation to go about in his dominions. And now a great surprise, for presently an obsequious official comes from the Dey bringing passes and an authorisation whose like had never before been issued to a foreigner, and a pair of “presents.” The presents are two grinning, good-natured young Irishmen, who stand in the courtyard clad in the scanty rags tossed to Christian slaves, and with the usual chains upon their legs. These young Celts, deserters from the Royal Navy to the Spanish service, had been captured and enslaved by the Algerians.
What can such an excess of benevolence mean? Little by little the story comes to Bruce’s ears; the old Dey has secretly admired his courage all the while.
The autumn of the year finds the antiquarian “dervish,” sketch-book in “hand, wandering off into the interior of the Barbary States”; he explores the dry, treeless mountain land of North Africa searching for temples and ruins, he ventures to the edge of the desert and sketches the Roman columns of some dead city overwhelmed by time, silence and sand. One pictures the antiquarian expedition led by this composed Olympian Scot, with a rich sense of humour lying half hid in a keenly intelligent eye, the cavalcade consisting of the Irish sailors, a young Italian architectural draughtsman, one Luigi Balugani, and Moorish attendants.
A classical column or a Roman shrine, suddenly seen through village palms, brings all to a halt, quiet descends, pencils flourish busily, measurements are taken; then follows the papery snap of a closing sketch-book, a stir of hoofs, a variety of equine snorts, and off goes the sometime consul of the eighteenth century in search of more antique “magnificence.”
At El Djem, the huge amphitheatre which is larger than the colosseum at Rome, had just had “two sections” blown to pieces to prevent its being used as a fortress by marauding tribes. A rumour stirred the camp, a rumour of a petrified Roman city with “petrified men and horses, women at the churn, the little children, the cats, the dogs, and the mice.” A romantic tale; indeed, it was all romance!
At Tunis the expedition gathered in one Osman, a “French renegade,” “very brave,” says Bruce, “but he needed a sharp lookout that he did not often embroil us where there was access to women or to wine.”
“I believe I may confidently say,” wrote Bruce, “that there is not either in the territories of Algiers or Tunis a fragment of good taste of which I have not brought a drawing to Britain.”
Adventure by sea now awaited this cultural cavalcade. Arriving at Ptolemais, a small port of Tripolitania, the whole muster of Moors, sailors, and attendants took passage on a small Greek junk bound for Crete. The African littoral being in the grip of a famine, the ship had arrived from Crete with a cargo of corn. Returning to Crete, a storm presently gathered up the vessel, and wrecked her on the Libyan shoals. Bruce swam ashore, and falling into the hands of Arabs who had come to plunder the wreck, was stripped naked, and beaten. Painfully hurt, and ignorant of the fate of his goods and his company, he took refuge from the continuing storm in the lee of bush. In the morning an old man and a number of young men came up to where he was sitting. Then Bruce:
“I gave them the salute Salam alicum! which was only returned by one young man in a tone as if he wondered at my impudence. The old man then asked me Whether I was a Turk, and what I had to do there? I replied I was no Turk, but a poor Christian physician, a dervish that went about the world seeking to do good for God’s sake, and was then flying from famine and going to Greece to get bread. He then asked me if I was a Cretan? I said I had never been in Crete, but came from Tunis, and was returning to that town, having lost everything I had in the shipwreck of that vessel. I said this in so despairing a tone that there was no doubt left with the Arabs that the fact was true. A ragged, dirty barracan was immediately thrown over me and I was ordered up to a tent in the end of which stood a long spear thrust through it, a mark of sovereignty.”
Little by little the company and even the baggage come to light. The wanderings begin again; they become confused and difficult to follow; the tall Scot is acquiring a touch of the true vagabond mind; one now finds him roaming everywhere, ruin or no ruin. The sailors are sent home; the company drops away; his young Italian architectural draughtsman, Luigi Balugani, is now with Bruce, now waiting in some end-of-the-world town for his return.
Somewhere in Northern Africa he encounters a tribe who eat lions, and shares their repast. “The first was a he-lion, smelling violently of musk.... I then had a lion’s whelp six or seven months old; it tasted on the whole the worst of the three.”
In Egypt he ascended the Nile, fought off bandits in the Valley of the Kings, made friends with Ali Bey, governor of Egypt, and his Vizir, a Copt given to astrology. His fame as wandering Christian physician had opened the door, for Moslem rulers in the eighteenth century were as eager to have Christian physicians as Christian rulers were to have Moslem physicians in the twelfth. A case of telescopes, to which he clung with a true Scot’s persistence, won for him the special standing of an astrologer. As a reward for treating Ali Bey, the governor obtained from Constantinople a kind of supreme laissez passer, “a firman of the Grand Signor wrapped up in green taffeta, magnificently written and titled and the inscription powdered with gold dust.” Ali Bey also gave him a letter to Ras Michael, lord of Abyssinia.
The western coast of the Red Sea is a thing of lifeless burning rock and glaring beaches of blazing white sand; in the eighteenth century the region was still nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, and Turkish officials dwelt in the coral houses, and waddled to the beach to plunder travellers standing bewildered in the apocalyptic sun. In 1769, a tall man arrived who looked his would-be plunderers in the face, and even managed to awe them with his letter from the “Grand Signor” with its powder of gold. This gentleman was the Laird of Kinnaird, for His Majesty’s late consul at Algiers had succeeded to the paternal estate. The Laird of Kinnaird seeing the world as a Frankish dervish! Balugani, the draughtsman, was still with him; the young artist must have beep something of a man.
“The noblest of all occupations,” wrote Bruce in later times, “is that of exploring the distant parts of the Globe.” The Laird of Kinnaird was on his way to perhaps the most inaccessible country of his world, a land forgotten for five hundred years in the forests of Africa. Mr. Bruce had determined to reach the Kingdom of Abyssinia.