Travells Eldest Son in Conversation with a Cherokee Chief.

by John Kay
1791

British Museum J,4.339

Two men face each other in profile, standing on a grassy mound. The taller (left), who wears a laced suit and sword with a ruffled shirt, is James Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller whose 'Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1768-1773', appeared in 1790. The other is Williamson, an Edinburgh bookseller and tavern-keeper, who had published an account of his adventures in America: 'French and Indian Cruelty exemplified in the Life of Peter Williamson', 1757, &c, and compiled the first Edinburgh directory (1773). Their words are engraved beneath the design:

'[J.B.] How dare you approach me with your travells. There is not a single word of them true. [P.W.] There you may be right, and altho I never dined upon the Lion or eat half a Cow and turned the rest to grass, yet my works have been of more use to mankind than yours and there is more truth in one page of my Edin.^r directory than in all your five Volumes 4^o. So when you talk to me dont imagine yourself at the Source of the Nile!'

—M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, VI, 1938