The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer
Miles Bredin
HarperCollins, £17.99, 290pp
With its haunting refrain, "Abyssinia is My Home", Willie Dixon's classic Jungle Blues could, back in the late 1700s, equally have applied to the Scottish explorer James Bruce. In Dixon's song, the reference was to America's slave heritage - a legacy that has now slipped, musically, from blues to reggae. It is a beat heavy with myth, heavy with history, binding Rastafarianism's confused roots in the Ethiopian church with the legend of Prester John - the medieval warrior king who would come out of the East in God's defence - and the country's fabled possession of the Ark of the Covenant.
As he traces Bruce's travels through Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known), it is Miles Bredin's contention that as well as searching for the source of the Nile, he was looking for the lost Ark. There is circumstantial evidence for this: Bruce was a Mason, a member of the Canongate Kilwining Lodge No 2. The most powerful lodge in Britain, its members in Bruce's time included Johnson's biographer Boswell and many other important figures. "The Craft", as Masonry styled itself, had its roots in the medieval Templars. They had their own links with Abyssinia, and the Ark and the lost biblical Book of Enoch - which Bruce would bring back with him - were important to both organisations.
Bredin admits he can't really prove his thesis, but the mystic lure of the Ark certainly adds to the excitement of what is essentially a quest narrative. The real object, however, was a spring. Although no mystery to those who lived around it, the riddle of the source of the Nile had perplexed scholars and explorers from Ptolemy to Prince Henry the Navigator. It was this "opprobrium of geographers" which led Bruce to set off to Abyssinia in 1762, via a consulship in Algiers and an exploration of the Red Sea, in search of it.
It took him seven years to get there, and he cut quite a figure along the way - a man, in the words of the historian Nimmo, "of Herculean physique and more than ordinary strength of mind". But Bruce was not just a giant physically (six foot four, with dark red hair, he stood seven feet tall in the armour he later wore as an Abyssinian captain of horse); he was a giant of the Enlightenment, too. His exploits marked him out, along with Hume, Watt and Boswell, as "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 pioneer, the world".
Predominantly self-taught (by the time he eventually reached his destination, he was master of some 14 languages, including Geez, the - even then - fast-disappearing liturgical language of Ethiopia), he was an expert shot and horseman. He became knowledgeable in tropical medicine. He was a proficient painter. His funds for the journey had something of the Enlightenment about them, too: they came from a rich seam of coal on his estate that was used to smelt iron in a new scientific process.
The equipment Bruce took with him was a fantastic mixture of ancient and modern: measuring rods, three telescopes, quadrants, charts of the stars, three ship's blunderbusses, several pistols, a variety of swords - and, to ease the pain of travel, medicine, tobacco and wine. He was, indeed, "as well-prepared as Evelyn Waugh's William Boot in Scoop in all but one respect: he had no cleft sticks, for it was Bruce who discovered that they are used in the Ethiopian highlands by message bearers".
The blunderbusses included one with a joint in the stock (Bredin later sees it in the home of Bruce's descendant Lord Elgin), which could be clicked into place and produced, Clint Eastwood-like, from under a cloak. Bruce's life, ever under threat from attacks by bandits and local chieftains, would be saved by exactly such a strategy.
Abyssinia was ruled by a treacherous, shifting series of alliances. There was a king, but each region had its "ras" (the word that gives us rastafarian), and whichever ras was strongest controlled the king. In Bruce's time, Ras Michael was in the ascendant for a while. Much impressed by the giant Scotsman's abilities, he accorded him numerous honours. But Bruce was cunning, and when (in a medieval-style battle in which he himself took part) Ras Michael was ousted, he had other protectors on which to fall back.
This was partly because he was generous with his medicines. It was also because he was generous with his sexual favours.He had countless relationships with Ethiopian women, from village girls to noblewomen. The most important of these was with the beautiful Ozoro Esther, Michael's wife. Abyssinian sexual mores appear to have been very liberated: far from being angry, the Ras seemed to encourage the liaison. This bedroom diplomacy nearly always seemed to improve the big Scot's standing.
In late 1770, with Bruce's arrival at the source of the river - a swamp with two fountains in it, it is now a lump of concrete with a metal pump emerging from it - came another sexual conquest. The "nymph of the Nile" was about 16, Bruce records, "remarkably genteel" and, besides, "very sprightly".
Portuguese missionaries had, years before, been the first Europeans to see the Nile, but Bruce made out they had got it wrong. This was, in any case, only the Blue Nile, not the more important White Nile, which rises 500 miles south in Uganda. He might well have suspected that there was more to the story than he knew: at the two rivers' confluence at Khartoum, which he passed through on his way back, you can clearly see the line between them - the colours a consequence of their having travelled through different soils.
More tribulations, including a taxing desert crossing in which he nearly died, finally brought Bruce home to Europe in 1773. He had a guinea worm inside his leg, but that didn't lessen his appeal to the ladies. "Your eyes and your heart tell me, dear Brus, that you love me," wrote one French paramour.
If he was feted on the continent, back across the Channel the story was different. Boswell - and Johnson, who through his authorship of Rasselas was mistakenly thought an expert on Abyssinia - both put it about that he had made everything up. Although Bruce's five-volume Travels, not published until 1790, was an instant bestseller and may have inspired Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", they also made him a figure of fun. The cartoonist Cruikshank caricatured his Abyssinian Breakfast, based on the story that Ethiopians took live cuts of meat from cattle (which they did); others characterised his adventures as "more wonderful than those of Sinbad the sailor and perhaps as true".
Bruce died in 1794, falling down a staircase in his rush to accompany a woman to her carriage. It was a sad if appropriately courtly end for the irascible charmer whose story Bredin tells so well. In spite of everything he was, as Livingstone put it, "a greater traveller than any of us".
• Miles Bredin will talk on Bruce and his travels at Waterstone's, George Street, Edinburgh, at 7pm on February 9.
