Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/517

Rh in languages, negociations, and treaties, accompanied with proper drugomans and officers, was to be sent to Abyssinia to cement a perpetual friendship and commerce between two nations that had not a national article to exchange with each other, nor way to communicate by sea or land. The minister, who must have known this, very wisely, at giving his fiat, pitched upon the consul M. de Maillet to be the amabassador, as a man who was acquainted with the causes of Poncet's failure, and, by following an opposite course, could bring this embassy to a happy conclusion for both nations.

confidercd himself as a general whose business was to direct and not to execute. A tedious and troublesome journey through dangerous deserts was out of the sphere of his closet, beyond the limits of which he did not choose to go. Beyond the limits of this, all was desert to him. He excused himself from the embassy, but gave in a memorial to serve as a rule for the conduct of his successor in the nomination in a country he had never seen; but this, being afterwards adopted as a well-considered regulation, proved one of the principal causes of the miscarriage and tragedy that followed.

, vice-consul at Damiata, was pitched upon as the ambassador to go to Abyssinia. He was a young man of some merit, had a considerable degree of ambition, and a moderate skill in the common languages spoken in the east, but was absolutely ignorant of that of the country to which he was going, and, what was worse, of the customs and prejudices of the nations through which he was to pass. Like most of his countrymen, he had a violent predilection