The world's explorers, or, Travels and adventures

Front matter

Qfacnell Hmoeraitg ffixbrarg

CHARLES WILLIAM WASON

COLLECTION

Contents

Bbuce and Abyssinia.

I. — Truth Strauger'thau Fiction. Critics of the Laat Century : their Ignorance and Injustice. Bruce the Traveller. His Birth and Early Life. Indian Scheme. Study of Oriental Languages. Consulship at Algiers. Bruce Departs on his Travels. Lions and Lion-eaters. Euins of Ancient Cities. Caravan. Shipwreck atBengazi. Ajrival at .Alexandria. Cairo Page 1

II. — Cairo in the Last Century. Ali Bey and his Favourites. Bruce as an Astrologer. Trying a Prescription. Bruoe's Toyage up the Nile. The Nile Boat. Crocodiles. Kenne. The Caravan. Quarrel with the Leader. Cosseir. Fable of the Emerald Mountain. A Boat without Nails. Arrival at Jidda. Curious Adventure. Eastern Method of Trading. Voyage towards Massuah. Arrival in Abyssinia 11

I

Tmth Stranger than Fiction — Critics of the Last Century : their Ignorance and Injustioe^Bruce the Traveller — His Birth and Early Life — Indian Scheme — Study of Oriental Languages — Consulship at Algiers — ^Bruoe Departs on his Travels — Lions and Lion-eaters — ^Ruins of Ancient Cities — Caravan — Shipwreck at Bengazi — Arrival at Alexandria— Cairo.

TN one of Captain Marryat's clever books tliere is an amusing story of an English sailor, -who, strongly urged to tell a tale for the delectation of a Turkish pasha, proceeds to spin one of the most Avonderful "yarns" ever perpetrated by nautical adventurer. The dangers and escapes of. Sindbad the Sailor are as nothing compared ■with the perils and adventures of this modern mariner. He relates how in a gale the crew of his ship were compelled to "station two men to hold the captain's hair on his head," how " a little boy was carried up into the air by the force of the gale, and then slid back on a moonbeam unharmed to the deck of the ship," with many other particulars "equally marvellous and strange. The pasha listens to all with an air of imperturbable gravity. Each extravagant fiction gains ready and uudoubting credence with him; and, however "tough". the English; Jack's yarn may be, the Turkish dignitary is ready for fresh marvels.. But amid all this mass of absurdity there happens to be just one little grain of truth. Jack mentions by chance in the course of his marvellous narrative that in his travels he has met with an animal which has a bill like a duck, and four webbed feet — he is alluding, in fact, to the well-known "duckbill" of New Holland. At this the pasha's patience is exhausted : he who has contentedly submitted to the barefaced demands Jack has been all along making on his credulity, cannot bring himself to believe in the existence of a duck-billed quadruped ; and by the mouth of his vizier and interpreter, he indignantly admonishes the narrator to refrain from telling

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him suoli impudent lies. Whereupon honest Jack departs, marvelling greatly that the pasha should have pitched upon the only piece of truth in the whole yarn as the subject of his indignant protest.

This little anecdote furnishes no unapt illustration of the behaviour of a numlier of British and foreign critics at the close of the last century ■with regard to an enterj^rising and persevering traveller. Not that the British public of the latter part of the eighteenth century was wanting in credulity. When a rumour was spread of the appearance of a ghost in Cock-lane, Smithfield, a multitude of the curious flocked to hear the spectre's knookings, and returned with a, full conviction of the reality of their supernatural host; the impudent quack, Dr. Graham, never lacked dupes to listen to his preposterous stories of cures he had effected, or to pay the unconscionable fees he demanded for pretended services ; but when a brave, honest gentleman, who had perilled his life and sacrificed his fortune in the cause of science, came home from histravels with a plain account of what he had seen and experienced in distant lands, he was assailed with sneers by the malevolent, and with open denial by the incredulous ; and the public, taking its tone from sundry ignorant and self-elected critics, refused to the veraciousnarrative of James Bruce the credence it had given to the fictitious pretensions of a score of earlier writers. Dr. Johnson, himself the very reverse of a traveller, pronounced in a few turgid sentences a dictum adverse to the Abyssinian pilgrim's credibility; a graceless German, named Easpe, wrote a marvellous farrago of impossible achievements, which he dubbed The Adveidares of Baron Muncliausen, and sarcastically dedicated to Bruce ; and presently there appeared a certain Baron de Tott, who, emboldened by the storm of ridicule he saw pouring down on the devoted head of the traveller, boldly declared his beUef that Bruce had not been in Abyssinia at all. And preposterous as this assertion might seem, there were many who believed it, until the well-known Daines Barrington wrote an elaborate vindication of his friend, and silenced the baron and his followers.

