Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (30 page)

It seems appropriate that the source of the Nile should be the scene of a bloody battle, one that determined the precise extent of the religious map of Africa.

Queen Sabla Wangel and her son Gelawdewos, encouraged by the remaining Portuguese and by the stock of arms they still carried, rallied and went to do battle. It was fiercely fought on both sides with many falling. There is a persistent story that one Portuguese warrior was so intent on avenging the hideous mauling of da Gama that he rode with his loaded arquebus right through Ahmed’s front line until he could fire at almost point-blank range on the Muslim leader. The wounded imam fell and his troops turned and fled.

One account of the battle states that a champion Ottoman fighter refused to run away with the others. Once he saw that

By 1543 the Arab-backed invaders had been repulsed and Ethiopia remained a Coptic anomaly in a Muslim east Africa. Prester John had triumphed.

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A kind of Blue

The morning is for work; the rest of the day depends on the person
.
Ethiopian proverb

James Bruce was an explorer whose name is firmly associated with the Blue Nile. He claimed he was the first European to visit its source, though this was not true.

We have heard how the Blue Nile, or Abay as it is called in Ethiopia, has its source in the mountains at Sekala, a fact that was known for many centuries before Bruce explored Ethiopia. Baltazar Téllez, writing in the seventeenth century about the Jesuit missionaries who visited Ethiopia, wrote, ‘It was said of Alexander the Great that the first question he asked when he came to Jupiter Ammon [the oracle at Siwa] was where the Nile has its rise, and we know he sent explorers throughout Ethiopia without being able to find out this source.’ Earlier, the Persian invader King Cambyses, who later lost an army in the Sahara on its way
to sack the same oracle that was visited by Alexander, also sent troops in search of the Nile’s source in Ethiopia.

Neither of these efforts came close to succeeding. Though the general area was known, the exact spot wasn’t, and it wasn’t until the arrival of Pedro Páez in 1613 that the source of the Blue Nile was seen by a European. There is some controversy over this, given James Bruce’s claim that he was the first European to get to the Blue Nile’s source when he traipsed there from the Red Sea coast in 1769–71. That Bruce of Kinnaird’s journey was epic and extraordinary no one could contend; it was also the first to entail travel from the Blue Nile to the White – but without following the cataract-laden length of the Blue Nile. The honours, however, must go to Páez. His description of the spring where the Blue Nile rises is so accurate that he must have seen it. It does Bruce no credit that he tried to muddy the water surrounding Páez’s claim; later, when he returned to Britain and had his own, perfectly true revelations about Ethiopia ridiculed by Dr Johnson among many others, one feels an element of poetic justice at work.

James Bruce visited the sacred spring in 1770. Emperor Takla Haimanot II said, ‘I do give the village of Gish and those fountains he is so fond of to Yagoube [Bruce] and his posterity for ever, never to appear under another name in the deftar [register] and never to be taken from him or exchanged.’ The church at the source is dedicated to St Michael and Zarabruk. When Major R. E. Cheesman was British consul in north-west Ethiopia in 1925, he enquired about the origin of Zarabruk. The priests said he was a saint, but knew no more (though it can also take the meaning ‘blessed seed’ in Amharic). Yet when Bruce was there the place had the single name St Michael Gish. It has been suggested that ‘Zarabruk’ is a corruption of the explorer’s name, so it might be that Bruce’s legacy lives on as commanded.

At Wigtown literary festival in Scotland I met a direct descendant of Bruce. He worked for a whisky distillery. As Bruce had married the daughter of a wine merchant, it seemed appropriate. Alex Bruce, the descendant, lived on an estate in Scotland. However, he had no idea that his family owned land abroad, fabulously strange and mythical land too: the source of the Blue Nile.

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James Bruce – the ‘liar’ of the Nile

Truthful speech is short; a lie is long
. Ethiopian proverb

James Bruce, a distant relative of Robert the Bruce and the Earls of Elgin, was, on the face of it, the most ideally equipped explorer ever to search for the Nile’s secrets. Like Samuel Baker who we met at the Murchison Falls, he was big and strong – six foot four with red hair and a muscular frame. Like Burton, he mastered languages – Arabic, Coptic and Amharic. Like Stanley, he was fearless and aggressive in pursuing his aims. Like Schweinfurth, he was a natural scientist who took a wide and informed interest in all he saw. And yet, for many years, he was most remembered as a liar, a thin-skinned boaster, an ineffective bully and a nasty cheapskate. Oh, and he was fat too, at the end, so gross that his carriage wobbled uncontrollably when he mounted it, and when he fell down some stairs his enormous weight proved the death of him, crushing his once strong frame. Just what had gone wrong?

