Read Ebook: Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile Volume 1 (of 5) In the years 1768 1769 1770 1771 1772 and 1773 by Bruce James

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OF THE

FIRST VOLUME.

DEDICATION.

INTRODUCTION, Page i

ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST AGES OF THE INDIAN AND AFRICAN TRADE--THE FIRST PEOPLING OF ABYSSINIA AND ATBARA--SOME CONJECTURES CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE THERE.

TRAVELS

TO DISCOVER

THE SOURCE OF THE NILE.

It was on Saturday the 15th of June, 1768, I sailed in a French vessel from Sidon, once the richest and most powerful city in the world, though now there is not remaining a shadow of its ancient grandeur. We were bound for the island of Cyprus; the weather clear and exceedingly hot, the wind favourable.

This island is not in our course for Alexandria, but lies to the northward of it; nor had I, for my own part, any curiosity to see it. My mind was intent upon more uncommon, more distant, and more painful voyages. But the master of the vessel had business of his own which led him thither; with this I the more readily complied, as we had not yet got certain advice that the plague had ceased in Egypt, and it still wanted some days to the Festival of St John, which is supposed to put a period to that cruel distemper.

We observed a number of thin, white clouds, moving with great rapidity from south to north, in direct opposition to the course of the Etesian winds; these were immensely high. It was evident they came from the mountains of Abyssinia, where, having discharged their weight of rain, and being pressed by the lower current of heavier air from the northward, they had mounted to possess the vacuum, and returned to restore the equilibrium to the northward, whence they were to come back, loaded with vapour from Mount Taurus, to occasion the overflowing of the Nile, by breaking against the high and rugged mountains of the south.

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 historian, of this phaenomenon, hitherto a mystery through all ages. I exulted in the measures I had taken, which I flattered myself, from having been digested with greater confederation than those adopted by others, would secure me from the melancholy catastrophes that had terminated these hitherto-unsuccessful attempts.

On the 16th, at dawn of day, I saw a high hill, which, from its particular form, described by Strabo, I took for Mount Olympus. Soon after, the rest of the island, which seemed low, appeared in view. We scarce saw Lernica till we anchored before it. It is built of white clay, of the same colour as the ground, precisely as is the case with Damascus, so that you cannot, till close to it, distinguish the houses from the earth they stand upon.

It is very remarkable that Cyprus was so long undiscovered; ships had been used in the Mediterranean 1700 years before Christ; yet, though only a day's sailing from the continent of Asia on the north and east, and little more from that of Africa on the south, it was not known at the building of Tyre, a little before the Trojan war, that is 500 years after ships had been passing to and fro in the seas around it.

It was, at its discovery, thick covered with wood; and what leads me to believe it was not well known, even so late as the building of Solomon's Temple, is, that we do not find that Hiram king of Tyre, just in its neighbourhood, ever had recourse to it for wood, though surely the carriage would have been easier than to have brought it down from the top of Mount Libanus.

That there was great abundance in it, we know from Eratosthenes, who tells us it was so overgrown that it could not be tilled; so that they first cut down the timber to be used in the furnaces for melting silver and copper; that after this they built fleets with it, and when they could not even destroy it this way, they gave liberty to all strangers to cut it down for whatever use they pleased; and not only so, but they gave them the property of the ground they cleared.

Things are sadly changed now. Wood is one of the wants of most parts of the island, which has not become more healthy by being cleared, as is ordinarily the case.

At Cacamo on the west side of the island, the wood remains thick and impervious as at the first discovery. Large stags, and wild boars of a monstrous size, shelter themselves unmolested in these their native woods; and it depended only upon the portion of credulity that I was endowed with, that I did not believe that an elephant had, not many years ago, been seen alive there. Several families of Greeks declared it to me upon oath; nor were there wanting persons of that nation at Alexandria, who laboured to confirm the assertion. Had skeletons of that animal been there, I should have thought them antediluvian ones. I know none could have been at Cyprus, unless in the time of Darius Ochus, and I do not remember that there were elephants, even with him.

