Note: James Bruce, related to Robert the Bruce, was reputed to have brought some very important Masonic papers, or papers which were important to the Masonic movement in Scotland at that time. ========================================================== Tales of the Lust crusade. by Trevor Grove He was a real Indians Jones who saw his adventures as an excuse for sexual conquest. But as a new book reveals, James Bruce was one of Britain's greatest ever explorers.... Had Scotsman James Bruce not been such a remarkable man he might be better-known today. As the discoverer of the source of the Blue Nile in 1770, his name would be up there with those heroes of the following century, Livingstone, Speke and Burton. But Bruce was remarkable, provokingly so. He was big, boastful, cocksure and larger than life in every way. His adventures as an explorer, fighter courtier and womaniser were astounding He comes across as a sort of 18th century Indiana Jones, crossed with Casanova. So amazing were his exploits that many contemporaries dismissed his accounts as fantasy. Only after his death, were the magnitude of Bruce's achievements acknowledged. Now a new biography by Miles Bredin has retraced his hair-raising journeys. Based on Bruce's own journals, they make extraordinary reading. Bruce was born in Stirlingshire in 1730, but brought up in England and educated at Harrow, before joining the wine trade. Restless after the death of his wife, he took to exploration. Whether in European dress or the native robes he loved to affect, Bruce was striking to look at: 6ft 4in, broadchested and red-haired. He was a skilled horseman, a deadly shot and an indefatigable lover. The list of his accomplishments is astonishing. By the time he set off for Abyssinia in Search of the source of the Nile, he could speak 11 languages and was a good geographer, astronomer historian, linguist, botanist, ornithologist and cartographer. He had learned medicine and, though he took a young Italian artist, he could also draw and paint himself-which was just as well since the Italian died before their return, murdered, rumour had it, by the hot-tempered Bruce himself. Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it then was had had almost no contact with the outside world for more than 130 years when James Bruce and his small party arrived at the Red Sea port of Massawa in 1769. The last white people to be allowed a foothold in the region had been Portuguese Jesuits, who had been thrown out in 1632. Since then the country had remained in medieval barbarousness. Just what this meant Bruce was to discover, when the ruler of Massawa held them hostage for two months in the abominable African heat, demanding gold in exchange for their lives. It was behaviour to which Bruce would soon become accustomed. Again and again over the coming months, it was only his medical skills backed up by pistols, blunderbusses diplomacy and his winning ways with womenfolk that saved him and his followers from being hacked to death. In November, they got away from Massawa and headed towards Gondar, the imperial capital, lugging Bruce's hefty scientific instruments across the mountains until they entered Tigre where the bloodthirsty dictator Ras Michael ruled in the name of the 15year-old king, Tecla Haimanout II. One of Michael's underlings met them en route and introduced Bruce to more genial aspects of Ethiopian life. They got drunk together on the local mead, and enjoyed the favours of some local village girls. Bruce had asked the girls how many kisses they would give him in exchange for the beads he had brought for barter. 'We will give you as many as you wish for nothing,' they answered, and proceeded to prove to the large, friendly Scot that they were 'very fair and liberal dealers'. Throughout his travels, Bruce seemed to make the most of such opportunities and to be rather proud of his promiscuousness. Later in his journey he relates being instructed on the traditions of Abyssinian hospitality by a local chieftain: 'It is a custom that a stranger of distinction, like you when he is their guest, sleeps with the sister, daughter, or near relation of the principal men among them.' In February 1770, after Eve months of toil and danger, Bruce's party reached the capital, only to find themselves in a civil war, with Ras Michael righting a rebel governor and the royal family ravaged by smallpox. This was a splendid opportunity for Bruce, a dab hand at inoculation, fumigation and other contemporary means of treating the disease. As a result of his successful ministrations, he not only became firm friends with the Iteghe, or Queen Mother, but also her daughter Ozoro Esther, whose favourite child he saved from death. Although Princess Esther was the wife of the tyrannical Ras Michael, she and Bruce became fast friends. Some days later Esther's husband, the 'lean, old and apparently much-fatigued' Ras Michael rode his mule into town at the head of a victorious army of 30,000 men and a great array of captives. Bruce recorded what happened next: 'The first horrid scene Michael exhibited there was causing the eyes of 12 of the Chiefs of the Galla, whom he had taken prisoners, to be pulled out and the unfortunate sufferers to be turned out to the fields, to be devoured at night by the hyenas.' Feted for his healing powers and now famous as a sharpshooter and horseman, Bruce met the young king, who made him a lord of the bedchamber and commander of his own cavalry, the Black Horse. Thoroughly at home by now, it was only to be expected that Bruce should be invited to a royal wedding feast. The chief delicacy on such occasions was raw beef, cut in strips from a living beast so that the muscle fibres were still twitching. The women hand-fed choice morsels to the men before gorging themselves while the poor creature slowly bled to death as Slice after Slice of its body was hacked off. Meantime the mead was passed round in great quantities until, typically on such feast-days, 'love lights all its fires, and everything is permitted with absolute freedom. There is no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or retirement to gratify their wishes; there are no rooms but one.' When a pair of diners decided to become more intimately acquainted, the two nearest them would hold up their cloaks like a Screen to conceal their activities. But Bruce observed: 'If we may judge by the sound they seem to think it as great a shame to make love in silence as to eat.' It is quite possible that it was at one of these Bacchanalian parties that Bruce and Ras Michael's wife Esther consummated their relationship. That they became lovers, with or without Ras Michael's knowledge, seems clear. 