BRUCE AND THE NILE: SONNINI, BROWNE, AND BONAPARTE
At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a decline in
Muhammadan fanaticism which in the preceding centuries had so zealously
guarded the portals of African discovery. This was partly due to the
increase of friendliness and commercial relations between England and
France on the one hand and the Turkish Empire on the other. Consuls
were established to safeguard the interests of British merchants in
the tributary Turkish states of Barbary and in Egypt. Another stimulus
to friendly relations was the coffee trade. Coffee had been introduced
from Turkey into Europe in the seventeenth century. By the beginning of
the eighteenth the demand for it in the civilised countries of northern
and central Europe became so great that British and French ships began
to ply on the Red Sea and in the Levant merely for the transport of
coffee from the ports of southern Arabia to Suez, and thence (_via_
Alexandria) to France and England. It became possible for Frenchmen
and Englishmen to travel in Turkish Egypt without undue risk of
maltreatment, especially if they obtained permission to do so through
their consuls.
Almost the first English traveller to start on the Nile quest in the
eighteenth century was Richard Pococke, a learned divine (Doctor of
Laws and Fellow of the Royal Society), who afterwards became Bishop of
Meath. Pococke was remarkable for his knowledge of Greek. He travelled
a great deal in the Levant between 1737 and 1740, and made at least two
journeys to Egypt, during which he followed the Nile up to the First
Cataract. At that period the description of the journey from England to
Egypt has a rather modern sound. The traveller proceeds without much
difficulty overland from Calais to Leghorn, and from this Tuscan port
sails round Sicily to Alexandria, sometimes to Rosetta.
The book in which Pococke describes his adventures and researches[27]
is also in advance of its times, and in printing and illustrations
might well have been credited to the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Pococke devoted himself mainly to making plans and drawings
of Egyptian monuments, Coptic churches, and Muhammadan mosques.
He collected a great many Greek inscriptions (amongst others, the
interesting Greek and Latin sentences scratched on the legs of Memnon),
and besides many plans and drawings of buildings which illustrate his
book, are some excellent pictures of plants characteristic of Egypt.
Especially noteworthy are the botanical drawings of the branching
Hyphæne palm. These etchings would not be out of place in the most
modern work on Africa. Pococke ascended the Nile to the First Cataract,
then the limit of Turkish rule.
[Illustration: THE BRANCHING _Hyphæne_ PALM (_Hyphæne thebaica_).
Taken from interior of Nasr Fort (R. Sobat).]
One amusing feature in Pococke’s sumptuous volumes is the number of
dedications to British statesmen and notabilities of that date. The
book in general is dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery,
“Groom of the Stole to His Majesty George II.” His careful map of the
Nile from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean is dedicated to Lord
Carteret, “First Secretary to the King.” The map of Cairo and its
environs (a very interesting one with reference to the modern growth
of the city) is inscribed to the Earl of Stafford. These dedications,
however, seem to foreshadow a growing interest on the part of English
noblemen in the problem of the Nile,--an interest which, as will now be
shown, played such a part in the expedition of Bruce.
James Bruce was the first of the great group of notable British
explorers who between them in a century and a half have laid bare
to the world nearly every notable feature in the geography of the
Nile basin. This remarkable Scotchman was born at Kinnaird House,
Stirlingshire, in 1730. He was the son of a land-owner, and was
educated at Harrow. Soon after leaving school he was put (against his
will) into the wine trade with Spain and northern Portugal. In this
pursuit he visited Galicia and the northwest coast of the Spanish
peninsula. His trade, never very successful, was interrupted by the
war with Spain, which broke out in 1758. Bruce conceived a plan for
landing a British force at Ferrol, in Galicia, and to prosecute this
idea he obtained an introduction to the Earl of Halifax, then president
of the Board of Trade. George Montagu Dunk, second Earl of Halifax,
was a widely read man,[28] who took an interest in many subjects,
amongst others the mystery of the Nile. He is a curious link in that
chain of persons who have contributed efforts toward the revelation
to the civilised world of the whole course of this wonderful river.