In passing, I would fain have gone ashore to see if there were any remains of the celebrated temple of Paphos; but a voyage, such as I was then embarked on, stood in need of vows to Hercules rather than to Venus, and the master, fearing to lose his passage, determined to proceed.

Many medals are dug up in Cyprus; silver ones, of very excellent workmanship, are found near Paphos, of little value in the eyes of antiquarians, being chiefly of towns of the size of those found at Crete and Rhodes, and all the islands of the Archipelago. Intaglios there are some few, part in very excellent Greek style, and generally upon better stones than usual in the islands. I have seen some heads of Jupiter, remarkable for bushy hair and beard, that were of the most exquisite workmanship, worthy of any price. All the inhabitants of the island are subject to fevers, but more especially those in the neighbourhood of Paphos.

We left Lernica the 17th of June, about four o'clock in the afternoon. The day had been very cloudy, with a wind at N. E. which freshened as we got under weigh. Our master, a seaman of experience upon that coast, ran before it to the westward with all the sails he could set. Trusting to a sign that he saw, which he called a bank, resembling a dark cloud in the horizon, he guessed the wind was to be from that quarter the next day.

Accordingly, on the 18th, a little before twelve o'clock, a very fresh and favourable breeze came from the N. W. and we pointed our prow directly, as we thought, upon Alexandria.

The coast of Egypt is exceedingly low, and, if the weather is not clear, you often are close in with the land before you discover it.

A strong current sets constantly to the eastward; and the way the masters of vessels pretend to know their approach to the coast is by a black mud, which they find upon the plummet at the end of their sounding-line, about seven leagues distant from land.

Our master pretended at midnight he had found that black sand, and therefore, although the wind was very fair, he chose to lie to, till morning, as thinking himself near the coast; although his reckoning, as he said, did not agree with what he inferred from his soundings.

As I was exceedingly vexed at being so disappointed of making the best of our favourable wind, I rectified my quadrant, and found by the passages of two stars over the meridian, that we were in lat. 32? 1? 45??, or seventeen leagues distant from Alexandria, instead of seven, and that by difference of our latitude only.

From this I inferred that part of the assertion, that it is the mud of the Nile which is supposed to shew seamen their approach to Egypt, is mere imagination; seeing that the point where we then were was really part of the sea opposite to the desert of Barca, and had no communication whatever with the Nile.

On the contrary, the Etesian winds blowing all Summer upon that coast, from the westward of north, and a current setting constantly to the eastward, it is impossible that any part of the mud of the Nile can go so high to the windward of any of the mouths of that river.

It is well known, that the action of these winds, and the constancy of that current, has thrown a great quantity of mud, gravel, and sand, into all the ports on the coast of Syria.

All vestiges of old Tyre are defaced; the ports of Sidon, Berout, Tripoli, and Latikea, are all filled up by the accretion of sand; and, not many days before my leaving Sidon, Mr de Clerambaut, consul of France, shewed me the pavements of the old city of Sidon, 7 1/2 feet lower than the ground upon which the present city stands, and considerably farther back in the gardens nearer to Mount Libanus.

This every one in the country knows is the effect of that easterly current setting upon the coast, which, as it acts perpendicularly to the course of the Nile when discharging itself, at all or any of its mouths, into the Mediterranean, must hurry what it is charged with on towards the coast of Syria, and hinder it from settling opposite to, or making those additions to the land of Egypt, which Herodotus has vainly supposed.

The 20th of June, early in the morning, we had a distant prospect of Alexandria rising from the sea. Was not the state of that city perfectly known, a traveller in search of antiquities in architecture would think here was a field for long study and employment.

It is in this point of view the town appears most to the advantage. The mixture of old monuments, such as the Column of Pompey, with the high moorish towers and steeples, raise our expectations of the consequence of the ruins we are to find.

But the moment we are in the port the illusion ends, and we distinguish the immense Herculean works of ancient times, now few in number, from the ill-imagined, ill-constructed, and imperfect buildings, of the several barbarous masters of Alexandria in later ages.

