James Bruce
Bruce arrives to Ethiopia a little more than a century after the European-Ethiopian project to find common ground against Islam had been abandoned. Although a few Europeans had visited or stumbled into Ethiopia in the interim, Bruce's visit was the most significant since Ethiopia had cast off Catholicism for good.
As Silverberg (p. 313) writes,
In 1769, there arrived the astonishing James Bruce. a towering Scot who had come looking for the source of the Blue Nile. His gift for languages, his phenomenal courage, and his fierce hatred of Catholicism... saw him safely through a two-year visit in which he became the confidant of the king and took part in an intricate civil war.