Lord Halifax brushed aside the scheme for landing a force at Ferrol
as unnecessary and impracticable. But he began to consult Bruce about
the Nile Quest, as a man who had travelled considerably about Europe
even at that period--his travels having been undertaken to assuage
the grief caused by the loss of his wife. Bruce took up the matter
with energy. Lord Halifax, therefore, secured for him the appointment
of consul at Algiers, with the idea that this place and post would
enable Bruce to prepare for the exploration of the Nile by learning
Arabic and acquiring information concerning the interior of Africa.
Apparently the consulate at Algiers in those days was not harassed with
any restrictions regarding residence; indeed, Bruce’s consular duties
appear to have been merely nominal, for he was only a year at Algiers,
and spent it in the study of Arabic and Turkish.[29] In 1763 Bruce
started on a remarkable tour through Tunis and Tripoli, in which he
drew and measured (with the aid of a professional Italian draughtsman)
the wonderful Roman ruins in those countries. He then extended his
journeys to the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus, and explored Syria and
Palestine. The greater part of the drawings which he made of buildings
in all these Mediterranean lands are now stored in the British Museum.
At last, in the summer of 1786, Bruce landed at Alexandria, accompanied
by the Italian artist-assistant, Balugano. He ascended the Nile as
far as Assuan. Then, crossing the desert to the Red Sea coast, he
took ship and sailed to Jiddah, the port of the Hajaz. After four
months spent on the coast of Arabia, where apparently he met with
no fanaticism, he sailed over to Masawa, the port of Abyssinia, and
from this point travelled to the then capital, Gondar in Tigre. The
Emperor of Abyssinia received him with great favour, gave him military
rank, and enabled him to reach the course of the Blue Nile, which
Bruce always held to be the main stream. Striking the Blue Nile in
the country of Gojam near its exit from Lake Tsana, Bruce crossed the
stream by its masonry bridge and travelled due west of the source of
the river in the western part of Gojam. Bruce fixed with approximate
correctness the latitude of the source of the Blue Nile on Sagada
Mountain, and also the longitude, by observation of the first satellite
of Jupiter. The latitude he fixed at 10° 55′ 25″, the longitude at 36°
55′ 30″ east of Greenwich. The present writer is not aware that any
subsequent observations have much upset these computations of Bruce’s.
The latitude of the Blue Nile source is, therefore, approximately 11°
north. As the Jesuits guessed it at 12°, they were not so much out
in a surmise which, after all, was based on nothing but vague dead
reckoning, and one cannot sympathise with Bruce when he sneers at them
for their error. Bruce, in fact, was very bitter against the memory of
Paez and Lobo when he learned from D’Anville that these missionaries
had preceded him as discoverers of the Blue Nile sources. He admits the
genuineness of Paez’ reports, but endeavours to show that Lobo merely
copied Paez’ description, and did not himself visit the sources of the
Blue Nile. In this contention I think he is unjust. There is certainly
a great deal of correspondence between the accounts of Paez and Lobo,
but Lobo enters into more detail than Paez, and as, after all, he
is describing the same features, it is hardly surprising that his
description should so closely parallel that of the man who preceded him
by some ten years. As there is no doubt that Lobo was in the country
round about Lake Tsana in the year 1625 or 1626, it would be surprising
if he had not attempted to see the sources of the famous river.
Bruce brings out as strongly as the Jesuits the fact that the river
Jimma, which rises on Sagada Mountain, flows with a strong observable
current in a circular course through the southern part of Lake Tsana.
