James Bruce (December 14, 1730 - April 27, 1794) was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile. Throughout his journeyings in Barbary and the Levant, he made careful drawings of the many ruins he examined. He also acquired a sufficient knowledge of medicine to enable him to pass in the East as a physician. In 1768 he arrived at Alexandria, having resolved to discover the source of the Nile. After many adventures and misadventures he achieved his goal and argued that the Blue Nile was the Nile of the ancients and thus he was the discoverer of its source. In 1790 he published his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773, but was assailed by other travellers as being unworthy of credence. The substantial accuracy of his Ethiopian travels has since been demonstrated, and it is considered that he made a real addition to the geographical knowledge of his day. He died in 1794 at the age of 63.