Bruce brought back news of the Nile, of its source, that people just didn’t want to hear. He spoke of farmers removing a steak from a living cow, eating it raw, then sewing up the skin and letting the creature live to graze another day. But this was merely the alibi for his ridicule, the thing Dr Johnson and others latched on to when they found this overbearing, overweening Scot unbearable in his boasting, lack of generosity and above all humourlessness. It is interesting that in France Bruce commanded respect and was given an influential hearing. In England he received merely ridicule. Only someone defective in a sense of humour would have presented the cow/live-steak information in anything other than a circumspect and comical format. He would have realised that he would be disbelieved and would have moved on to other topics. Here’s how Bruce dealt with it: when a guest expressed disbelief in his story he cut a raw steak and would not let the man leave the table until he had eaten it. That’s a guest in his own house. Imagine how he reacted when literary London found his stories a little . . . unusual. No, Bruce is a singular example of how an unspeakable man, however impeccable his achievements, can end up being largely ignored.

Bruce started life in Scotland, was educated at Harrow and spent two years as a consul in Tunis. He was brave even then, standing his ground
in court while another petitioner was strangled in his presence. He was also an originator. Before Mungo Park, the first European to go up the River Niger, Africa had been largely ignored by land-based explorers (it is interesting that four of the world’s greatest explorers were Scottish: Mungo Park, Alexander Mackenzie (the first across North America), James Bruce and David Livingstone). It took more guts to go inland through unknown tribes than to sail the globe in a man-of-war, and Bruce was the first to show it was possible. He was determined to solve the problem of the Nile and he did. Before everyone laughed at him.

Strangely it was not in his outward journey that he was a trail blazer, merely his homeward trek. Getting to the source of the Blue Nile, he had attempted to travel upstream from Cairo but had soon abandoned the river for the Red Sea route that brought him to Wassawa. Here he was following in the footsteps of generations of Portuguese, and he landed with an Italian who agreed to accompany him to the source. The Italian, Luigi Balugani, was a fine artist who would die in Ethiopia. Bruce, ever the pragmatist, acquired his drawings and gave them to George III, passing them off as his own. And in his memoirs, written seventeen years later, Balugani gets not a single mention. In this we see the seeds of what made him disliked. What kind of man would travel with another who died prematurely, steal his only contribution, his legacy, and never mention his name?

When Bruce gets to the source he is 150 years late. His real journey, his significant journey, has yet to start, except he thinks it has already ended. At Lake Tana he accuses Pedro Páez, the first European to the source of the Blue Nile, of lying, of never having been there. When R. E. Cheesman, the last of the great explorers of the Nile (he mapped much of the Blue Nile for the first time in the 1920s and 1930s), visited the sites visited by Páez he realised that the Jesuit had really been to the source and Bruce had deliberately misled the world in order to make it appear that an Anglo-Saxon, and an anti-papist, was the first.

To avoid the conniving and rapacious inhabitants of Massawa on the Red Sea, Bruce went home by following, at least some of the way, the Blue Nile to where it joined the White Nile in Sudan. Understandably subdued by the view of that great river extending away south into Africa, he pretended it didn’t exist, or didn’t count. He couldn’t even bring himself to name it, calling it by the local name Abiad instead, which means ‘white’ in Arabic.

From here he went downstream past strange obelisks and steep
pyramids, and was the first to note, perspicaciously, ‘It is impossible to avoid risking a guess that this is the ancient city of Meroe,’ referring to a site near Shendy in present-day Sudan. He kissed the hand of the Queen of Shendy – whereupon she drew back utterly shocked, exclaiming that no one had ever dared do such a thing before. True to his polymathic nature he observed that Venus was peculiarly bright at that time: ‘it appeared shining with undiminished light all day, in defiance of the brightest sun’. In that year Venus was indeed at its closest to the earth for 243 years.

