This was depressing enough but he also received news that wild rumours about his travels were doing the rounds in England. It seemed he had become a laughing stock in his absence. To a man as proud as Bruce, this was worse than failure. ‘One thing only detained me from returning home; it was my desire of fulfilling my promise to my Sovereign, and of adding the ruins of Palmyra to those of Africa, already secured and out of danger.’
If he had known how completely uninterested George III was in the pictures he had been promised, he would have taken the first boat back to Dover. There were more important matters on the royal mind: this was the year when Clive departed India, leaving it in a state of complete chaos. Paintings would not have been uppermost in George’s thoughts. Bruce embarked for Syrian Tripoli where he went shooting and bought two hunting dogs – Juba and Midore – which, when not kennelled with Consul Charles Gordon, were to become devoted companions. In Tripoli he was told that to visit Palmyra he should approach from Aleppo which advice he immediately followed. After every journey he relapsed into ill health, but thankfully Aleppo was the best place in the Levant to do so, for there lived Patrick Russel, an English doctor who cured him, taught him medicine and became a lifelong friend. A plague specialist who had spent many years living in the Levant, he was well-versed in tropical illnesses and prepared a vast medicine chest for Bruce, which he then instructed him how to use. Russel and his brothers were excellent violinists who would play long into the night, and as Bruce danced with the local consuls, the French merchants and their wives, he began to recover. He also struck up new acquaintances: the Bellevilles and the Thomases, who were local traders, became firm friends. Bruce left Aleppo ‘in perfect health, and in the gayest humour possible’.
Palmyra had been visited before, most notably by his friend Robert Wood, but there was more work to be done both there and at nearby Baalbek, so having arranged the appropriate letters of introduction he set off to more adventures in the desert. He had an enjoyable and instructive time – it was ‘all classic ground’ – but he wrote little about it for fear of repeating the work of earlier travellers. More importantly, he disagreed with Wood. Not wanting to contradict his friend, he therefore set up his camera obscura, made some very beautiful paintings with Balugani, and returned to Aleppo two months later. Whilst he was away, exciting news had arrived from Europe. Patrick Russel’s brother Alexander had found him ‘an excellent reflecting telescope’ in London and also an achromatic one. Two time-pieces needed for taking longitude measurements had been sent from Paris to await Bruce’s arrival in Alexandria. They were not as good as his original Ellicott – a copy of Harrison’s 1760 chronometer which, through its ability to maintain accuracy over long periods, transformed navigation – but they would do. (Ellicott was one of the greatest clock-makers of the day, and among other things horologist to Catherine the Great.) This was great news indeed but Bruce recorded that it ‘still left me in absolute despair about obtaining a quadrant, and consequently gave me very little satisfaction’. In spite of this he decided to go to Egypt to visit the pyramids. The pyramids – a powerful image on all Masonic paraphernalia – were of special interest to him. It is a central tenet of Masonic lore that their founders built the pyramids.
Before he left, however, he received news he could never have anticipated. Abandoned by officialdom in his own country, it seemed that France was anxious to provide him with the necessary instruments to continue his travels. The fact that France and England were scarcely friends seems to have been overlooked when set against the aristocratic and masonic links that encouraged Bruce’s friends to help him and the lust for Enlightenment which was so much more entrenched in France than in Britain. His principal benefactor – the naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who was a member of the same lodge as Voltaire – managed to persuade the French government that the discovery of the source of the Nile was more important than whether the feat was achieved by an Englishman or a Frenchman.
The Comte de Buffon, Mons. Guys of Marseilles, and several others well known in the literary world, had ventured to state to the minister [the Duc de Choiseul who became a friend and had provided Bruce with his laissez-passer to travel through France on his way to Italy], and through him to the king of France, Louis XV, how very much it was to be lamented, that after a man had been found who was likely to succeed in removing that opprobrium of travellers and geographers, by discovering the sources of the Nile, one most unlucky accident, at a most unlikely time, should frustrate the most promising endeavours. That prince, distinguished for every good quality of the heart, for benevolence, beneficence, and a desire of promoting and protecting learning, ordered a military quadrant of his own military academy at Marseilles, as the nearest and most convenient port of embarkation, to be taken down and sent to me at Alexandria.
Bruce now had all he needed. In fact, he was rather better equipped than he had been in the first place, for he had just been given one of the best quadrants available – ‘reputed to be the most perfect instrument ever constructed in France’. He could straightaway devote himself entirely to discovering the source of the Nile; he had the money and the knowledge and he now had what money could not buy, the equipment with which to record his anticipated discoveries. He spent the winter with his friends in the Levant, preparing for his first venture into uncharted territory. He had learned the error of his ways and would not leave until he had all the permissions he could possibly need. His friend Murray, the ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, managed to secure a firman (a letter of recommendation similar to a passport) from the Grand Signor at Constantinople which would prove invaluable; Bruce even acquired a letter to the Khan of the Tartars in case he became really lost. He had to solicit firmans for every eventuality and obtain letters of credit from his bankers in London as well as learn as much as he could about this momentous undertaking. He would still have difficulties if his firmans were not recognized or if he could find no one to honour his letter of credit, but the Arabic banking system was sophisticated and he could rely on it until he arrived in Abyssinia. His former colleagues, the British and French consuls in the area, were extremely helpful in this regard. He thus spent much of the winter writing bread and butter letters whilst others prepared the way for him.
Bruce planned to visit Alexandria, pick up his equipment and take it on a trial run to the pyramids. Then he would set off for Abyssinia through Massawa. Abyssinia’s littoral, including the Red Sea port of Massawa, was loosely under the control of the Sublime Porte. The only other way to reach the country was a long march via Sennaar in present-day Sudan. Having heard what had happened to the French ambassador du Roule in 1705, he was shy of going by way of Sennaar. Du Roule, the last man ever to have attempted an unannounced visit to the court of the King of Kings, took the Sennaar road and was murdered in the capital of the Fung kingdom. Massawa was an unknown quantity, unvisited by Europeans for 150 years, and Bruce would not go there until he was exhaustively prepared. As Bruce sat, dressed in the costume of a Barbary Arab, in the prow of a boat en route to Alexandria via Cyprus, he saw a high bank of clouds that he conjectured had come from the mountains of Ethiopia and would water the Nile. He was well-satisfied with his precautions.
Nothing could be more agreeable to me than that sight, and the reasoning upon it. I already, with pleasure, anticipated the time in which I should be a spectator first, afterwards an historian, of this phenomenon, hitherto a mystery through all ages. I exulted in the measures I had taken, which I flattered myself, for having been digested with greater consideration than those adopted by others, would secure me from the melancholy catastrophes that had terminated those hitherto unsuccessful attempts.
He first must needs make friends with the rulers of Egypt – the Mamelukes. Egypt was nominally ruled by the Turks but, under the recent onslaught of Catherine the Great, and after centuries of decadent rule, the Ottoman Empire was slowly crumbling. The Mamelukes were originally installed as a slave caste by rulers too lazy to govern themselves and as such had fought nobly against the crusaders and their descendants, but they had enjoyed greater and greater autonomy over the previous centuries. Indeed, Ali Bey, the present ruler, would declare himself an independent sultan the following year. Bruce was to be disappointed