Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton was born on March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devon, the eldest child of Joseph Netterville Burton, a lieutenant colonel of Anglo-Irish descent, and Martha Baker, the daughter of a wealthy English family ^[1]. The household did not stay put. Within months of his birth the family moved to Tours in France, and Burton spent much of his childhood shifting between France, Italy and England as his restless father chased health cures and cheap living on the continent ^[2].

That itinerant upbringing left him with little formal schooling but an early and unusual ear for languages. By his teens he had picked up French, Italian and the Bearnais and Neapolitan dialects, along with a reputation for fighting, gambling and defying tutors ^[1]. In 1840 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, where he added Arabic to his studies on his own initiative because no one at the university would teach it to him formally ^[2].

Oxford and Burton were a poor match. He found the curriculum dull, mocked his examiners, and in 1842 was expelled after attending a steeplechase in deliberate violation of college rules. Rather than treating the expulsion as a disgrace, he pushed his family to buy him a commission in the army of the East India Company, and that same year he sailed for Bombay as an ensign in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Richard Francis Burton before the famous journeys will find the answer in his seven years in India. Posted to Sindh under Sir Charles Napier after its annexation in 1843, Burton threw himself into the languages and daily life of the region with an intensity that unsettled his fellow officers ^[3]. He passed official examinations in Hindustani, Gujarati, Marathi, Persian, Sindhi and Punjabi, and eventually claimed working command of more than twenty five languages, with dialects raising the count higher ^[2].

Burton worked for a period in the survey department and gathered intelligence for Napier, sometimes traveling in native dress under the persona of a half-Arab, half-Persian merchant he called Mirza Abdullah ^[3]. The disguise work gave him access to markets, shrines and conversations closed to uniformed Europeans, and it became the template for his later, more famous impersonations.

A report he prepared on male brothels in Karachi, written at Napier's request, later surfaced and damaged his standing with superiors, and his prospects for promotion dimmed ^[1]. Ill with cholera and worn down, he returned to Europe on sick leave in 1849. Out of the Indian years came his first books, including Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus, published in 1851, which established the pattern of his career: hard travel first, then dense, opinionated volumes about what he had seen ^[4].

The journey that made Burton famous began in 1853. With support from the Royal Geographical Society, he set out to perform the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, a city forbidden to non-Muslims on pain of death ^[3]. He prepared with characteristic thoroughness, undergoing circumcision to reduce the risk of exposure and refining a persona, this time as a Pashtun physician and dervish, so that his speech, manners and habits would withstand months of close scrutiny ^[1].

Traveling from Cairo through the port of Yanbu to Medina and then to Mecca, Burton completed the rites of the pilgrimage, sketched the interior of the sanctuary from memory, and recorded measurements and observations under conditions where discovery could have cost him his life ^[3]. He was not the first European to enter Mecca, a fact he acknowledged, but no predecessor had documented the pilgrimage with such range and precision.

His three-volume account, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, appeared between 1855 and 1856 and made him a celebrity in Britain ^[4]. The book mixed adventure with ethnography, footnotes and asides on everything from camel gear to theology, and it remains among the most cited nineteenth century Richard Francis Burton facts that he pulled the feat off at all. In 1854 he followed it with another first, entering the walled city of Harar in present-day Ethiopia, another place said to be closed to Europeans, and surviving to describe it in First Footsteps in East Africa ^[4].

Among Richard Francis Burton achievements, the East African expedition of 1856 to 1859 carries the most geographical weight. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society to seek the great lakes of the interior and the possible sources of the Nile, Burton set out from Zanzibar in 1857 with John Hanning Speke, a fellow officer who had been with him during a disastrous earlier landing at Berbera, where Somali attackers killed one of their party and a javelin pierced both of Burton's cheeks ^[3].

The march inland was brutal. Both men suffered repeated bouts of malaria and other illnesses; Burton at times could not walk and Speke went temporarily blind. In February 1858 they became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika ^[3]. On the return journey, while Burton lay ill at Tabora, Speke traveled north alone and sighted the vast lake he named Victoria, which he immediately proposed as the true source of the Nile.

