The Pale Abyssinian: The Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer

CHAPTER 2

THE CALAMITOUS CONSUL

One man was to be the catalyst for Bruce’s new life – the politician, civil servant and former traveller, Robert Wood. Wood had the ear of all the great men of the age. Pitt, Egremont, Halifax, Bute, Grenville and the king himself, all listened to the man who had explored the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek before going on to forge a brilliant career in the service of the crown. As eighteenth-century political alliances were made and dissolved, as administrations rose and fell, Wood, who purposely avoided great office, was one of the few men who consistently kept close to power. Ministers came and went but he managed to outstay them all until his death in 1771. His first significant job had been as Pitt’s secretary at the Irish office where he soon became known as ‘Mr Pitt’s Wood’, but from there he had moved on to greater things, always managing to keep out of the way when governments fell and always reappearing when the new ones arose. It is not certain how the two men met but, although there are no records of either claim, Wood said that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Although they were not contemporaries, Harrow may well have been the link between him and Bruce. Wood recognized the spark of talent in the unfulfilled Scot and ensured that it was kindled and fed. It was through Wood’s efforts that Bruce’s abilities were put to more productive use than that of enlightened land owning.

The two were already friends when British relations with Spain declined drastically once more and it occurred to Bruce that the scribblings he had made in Ferrol a few years earlier might be of some use to the country. He formulated a plan for the capture of Ferrol; from this seemingly impregnable port where he had spent a few days with Matthew Stephenson in July 1757, an invasion could be launched. The plan offered two things Bruce sought: advancement and the opportunity to wage war upon a Catholic country. He wrote to Wood and ‘offered to fix an ensign upon the landing place in the first boat that went on shore’.

Wood took the plan from Bruce and arranged an interview with William Pitt. Secretary of State Pitt – who had yet to become either Prime Minister, Chatham, or elderly – was impressed by Bruce but was unable to accept the scheme since war with Spain, let alone invasion of one of its principal ports, was a catastrophe he was then trying to avoid. Already embroiled with Frederick the Great of Prussia against France, Russia and Austria, another front was the last thing he desired. He would, however, take note for the future, he said. France was by now the principal enemy and Spain was becoming of secondary importance.

It must have been a galling time for Bruce; his contemporaries were making names for themselves whilst he had only just managed to extract himself from the wine business in which he was no longer interested. His affairs in Scotland were still not settled to his satisfaction and until that was done he was unable to plan his future. He returned north invigorated by his flirtation with power but still having achieved little. He threw himself into re-organizing the estate, attempting to remove some tenant farmers and coal miners who were spoiling the view from Kinnaird. He had great plans for the house and park so at the same time ensured that the new collieries being planned to supply the Carron Company would not provide additional eyesores.

Months later, he heard from Wood again and was summoned to London. His Ferrol plan was being revived by Pitt but in a modified form that Bruce believed would doom the project to failure. It was intended that the attack on Ferrol should coincide with an invasion of France through Bordeaux. Swiftly, Bruce composed a memorandum in which he begged the government not to pursue such a course. It had some effect and the original plan was once more adopted and championed by Pitt. Ferrol would be invaded as Bruce recommended and an army landed. It was, however, almost immediately abandoned due to objections from the Portuguese ambassador who, as the representative of Britain’s oldest ally, could not be disregarded. Bruce could not understand why he was being consecutively ignored then fêted by the great men of the day and in high dudgeon he decided to return once more to Scotland and find himself a wife. His ego was not the most important casualty of the plan’s rejection: a furious Pitt went to Bath and resigned over the issue.