Lake Tsana, indeed, would seem to be nothing but a huge volcanic
crater which has been filled up by the Blue Nile. He calculates the
approximate altitude of these sources at forty-eight hundred and
seventy feet. Near the village of Sakala or Sagada is a marsh at the
bottom of the Mountain of Gish. In this marsh there is a hillock of
a circular form a few feet above the surface of the marsh, a more or
less artificial altar raised by the people to the sources of their
Nile. In the middle of this hillock is a hole, artificially made, or
at least enlarged by the hand of man, and kept clear of grass or other
aquatic plants. The water in it is perfectly pure and limpid, but has
no ebullition or motion of any kind observable on its surface, though
it overflows into a shallow trench running round the mound and entering
the water in an eastward direction. The principal fountain of the
Blue Nile is only about three feet across. Ten feet distant from this
first source is another, only eleven inches broad. This would seem to
be the deepest of the three sources, and the one which was pronounced
unsoundable by Lobo. The water from these fountains is good, tasteless,
and intensely cold.
Following by land the course of the Blue Nile down stream till he
reached the confluence with the White Nile at the site of Khartum,
Bruce then turned northwards and descended the main Nile to Berber.
From this point he travelled across the Nubian desert to Korosko, which
place he reached with the greatest difficulty, very many dying from
thirst on the way. Having been obliged to abandon his caravan in the
desert, he started back from Korosko with fresh camels and guides, and
recovered his baggage from the desert. Bruce’s journeys in Abyssinia
and along the course of the Nile had occupied him nearly three years,
from the middle of 1770 to the beginning of 1773. From Alexandria he
made his way to Marseilles during a brief interval of peace between
England and France. The cultivated Frenchmen of that day received him
with the greatest kindness and _empressement_, and he spent some time
in Paris conferring with Buffon and other scientific men. But in Paris
he learned to his great chagrin that he was not the original discoverer
of the source of the (Blue) Nile. D’Anville, the great map-maker,
was able to prove to him that Lake Tsana and the main course of the
Bahr-al-Azrak had been made known to Europe by the journeys of the
Jesuit priests Paez and Lobo. Moreover this geographer attempted to
convince Bruce that the Blue Nile was not the main stream, and that the
mystery of the Nile sources remained at least two-thirds unexplored.
It is curious, in fact, to reflect that D’Anville, by his industrious
gathering up of all floating information, especially from French
consuls in Egypt, was far more correct in his delineation of the Nile
basin than Bruce himself, though D’Anville had published his map a year
before Bruce’s arrival in Paris.
[Illustration: BRUCE’S MAP OF THE NILE SOURCES.]
On account of this chagrin, or for other reasons, Bruce delayed[30]
the publication of his travels for seventeen years after his return
to England. They were not published (in five volumes) until 1790.
Strange to say, Bruce’s admirable work, though so truthful[31] and
convincing as one reads it now, was received with universal incredulity
in Great Britain. Among the stories selected for special derision was
the account constantly repeated by Bruce of the Abyssinian custom
of bleeding cattle and drinking their blood, and, still more, of
cutting raw flesh off the living animal, which is then turned out to
graze (or at least that is the flippant rendering of the contemporary
critic). As a matter of fact, these customs had been already reported
by the Jesuits from one to two hundred years previously, nor is there
any reason to suppose that Bruce departed from the exact truth in
describing contemporary Abyssinian customs. A hundred years later East
African travellers like New, Von der Decken, Joseph Thomson, and the
author of this book, noticed similar customs as regards blood-drinking
on the part of the Masai and the Bantu races of Kilimanjaro and Kikuyu.
