James Bruce
1730-1794
Scottish Explorer
When James Bruce returned to England in 1774 after years spent in the mysterious land of Ethiopia, his fantastic tales gained him a reputation as a liar. Yet modern research has confirmed the accuracy of Bruce's account, which he set down in writing in 1790.
Born in 1730 in Stirlingshire, Bruce was the son of an aristocratic family who owned an estate at Kinnaird House. His mother died when he was three years old, and his father later arranged for him to be taught by a private tutor in London. He went on to Harrow School and Edinburgh University, where his father expected him to study law; Bruce's interests, however, were in languages and art.
Bruce married in 1752, but his wife died in childbirth nine months later. To recover from his grief, he traveled around Europe, returning to London after the death of his father in 1758. During this time he became fascinated with Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was then called, and resolved to go there. In particular, he hoped to find the source of the Blue Nile, which together with the White Nile, a deeper river that flows northward from its source at Lake Victoria in Central Africa, forms the Nile proper at Khartoum in modern-day Sudan.
James Bruce. (The Granger Collection, Ltd. Reproduced with permission.)Appointed British consul-general to Algiers in 1762, Bruce served in that position for two years, then spent considerable time traveling throughout North Africa, devoting himself to learning languages. By 1768 he had wound up in Cairo, accompanied by an Italian assistant named Luigi Balugani. He ultimately made contact with the patriarch of Ethiopia, a leading church official in that land, which was Christianized during the fourth century A.D.
Taking with him a letter of introduction from the patriarch, Bruce endeavored by a number of means to reach Ethiopia. Stopped by war from going in via the Nile, he used a circuitous route that took him across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, and back again to the ancient city of Aksum. Finally, he arrived in Gondar, then the capital, in 1770, and ultimately met Ras Michael of Tigre, ruler of the Abyssinian Empire.
Ras Michael invited Bruce on an expedition up the Little Abbai River, thought to be the source of Blue Nile, but constant fighting between Ethiopia and its neighbors forced them to turn back. Late in 1770, Bruce and Balugani made a second expedition up the Little Abbai, reaching its source on November 4. Unbeknownst to them, the explorer Pedro Paez (1564-1622) had already been there in 1618.
In the months that followed, Bruce collected extensive knowledge about Ethiopia. Balugani died of dysentery, and Bruce left Ethiopia in December 1771. He spent time in Sennar, a Muslim town in what is now Sudan, studying the life of the people there before taking the Nile north to Cairo, where he arrived in 1773.
Bruce returned to a number of disappointments in Europe. Before leaving, he had become engaged to a woman, and later, thinking him long dead, she had married an Italian noble. In Paris, a cartographer informed him of Paez's earlier journey to the source of the Blue Nile; and finally, after an initially warm reception in England, the explorer soon gained a reputation as a spinner of tales.
Licking his wounds, Bruce retired to Kinnaird House, married a much younger woman, and lived happily until 1788, when she died suddenly. Once more seeking to assuage his loss, he set out to write of his adventures, and published a book in 1790. It was received with no more credulity than his earlier verbal accounts of his journeys—even though modern scholarship has confirmed most of his findings. Bruce died in 1794 after he fell down a flight of stairs on his way to escort a lady to her carriage.
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