As Bruce made his preparations to leave, however, one of his conspicuously more successful friends – William Hamilton – contacted him and, acting as Lord Halifax’s secretary, asked Bruce to come and see the great statesman. Hamilton and Bruce had remained friends since Harrow but, while Bruce had battled with illness and spent rather too much time hunting and changing careers, Hamilton had only deviated once. He had trained as a lawyer and then changed course to become a politician. By this time, he even had a nickname – ‘Single Speech’ Hamilton – an epithet he had earned following his spectacular fifteen-hour maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1754. The speech was said to have been written by Samuel Johnson but, since Hamilton rarely spoke in public again, this charge was never proved. His reticence, however, earned for him a great reputation as a thinker, although perversely he also retained his standing as an orator. Hamilton was thus by this time – seven years after the speech – an important player in the corridors of power. (This would be the apex of his career. He would later be described by Lord Charlewood as ‘a man whose talents were equal to every undertaking; and yet from indolence, or from too fastidious vanity, or from what other cause I know not, he has done nothing’.) Lord Halifax sympathized with Bruce – who had wasted much time commuting between Scotland and London only to be left languishing in anterooms by busy ministers – and told the industrious laird that he had work for young men of initiative. Acting under Wood’s influence, Halifax offered Bruce the consulship at Algiers. It was just the kind of employment that he both wanted and needed.

The two men talked long about the possibilities that the posting could offer a man of Bruce’s enterprise. Halifax expected Bruce to perform his consular duties but he also hoped that he would use the post as a platform from which he could explore and record what he saw for the benefit of the new Britain. Robert Wood had discovered and recorded many of the art treasures of the ancient world but there were hundreds of other sites that required classification. Algiers would be the perfect place from which to mount expeditions and his role as consul would give Bruce the authority to travel in style and safety. The menial work, claimed Halifax, would be handled by a vice-consul, who could stamp all the forms and deal with the day-to-day running of the consulate. Then as now, embassies and consulates in Africa were rather more involved in promoting trade than extending the hand of interracial friendship. Someone more knowledgeable would engage in affairs of business whilst Bruce would appear at official functions and travel. Halifax’s plans, however, were foiled and Bruce was compelled to learn the art of diplomacy on the hoof. Algiers was an important, though unprestigious, posting where angering the ruling Dey could result in the enslavement of many British sailors and merchants who sailed in the Mediterranean under a protective treaty with the city state. The Dey was considered little more than a pirate by Britain yet he was in a position to be a serious threat to trade. Bruce would later be condemned for his diplomatic ineptitude although he had been employed for a completely different purpose.

Halifax’s principal wish, claimed Bruce, was ‘that I should be the first, in the reign just now beginning [George III had become King in 1760], to set an example of making large additions to the royal collection, and he pledged himself to be my loyal supporter and patron, and to make good to me, upon this additional merit, the promises which had been held forth to me by former ministers for other services.’ (Bruce claims to have been offered a baronetcy and a pension for his plan to attack Ferrol. There is no record of this but it would have been a perfectly natural offer.) He continued:

The discovery of the source of the Nile was also a subject of these conversations; but it was always mentioned to me with a kind of diffidence, as if to be expected only from a more experienced traveller. Whether this was but another way of exciting me to the attempt I shall not say; but my heart in that instant did me the justice to suggest, that this, too, was either to be atchieved [sic] by me, or to remain, as it had done for the last two thousand years, a defiance to all travellers, and an opprobrium to geography.

The deal struck, Bruce headed back to Scotland with a new spring in his step. He was at last a man with a purpose. But he must first settle his affairs. The estate had to be put into the hands of lawyers and factors, the bank must arrange for him to be able to draw money in Cairo and other points east and he must prepare himself for what was destined to be a long journey. On 18 February 1762, he received official notice from Robert Wood that the consulship was his, and moreover, Wood had managed to arrange matters such that Bruce would be able to spend time in Italy on the way. There he would finish his artistic education in order that he might be able better to appreciate the antiquities of the ancient world.

