Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  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.

  4 • 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.

  5 • 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.

  Sadly, the world’s first ultra-marathoner is thought to have succumbed to dysentery and heat exhaustion. The stones marking the site of his burial were buried by the construction of the Aswan dam, the building of which made the canals of Egypt stagnant.

  Word of the Nile was spreading. With the establishment of publishing houses and an increasingly informed readership, attention turned to all that was exotic. One avid reader of anything about the East, and about the country of the mighty Nile, was a young Corsican artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  6 • Queen of the Nile

  A weak person loves the weakness of the strong. Nubian proverb

  Europe had not forgotten the Nile – there is a steady stream of travelogues appearing throughout the eighteenth century by the likes of James Bruce, Jan Potocki and Richard Pococke. It took Napoleon, however, to bring the Nile fully back into the European mind. He wanted to be Alexander the Great, only Greater, and Alexander had conquered Egypt and the Nile before turning his attention to India. Napoleon would do better; he aimed to take Egypt, then the Levant, and finally wrest India from the calculating British.

  Napoleon saw the river as the lifeblood of Egypt. He said, ‘If I were to govern this country not one drop of water would be lost to the sea.’ This same quotation was used 150 years later by the Greek Egyptian engineer Adrian Daninos to support construction of the Aswan high dam – one lasting impact of Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt. This quixotic expedition also led to the birth of the Egyptology we know today, dragging Egypt from its long slumbers under Ottoman rule. Napoleon’s soldiers uncovered the Rosetta Stone, thus starting the process of finally decoding hieroglyphics; and the influx of French savants led to a scientific interest in the Nile, the first barrage across the river and ultimately to the Suez Canal.

  And Napoleon did it all without his beloved Josephine. When he went to Egypt to conquer the Nile in 1799 he imagined he would be there with Josephine. They had tried for a child but none was forth-coming. The cunning Josephine suggested that a cure at the spa of La Plombières might aid conception rather better than a fifty-four-day journey by sea to Alexandria. Napoleon was very unhappy about this but grudgingly allowed her to remain in Europe.

  Josephine, however, had no intention of taking a rest cure in the Vosges Mountains; not even the famous glaces Plombières could tempt her. Instead she stayed in Paris and continued having an affair with a young man called Hippolyte Charles. Napoleon, who up to this point had never been unfaithful to Josephine, was grief stricken by the news. And it wasn’t the first time. In Italy he had threatened to kill Josephine when he discovered her affair with a young adjutant called . . . Hippolyte Charles. He had Charles dismissed from the army. Now it seemed that she had been spotted in a private box in the theatre with Charles, that that charming Charlie had given her a little dog and had even been seen in her carriage. Not that Napoleon believed any of this at first. As a successful general he was surprisingly trusting, but his friend and long associate General Junot assured him most forcibly that it was true. Bonaparte was furious and sad and then furious again: ‘Josephine! You should have told me. To have been so fooled. I will exterminate that race of jackanapes and dandies. As for her – divorce! A blazing public divorce!’

  Instead he conquered Egypt. Call it being in denial. To take his mind off things still further, Napoleon intended to do a lot of reading during his campaign. The camp library he insisted on taking with him included his favourite poets such as Ossian and Tasso, forty ‘English Novels’, Homer, Ariosto, Plutarch
, works on geography, travel and history such as Fontenelle’s Worlds and Cook’s Voyages, treatises on fortifications and fireworks (their more deadly variants, one assumes), Voltaire, Goethe and, listed in his own hand under ‘Politics’: the Bible, the New Testament, Koran, Vedan (sic) [the Vedantas], Mythology, Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois.

  Was it prescience that led him to list works of religion, once he had headed east, to their very source, as works of politics; or perhaps in his messianic drive religion was more use to him than the endless arguments that pass for much of politics? When leaving France he remarked to his secretary, Louis de Bourrienne, ‘Europe is a molehill. There have never been great empires and revolutions except in the East.’ On arrival he wrote to his brother Joseph, ‘Egypt is richer than any other country in the world in corn, rice, vegetables and cattle.’ His ambitions were clear when he was asked how long he would stay: ‘A few months or six years; all depends on circumstances . . . if all goes well, it will enable me to get to India.’

  Meanwhile he had his books. Often he preferred to be read to: his secretary reported, ‘if I read poetry he would fall asleep; but when he asked for the “Life of Cromwell” I counted on sitting up pretty late’.

  We have travelled from Islamic Cairo to the source of the Blue Nile, then with Bruce we have found ourselves back in Cairo, where the River Mamluks were still in power, albeit now under the auspices of the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered them in 1517. (Egypt would remain somewhat nominally an Ottoman state until 5 November 1914.) With their antique weapons and ancient tactics the Mamluk rulers of Egypt were soon to be outgunned. Napoleon fought his way from Alexandria to Cairo and there his army squatted, starved of entertainment and women.

  A young accompanying officer, Niello Sargy, who later wrote up his experiences in Egypt, recalled: ‘The common women were horrible. But the Beys, the prominent Mamluks of the country, had left behind some pretty Armenians and Georgians, whom the generals grabbed for the so-called good of the nation.’ Napoleon, spurned by Josephine – who continued to refuse to accompany him east – may well have been sensitive to the notion that an Eastern potentate must have a harem. He knew now, thanks to his confidant General Junot, that Josephine was serially unfaithful not just with Charles, but also with his own powerful friends. While it has often been true that an Eastern potentate would have the right to annex any woman, this was far from always being the case. Rulers such as Saladin often married the widows of friends or relatives to provide security for these women in old age – and in any case their first boast would be of children rather than their wives. Napoleon was a European and not so self-assured – he wanted a trophy wife. Perhaps, too, he was thinking of the last European conqueror of Egypt – Julius Caesar. He needed his own Cleopatra. The highest-status women were the Caucasian mistresses of the deposed Ottoman rulers. Napoleon ‘relaxed at first with some of the women of the beys and Mamluks. But finding with these beautiful Georgian women neither reciprocity nor any charm of society, he smelled a void in all of them, and missed all the more the lascivious Italian and friendly French women.’ Did the abandoned women of the beys really give Napoleon the cold shoulder? Or did he, with his generals cavorting with the locals, desire to go one better and get a bona fide French woman?