# Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile/Volume 1/Book 1/Chapter 1

TRAVELS
TO DISCOVER
THE SOURCE OF THE NILE.
BOOK I.
The Author's Travels in Egypt—Voyage in the Red Sea, till his Arrival at Masuah.
CHAP. I.
The Author sails from Sidon—Touches at Cyprus—Arrives at Alexandria—Sets out for Rosetto—Embarks on the Nile—and arrives at Cairo.
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.
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 phænomenon, hitherto a mystery through all ages. I exulted in the measures I had taken, which I flattered myself, from having been digested with greater consideration 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.
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 (Acamas) 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.
Many medals (scarce any of them good) 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.
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.
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, andLatikea, 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, 7½ 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, whichHerodotus 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, byStrabo.
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.
On the other hand, the British, Danish, Swedish, and Dutch navigators of the ocean, no sooner saw the storm beginning, than they left their houses, took to their boats, and went all hands on board. These knew the sufficiency of their tackle, and provided they were present, to obviate unforeseen accidents, they had no apprehension from the weather. They knew that their cables were made of good hemp, that their anchors were heavy and strong. Some pointed their yards to the wind, and others lowered them upon deck. Afterwards they walked to and fro on their quarter-deck with perfect composure, and bade defiance to the storm. Not one man of these stirred from the ships, till calm weather, on the morrow, called upon them to assist their feeble and more unfortunate brethren, whose ships were wrecked and lay scattered on the shore.
Christian vessels are not suffered to enter this port; the only reason is, least the Moorish women should be seen taking the air in the evening at open windows; and this has been thought to be of weight enough for Christian powers to submit to it, and to over-balance the constant loss of ships, property, and men.
Alexander, returning to Egypt from the Libyan side, was struck with the beauty and situation of these two ports.Dinochares, an architect who accompanied him, traced out the plan, and Ptolemy I. built the city.
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.
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.
The Greeks, for the most part, are better instructed in the history of these places than the Cophts, Turks, or Christians; and, after the Greeks, the Jews.
As I was perfectly disguised, having for many years worn the dress of the Arabs, I was under no constraint, but walked through the town in all directions, accompanied by any of ​those different nations I could induce to walk with me; and, as I constantly spoke Arabic, was taken for a Bedowé by all sorts of people; but, notwithstanding the advantage this freedom gave me, and of which I daily availed myself, I never could hear a word of this monument from either Greek, Jew, Moor, or Christian.
Alexandria has been often taken since the time of Cæsar. It was at last destroyed by the Venetians and Cypriots, upon, or rather after the release of St Lewis, and we may say of it as of Carthage, Periére ruinæ, its very ruins appear no longer.
The building of the present gates and walls, which some have thought to be antique, does not seem earlier than the last restoration in the 13th century. Some parts of the gate and walls may be of older date; (and probably were those of the last Caliphs before Salidan) but, except these, and the pieces of columns which lie horizontally in different parts of the wall, every thing else is apparently of very late times, and the work has been huddled together in great haste.
It is in vain then to expect a plan of the city, or try to trace here the Macedonian mantle of Dinochares; the very vestiges of ancient ruins are covered, many yards deep, by rubbish, the remnant of the devastations of later times. Cleopatra, were she to return to life again, would scarcely know where her palace was situated, in this her own capital.
It is thinly inhabited, and there is a tradition among the natives, that, more than once, it has been in agitation to abandon it all together, and retire to Rosetto, or Cairo, but that they have been withheld by the opinion of divers saints from Arabia, who have assured them, that Mecca being destroyed, (as it must be as they think by the Russians) Alexandria is then to become the holy place, and that Mahomet's body is to be transported thither; when that city is destroyed, the sanctified reliques are to be transported to Cairouan, in the kingdom of Tunis: lastly, from Cairouan they are to come to Rosetto, and there to remain till the consummation of all things, which is not then to be at a great distance.
Ptolemy places his Alexandria in lat. 30° 31′ and in round numbers in his almagest, lat. 31° north.
Our Professor, Mr Greaves, one of whose errands into Egypt was to ascertain the latitude of this place, seems yet, from some cause or other, to have failed in it, for though he had a brass sextant of five feet radius, he makes the latitude of Alexandria, from a mean of many observations, to be lat 31° 4′ N. whereas the French astronomers from the Academy of Sciences have settled it at 31° 11′ 20″, so between Mr Greaves and the French there is a difference of 7′ 20″, which is too much. There is not any thing, in point of ​situation, that can account for this variance, as in the case of Ptolemy; for the new town of Alexandria is built from east to west; and as all christian travellers necessarily make their observations now on the same line, there cannot possibly be any difference from situation.