It will be our task, in these pages, briefly to recount the labours of the Abyssinian traveller, and to show hov.' those labours were requited.

James Bruce, the discoverer of the sources of the "Blue Nile,'' was born on the 14th December, 1730, at the seat of a long line of ancestors, Kinnaird House, in the county of Stirling, in Scotland. His family was one of considerable antiquity, and could trace back its

BRUCE AND xVBYSSiXIA. H

annals to a younger son of the heroic Robert Bruce. James was the older of two sons, and the heir- apparent to the estate oi Kinnaird ; his father, naturally and wisely anxious to give him an education commensurate with the position he would one day "be called to occupy, sent him first to a good school in the neighbourhood of London, and then to Harrow. At the latter school, where he remained four years, he appears to have acquired a considerable knowledge of the ancient languages, and to have made himself popular and beloved. At the age of seventeen he returned to his native country, in order to commence the study of the law at the University of Edinburgh.

But the study of the law presented little to gratify his ardent imagination, while the close application it demanded proved too heavy a tax on a frame which, slender and delicate, gave little promise of the athletic strength to which it attained in after days. Mr. Bruce was soon obliged by ill-health to abandon his legal studies, and he looked around in search of a new field for his energies. India was then, as it has ever since been, the country towards which many a restless and enterprising spirit looked ardently as a field where fame and fortune could be won, and to India James Bruce resolved to proceed. He was too old to be sent out as a writer in the East India Comj)any's service, and determined, therefore, to seek permission to settle in Hindostan as a free trader, under the patronage of the court, of directors. Bent on obtaining this privilege he repaired to London in July, 1753, when he was twenty-throe.

His Indian scheme, however, was destined to remain unfulfilled ' In London he made the acquaintance of the family of a Mrs. Allan, the widow of a wealthy wine-merchant, to whose daughter he was married in February, 1754: ; whereupon he gave up the idea of proceeding to India. Perhaps this was a fortunate resolve ; for in 175Goccurred the taking of Calcutta by the infamous Surajah Dowlah, an event followed by the massacre of the Black Hole, in which Mr. Bruce might have perished with the other hapless victims of the wretched despot, soon himself to meet his reward at the hands of the victors of Plassey, led by the young and intrepid Chve.

A few short months saw Bruce a widower. His young wife fell a victim to consumption, and Bruce returned almost heartbroken to London. For some years he devoted himself to the study of Oriental languages ; for, as the depression of spirits produced by his great i THE WORLD'S EXPLORERS.

grief yielded insensibly to the natural effect of time on a character singularly energetic and active, Bruce conceived the idea of a new career in which difficulties and dangers were to be overcome and fame ■was to be gained. The death of his father in 1758 put him in possession of the paternal estate, and the idea of Eastern travel and exploration took a firmer hold on his imagination in proportion as his mnvearied industry gave him a greater insight into tlie (ihees, or Ethiopic, and the Arabic languages, the objects of his dilicfnt study during some years.

In 1762 the consulship at Algiers was offered to Mr. Bruce, who eagerly accepted it, as an official position couldnot failto be asteppingstone to the enterprise he had detCTmined to prosecute. I'his was nothing less than the discovery of the source of the Nih\ a prol>k>;n that had perplexed the learned of various ages, and which even kings at the head of victorious armies had failed to solve. After holding the consulship for a year, during which time he displayed eminent firmness and resolution in the course of a quarrel with the savage Dey, Bruce applied for leave of absence to travel in the interior, and then for permission to resign his appointment. Though he had steadfastly

EUTPTIAN DANCINtr GIULS

advocated the interests of his own government in ojiposition to those of the Dey, his uniform honesty and singleness of purpose so gained the good opinion of that barbaric potentate, that he was furnished with valuable letters of recommendation to the governors of the places lie intended to visit in Algiers, and to the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli.