At the age of thirty-two Bruce’s professional life had at last come together. His love-life followed suit: he had fallen head over heels for a sixteen-year-old neighbour – Margaret Murray – who promised to wait for him whilst he was in foreign parts. (We know nothing of his relationships with women between the death of his first wife and his engagement to Margaret. He never wrote about this period, but judging by his later behaviour we can presume that he had mistresses and women friends.) Prepared and cocksure in both his private and public lives, he went to London where he was presented at court and given details of the task that awaited him.

The king had, in fact, initially objected to Bruce’s appointment. With the good sense which he would retain, for the most part, until much later in his reign, he had ventured to Halifax that it might be wiser to appoint a consul who knew something of the Barbary States. It was true that Bruce spoke Arabic, an unusual accomplishment, but since none of his predecessors had done so, and all consuls were provided with an interpreter, this was not seen as an advantage. Other than this, Bruce had no qualifications for the job. The appointment was, and was intended to be, a sinecure. Wood, though, had not only the ear of the prime minister, but also that of the king. Only two years later he would be made Groom Porter to the Royal Household, a role which had nothing to do with brushing or carrying and everything to do with influence. Already, in 1762, he was in a position to calm the king’s anxieties and ensure that his protégé was well-received. In April Bruce, by then ‘a man of Herculean physique and more than ordinary strength of mind’ (according to Nimmo in his History of Stirlingshire), left Britain for France. It would be twelve years before he returned.

In his baggage he had hundreds of books and instruments to which he would add on his travels. Ludolf’s History of Ethiopia would have been near the top of the pile with Herodotus, Cosmas Indicoplustes and his mentor Wood’s 1753 publication The Ruins of Palmyra. These would come to a sad end in Cairo:

To reduce the bulk as much as possible, after considering in my mind what were likeliest to be of service to me in the countries through which I was passing, and the several enquiries I was to make, I fell, with some remorse, upon garbling my library, tore out all the leaves which I had marked for my purpose, destroyed some editions of very rare books, rolling up the needful parts, and tying them by themselves. I thus reduced my library to a more compact form.

Bruce had measuring rods, three telescopes from François Watkins in Charing Cross, another made for Edward Wortley Montagu by Adam, quadrants and charts of the stars so he could use them correctly. (Edward Wortley Montagu, the supremely eccentric son of Lady Mary and a later critic of Bruce, had been unable to collect his telescope for at the time he was penniless in Italy, reeling from the news that his mother, who had just died, had left him only a guinea in her will.) Bruce was extremely interested in astronomy but would also be using the equipment for navigational and charting purposes. He did not merely wish to discover the source of the Nile; he wanted to put it on the map. The telescopes had been troublesome to obtain since all the worlds’s astronomers were preparing for the transit of Venus expected in June 1769. Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had set off to view it from the South Seas and their European counterparts were preparing to go to Armenia where it was expected to be especially visible. Bruce also wanted to see the phenomenon but was not sure where he would do so. He had guns aplenty with which to fight and bribe his way around Africa. Most came from Heriot Row – some ‘silver mounted and richly wrought’, others, like the three ships’ blunderbusses, more practical than attractive. He had snuff boxes and shoes from London, ammunition and swords, wine and cutlery and £66 worth of new clothes from one shop alone. He was 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 putative consul had managed to receive permission to travel through France despite it being the sixth year of the Seven Years War. None the less, fuelled by pride in his new office, he rushed directly to Rome to receive his orders. The king had given him a mission in Malta so Bruce was able to visit Italy rather than embark immediately for the Barbary States. King George believed himself to have been slighted by the Catholic Grand Master of the chivalric island state, who had been far too friendly to the French. Knowing that diplomacy moves slowly, Wood had already arranged that Bruce should deliver the ultimatum, before it had even been decided upon, let alone written. When it was completed it would be delivered by warship to Bruce in Italy. Wood’s purpose was to allow Bruce time in Italy to learn about antiquities. Neither of them, however, realized quite how long the visit would be. Bruce eventually had to kill time for eight months before he continued on his way, a period that he spent profitably, improving his mind and making contact with people who would later be of assistance.