Mr Niebuhr, whether from one or more observations he does not say, makes the latitude to be 31° 12′. From a mean of thirty-three observations, taken by the three-feet quadrant I have spoken of, I found it to be 31° 11′ 16″: So that, taking a medium of these three results, you will have the latitude of Alexandria 31° 11′ 32″, or, in round number, 31° 11′ 30″, nor do I think there possibly can be 5″ difference.
By an eclipse, moreover, of the first satellite of Jupiter, observed on the 23d day of June 1769, I found its longitude to be 30° 17′ 30″ east, from the meridian of Greenwich.
We arrived at Alexandria the 20th of June, and found that the plague had raged in that city and neighbourhood from the beginning of March, and that two days only before our arrival people had begun to open their houses and communicate with each other; but it was no matter, St John's day was past, the miraculous nucta, or dew, had fallen, and every body went about their ordinary business in safety, and without fear.
With very great pleasure I had received my instruments at Alexandria. I examined them, and, by the perfect state in which they arrived, knew the obligations I was under ​to my correspondents and friends. Prepared now for any enterprise, I left with eagerness the thread-bare inquiries into the meagre remains, of this once-famous capital of Egypt.
The journey to Rosetto is always performed by land, as the mouth of the branch of the Nile leading to Rosetto, called the Bogaz, is very shallow and dangerous to pass, and often tedious; besides, nobody wishes to be a partner for any time in a voyage with Egyptian sailors, if he can possibly avoid it.
The journey by land is also reputed dangerous, and people travel burdened with arms, which they are determined never to use.
For my part, I placed my safety, in my disguise, and my behaviour. We had all of us pistols at our girdles, against an extremity; but our fire-arms of a larger sort, of which we had great store, were sent with our baggage, and other instruments, by the Bogaz to Rosetto. I had a small lance, called a Jerid, in my hand, my servants were without any visible arms.
We left Alexandria in the afternoon, and about three miles before arriving at Aboukeer, we met a man, in appearance of some consequence, going to Alexandria.
Some inconsiderable ruins are at Aboukeer, and seem to denote, that it was the former situation of an ancient city. There is here also an inlet of the sea; and the distance, something less than four leagues from Alexandria, warrants us to say that it is Canopus, one of the most ancient cities in the world; its ruins, notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the branch of the Nile, which goes by that name, have not yet been covered by the increase of the land of Egypt.
At Medea, which we suppose, by its distance of near seven leagues, to be the ancient Heraclium, is the passage or ferry which terminates the fear of danger from the Arabs of Libya; and it is here supposed the Delta, or Egypt, begins.
Dr Shaw is obliged to confess, that between Alexandria and the Canopic branch of the Nile, few or no vestiges are seen of the increase of the land by the inundation of the river; indeed it would have been a wonder if there had.
Dr Shaw adds, that the ground hereabout may have been an island; and so it may, and so may almost any other place in the world; but there is no sort of indication that it was so, nor visible means by which it was formed.
We saw no vegetable from Alexandria to Medea, excepting some scattered roots of Absinthium; nor were these luxuriant, or promising to thrive, but though they had not a very strong smell, they were abundantly bitter; and their leaves seemed to have imbibed a quantity of saline particles, with which the soil of the whole desert of Barca is strongly impregnated.
We saw two or three gazels, or antelopes, walking one by one, at several times, in nothing differing from the species of that animal, in the desert of Barca and Cyrenaicum; and the jerboa, another inhabitant of these deserts; but from the multitude of holes in the ground, which we saw at the root of almost every plant of Absinthium, we were very certain its companion, the Cerastes, or horned viper, was an inhabitant of that country also.
All Egypt is like to this part of it, full of deep dust and sand, from the beginning of March till the first of the inundation. It is this fine powder and sand, raised and loosened by the heat of the sun, and want of dew, and not being tied fast, as it were, by any root or vegetation, which the Nile carries off with it, and buries in the sea, and which many ignorantly suppose comes from Abyssinia, where every river runs in a bed of rock.
When you leave the sea, you strike off nearly at right angles, and pursue your journey to the eastward of north. Here heaps of stone and trunks of pillars, are set up to guide you in your road, through moving sands, which stand in hillocks in proper directions, and which conduct you safely to Rosetto, surrounded on one side by these hills of sand, which seem ready to cover it.