There are two ports, the Old and the New. The entrance into the latter is both difficult and dangerous, having a bar before it; it is the least of the two, though it is what is called the Great Port, by Strabo.

Here only the European ships can lie; and, even when here, they are not in safety; as numbers of vessels are constantly lost, though at anchor.

Above forty were cast a-shore and dashed to pieces in March 1773, when I was on my return home, mostly belonging to Ragusa, and the small ports in Provence, while little harm was done to ships of any nation accustomed to the ocean.

Many of their cables being made of a kind of grass called Spartum, could not bear the stress of the vessels or agitation of the waves, but parted with the anchors, and the ships perished.

The healthy, though desolate and bare country round it, part of the Desert of Libya, was another inducement to prefer this situation to the unwholesome black mud of Egypt; but it had no water; this Ptolemy was obliged to bring far above from the Nile, by a calish, or canal, vulgarly called the Canal of Cleopatra, though it was certainly coeval with the foundation of the city; it has no other name at this day.

This circumstance, however, remedied in the beginning, was fatal to the city's magnificence ever after, and the cause of its being in the state it is at this day.

The importance of its situation to trade and commerce, made it a principal object of attention to each party in every war. It was easily taken, because it had no water; and, as it could not be kept, it was destroyed by the conqueror, that the temporary possession of it might not turn to be a source of advantage to an enemy.

We are not, however, to suppose, that the country all around it was as bare in the days of prosperity as it is now. Population, we see, produces a swerd of grass round ancient cities in the most desert parts of Africa, which keeps the sand immoveable till the place is no longer inhabited.

I apprehend the numerous lakes in Egypt were all contrived as reservoirs to lay up a store of water for supplying gardens and plantations in the months of the Nile's decrease. The great effects of a very little water are seen along the calish, or canal, in a number of bushes that it produces, and thick plantations of date-trees, all in a very luxuriant state; and this, no doubt, in the days of the Ptolemies, was extended further, more attended to, and better understood.

Pompey's pillar, the obelisks, and subterraneous cisterns, are all the antiquities we find now in Alexandria; these have been described frequently, ably, and minutely.

The foliage and capital of the pillar are what seem generally to displease; the fust is thought to have merited more attention than has been bestowed upon the capital.

The whole of the pillar is granite, but the capital is of another stone; and I should suspect those rudiments of leaves were only intended to support firmly leaves of metal of better workmanship; for the capital itself is near nine feet high, and the work, in proportionable leaves of stone, would be not only very large, but, after being finished, liable to injuries.

This magnificent monument appears, in taste, to be the work of that period, between Hadrian and Severus; but, though the former erected several large buildings in the east, it is observed of him he never put inscriptions upon them.

This has had a Greek inscription, and I think may very probably be attributed to the time of the latter, as a monument of the gratitude of the city of Alexandria for the benefits he conferred on them, especially since no ancient history mentions its existence at an earlier period.

I apprehend it to have been brought in a block from the Thebais in Upper Egypt, by the Nile; though some have imagined it was an old obelisk, hewn to that round form. It is nine feet diameter; and were it but 80 feet high, it would require a prodigious obelisk indeed, that could admit to be hewn to this circumference for such a length, so as perfectly to efface the hieroglyphics that must have been very deeply cut in the four faces of it.

The tomb of Alexander has been talked of as one of the antiquities of this city. Marmol says he saw it in the year 1546. It was, according to him, a small house, in form of a chapel, in the middle of the city, near the church of St Mark, and was called Escander.

The thing itself is not probable, for all those that made themselves masters of Alexandria, in the earliest times, had too much respect for Alexander, to have reduced his tomb to so obscure a state. It would have been spared even by the Saracens; for Mahomet speaks of Alexander with great respect, both as a king and a prophet. The body was preserved in a glass coffin, in Strabo's time, having been robbed of the golden one in which it was first deposited.

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