And now, attended by ten spahis or dragoons, excellent good horsemen, but exceedingly cowardly, Bruce set out on his journey, the primary object of which was to explore the various towns in the Barbary States where ruins of ancient temples and other buildings might be found, and to make drawings and write descriptions of i.hese antiquities. He had hired an Italian artist named Balungani to assist

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him with ' Ilia drawings; but the poor draughtsman died of dysentery long before the travels of Bruce came to an end.

Our hero was a model traveller in many respects. He had prepared himself for his enterprise by a long and arduous course of study, and was able to speak in the modem Greek, the Ax-abic, and the Ethiopiclanguages. He had devoted much attention to mathematics and astronomy, and was thus enabled to take observations and determine •longitudes and latitudes with an accuracy to which his detractors themselves have borne unwilling witness. He knew enough of the principles of surgery and medicine to make himself valued and respected by many a wUd tribe, and, moreover, he stood six feet four inches in height without his stockings, and was possessed of courage and determination at least proportionate to his bodily stature. Such was the traveller who sallied forth to explore the then almost unknown districts of the Barbary States.

On the frontiers between Algiers and Tunis, he stopped at Hydra, the Thunodrudum of the ancients. Here he found a tribe of Arabs, called the Welled Sidi Boogannim — the sons of the father of flocks. They are a very rich tribe ; they pay no tribute, form a kind of halfmilitary, half-religious order, and are bound by a vow to eat lion's flesh as their daily food. They are naturally expert hunters, and are exempted from tribute in consideration of the services they perform i)i ridding the country of lions. Bruce himself ate lion's flesh with the Welled Sidi Boogannim, and describes the flesh of the male lion as tough, lean, musky in flavour, and altogether resembling what he could fancy would be the taste of old horseflesh. The flesh of the she-lion he describes as fatter and less disagreeable ; but the meat of a whelp of six or seven months was the most nauseous of all.

In reference to this fact of Hon-eating, which has been abundantly verifled by later travellers, Bruce tells an anecdote strongly illustrative of the hardness of belief of the learned in those times, and of the difficulty with which a traveller gained credence who had to teach some new thing. A Dr. Shaw, of Oxford, who had travelled among the Arabs, and under whose notice this custom of lion-eating had come, very naturally mentioned the circumstance on his return to England but this would not do for the Oxford common-room. That lions ate men everybody knew ; but a man eat a lion — preposterous ! So the doctor, a peaceable man, anxious to propitiate his critics, discreetly omitted the fact of the lion -eating in his narrative, and merely hinted

BliUCE AND ABYSSINIJL. 7

at it in his appendix. Our traveller was not the mail to take a similar course. When he had once asserted a thing as a fact, he considered it a point of honour to maintain his assertion, and contradiction only made him cling the firmer to his position, on the good old principle that, however wide a scope there might be in matters of theory for difference of opinion, facts were not to be suppressed or explained away, inasmuch as, if once true, tliey were true always.

As he travelled from place to place, diligently drawing every remarkable relic of antiquity that came in his way, noticing at Lambessa the sculptured standard of a legion with the proud old inscription " Legio Tertia Augusta," and at Kisser, the Colonia Assuras of the ancients, a small square temple with instruments of sacrifice carved upon it, the explorer could not fail to meet with stirring adventures, more especially as the country was in a stats of war. In the ruins of Spaitla, the ancient Suffetula, his studios were unpleasantly interrupted by a visit from a lawless tribe, the Welled Omram. These marauders blockaded Bruce and his party, who fortified themselves within the high walls of the ruined temples of Spaitla, and kept the besiegers at bay with their guns. The arrival of a friendly tribe rescued the besieged garrison, who were reduced to a state of semi-starvation when the relieving force freed them from their tormentors. At Feriana, the ancient Thala, which Metellus destroyed in his pursuit of Jugurtha, King of Numidia, he found fishes like gudgeons swimming merrily in baths of very warm water. Near Tripoli he met the Emir al Hadj, or commander of the annual cai'avan conducting the yearly throng of pilgrims who journey from Fez and Zuz, in Morocco, to Mecca. A disorderly rabble rout these hadji proved to be — about three thousand in number, with some fourteen thousand camels. They mistook Bruce and his horsemen for mounted banditti, and showed a disposition to run, but plucked up courage, which soon changed to insolence when they found that the travellers were peaceable men, and had no confederates lurking in the neighbourhood.