The same writers constantly make allusion to the love of raw flesh
on the part of most of the East African pastoral races, many of whom
are more or less related to the Galas in blood (the foundation of the
Abyssinian population is Gala). The actual truth about the cutting
of steaks from the living animal seems to be this. It was sometimes
customary (even if the custom has wholly died out at the present day)
to slaughter a beast by degrees. The great arteries and the vital parts
were avoided, and the palpitating, hot flesh was cut off strip by strip
and devoured. But in all probability the creature was not as a general
rule expected to live long after part of its flesh was removed. It was
generally finished within two or three hours. Bruce, if I remember
rightly, only relates one instance where, after two pieces of flesh
had been removed from the buttocks of a cow, the skin was fastened up
over the wound and the creature was driven on a little further to be
finished on a later occasion. A summarised extract from Bruce’s travels
gives a vivid description of the way the Abyssinians feasted on raw
meat:--
“In the capital, where one is safe from surprise at all times, or
in the country villages, when the rains have become so constant
that the valleys will not bear a horse to pass them, or that men
cannot venture far from home through fear of being surrounded by
sudden showers in the mountains; in a word, when a man can say
he is safe at home, and the spear and shield are hung up in the
hall, a number of people of the best fashion in the villages, of
both sexes, courtiers in the palaces or citizens in the town, meet
together to dine between twelve and one o’clock. A long table is
set in the middle of a large room, and benches beside it for a
number of guests who are invited. Tables and benches the Portuguese
introduced amongst them, but bull hides spread upon the ground
served them before, as they now do in the camp and country.
“A cow or bull, one or more, as the company is numerous, is brought
close to the door and its feet strongly tied. The skin that hangs
down under its chin and throat is cut only so deep as to arrive at
the fat, of which it totally consists, and by the separation of
a few small blood-vessels six or seven drops of blood only fall
upon the ground. They have no stone bench or altar upon which
these cruel assassins lay the animal’s head in this operation.
The author, indeed, begs their pardon for calling them assassins,
as they are not so merciful as to aim at the life, but, on the
contrary, to keep the beast alive till he is nearly eaten up.
Having satisfied the Mosaic law, according to their conception, by
pouring these six or seven drops upon the ground, two or more of
them fall to work. On the back of the beast, and on each side of
the spine they cut skin deep; then, putting their fingers between
the flesh and the skin, they begin to strip the hide of the animal
half-way down his ribs, and so on to the buttock, cutting the skin
wherever it hinders them commodiously to strip the poor animal
bare. All the flesh on the buttocks is then cut off, and in solid,
square pieces, without bones, or much effusion of blood; and the
prodigious noise the animal makes is a signal for the company to
sit down to table.
“There are then laid before every guest, instead of plates,
round cakes (if they may be so called) about twice as big as a
pancake, and something thicker and tougher. It is unleavened bread
of a sourish taste, far from being disagreeable, and very easily
digested, made of a grain called teff. It is of different colours,
from black to the colour of the whitest wheat bread. Three or four
of these cakes are generally put uppermost for the food of the
person opposite to whose feet they are placed. Beneath these are
four or five of ordinary bread and of a blackish kind. These serve
the master to wipe his fingers upon, and afterwards the servant
as bread for his dinner. Two or three servants then come, each
with a square piece of beef in their bare hands, laying it upon
the cakes of teff placed like dishes down the table, without cloth
or anything else beneath them. By this time all the guests have
knives in their hands, and their men have large crooked ones, which
they put to all sorts of uses during the time of war. The women
have small clasped knives, such as the worst of the kind made at
Birmingham, sold at a penny each. The company are so ranged that
one man sits between two women; the man with his long knife cuts
a thin piece, which would be thought a good beefsteak in England,
while you see the motion of the fibres yet perfectly distinct and
alive in the flesh. No man in Abyssinia, of any fashion whatever,
feeds himself or touches his own meat. The women take the steak
and cut it lengthways about the thickness of a little finger, then
crossways into square pieces something smaller than dice. This they
lay upon a piece of the teff bread strongly powdered with black
pepper, or Cayenne pepper, and mineral salt; they then wrap it up
in teff bread like a cartridge.