In Rome Bruce studied the paintings and sculptures in the Vatican and in the houses of the fashionable set. Doubtless, he was inspired by his surroundings as he walked around the ancient capital which, millennia earlier, had sent out its own adventurers to seek the head of the Nile. Writing only two years before Bruce’s arrival, the German art historian and resident of Rome, Johann Winckelmann, had said of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers:

The unknown sources of the Nile are ingeniously represented in the figure of this river on the fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome by a garment with which he seems to be trying to conceal his head. This symbol is still true today, for the sources of the Nile still have not been discovered.

Bruce observed the ancient ruins and continued his studies but still no news came from England. He whiled away his time seeing friends at the Caffé degli Inglesi and sitting for the fashionable painter Pompeo Batoni in an expensive bid to make sure Margaret Murray did not forget him:

I begin sitting to-morrow to the best painter in Italy; but as he only paints in oil, I am obliged to sit for a head, as it is called … and the miniature is to be copied from that picture by the best painter of miniatures in Italy, who is a lady [the society artist Veronica Stern]. This is as certain a way of your having as good a picture as the subject will admit of

In the absence of instructions, most of August was occupied with the strenuous task of sitting still in the studio of the eighteenth-century’s equivalent of Snowdon.

For six months he travelled around the various nation states of pre-unification Italy on a short but busy Grand Tour. Bruce took his visit seriously; according to his first biographer, Alexander Murray, who edited the second edition of the Travels, much of Bruce’s time in Florence was spent attending art lessons.

Although amateur archaeology had been enjoying a great vogue among Britain’s Grand Tourists since the 1747 discovery of Pompeii, Bruce also studied the ruins in more detail than was the norm. At Paestum he made some architectural drawings which he even hoped to publish but the project never progressed further than the plate-making stage. The then British Resident and Walpole’s correspondent Horace Mann (later to delight in the title of Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany) had him to stay in Leghorn (Livorno) and Florence where Bruce, like many other visitors had an audience of the Grand Duke. In Bologna he met the artistic patron the Marquis di Ranuzzi and renewed friendships with his distant cousin Andrew Lumisden and with Robert Strange.

These last two were great Jacobites who were in cautionary exile but eventually returned to Britain before Bruce. Strange and Lumisden – as exiled brothers-in-law – were extremely close. They used to reply to each other’s letters and eventually merited a joint biography. Lumisden had been the Young Pretender’s private secretary; Strange, a fine artist, was denied membership of the Royal Academy because of his Jacobite leanings and thus did not receive his deserved knighthood until 1787. His exile was expensive and it stifled his real artistic leanings by forcing him to concentrate on the more profitable task of making engravings of the classics, which sold in huge numbers. He is now more famous for his financially necessary engravings, particularly his Stuart bank notes which would have become the currency of Scotland and England had the ’45 rebellion succeeded. Strange, more of a thinker than a fighter, had been coerced by love into fighting for the Jacobites at Falkirk and Culloden. Had he not, he would never have won the hand of Andrew’s sister, the fervently pro-Stuart Isabella Lumisden. Even then, the romance did not truly blossom until Strange found himself being hounded around the Highlands by Cumberland’s soldiers. He escaped detection only by hiding under Isabella’s skirts, whilst she steadfastly insisted to the officers searching the building that she had not seen the fugitive. Brought together in adversity, they had a long and happy marriage and were charming enough to overcome Bruce’s Hanoverian instincts. The Stranges became Bruce’s closest lifelong friends.