At Ras Sem Bruce visited the petrified city, respecting which it had been asserted, and, indeed, extensively believed in Africa, that the Divine vengeance had overtaken the inhabitants, and suddenly transformed them to stone, as they were engaged in their daily employment. A French consul had once offered a considerable sum to the Arabs for a specimen of petrified humanity, aind had been rewarded by becoming the possessor of a very rudely sculptured statue. As may be supposed,

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our enthusiastic investigator found no stony inhabitants at Ras Sem, but he had an opportunity, for the first time, of observing the habit* of

LION, LIONESS, AND CUBS.

the jerboa, a curious long-legged mouse, remarkably long-limbed and agile. Soon after this Bruce was shipwrecked in a Greek vessel, near the harbour of Bengazi, and very narrowly escaped with hjs.

life. His account of his escape reads like a passage from Rotnnmin (^rasoe :—

The vessel, he says, was very ill accoutred. She had enough of sail, but no ballast. A crowd of passengers fleeing from the famine were taken on board. The commander was not accustomed to those seas. A light, steady breeze, promising a short and agreeable voyage, soon became violent and cold. A storm of hail followed, and the gathering of the clouds seemed to threaten thunder. The captain was preparing, on Mr. Bruce's persuasion, to put into the harbour of

Bengazi, when the vessel unexpectedly struck on a sunken rock in the entrance to the harbour, and at no great distance from the shore. Mr. Bruce and his two servants, one of whom, Roger M'Cormack, was an old man-of-war's man, went down into one of two boats that were towing astern, trusting to their own skill to get ashore. Before they could get clear of the ship, a crowd of passengers rushed in after them. They had not got twice their boat's length from the ship when they were drenched by a wave which nearly filled their frail craft, and drei\' a howl of despair from the wretched passengers. Bruce had fortunately stripped himself for a swim, retaining only his waistcoat and drawers. A sUk sash was wrapped round him. In his breast-pocket he had a pencil, a small pocket-book, and a watch. The next wave was to determine the fate of those in the boat ; he, therefore, called his servants to follow him if they could swim, and instantly let himself down in the face of the wave. With all his strength and activity n

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swimming, he could not witlistand tlie force of the surf. From the etbing -waye he recci-\'c:l a violent blow on the breast, v.-liich threw him upon his l^ack, and occasioned him to swallow a ccjnsiderable quantity of water. He dipped his head wdiile the next wave passed over. He was now breathless, weary, and exhausted, bnit almost on land. A large wave floated him up ; but he was again struck on the face and breast, and involuntarily twisted about by the violence of the ebbing wave. As a last effort, he tried to feel the bottom, and happily reached the sand with his feet, although the water was still over his mouth. This success inspired him with new vigour. He floated on with the influx of the wave, and, by sinking and touching the ground, tvithstood the ebb. At last, finding his hands and knees upon the sand, he fixed his fingers in it, crawded forward a few paces wdien the sea retired, and, having got beyond its reach, he sank insensible on the ground.

The Arabs, in the meantime, came down to plunder the vessel. The persons in the boat had perished. One boat "was thrown ashore ; the Arabs had several others. In these they made their way to the ship to plunder the wreck, and brought the people safe to land. A blow on the neck with the butt-end of a lance was wdiat first awakened Bruce from the senseless state in which he lay, after escaping the violence of the waves. The Arabs, believing him, from his dress, to be^a Turk, after beating, kicking, aird cursing him, stripped him of