Burton considered Speke's claim unproven, since Speke had not circumnavigated the lake or traced a river flowing from it, and the disagreement hardened into a public feud after Speke hurried home first and presented his conclusions to the Geographical Society ^[5]. The quarrel was set to culminate in a formal debate at Bath in September 1864, but Speke died of a gunshot wound while hunting the day before it was to take place, an event ruled accidental though it has been argued over ever since ^[5]. Later expeditions by others confirmed that Speke had been essentially right about Lake Victoria, yet Burton's insistence on evidence over assertion reflected the standards of the science of his day.

In 1861 Burton married Isabel Arundell, the daughter of a devout Roman Catholic gentry family who had pursued the match for a decade over her parents' objections ^[6]. The marriage was close if unconventional. Isabel managed his publications, lobbied officials on his behalf, followed him to postings when permitted, and adopted his motto of "pay, pack and follow" when orders arrived ^[6]. They had no children.

The couple's finances rested on Burton's consular salary and his pen rather than on inherited wealth. His temperament did not soften with marriage: he remained blunt, contemptuous of respectable opinion, and fond of shocking dinner guests with tales calculated to test their nerve ^[1]. Contemporaries described the scar across his cheek from the Berbera javelin as fitting the persona.

Isabel's devotion had a controversial coda. After Burton's death she burned many of his private papers, journals and the manuscript of his revised translation of The Scented Garden, believing she was protecting his soul and his reputation ^[6]. Biographers have lamented the loss of that archive ever since, and the burning remains one of the most argued episodes in any Richard Francis Burton biography.

From 1861 Burton served in the British consular service, an arrangement that gave him a salary and long stretches of time to write. His postings traced a downward arc in glamour and an upward one in comfort: Fernando Po off West Africa from 1861, Santos in Brazil from 1865, Damascus from 1869, and finally Trieste, then an Austrian port, from 1872 until his death ^[2]. The Damascus posting ended badly in 1871 when disputes with local authorities and complaints against him led to his recall, a blow he felt keenly ^[1].

Trieste bored him, and boredom made him productive. He poured out books on subjects from swordsmanship to the Etruscans, but his lasting monument from these years is translation. In 1883 he and Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot issued the first English version of the Kama Sutra through their privately organized Kama Shastra Society, a device for dodging Britain's obscenity laws ^[7]. Between 1885 and 1888 he published his unexpurgated sixteen-volume translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, known as the Arabian Nights, laden with footnotes on the customs of the Muslim world that were as provocative as the tales themselves ^[4].

The Nights sold by private subscription and finally made Burton financially secure. Recognition from the state came late: he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1886, becoming Sir Richard Burton at the age of sixty five ^[2].

Burton died of a heart attack in Trieste on October 20, 1890, at the age of sixty nine ^[2]. Isabel brought his body back to England, and he was buried in the Catholic cemetery at Mortlake in south west London in a tomb she designed in the form of a stone Bedouin tent, which still draws visitors ^[6].

His reputation has never settled. To admirers he was the greatest linguist and boldest traveler of his century, a scholar who documented societies most Europeans refused to look at honestly. Critics, both in his lifetime and since, have pointed to the racial attitudes threaded through his writing and to his role within imperial expansion, and modern scholarship reads him within that context rather than apart from it ^[5]. More than forty books appeared under his name, and his translations of the Nights and the Kama Sutra shaped English-language access to Eastern literature for generations ^[7].

Biographies keep coming, from Fawn Brodie's The Devil Drives in 1967 to studies by Mary Lovell and others, and his Personal Narrative of the pilgrimage has never gone out of scholarly circulation ^[5]. The essential Richard Francis Burton facts, the disguised hajj, Harar, Lake Tanganyika, the sixteen volumes of the Nights, would each alone anchor a notable Victorian career. That one man compiled all of them explains why he remains impossible to ignore.