“In the mean time, the man having put up his knife, with each hand
resting on his neighbour’s knee, his body stooping, his head low
and forward, and mouth open very like an idiot, he turns to the one
whose cartridge is first ready, who stuffs the whole of it into
his mouth, which is so full that he is in constant danger of being
choked. This is a mark of grandeur. The greater the man would seem
to be the larger piece he takes in his mouth; and the more noise he
makes in chewing it the more polite he is thought to be. They have
indeed a proverb that says, ‘Beggars and thieves only eat small
pieces or without making a noise.’ Having despatched this morsel,
which he does very expeditiously, his next female neighbour holds
another cartridge which goes the same way, and so on till he has
finished. He never drinks till he has finished eating; and, before
he begins, in gratitude to the fair one that fed him, he makes up
two small rolls of the same kind and form; each of his neighbours
open their mouths at the same time, while with each hand he puts
their portion into their mouths. He then falls to drinking out of
a large handsome horn; the ladies eat till they are satisfied,
and then all drink together. A great deal of mirth and jokes goes
round, very seldom with any mixture of acrimony or ill-humour.
“During all this time the unfortunate victim at the door is
bleeding indeed, but bleeding little. As long as they can cut off
the flesh from his bones they do not meddle with the thighs or the
parts where the great arteries are. At last they fall upon the
thighs likewise, and soon afterwards the animal, bleeding to death,
becomes so tough that the cannibals, who have the rest of it to
eat, find it very hard work to separate the flesh from the bones
with their teeth, like dogs.
“In the mean time those within are very much elevated; love
lights all its fires, and everything is permitted with absolute
freedom. There is no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or
retirement to gratify their wishes; there are no rooms but one, in
which they sacrifice both to Bacchus and to Venus.”
Bruce’s travels are as well worth reading to-day as they were in 1790.
A somewhat conveniently abridged edition was published in the same year
(1790) as the five volumes appeared, but all who are taking up the
subject of Abyssinia seriously are advised to work their way through
the original five volumes. A sumptuously illustrated edition in eight
volumes appeared after the author’s death, in 1805. Bruce was received
with some honour at court on his return, but was awarded no special
distinction. Dr. Johnson, amongst others, denounced the brilliant
young Scotch traveller as an unscrupulous romancer; Horace Walpole
pronounced his volumes “dull and dear.” Just as the African Association
sprang into being and directed its efforts toward the rehabilitating
of Bruce’s character as a truthful writer, Bruce himself died in the
most disappointing manner by falling down the stairs at his house and
breaking his neck. His death was occasioned by over-politeness. He was
rushing from his study to the hall in order to be able to escort a lady
to her carriage.
Bruce was really a great traveller, an accurate observer, a splendid
sportsman,[32] and a far-sighted “Imperialist.” In 1775 he conceived
the need of the English rulers of India controlling the Egyptian
route, and actually obtained from the Turkish authorities in Egypt a
concession for the English on the shores of the Red Sea.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF JAMES BRUCE.]
As has been already mentioned, Bruce had been accorded a magnificent
reception by the scientific men of France. Buffon especially was
incited by Bruce’s stories to urge the French government in the
direction of Nile exploration. Buffon had become interested in a
young man native to Alsace, Sonnini de Manoncourt. Sonnini was born
at Lunéville in 1751. He was the son of a Roman court official who
had followed King Stanislas of Poland to his residence in Lorraine.
Sonnini, the younger, who had travelled in French South America, had
conceived the idea of a journey through Africa from north to south,
from the Gulf of Sidra in Tripoli to the Cape of Good Hope. This
scheme, however, when recommended to the French Foreign Office official
who then had charge of the French establishments in the Levant, was
deemed impracticable, and Sonnini was invited to restrict his attempts
to a careful exploration of the Nile from Rosetta southward to the
limits of Egyptian rule. His travels did not extend much beyond Assuan,
but he brought back a great deal of detailed information about Upper
Egypt, its fauna, flora, and the habits and customs of its population
along the banks of the Nile. Sonnini’s work will always remain a useful
book of reference. For the period at which he wrote he took a great
interest in the question of the geographical distribution of mammals.
He attempted to collect information regarding the gradual disappearance
from civilised Egypt of the great fauna. In this he followed the
inspiration of Buffon. According to Sonnini and Buffon, hippopotamuses
only became extinct in the Lower Nile near the Mediterranean as late as
1658. Two hippopotamuses were killed at Damietta in 1600 by an Italian
surgeon named Federigo Zeringhi.
* * * * *
Nearly a hundred years before Cecil John Rhodes was brooding in his
studies at Oriel College over the advance of British South Africa
toward the equatorial regions, that same college at Oxford was
nurturing other dreams of African exploration in the mind of William
George Browne, a Londoner by birth (1768), who at seventeen became an
undergraduate at Oriel. Browne was fired by reading Bruce’s “Travels,”
and a year after those five volumes were published, when he was only
twenty-three (1791), he started for Alexandria, which he reached
after a month’s journey from England (not a bad record for those
days). Egypt proper prior to the descent of the French under Napoleon
must have been fairly free from Muhammadan fanaticism and distrust
of Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century. Not a few
travellers--French, Italian, and English--were able to circulate in
the dominions governed by the Mameluks. Browne first of all visited
the oasis of Siwah. He spent a year and a half on this journey, and
examined the whole of Egypt proper and the peninsula of Sinai. Being at
Assiut in March or April, 1793, he heard of the caravan which, until
quite recently, left that place annually to travel across the desert
to Darfur. Following the same route, and in a measure attaching himself
to the caravan, he reached Darfur after a journey of considerable
difficulty. Here he found himself amongst such fanatical Muhammadans
that he was practically a prisoner, and it was only by invoking the aid
and sympathy of the Turkish authorities in Egypt that he induced the
Sultan of Darfur to allow him to return. Even then he was not allowed
to carry out his project of striking the White Nile from the direction
of Darfur, and thence crossing into Abyssinia. He was obliged to return
along the caravan route to Assiut. He then continued his travels in the
direction of Syria, and arrived in London in 1798. After publishing an
account of his travels, he again left England for the Levant. In 1812
he started for Persia with the intention of exploring Central Asia.
Between Tabriz and Teheran his caravan was attacked by robbers, and he
was killed.
The part of his book which deals with Egypt and Darfur is excellent,
much in advance of his age and very “modern” in its accuracy,
definiteness, and absence of gushing enthusiasm. Equally remarkable for
the age is the soundness of his orthography in spelling local names and
in transcribing dialects. Browne’s work still remains an authority on
Darfur.
The eighteenth century closed with some advance in the direction of
the Nile Quest. At any rate interest in the Nile problem had revived
in Europe. The publication at the beginning of the century, in an
English translation from the Portuguese, of the travels undertaken by
the Jesuit Fathers in Abyssinia,--the fact that an English statesman
(Lord Halifax) under the second George made it possible for Bruce to
start on his great journeys, and, lastly, the creation of the African
Association, testified to the commencement of this interest in England.
In France the question had been receiving attention from the end of the
seventeenth century, but mainly for political reasons. It had occurred
to Louis XIV. and to the ministers of his successor that Egypt, so
loosely held by the Turk, would be an admirable base from which to
effect the conquest of India. These ideas were not lost on Napoleon
Bonaparte, and the eighteenth century closes with the invasion of Egypt
by the French, an event as wonderful to the full and as far-reaching
in its results as the conquest of the same country by the Greeks under
Alexander the Great 2131 years previously. Alexander’s conquest of
Egypt from the Persians, or rather from the several native Egyptian
dynasties who were ruling under Persian suzerainty, put an end to the
régime of Ancient Egypt and Hellenised the countries of the Lower Nile
and of Abyssinia. The invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte broke the power
of the Moslem, and prepared the way for the administration of Egypt
by Europeans and Christians. Rome profited by the exploits of the
Macedonians; England has succeeded to the task which was begun with
such amazing brilliance by Frenchmen.
[Illustration: MAP OF AFRICA BY WILLIAMSON, LONDON, 1800.
Giving results of Browne’s journey to Darfur, French exploration of
lower Nile, and much Arab information from Egypt, North Africa, and
Senegambia.]