BRUCE, JAMES

James Bruce (December 14, 1730-April 27, 1794) was a Scottish explorer who visited Ethiopia from 1769-72, and is best known for his Iravels to Discover the Sources of the Nile (1790). In Ethiopia he seems to have been referred to as El Hakim Yagoube.

PHOTO CAPTION: James Bruce. SOURCE: EA Library

Born at Larbert, in Sterlingshire, Scotland, he studied at Edinburgh University, and began training for the bar, but, after marrying Adriana Allan, a wine merchant’s daughter, he went into her father’s business. After his wife’s death in 1754, he traveled to Spain in 1757, where he became interested in Arabic manuscripts, and learned Arabic. He was subsequently appointed British consul in Algiers in 1763.

Deeply interested in the origins of the Nile, he went to Egypt in 1768, wearing Arab dress. Having received letters of introduction, he sailed down the Nile to Aswan, and then travelled east across the desert to Kosseir (Quseir) on the Red Sea coast.

From here he sailed to Jidda on the coast of the Arabian peninsula, from where, after a short stay, he sailed to Yemen, before landing at Massawa on the African coast in 1769. After encountering some opposition from the Naib, the local ruler, he proceeded into the interior of Ethiopia, at that time relatively isolated from Western contacts, and in the throes of civil war.

He visited Adwa and Aksum, the two main towns in Tegré province, before arriving at Gondar, the imperial capital, on February 15, 1770. At Gondar he won the friendship of the dowager empress Mentewab, and gained a good knowledge of Ethiopian personalities and politics. Together with his Italian assistant Luigi Balugani, to whom he was manifestly unfair in his subsequent writings, he also visited the sources of the Blue Nile, on November 4, 1770 thus accomplishing his life’s ambition.

At the end of December 1771 he left Gondar and travelled westwards to Sennar on his way home. En route he visited France in 1773 where he gave an account of his travels to the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), and was received at the French court. In 1774 he returned to London, where he was greeted with initial interest, but later encountered disbelief, partly because his visit to France had soured his welcome. In 1776 he returned to Scotland and remarried. He began to write his Travels, in 1780, and on completing them spent his last years in retirement.

Bruce’s Travels which appeared in five volumes in 1790, though the work of a vain man occasionally prone to exaggeration, was important as the first extensive description of Ethiopia since the account of the Portuguese Jesuits over a century and a half earlier. Besides containing useful descriptions of Ethiopian government and customs, they included extensive summaries of the Ethiopian royal chronicles, which had not hitherto been known abroad.

RICHARD PANKHURST