Having examined many ruins in eastern Algeria, he travelled by land from Tunis to Tripoli, and at Ptolemaida took passage for Candia; but was shipwrecked near Benghazi and had to swim ashore.

After visiting Thebes, where he entered the tomb of Ramesses III, KV11, he crossed the desert to Kosseir, where he embarked in the dress of a Turkish sailor.

His fine presence (he was 6-foot 4 inches high), his knowledge of Ge'ez, his excellence in sports, his courage, resource and self-esteem, all told in his favour among a people who were in general distrustful of all foreigners.

He stayed in Ethiopia for two years, gaining knowledge, copying books and collecting herbs that had special medical use, which he later presented as a gift to the French and Italian monarchs.

Late in the afternoon, after having climbed to 9,500 feet, Bruce's party came upon a rustic church, and the guide, pointing beyond it, indicated a little swamp with a hillock rising from the centre.

When they reached the springs at Gish, James Bruce celebrated his achievement, by picking up a half coconut shell he used as a drinking cup, filling it from the spring, then obliged Strates to drink a toast to "His Majesty King George III and a long line of princes", and another to "Catherine, Empress of all the Russians" – this last was a gesture to Strates' Greek origin, since Catherine the Great was just then at war with the Turks in the Aegean Sea.

[1] A Spaniard, the Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez, had previously reached the source of the Blue Nile by travelling from the opposite direction through the mountains of Ethiopia from the Red Sea coast in 1618.

The same location had been visited and speculated about in a similar vein in 1629 by the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Jerónimo Lobo, who like Páez had arrived in Ethiopia by the Red Sea route.

Bruce's journey proved this theory about the source of the Blue Nile to be fact but he disputed the historicity of Páez's visit because Lobo had failed to mention it.

[5] Once in Sennar he found himself detained there, and on the night of 25 August the house he was staying in was attacked by thieves, whom Bruce for good reason suspected to be acting with the knowledge, if not on the orders of King Ismai'l.

[6] As he and his companions crossed the desert on the eastern side of the bend of the Nile, they came across the corpses of the caravan of the Muslim dignitary Mahomet Towash they had hoped to travel with; despite his status, they had been waylaid, robbed, and killed by the local tribesmen.

The highly unusual monument was made out of cast iron by the local Carron Ironworks and stands on the south east corner of the churchyard.