The consulate was conferred on James Bruce solely to study antiquities in Africa [said Godfrey Fisher] and he was sent through France under a safe conduct to examine classical remains in Italy before reaching Algiers after the war. In spite of some likeable qualities, he was arrogant and irascible and, judging by his letters there may be some reason to question his mental stability. While he frantically summoned warships to his aid, he speaks in high terms of the Dey’s treatment of him … his successor complained that he had left ‘everything relative to publick affairs in much confusion and strangely neglected’.
This may be true although the British government, which had sent Bruce to study antiquities, surely had some share of the responsibility for his failure in a task he was neither trained for nor inclined to do. At least he was treated somewhat better than his predecessor and did well enough to get paid. The previous consul, Stanhope Aspinwall, spent five years in penury before he secured his pension, writing to Egremont (Halifax’s predecessor) in 1763:
Having been removed from being the King’s agent and consul at Algiers (in reaction to a letter from the Dey that I was unacceptable to him) without any the least previous notice, and left to get home as well as I could with a wife and numerous family, in winter and in time of war, I was many months in England soliciting the Earl of Bute but in vain …
Those following fared little better, for Algiers was a notoriously difficult post. The Dey often contrived to have consuls dismissed so as to leave him free to appoint his own. Kirke was soon recalled to Britain after Commodore Harrison, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean, reported him for corruption and dereliction of duty. Sir Robert Playfair (consul general in Algiers 100 years later and a Bruce enthusiast) wrote of the fate of Kirke’s successor, LeGros, who was driven to suicide by the difficulty of the posting: ‘He “met with a misfortune that made it impossible for him to execute that employment”, and the last we hear of him is that “he was sitting on a bed, with a sword and a brace of pistols at his side, calling for a clergyman to give him the Sacraments that he may die contented”.’
Bruce made sure that Halifax knew what he thought of his treatment: ‘I only very heartily regret with shame to myself that with my utmost diligence and attention I have not been able to merit of your Lordship the same marks of confidence constantly bestowed upon my predecessors in office,’ and in August he gave up diplomacy for good to set off on his travels. It was a chastened Bruce who left Algiers to record the ruins of ancient civilizations in which Halifax and the king had shown such interest: the merchants of Algiers heaved a collective sigh of relief.
The erstwhile consul first made for Mahon – just opposite Algiers, in the Mediterranean – where he had to attend to some ‘business of a private nature’. If, as seems likely, this was to do with Bridget Allan’s child it would have required all of his meagre diplomatic skills. His ‘housekeeper’ having died in quarantine on a visit from Algiers to Minorca, a man called Giovanni Porcile, who had been looking after the child, was demanding payment. Bruce was soon on his way back to Africa where he visited only a few ancient sites before going on to Tunis. He had learned the advantage of establishing credentials whilst in Algiers and wanted to meet the Bey before he started his exploratory tour. Carthage only occupied him for a few hours, since he knew he would be able to return with the Bey’s help whenever he wished. In Tunis, Barthélèmy de Saisieu, the French consul, provided him with a guide and ten ‘horse-soldiers, well armed with fire-locks and pistols, excellent horsemen, and, as far as I could ever discern upon the few occasions that presented, as eminent for cowardice, at least, as they were for horsemanship’. This small army proved to be quite useless when it was actually needed a few weeks later.
It was a fair match between coward and coward. With my company, I was enclosed in a square in which three temples stood [at the ruins of Spaitla], where there yet remained a precinct of high walls. These plunderers would have come in to me, but were afraid of my firearms; and I would have run away from them, had I not been afraid of meeting their horse in the plain. I was almost starved to death, when I was relieved by the arrival of Welled Hassan and a friendly tribe of Dreeda.
Bruce also had ten servants, two of whom were Irish slaves – Hugh and Roger McCormack – given him as a going away present by the Dey of Algiers (though formerly soldiers in the Spanish army, he was still referring to them as slaves a year later). He was also given a covered cart in which to put his astronomical instruments and other equipment; it was quite a caravan that made its way from Tunis inland, back towards Algiers. Bruce’s plan was twofold. He wanted to test his safari equipment – amongst which he doubtless included the artist Balugani – and he wished to record as many ancient ruins as he could. Thomas Shaw – an adventurous Oxford don and author of Travels or Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant – had written about some of the ruins on the north coast of Africa but had missed out a great many others. Bruce wanted to venture where Shaw had not, paint pictures and then present the whole to the king, thus satisfying his own curiosity and simultaneously securing a peerage or a baronetcy for his dotage. They had permission to travel anywhere and took full advantage of it. They had two camera obscura, mirrored boxes, used contemporaneously by Canaletto, which by reflecting the scene on to paper allowed artists inside to trace exactly the outlines of the ruins they observed. It is astonishing how many paintings the two made: three bound volumes were given to George III on Bruce’s return. He kept some and gave others to friends. He quarrelled constantly with Dr Shaw’s artistic opinions: ‘There is at Thunodrunum a triumphal arch, which Dr Shaw thinks is more remarkable for its size than for its taste of execution; but the size is not extraordinary; on the other hand, both taste and execution are admirable,’ and criticized his work: ‘Doctor Shaw, struck with the magnificence of Spaitla, has attempted something like the three temples, in a style much like what one would expect from an ordinary carpenter or mason.’
Always contrary, Bruce was happy to have differences of opinion but he went out of his way to defend Shaw’s honour in the Travels, relating a story he knew would not be believed in order to show solidarity with his peer. At Sidi Booganim he came across a tribe which ate lions’ flesh. At the first opportunity, he tucked in: ‘The first was a he-lion, lean, tough, smelling violently of musk, and had the taste which, I imagine old horse-flesh would have … The third was a lion’s whelp, six or seven months old; it tasted, upon the whole, the worst of the three.’
Bruce was being deliberately provocative when he wrote about this in the Travels. Shaw had told a similar story when he had returned to Oxford twenty years earlier and no one had believed him. Now Bruce was doing the same. By the time of writing Bruce had also been severely criticized by those who did not believe him and, although he disagreed with Shaw on points of taste, he wanted to show solidarity on points of belief. This was an age when most people did not know what a lion looked like, save possibly in heraldry. Twenty-five years later Stubbs was to portray male lions stalking and tearing chunks out of horses – anatomically correct but not behaviourally so. Lions were still more mystical than real – they could only be seen by prisoners at the Tower of London – and no one could believe that men would or could eat the king of beasts. Thus, no one believed Bruce when he returned. Some of his stories – which seem unremarkable to us now – were judged too outlandish to be true. Bruce thus laboured the point in his book: ‘With all submission to that learned university, I will not dispute the lion’s title to eating men; but, since it is not founded upon patent, no consideration will make me stifle the merit of the Welled Sidi Boogannim, who have turned the chace [sic] upon the enemy.’
They continued their march up and down the Medjerda valley, through wheat fields that had fed ancient Rome, visiting Hydra and Constantina across lands which had seen Caesar and Hannibal, the Ptolemies and Pompey. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians – all had been there before