performed the necessary clerical duties, but likewise read Greek with our traveller, and enabled him, by constant practice, to converse in the modern idiom. The friendship of this man, which he acquired by kindness and affability, was afterward of the most essential service to him, and contributed more, perhaps, than any other circumstance to preserve his life and forward his views in Abyssinia.
At length, in the month of August, 1765, Bruce departed from Algiers, furnished by the dey with ample permission to visit every part of his own dominions, and recommendatory letters to the beys of Tunis and Tripoli. He first sailed to Port Mahon, and then, returning to the African shore, landed at Bona. He then coasted along close to the shore, passed the little island of Tabarca, famous for its coral fishery, and observed upon the mainland prodigious forests of beautiful oak. Biserta, Utica, Carthage were successively visited; and of the ruins of the last, he remarks, that a large portion are over-*flowed by the sea, which may account, in some measure, for the discrepancy between the ancient and modern accounts of the dimensions of the peninsula on which it stood.
At Tunis he delivered his letters, and obtained the bey's permission to make whatever researches he pleased in any part of his territories. He accordingly proceeded with an escort into the interior, visited many of the ruins described or mentioned by Dr. Shaw, feasted upon lion's flesh, which he found exceedingly tough and strongly scented with musk, among the Welled Sidi Booganim, and then entered the Algerine province of Kosantina. Here, he observes, he was greatly astonished to find among the mountains a tribe of Kabyles, with blue eyes, fair complexions, and red hair. But he ought not to have been astonished; for Dr. Shaw had met with and described the same people, and supposed, as Bruce does, that they were descendants of the Vandals who anciently possessed this part of Africa.