Rosetto is upon that branch of the Nile which was called the Bolbuttic Branch, and is about four miles from the sea. It probably obtained its present name from the Venetians, or Genoese, who monopolized the trade of this country, before the Cape of Good Hope was discovered; for it is known to the natives by the name of Rashid, by which is meant the Orthodox.
Dr Shaw having always in his mind the strengthening of Herodotus's hypothesis, that Egypt is created by the Nile, says, that perhaps this was once a Cape, because Rashid has that meaning. But as Dr Shaw understood Arabic perfectly well, he must therefore have known, that Rashid has no such signification in any of the Oriental Languages. Ras, indeed, is a head land, or cape; but Rassit has no such signification, and Rashid a very different one, as I have already mentioned.
Rashid then, or Rosetto, is a large, clean, neat town, or village, upon the eastern side of the Nile. It is about three miles long, much frequented by studious and religious Mahometans; among these too are a considerable number of merchants, it being the entrepot between Cairo and Alexandria, and vice versa; here too the merchants have their factors, who superintend and watch over the merchandise which pass the Bogaz to and from Cairo.
There are many gardens, and much verdure, about Rosetto; the ground is low, and retains long the moisture it imbibes from the overflowing of the Nile. Here also are many curious plants and flowers, brought from different countries, by Fakirs, and merchants. Without this, Egypt, ​subject to such long inundation, however it may abound in necessaries, could not boast of many beautiful productions of its own gardens, though flowers, trees, and plants, were very much in vogue in this neighbourhood, two hundred years ago, as we find by the observations of Prosper Alpinus.
The study and search after every thing useful or beautiful, which for some time had been declining gradually, fell at last into total contempt and oblivion, under the brutal reign of these last slaves, the most infamous reproach to the name of Sovereign.
Rosetto is a favourite halting-place of the Christian travellers entering Egypt, and merchants established there. There they draw their breaths, in an imaginary increase of freedom, between the two great sinks of tyranny, oppression, and injustice, Alexandria and Cairo.
Rosetto has this good reputation, that the people are milder, more tractable, and less avaricious, than those of the two last-mentioned capitals; but I must say, that, in my time, I could not discern much difference.
The merchants, who trade at all hours of the day with Christians, are indeed more civilized, and less insolent, than the soldiery and the rest of the common people, which is the case every where, as it is for their own interest; but ​their priests, and moullahs, their soldiers, and people living in the country, are, in point of manners, just as bad as the others.
Rosetto is in lat. 31° 24′ 15″ N.; it is the place where we embark for Cairo, which we accordingly did on June the 30th.
There is a wonderful deal of talk at Alexandria of the danger of passing over the desert to Rosetto. The same conversation is held here. After you embark on the Nile in your way to Cairo, you hear of pilots, and masters of vessels, who land you among robbers to share your plunder, and twenty such like stories, all of them of old date, and which perhaps happened long ago, or never happened at all.
But provided the government of Cairo is settled, and you do not land at villages in strife with each other, (in which circumstances no person of any nation is safe) you must be very unfortunate indeed, if any great accident befal you between Alexandria and Cairo.
For, from the constant intercourse between these two cities, and the valuable charge confided to these masters of vessels, they are all as well known, and at the least as much under authority, as the boatmen on the river Thames; and, if they should have either killed, or robbed any person, it must be with a view to leave the country immediately; else either at Cairo, Rosetto, Fuè, or Alexandria, wherever they were first caught, they would infallibly be hanged.
* ↑ The nucta, or dew, that falls on St John's night, is supposed to have the virtue to stop the plague. I have considered this in the sequel.
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xiv, p. 781.
* ↑ It is called Mamilho.
* ↑ Newton's Chronol. p. 183.
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xiv. p. 684,
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xiv. p. 780.
* ↑ This is an old prejudice. See Herodotus, lib. ii. p. 90. sect. 5.
* ↑ Berytus.
* ↑ Laodicea ad mare.
* ↑ Herod. lib. ii. p. 90.
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 922.
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 922
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 920. Q Curt. lib. iv. cap. 8.
* ↑ Plin. lib. v. cap. 10. p. 273.
* ↑ We see many examples of such leaves both at Palmyra and Baalbec.
* ↑ Marmol, lib. xi. cap. 14. p. 276. tom. 3.
* ↑ Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 922.
* ↑ A peasant Arab.
* ↑ Means a narrow or shallow entrance of a river from the ocean.
* ↑ Herod. p. 108.
* ↑ Shaw's Travels p. 293.
* ↑ See a figure of this animal in the Appendix.
* ↑ See Appendix.
* ↑ Shaw's Travels, p. 294.
* ↑ The Mamaluke Beys.