THE GREAT GATE AT UAALl.l,

BRUCE AXD ABYSSIKIA. 11

tlie scanty clothing yet upon him ; and, after treating the rest- in the same manner, went to their boats, to seek the bodies of those , who had been drowned. On its appearing, however, that tlie shipwrecked wayfarer was not a Turk, but a poor Christian physician, the swarthy wreckers somewhat relented towards him, and threw around his bruised and wearied form a tattered baraca. The sheikh of the tribe ordered him a supper, and he afterwards procured a passage to Canen, in Crete, in the ship of a French captain, who happened to be at Bengazi. Thence, after recovering from a dangerous illness, Bruce proceeded to Sidon, Baalbec, and Palmyra, everywhere making drawings, examining hieroglyphics, seeking to decipher doubtful or obscure inscriptions, and bearing hardships, fatigues, and occasionally sickness, with unfailing buoyancy of spirit. At length he arrived at Alexandria, and thence proceeded to Cairo. He had now received some scientific instruments from Europe, and was bent on making every preparation for the expedition from which he justly hoped to earn credit and fame — the project which had been present to his mind for years, and to which he had clung through discouragement and dissuasions which would have shaken a less vigorous resolution — the attempt to discover the sources of the Nile.

II

Cairo in the Last Century — ATi Bey and Ma Favourites — ^Bruce as an Astrologer — Trying a Prescription — Bruce's Voyage up the Nile — The Nile Boat — Crocodiles — Kenne — The Caravan — Quarrel with the Leader — Cosaeir — Fable of the Emerald Mountain — A Boat without Nails — ^Arrival at Jidda — Curious Adventure — Eastern Method of Trading — Voyage towarda Massuah — Arrival in Abyssinia.

A VERY different place was the Cairo whence James Bruce started on his voyage up the Nile from the bustling city through which thousands of travellers now stream every month; bound for the presidencies of our Indian Empire. The overland route had not yet been dreamt of, and the camel, horse, and mule were the only means of transport where now the iron steed and the iron road have established themselves — a type of modern progress and civilisation amid the stag-' nation of the East. The voyage up the Nile, now a favourite trip with luxurious " howadji;" who, as the author of the Nile Notes observes, are accustomed to " suffer and be strong" on a luxurioussofa, surrounded- by all the means and apphances of comfort, was at

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that time a dangerous undertaking, not to be achieved without much negotiation and entreaty, and much propitiation of various men in power. It was a Cairo without donkeys for hire and sellers of jeweUery— a Cairo hostile to strangers and intolerant of exploring zeal — that Bruce entered at the end of the year 1768.

Fortunately, however, one cu'- ciimstance was in his favour. Ali Bey, Pasha of Egypt, was entirely swayed in his counsels by three advisers — a Jew, a Greek, and a Coptic Egyptian — and the third of these men, Risk by name, possessed the greatest share of the Bey's confidence. Risk was greatly impressed at sight of the astronomical and scientific instruments Bruce had brought with him, and looked upon the gigantic British traveller as a great necromancer and magician, to whom, accordingly, he applied for prophecies concerning future events, especially touching the issue of a certain expedition to Mecca which was shortly to be undertaken. In a country where the bastinado or

BRUCE AND ABYSSINIA.

death by impalement might be the consequence of a mistake, it was a serious thing to meddle with astrology ; but Bruce judiciously contrived to give an oracular ambiguity to his prophecies. He had, moreover, the satisfaction of knowing that he should be far beyond the territories of the pasha before the issue proved their correctness or their fallacy ; and Kisk, whose respect for a prophet that had such manifold and complicated appliances was unbounded, recommended Bruce in warm terms to his master. The Bey also happened to be unwell, and Bruce, suspecting that the illness arose from excess at table, prescribed a very simple remedy, which was first tried, on the principle, "Fiat

EUVPIIAK FEMALE COSTUi'UES.

experimentum in corpore vUi," on an unfortunate monk of the Greek convent, and then used by the Bey with complete success. This proof of profound medical science completed the favourable impression Bruce had already made, and he, departed on his journey well provided with letters of recommendation from the bey himself, and from, the janissaries, to the principal authorities, political, military, and ecclesiastical, with whom he might expect to be brought in contact.

And now, on the 12th of December, 1768, Bruce started on the voyage up the Nile. He travelled in a boat a hundred feet long, provided with two tall masts and enormous lateen sails, the greater of them a hundred and twenty feet in length. He passed the famous p)yramids of Ghizeh, concerning which he surmised that they were hewn out of the solid rock — an opinion disputed by later travellers.

