D’Anville, who followed to some extent the Sicilian maps of the eleventh century in his delineation of the Nile and inner Africa, made the opposite mistake to Ptolemy and the Portuguese. They carried the main Nile and the geography of Abyssinia many degrees too far to the south. D’Anville placed the sources of the Nile and the Bahr-al-Ghazal something like ten degrees too far to the north. At the same time his map marked a considerable advance in the correct delineation of Nile geography as well as in that of the Niger and the Zambezi. CHAPTER VIII BRUCE AND THE NILE: SONNINI, BROWNE, AND BONAPARTE At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a decline in Muhammadan fanaticism which in the preceding centuries had so zealously guarded the portals of African discovery. This was partly due to the increase of friendliness and commercial relations between England and France on the one hand and the Turkish Empire on the other. Consuls were established to safeguard the interests of British merchants in the tributary Turkish states of Barbary and in Egypt. Another stimulus to friendly relations was the coffee trade. Coffee had been introduced from Turkey into Europe in the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the eighteenth the demand for it in the civilised countries of northern and central Europe became so great that British and French ships began to ply on the Red Sea and in the Levant merely for the transport of coffee from the ports of southern Arabia to Suez, and thence (_via_ Alexandria) to France and England. It became possible for Frenchmen and Englishmen to travel in Turkish Egypt without undue risk of maltreatment, especially if they obtained permission to do so through their consuls. Almost the first English traveller to start on the Nile quest in the eighteenth century was Richard Pococke, a learned divine (Doctor of Laws and Fellow of the Royal Society), who afterwards became Bishop of Meath. Pococke was remarkable for his knowledge of Greek. He travelled a great deal in the Levant between 1737 and 1740, and made at least two journeys to Egypt, during which he followed the Nile up to the First Cataract. At that period the description of the journey from England to Egypt has a rather modern sound. The traveller proceeds without much difficulty overland from Calais to Leghorn, and from this Tuscan port sails round Sicily to Alexandria, sometimes to Rosetta.