‘Come and triumph with your Don Quixote’: or, how James Bruce travelled to discover the Nile but found Scotland instead

Abstract

After spending several years travelling through East Africa gathering scientific and geological data, battling disease, and dodging pirates, bandits and soldiers, James Bruce expected to return to Britain a hero. Instead his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, while wildly popular, was met with such derision from the London public that his reputation never recovered. I argue that his readers’ scepticism was inextricably tied to the fact that national identity is a fluid construct within the text: at various points in the narrative, in order to facilitate his safe passage through unknown or even hostile territory, Bruce claims to be Scottish, English, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Indian and Abyssinian, and he apparently transgresses both national and class boundaries with ease. I consider how the various cultural identities that Bruce adopts compete with the nationalistic narrative of his account, which demonstrates the extent that late eighteenth-century travel writing challenged the conceptual foundations of British nationalism even as it inscribed them.