After some delay, the rais, or captain of the boat — a hadji who had made the voyage to Mecca, and never tasted fermented liquor — made his appearance with his son, very completely intoxicated. When this ■worthy follower of the prophet had slept himself sober, the voyage commenced in real earnest, and day after day the great boat worked its way up the broad current of the Nile, between the flat banks studded with pahn trees, beneath whose scanty shade crouched poverty-stricken villages — past magnificent ruins, teUing of the mighty Roman people, who left their mark in stone and sculpture wherever their vast yoke had been placed on the necks of the nations — past fishermen, on triangular wooden rafts supported on jars, floating down the stream to sell their pottery in the market-place at Cairo — past Comaicedy, where the l\ile inclines to the westward, and Nizelet el Aral, consisting of miserable huts, where the people wove boats with sugar-canes for a voyage down stream to Cairo. At Rhoda, where Bruce attempted to land to make drawings of some ruins, he was attacked by the natives, who stole the turban of his servant Mahomet, but were put to precipitate flight when a blunderbuss full of pistol-bullets was fired over their heads. Christmas Day, ninety-and-nine years ago, brought them to the ruins of Dendera, and here they saw the first crocodile. We are told that hundreds of these animals were afterwards seen lying upon every island of the river, like herds of cattle ; yet the inhabitants of Dendera drive their beasts of every kind into the water, and they stand there for hours. Girls and women, too, who come to fetch water in jars, stand up to their knees in the water for a considerable time, and, if we may guess by what happens, their danger is full as little as their fear, for none of them that Bruce ever heard of had been bitten by a crocodile. Further on he tells us that the ancient notion recorded in the fable of ^Esop, that the dogs run along the banks of the Nile, lapping the water as they go, lest the crocodile should seize, them if they tarried, is a fiction, for he himself saw many dogs quenching thentliirst, standing quietly in the river without showing any^of the apprehension of danger attributed to them in the ancient story.

After a voyage of sixty-four days, Bruce quitted the Nile. During his passage up the river he had diligently taken observations of the longitude and latitude of every important place, andj^ subsequent researches have testified to the accuracy of these labours. That they might not be lost, in case of fatal accident to himself, Bruce took care, before leaving the Nile, to "write up his journal," and send his various manuscripts to friends at Cairo, to remain with them till the issue of his enterprise should be known. And now he joined the caravan for Kenne, the ancient Csene Emporium, and the really perilous part of his journey commenced ; for, of the two hundred mounted guards who accompanied the caravan for its protection, it might truly be asked, " Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?" Not only were they arrant thieves, but Bruce shrewdly suspected discretion with them was considered decidedly the better part of valour, and before a few attacking Arabs they would run, like Falstaff, upon " instinct." Subsequent observation convinced him that his opinion was not ill-founded.

An attempt to steal a portmanteau confided by some Tm-ks to Bruce, and the severe chastisement inflicted on the offender by the proprietors, had nearly involved our traveller in a serious quarrel with Sidi Hassan, the leader of the caravan, and the rabble rout under his command. Hassan found fault with Bruce for patronising the Turks, and further declared that the whole camp was in disturbance on account of the beating of the man, and that it was as much as he could do to prevent his followers and servants from falling upon and exterminating Bruce and his followers. With characteristic intrepidity, our undaunted traveller laughed this covert threat to scorn. " With regard to your preventing people from murdering me," he said, " it is a boast so ridiculous that I only laugh at it Those pale-faced fellows who are about you, muffled up in burnouses for fear of cold this morning, are they capable of looking janissaries like mine in the face ? Speak low, and in Arabic, when you talk at this rate, or it may not, perhaps, be in my power to return the compliment you paid me last night, or hinder them from killing you on the spot.'' Ou this a man behind exclaimed, " Were ever such words spoken ? Tell us, master, are you a king ?" " If Sidi Hassan is your master," replied Mr. Bruce, " and you speak to me on this occasion, you are a wretch ! G-et out of my sight !" By a display of resolution, not unmixed, perhaps, with a little occasional bluster, to maintain " prestige, ' the traveller managed to preserve his position among the doubtful characters into whose company he was continually brought.

Bruce especially mentions the quantity of jasper, granite, and marble of various colours seen by the travellers on their way from Terfoowey to Cosseir, and he conjectures that hence the ancients must have drawn the stores of stone with which the ornamental parts of