'It was impossible to see Ozoro Esther, and hear her speak, without being attached to her for ever after,' wrote Bruce feelingly. To this day the guardian of Koscam, the palace in Gondar, which Esther shared with the Queen Mother, says that this is where James Bruce and the princess lived together and even had a daughter, though she died before she could be christened. After months of idleness punctuated by warfare, Bruce made a determined attempt to reach the Source of the Nile, which as every Abyssinian knew lay at Gishe Abbay but about which most of the world remained ignorant. Two 17th century Jesuit priests, Paez and Lobo, had seen the Source nearly 150 years before. But Bruce was undiscouraged. Evidently his view was that thanks to advances in measuring longitude, he could pinpoint on the map what the Jesuits merely saw. That would make him, not them-never mind Abyssinians-the real discoverer. After a dangerous journey through the rebel strongholds, Bruce's party reached their goal on November 4, 1770. They came to the top of some thickly wooded hills: 'We saw immediately below us the Nile itself strangely diminished in size, and now only a brook that had scarcely water to turn a mill. I could not satiate myself with the sight, revolving in my mind all those classical prophecies that had given the Nile up to perpetual obscurity and concealment.' THE king had honoured Bruce by granting him the lordship of Gishe, so he celebrated his moment of glory by throwing a feast for the local villagers. There was drinking and debauchery and the village shum, or headman, offered Bruce a choice of his daughters. He chose Irepone as his 'nymph of the Nile'. 'She was about 16 years of age remarkably genteel, and, colour apart, her features would have her a beauty in any country in Europe: she was, besides, very sprightly' Back at Gondar the constant warring between Ras Michael and his rivals embroiled Bruce in horrifying routine bloodshed. The country's young king never travelled without an executioner in his train, who would be called upon to hang men for the smallest misdemeanour- allowing a thorn-bush to snag the royal cape, for example. Bruce was invited to condemn to death a priest who had been his enemy-and did. The carnage in the city was so great that his hunting dogs would bring home the heads and arms of slaughtered men and gnaw them in his courtyard. In May 1771 the general unrest came to a head at the great battle of Serbraxos, in which Bruce, wearing a chain mail coat and a plumed helmet that made him 7ft tall, commanded the royal cavalry. The battle lasted for days. Chivalry in the form of attendant musicians and pauses for parlaying Coexisted with vile savagery: at the end of a successful skirmish the king and his officers would be pelted with the severed testicles of the enemy slain. At night one could hear the trophy hunters with their castrating knives competing with the hyenas among the dead or dying. AS MICHAEL lost the battle. His rivals now began to gather around the king, jostling for position. Sickened by the brutality, Bruce, or Hakim Yagoube as he had become known, was desperate to leave. Despite the grave dangers involved, he was determined not to go by the Red Sea this time, but to return through Sennaar (now Sudan), crossing the dreaded Nubian Desert to Aswan. He set off only to be stopped by a mysterious messenger. It was the beautiful Ozoro Esther, summoning him to a secret rendezvous. For a fortnight the lovers drank mead, made love and hunted elephants. Then, in the middle of January 1772, Bruce bade goodbye to his beloved princess. He turned his back on the medieval court of Abyssinia and commenced his long march back to 18th century Europe. It was to be a hellish journey, lasting almost a year. There were robbers and whirlwinds, blistering heat, terrible thirst and hunger. Men died or went mad. Even camels perished, at which point they were hacked up and the moisture drained from their bodies. Bruce himself, burnt, feverish and under attack from a guinea-worm that was eating away his leg, nearly died. As he sailed downstream to Cairo, borne by the great wide river whose mysterious beginnings had first drawn him there, he could at least reassure himself that it was the end of a glorious if terrible adventure. He had used the latest navigational technology to locate and map the source of the Nile. He had lived and loved and made war in one of the most savage yet thrilling countries in the world. He had catalogued Abyssinia's flora and fauna. He had discovered a previously unknown kind of pigeon and a shrub with anti-dysentery properties, tested on himself. Both would duly be named after him by his great contemporary the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. It is a macabre, blood-drenched tale, which even now makes one doubt its authenticity. Yet there is little question that James Bruce was there, came to be revered as well as mocked for his adventures and richly deserves to be remembered as 'the pale Abyssinian'. • The Pale Abyssian by Miles Bredin will be published on February 7, 2000 Daily Mail, Saturday, January 29, 2000
