“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas
Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear
that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes,
“prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy,
his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new
adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and
bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own,
and there was no enemy to be seen but winter and rough weather. This
ripened desire to have joy of the good green earth took a characteristic
and pleasant form,—the London advocate began to imagine himself as a
genial host bidding his guests be merry, and sip their ale under the
greenwood tree. This idea of himself presently took such a hold of the
poet that he began to refer to himself as “Mine Host of Merry-Mount.”
For “Merry-Mount” it was; the name “Mount Wollaston” had gone by the
board. Morton had christened the knoll at the head of the field “_Ma-re
Mount_,” from the Latin noun meaning the sea, and he took an enormous
pleasure in this ridiculous pun.
The golden reign on the Great Bay of the Massachusees! There was never
a scarcity of food at the great log house on the knoll, for Morton was
a keen sportsman, and soon taught his companions how to follow game.
The country abounded in “turkies, which at divers times came in great
flocks,” in venison and wild pigeons; the swift shadows of trout moved in
every pool. “It was a noted custom at my House,” wrote my host, “to have
every man’s duck upon a trencher.” There was wine to be had, probably
purchased from trading vessels or distilled from the pagan New England
wild grape, “good _Rosa Solis_,” the Rose of the Sun, a blessed name for
an old wine with the day’s glory in the grape. “Mine Host” even began the
old sport of falconry. “At my first arrival in these parts,” said he,
“I practiced to take a lanneret, which I reclaimed, trained, and made
flying in a fortnight, the same being a passenger at Michaelmas.” An odd
fragment of history, this young New England hawk sent over seas to fly
some English field!
Rarest touch of all, none need remain sad at the Merry-Mount. At the
field “there was a water, by mee discovered, most excellent for the cure
of melancholly.”
Trade flourished. The Elizabethan spirit, for all its poetic quality,
was practical enough, and Morton was no middle-aged carousing ass, or
befuddled idler. He found the furs he wanted because he sought them out,
and because he had a country-born instinct for the ways of the natural
world, an English sportsman’s training, and a genial humanity wide enough
to include the Indians as members of the human race.
Unhappy Indians of the Great Bay of the Massachusees! Some terrible and
unknown plague had descended upon them in the winter of 1616-17, and
almost destroyed them from off the earth. They were a broken people,
wandering about the lands of the ancestors like the ghosts of their race.
In April, 1623, on very slight provocation, Standish had “massacred”
seven of their men in cold blood; the word is that used by Charles
Francis Adams. As Cotton Mather observed with charity eighty years later,
“the woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room
for a better growth.”
Such were the forlorn, quiet, and broken people who found an
understanding friend in the poet host of Merry-Mount. Like any good
scholar of his day, he thought them possibly the relics of the scattered
Trojans! “I am bold to conclude,” begins Mine Host, “that the original
of the natives of New England may well be conjectured to be from the
scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”
He would not sell them drink, for he pitied them, and, moreover, he
was no man to want a drunken savage shattering the pleasant notes of
an old English pipe with a primitive strain. He told them that wine
was among the English “a sachem’s drink.” He could not discern the
religious-mindedness others had noted in the redskins. “For my part,”
declared Mine Host, “I am more willing to beleeve that the Elephants
(which are reported to be the most intelligible of all beasts) doe
worship the moon.” “Poor, silly lambes,” he called the dispossessed and
unfortunate creatures when they came to lament over their old benefactor
sitting ignominiously in the Puritan stocks.
Presently rumours arrive from Plymouth; the brethren look with anger at
the Mount. Morton’s five young exiled Englishmen are in their eyes,
“a drunken and deboste crew”; Morton himself is the “lord of Misrule”
maintaining a “school of atheism.” This last is patently a gibe at
Morton’s religious affiliations. A stout churchman by temperament and
conviction, Morton still held to the typical Elizabethan attitude that
matters of religion were best decided by the great and the learned of the
realm. In the good old Merry England days, for instance, Parliament had
on several occasions re-defined the Deity and nobody had been a penny the
worse.
Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient
and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is
merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at
Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer
from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches,
the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the
bright waters of the woodland bay.
The intense New England autumn comes with the first swift frost, the long
winter follows, snow lies deep on the great field, and beyond the field,
ice flats cover the bay to open water of the bitterest, coldest green.
“The aire doth begett good stomacks,” said Mine Host of Merry-Mount. In
the log house on the knoll, so many worlds apart in spirit from the log
house by shallow Plymouth Bay, fires leap merrily, ducks turn on the
spits, pannikins of wine grow warm on the embers’ edge; Morton sits with
his hand over the arm of his chair, and strokes the head of his “dogge.”
The Forest of Arden it is, and winter no such dread enemy after all.
Then, with its strange passion and violence, arrives the New England
spring. The country gentleman from England will show the “precise
separatists” how in Merry England of Church and King, is freely kept an
honest holiday. The first of May is approaching; he will go to the wood
and find a tree worthy to be the first Maypole in New England! Such a one
shall brew a barrel of ale, and such one shall roll out the latest barrel
of “good _Rosa Solis_” to the new born splendour of the sun!
The first of May in the year 1627, a fresh New England morning with the
sky still cool and silvery blue, and the trees thrusting out little,
cautious leaf tips “the size of a mouse’s ear.” Music in the greenwood,
merry music with an honest tune, the old, sweet, human music one might
hear in Master William Shakespeare’s comedies in London over the sea.
As the light ripens over the tawny eastern marsh now interwoven with
the faint emerald green of the new growth, and his good majesty the sun
climbs into the bright New England air, “Mine Host” steps from his house
of logs to proclaim an English holiday! Heigho, be jolly, under the
greenwood tree, for icicles shall no more hang by the wall; it is the
first of May!
The New England robins pipe, and cock their heads to one side as Mine
Host reads his proclamation, and their piping dies in a great shout as
the merry advocate completes the mock solemnity. Guests have already
arrived, more are coming across the bay in their little boats, some are
hastening to the Merry-Mount along the brambly woodland trails. The ever
hungry crew from Wessagusset is at hand, stray planters arrived within
the year, and perhaps the captain of a trading ship and his chorusing,
sunburnt tars. One hears the music, the wholesome, natural gaiety, the
knock of pewter mugs on wooden table tops, and men singing. To these
exiles, the festival meant the first touch of home they had in the
wilderness. That tall, soldier-like lad of Morton’s company, Tom Gibbons,
will “get religion,” and end his days as a pillar of the Puritan state;
little does he foresee such a change as he waves his pewter mug about!
A health to Master Thomas Morton of the Merry-Mount, and a fig for all
who doubt that laughter is the truest distinguishing mark twixt man and
beast! “Mine Host” was well prepared, he had brewed a huge barrel of
“excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other
good cheare for all comers of the day.”
Higher climbs the spring tide sun, lower sinks the good liquor in
“barrell and botel”; it is time to sweep together up the knoll to the
Maypole of New England!
The pole lay upon the ground, on the height of a knoll commanding the
field and the sea. It was a noble pine mast, some eighty feet high,
wreathed about with flowers and garlands of the New England spring, and
somewhere near the top of it, a fine pair of garlanded antlers served as
a rustic crown. Amid a thousand, noisy, contradictory counsels the pole
is raised, the gods alone know how, and now comes a young lad of Morton’s
company to sing the song the merry advocate has composed in honor of the
day.
“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!
Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;
Io to Hymen, now the day is come
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.
Make greene garlons; bring bottles out
And fill sweet nectar freely about.
Uncover thy head and feare no harme,
For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Nectar is a thing assign’d
By the Deities owne minde
To cure the hart opprest with greif,
And of good liquors is the chiefe.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the mellancolly man
A cup or two of’t now and than;
This physic soone revive his bloud
And make him be of a merrier moode.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,
No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,
Lasses in beaver coats come away
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.”
There is a stir in the greenwood at the close of the song, and through
the bushes come trooping the last of the Massachusees. Morton had not
forgotten his Indian neighbors. Tall, naked, coppery warriors, and Indian
lasses in beaverskin coats have arrived to share in the merriment of
Merry-Mount. English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes
the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round
and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of
a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned
muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there
a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the
Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors
in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best?
Nailed to the Maypole itself was a festival poem which “being
Enigmattically composed pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to
expound it.”
At nightfall there must have been many a befuddled head, and on the
following morn, a sizeable crew at the spring so efficacious against the
“melancholly.” But serious business was in the air, for the scandalised
brethren of Plymouth had resolved on action, and Miles Standish was soon
to descend on the disturber of Israel. The merry advocate knew where the
wind lay. “The setting up of this Maypole,” he wrote in later years,
“was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New
Plimmouth. They termed it an Idoll, yea, the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at
defiance with the place naming it Mount Dagon, threatning to make it a
woeful mount and not a merry-mount.”
It was Morton’s custom to go to Wessagusset once in a while, as he says,
“to have the benefit of company,” and there Standish found and secured
him. That he did not secure the poet well enough is apparent from the
fact that Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn escaped that night from his
captors, and made his way through a wild thunderstorm to his beloved
Merry-Mount.
There was a tremendous to-do on finding that the “Lord of Misrule” had
“flowne.” In “Mine Host’s” own words....
“The word which was given with an alarme, was,—o he’s gon!—he’s gon!—What
shell wee doe, he’s gon!—the rest (halfe asleepe) start up in a maze,
and, like rames, ran their heads one at another at full butt in the
darke. Theire grand leader, Captaine Shrimpe, took on most furiosly to
see the empty nest and the bird gon. The rest were eager to have torne
theire haire from theire heads; but it was so short that it would give
them no hold.”
Standish, however, returned to the Merry-Mount for his prisoner. Some
kind of judicial legerdemain took place at Plymouth, and Morton was
sent to England as prisoner. The specific charge against him was the
sale of firearms to the Indians. The arrest was illegal, the whole
process and the imprisonment an outrageous injustice, and there is not
a scrap of real evidence to show that there was a word of truth in the
specific charge. On Morton’s arrival in England, the English authorities
recognised the true state of affairs, and instantly released the prisoner.
It had been wisely observed that Puritanism is not so much a form of
religion as an attitude to life, and that there are Puritan sects in
Islam as well as in eastern and western Christianity. A meeting of the
mind which comes into the world already “Puritan,” and the mind which
is liberal by temperament has always meant a struggle, and the first
named has never troubled to make a declaration of war, but has offered
instant battle to his soul’s antagonist. Once victorious, the repressive
type has shown no mercy to victims of its aggression. The story of the
merry man of the Merry-Mount is the tale of such a challenge and such a
defeat. His May day revel was no orgy of “beastlie practices” worthy of
the “madd Bacchinalians,” nor did his verses “tend to lasciviousness”;
it was simply an English country revel such as he must have often
witnessed in his youth. And in historic justice to Morton, it ought to be
remembered that the good fathers of Plymouth, ministering angels as they
were beside the repressers at Boston, exemplified the “Puritan” attitude
in every moment of their lives, that they had been difficult to deal
with in England, and that they had on several occasions severely tried
the tempers of their exceedingly tolerant hosts at Leyden. Theirs is a
large documentation, and the facts are clear. Morton, moreover, suffered
because he was a stray communicant of the Church of England. In his case
Puritan antagonism for such as held a contrary attitude to life mingled
with the _odium theologicum_ to beget what began as injustice and ended
as cruel persecution.
So ends the Maypole scene of the comedy. There was a sequel, for Morton
returned. The beauty of the New England wilderness had stirred the heart
of this vagabond country gentleman, and moreover, he had property and an
investment to protect. During his stay in England, the Puritans under
Endecott and Winthrop began the settlement of “the Great Bay of the
Massachusees.” What happened to the merry-maker when he fell into such
hands is a tale for philosophers.
V
The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain
of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of
Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and
admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.”
The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting
attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the
man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to
cut off the ears of an unfortunate home-sick Englishman, a member of the
Church of England, who had been so browbeaten by “the saints” that he was
half a madman. One of the saints in England ventured to send a warning
to the New England brethren that there were already “diverse complaintes
against the severity of your government, especially Mr. Indicutts, and
that he shall be sent for over, about cutting off the Lunatick man’s
ears.”
This thin-lipped man, with the icy and merciless eyes,—his portrait
may be seen on the walls of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—was
presently to judge the “Lord of Misrule.” For Thomas Morton was once
more in his “Canaan.” While in London, he had been of service to Isaac
Allerton, an agent of Plymouth Colony, and Allerton had outraged Plymouth
by bringing back the disturber. There is still something mysterious about
this return with Allerton; it may be that Morton arranged it for the sake
of its irony.
From Plymouth, Morton went boldly to his property at the Merry-Mount, and
with great courage ventured to brave the Puritan tyranny. At a general
court in Salem, he very rightly refused to sign some hodgepodge of the
Mosaic law and English custom which the saints intended as a kind of
constitution, making his assent conditional on the addition of the
words,—“So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the
Kingdom of England.”
The refusal marked him for destruction. Now comes his arrest and trial on
the most trivial of charges; he had, so the saints protested, “taken away
a canoe from some Indians.” A delightful touch of Puritan love for the
redskin. “Charges,” wrote Mr. Charles Francis Adams, who was no partisan
of Morton’s, “which amount to absolutely nothing.” What chance had this
English gentleman, who knew himself to be a subject of King Charles and
whose soul was still a subject of Elizabeth, in this court composed of
seventeenth century Englishmen labouring under the extraordinary delusion
that they were primitive Jews of the Arabian desert? Once more the man of
Cliffords was condemned, set in the stocks, his property confiscated, and
he was sent to England penniless and half-starved for lack of money to
buy food.
Nothing can excuse this brutal, inhuman, and lawless condemnation. Now
comes a typical Puritan touch of vindictiveness. His persecutors waited
till the vessel carrying Morton to England came in sight of Merry-Mount,
and then set the house at the Mount afire, so that their victim might
see the destruction of his property. “That the habitation of the wicked
appear no more in Israel” wrote Winthrop sententiously. Was there ever
anything more heartless?
Poor “Mine Host” of the festal Maypole! “The smoake that did ascend,”
said he, “appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. Mine Host (that a
farre of abourd a ship did there behold this woeful spectacle) knew not
what he should doe in this extremity but beare and forbeare as Epectetus
says: it was bootless to exclaime.... The stumpes and postes in their
black livery will mourne.” And he cried, “Cruell Schismaticks!”
A campaign of slander now followed the violence, and it was whispered
about that the Lord of Misrule had been sent for on “a foule suspition of
murther.” There is no trace of any warrant, there is no trace of crime
committed by Morton; the one actual fact is that the English authorities
again delivered the prisoner. The source of the libel has recently been
uncovered; it was the pretty thought of Morton’s delightful stepson!
As Morton continued to live in England quite unmolested, though with
a vindictive enemy at his heels, it may be safely said that the whole
slanderous attack was a pure fabrication. Tested in England, the scene
of the supposed high crimes and misdemeanours, the slanderous charges
evaporate into unlovely wisps of Puritan malice and the imagination of a
blackguard being sued by his sister for withholding her marriage portion.
Years pass, the last of Elizabeth’s Merry England melts away, Oberon and
Titania forsake the moonlit glade, and a sullen and apprehensive England
rises against its Stuart king. An old man in his seventies watches the
tumult, his eyes full of memories. Far away from the storm, over the wide
Atlantic, lies new Canaan where the sun itself is like _Rosa Solis_,
where the tawny braves walk the trails of the greenwood, the sea birds
feed by the marsh, and the plover rises piping from the grass. His Forest
of Arden! And Merry-Mount is there where he played Mine Host, raised the
antlered Maypole, and proclaimed an English holiday. He will return there
again with his “dogge” and fowling piece; he is old now, and even the
Puritan magistrate will be content to let him spend his old age roaming
the fields. Little he knew the Puritan mind!
In the summer of 1643, he lands at Plymouth; one party is in favor of
handing him over at once to the Boston magistrates; Governor Bradford,
however, himself along in years, will suffer him to spend the winter
in the Plymouth jurisdiction. The next spring, in compliance with this
condition, the old man leaves Plymouth, and travels about; he goes to
Rhode Island and to Maine. As he goes, Endecott watches him like a hawk.
There comes some unlucky slip, a moment’s entrance, perhaps, into the
Massachusetts jurisdiction; the warrant is already at hand, and the old
Lord of Misrule is once more in the hands of his old persecutor. Again
he was brought to trial before Winthrop and Endecott. On trial for what?
For having, in England, “made a complaint against us at the council
board.” How a criminal offence could be manufactured out of an English
subject’s proper appeal to the head of the state did not worry Winthrop
or his fellow casuists. They were both the law and the judges of the law.
Some of the “evidence” had been collected by Winthrop’s pretty trick of
opening his opponents’ letters.
Owing to Morton’s being “old and crazy,” wrote Winthrop, “we thought not
fit to inflict corporal punishment on him but thought better to fine
him.” What a smug air of self-approval there is in this phrase! It has
not been hidden from impartial history, however, the other side of the
story. Winthrop and Endecott actually kept the broken old man in prison
a year, and caused him to pass through the bitterness of a New England
winter without a fire, without bedding, and with fetters on his limbs.
Regaining his liberty only after a piteous plea, he made his way to the
little royalist colony at Agamenticus in Maine. Let us hope there were
some good souls about to welcome and understand the poet of Merry-Mount.
Two years at Agamenticus, the hill seen afar over the sea as a high blue
dome; two years among friendly folk, and then Morton of Merry-Mount
wanders from earth to the Elysian fields where Good Queen Bess still
reigns, and Shakespeare and Ben Jonson dwell, and no man strives to shape
into some petty human scheme the mighty purposes of the Lords of Life.
In _Cyrano de Bergerac_, De Guiche and Cyrano discuss Don Quixote’s
famous battle with the wind mills. “Beware of such a battle,” says De
Guiche; “you will be hurled into the mire.” And Cyrano replies—“Or
upwards to the stars.”
_Five_: JAMES BRUCE
_Five_: JAMES BRUCE
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.”
[Illustration: 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.