He then crossed the Nubian Desert by the famed Forty Days Road, taking only eighteen days and crippling his feet in the process. He arrived at Aswan and bathed them in the Nile, stating with typical spikiness that he would never be back. In Cairo he rested some months to allow his feet to recover, then he returned via Italy where he challenged to a duel the Italian husband of a former love (she had gone twelve years without so much as a letter). The Italian Count apologised profusely and claimed ignorance of the whole affair. Bruce slouched towards London where his stories rather quickly became a byword for invention of the most ludicrous kind. He fell foul of Dr Johnson who had, in his first publishing endeavour forty years earlier, translated an account by Father Jerome Lobo (a comrade of Téllez) of the Jesuits in Ethiopia. Here came Bruce saying it was all lies. It didn’t help that James Boswell was a near-contemporary and disliked Bruce too. Fanny Burney, who also met Bruce, added to the slyly derisive note familiar to all who have been mocked by the English: ‘Mr Bruce’s grand air, gigantic height, and forbidding brow awed everybody. He is the tallest man you ever saw
gratis
.’

He retired to his estate in Scotland in high dudgeon and refused to write the story of his adventures. Fifteen years passed and he softened somewhat and employed a pastor in the Moravian church in Fetter Lane (how did he find
him
?) who would act as an amanuensis. Dr Johnson gets Boswell and Mr Bruce gets B. H. Latrobe, who wrote, ‘I had once or twice the misfortune to offend him in endeavouring to expunge a few grammatical errors.’ Latrobe worked long and hard, taking down five volumes of memoirs. True to form, Bruce didn’t pay him, so Latrobe resorted to sending pleading letters. Bruce replied, ‘I never really thought you put yourself on the footing of payment, nor do I well know for what, for it has been of no use to me . . .’ In the end he paid Latrobe five guineas for his work.

The books appeared and the laughter had not died in the intervening years. Horace Walpole pronounced the lengthy volumes ‘dull and dear’. Others took up again the theme of lying. A 1792 sequel to
Baron Munchausen
, published in London, was pointedly dedicated to James Bruce. It is the fate of some explorers who lie to be believed, the fate of other truth tellers to be doubted. Most explorers are truth stretchers – they do amazing things but then they have to add a bit extra. Maybe that is what drives them.

But the Nile was not just attracting explorers. Tourists and even athletes were soon to come looking at the world’s greatest river.

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Running the Nile

Don’t try to run in front of a river in flood
. Ethiopian proverb

Mensen Ernst was the world’s first professional athlete, bar a few prize-fighters and jockeys; he was Norwegian and he was born to run in 1795. He made his money slyly, by making bets with people about distances no one could possibly run, then he’d run them. He was the world’s second marathon runner and the world’s first ultra-marathoner. He once ran from Paris to Moscow in fourteen days, did a day’s sightseeing and then ran back again. In 1836 the East India Company bet him £250 he couldn’t run from Constantinople to Calcutta – he did it in four weeks. After three days’ rest, and perhaps a quick curry, he ran back again. The total journey, there and back, took fifty-nine days, averaging eighty-seven miles a day.

Ernst was fearless, operating on the theory that he could outrun any potential attacker, even those mounted on horseback. To prove his point he once outran a racehorse – not in initial speed but in endurance: the racehorse collapsed exhausted after a mere seventy miles. Ernst was only getting his second wind by then.

In 1842 he decided to run all the way to the source of the White Nile. Never mind that it had not yet been found, never mind that Nero’s centurions, plodders rather than runners, had disappeared centuries earlier in the great suppurating swamp of the Sudd. What was he planning – to walk on water? Nevertheless, the earnest Ernst set out running from Cairo in very fine fettle in December, the best month to
start (he had already run from Prussia via Jerusalem to get there). He drank Nile water and he pronounced it ‘invigorating’. He ran upwards of fifty miles a day, holding himself back for the big desert crossing. In Aswan, he rested for a moment under a tree, and died. His body was found several days later, quite dried out. According to a contemporary German biographer, Ernst’s motto was ‘Motion is life. Stagnation is death’. This seems curiously true about rivers as well as men.