It was January of 1763 before Bruce was ordered to Naples, where his very arrival prompted the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta to send an ambassador to the Court of St James’s, seeking absolution for appeasing the French. Sadly for Bruce, the ambassador in Naples was still Sir James Grey rather than the great collector, dancer and cuckold Sir William Hamilton but he did not have to stay long. The apologies of the Maltese Grand Master were promptly accepted and in February Bruce received orders to proceed to his posting aboard the British warship Montreal. These were the days of scurvy, powder monkeys, imprecise longitude measurements and colossal, top heavy, wooden sailing ships – dangerous enough for sailors but especially miserable for Bruce who suffered severely from seasickness. We know this from the letters of friends. James Turner, a trader in Cyprus, wrote to him in 1767 saying, ‘the calms you had at sea must have been disagreeable to you who suffers so much at sea’. Bruce’s willingness to jump on and off boats in the Travels, never mentioning his acute discomfort, is admirable. One wonders what other rigours he silently endured.

On 20 March 1763 Bruce arrived in Algiers as His Majesty’s Consul and Agent to Algier’. One senses that Bruce had been all but forgotten in the preceding eight months and that it had taken the prompting of his friend Wood to have him sent to Algiers at all. It would not be long before Whitehall had to sit up and pay attention. The world’s most unsuitable diplomat had just arrived on station in a posting that he was most unlikely to understand and was even less likely to tolerate. The historian of the Barbary States, Sir Godfrey Fisher, later lambasted Bruce:

Official indifference at home, complicated doubtless by naval wars, corrupt practises at Gibraltar and Minorca, and the active hostility at Algiers of Aspinwall [Bruce’s predecessor] and Bruce, contributed to the extinction of British interests, commercial and maritime along the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

The Barbary States on the northern littoral of Africa were a motley conglomeration of city states, separated by warring tribes who relied almost entirely on systematic piracy for their livelihoods. In their glory days the city’s corsairs had performed such memorable feats as the sack of Barcelona, but by this time in their history – nominally under the control of the crumbling Ottoman Empire – they were in precipitous decline. They were still known, however, as the ‘Scourge of Christendom’. Bruce’s job in Algiers was to maintain the treaty that had been forged in 1682 which allowed Britain to trade in the area without fear of molestation by the pirates of Algiers. Occasionally he would be asked to intercede on behalf of people who had been captured and taken into slavery but his main role – and the most important one in the eyes of his government – was that of maintaining the treaty. This was something that he managed to overlook in his treatment of the Algerians and it was to land him in a great deal of trouble. Believing, as he did, that Britain was the greatest country in the world, he tended to ignore the importance of maintaining the treaty when he was petitioning for the release of slaves or the compensation of widows (something that took up more and more of his time). To the British government the treaty was all, but to the inadequately briefed Bruce, the recipient of constant begging letters from the relations of enslaved Europeans, the treaty was of secondary importance to his humanitarian role. Moreover, he and the equally unprepared vice-consul William Forbes had no one to show them the ropes. An Irish merchant, Simon Peter Cruise, the man who should have been most helpful, had been consistently defrauding the unfortunate petitioners for years. As soon as Bruce discovered this, the pair became mortal enemies. For the first year, though, all was relatively peaceful.

The new consul kept himself occupied by perfecting his grasp of the Arabic language and Arabic customs. He gave the occasional dinner party for Aga Mahomet, the Dey’s brother, and his then friend Mr Brander, the Swedish consul. He also learned modern Greek from Father Christopher, a Greek Orthodox monk, who, having fallen upon hard times, came to live in the consulate as a chaplain-cum-tutor. He met with the traders to whom he had special access through Masonry (Algiers would become even more of a hotbed of Masonry in the early nineteenth century). Now and again he sued an Algerian for the return of enslaved Englishmen. It was a pleasant start to his term of office. He wrote long, chatty letters to his friends Strange and Lumisden and even to Mr Charron, a caterer in Leghorn who kept Bruce’s larder stocked with cases of wine and huge quantities of Parmesan cheese. It was not long before he forgot young Margaret Murray. Indeed, he seems to have made no contact with her in all his travels. Within a few months of his arrival, he was complaining to Charron about the lack of women, a predicament with which Charron sympathized: