Richard Francis Burton

English explorer and scholar

• Born: March 19, 1821
• Birthplace: Torquay, Devonshire, England
• Died: October 20, 1890
• Place of death: Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Italy)

A British army officer and Orientalist, Burton led major explorations in Asia, Africa, and South America and became famous as the author of travel books and many literary translations, including The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

Early Life

Richard Francis Burton was the eldest son of Mary Baker and Colonel Joseph Netterton Burton, an Irish officer who retired from an undistinguished military career in 1821. His parents moved to Tours, France, where Burton acquired a fluency in European languages while accompanying his parents on their frequent travels on the Continent. After an inconsistent early education, including a brief stay at a private school in Richmond, Burton returned to the Continent, where his adolescence consisted of an unruly, undisciplined lifestyle. He attended Trinity College, Oxford, from 1840 to 1842, but he was dismissed for an ambivalent attitude and disobedience. Fellow students at Oxford called him “Ruffian Dick.”

Having developed an interest in Oriental languages while at Trinity College, Burton enlisted in 1842 as an officer in the East India Company Army. He was sent to Gujarat and then to the Sind, where he lived among the Muslims for seven years while learning several Eastern languages, including Hindi and Arabic. Burton served briefly as an intelligence officer under Sir Charles Napier, the British Commander during the Indian wars (1842-1849).

Burton often performed intelligence missions that entailed going to local bazaars in disguise and bringing back reports, which were generally excellent. On Napier’s orders in 1845, Burton, with his usual thoroughness, undertook an investigation of the influence of homosexual brothels on British soldiers, and his detailed study led to their destruction. Unfortunately, a jealous officer later used the report in an effort to destroy Burton’s military career. Although exonerated, Burton, suffering from cholera, was sent back to England on extended sick leave in 1849.

Burton lived with his family in Boulogne for the next three years while writing three books about his Indian experiences. At the age of thirty, Burton was an imposing figure. Almost six feet tall, with piercing eyes and a dark complexion, he looked like an Arab. While in France, he continued his study of Asian languages (during a lifetime of travel, he would eventually master more than forty languages and dialects) and completed plans for his first great adventure, a visit to Arabia.

Life’s Work

Burton had always wanted to visit the Muslim shrines in Mecca. In 1853, the Royal Geographical Society helped him obtain a leave from the army, and Burton traveled by caravan from Cairo to the sacred city of Mecca disguised as an Afghan doctor. Using four languages and performing all the ceremonies and rituals of a devout Muslim, he penetrated the holiest shrines of Islam. Instead of returning to England to write of his experiences, Burton traveled to the equally forbidden Muslim city of Harar in Abyssinia. In 1854, he became the first European to visit Harar without being executed. He later wrote Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855-1856), which was not only a great adventure story but also a commentary on Muslim culture, and First Footsteps in Africa (1856), which described his adventures in Harar.

While in Africa, Burton met John Hanning Speke, also an East India Company officer. After his visit to Harar, the two officers led an expedition into Somaliland. Their camp was unexpectedly attacked by Somali warriors near Berbera. One member of the expedition was killed, and Speke was seriously wounded. Burton suffered a spear-wound in the jaw and was forced to return to England to recover.

In July, 1855, Burton volunteered for the Crimean War and trained the Turkish Bashi-Bazouk Irregular Cavalry while serving as chief of staff to General William F. Beatson. Despite his efforts, Burton saw no action at the front, and when Beatson left the army, Burton also resigned and returned to England in October, 1855.

In London, Burton again met Speke, who had also served in the Crimea, and described his plan to form an expedition to find the source of the Nile River. Speke had for a long time shared this goal, and when Burton asked him to join the expedition, Speke readily agreed. Because Burton had secured a grant of a thousand pounds from the Foreign Office and had obtained the patronage of the Royal Geographical Society, he was the leader of the expedition, with Speke as second in command. Their charge was to ascertain the limits of the Sea of Ujiji, which had been described by East African missionaries, to determine the exportable goods of the interior and to study the ethnography of the tribes. They were also instructed to discover the source of the Nile and the location of the legendary, but nonexistent, Mountains of the Moon. Organizational ability was not one of Burton’s great talents, and they wasted nearly six months planning and exploring the coastal areas near Zanzibar before hurriedly recruiting porters and moving into the interior.

On July 1, 1857, Burton and Speke departed from Bagamoyo and followed the traditional trade route to Kazeh, the site of modern Tabora. They reached Kazeh on November 7 and spent nearly a month reorganizing the expedition. They set out for Ujiji on December 5 with the knowledge gained from Swahili-speaking merchants that the Sea of Ujiji was actually three lakes—Nyasa, Tanganyika, and Victoria. Both Burton and Speke suffered remittent bouts of fever during this part of the journey. On February 13, 1858, Burton became the first European in modern times to see Lake Tanganyika. Speke was bitterly disappointed because he had contracted ophthalmia and could see nothing but a glare.

Frustrated because their health precluded an exploration of Lake Tanganyika and running low of supplies, the explorers started back to the coast on May 26. By this time, a growing strain in their relationship had turned to open animosity. While Burton recovered from malaria at Kazeh, Speke decided to examine the more northern Lake Victoria, which he reached on August 3. Although unable to explore the massive lake, he was convinced that Victoria was the source of the Nile. Burton, a much more literate geographer, refused to accept Speke’s theory, which led to more quarrels and their eventual estrangement. Speke quickly returned to England, where he was feted and given command of a new expedition by Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society. Burton, when he finally arrived, was ignored and denied financing for a new expedition. He wrote Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), a highly acclaimed book that attacked Speke’s theory and exacerbated their public feud.

In 1860, Burton unexpectedly sailed for the United States, where he traveled by stagecoach to Salt Lake City to visit the Mormon capital. In City of the Saints (1861), he compassionately described the Mormon Church, its leadership, and its controversial practice of polygamy. After returning to England, Burton married Isabel Arundell on January 22, 1861. She was the daughter of an aristocratic Catholic family, and Burton had been courting her since 1856.

A turning point came in Burton’s life in 1861, when he left the Indian army to accept a consular service appointment to Fernando Po on the unhealthy West African coast. During the next three years, he explored Dahomey, the Bight of Benin and Biafra, the Cameroons, and the Gold Coast. He used these experiences to write five anthropological books about the tribes of that region.

Burton returned to London in September, 1864, and was scheduled to debate Speke in a public meeting about his second expedition and the claim that Lake Victoria was truly the source of the Nile. After an introductory meeting, Speke died of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun wound in a questionable hunting accident. Although most scholars agreed with Burton’s theory, the source of the Nile remained unknown until 1876, when Henry Morton Stanley proved that Speke’s intuition had been correct. Shortly after Speke’s death in 1864, a bitterly disappointed Burton was given a consulate position at Santos, Brazil, where he continued his writing and explored the interior of South America. He quickly developed an aversion to Santos and began drinking heavily.

In 1869, after several pleas from his wife, Burton was transferred to Damascus but was recalled in 1871 when he and Isabel became involved in local affairs that offended several Muslim leaders. Burton argued that his actions had been misrepresented, and his conduct was finally approved by a Foreign Office review. After some months, he reluctantly accepted the consulate appointment to Trieste, but he believed that his diplomatic career was ruined. Trieste was Burton’s last appointment, and he used the position to travel and to write and translate an astounding number of books. In February, 1886, Burton was remembered for his service to the Crown when Queen Victoria made him a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George. Burton accepted the knighthood in the hope that it would lead to a better appointment, but he was never formally invested.

Burton’s last years were spent in completing his monumental translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1885-1888), more correctly called The Thousand Nights and a Night . He had suffered from the gout since 1883, and his health began to deteriorate noticeably. After two minor heart seizures, Burton died of a heart attack in Trieste on October 20, 1890. His body was returned to England and buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery at Mortlake, Surrey, in a white marble mausoleum sculptured in the form of an Arabian tent. After his death, his wife destroyed his forty-year assemblage of diaries, notes, and journals, including the revised edition of The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui (1886), on which he was working when he died. The significance of that loss to biographers, historians, and anthropologists is immeasurable.

Significance

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s adventurousness, curiosity, linguistic skills, and writing talent make a summary of his contributions almost impossible to believe. He was a Renaissance man: soldier, diplomat, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, translator, and poet. He was also competent as a botanist, zoologist, geologist, swordsman, artist, and physician. His greatest claim to fame, however, was in the field of exploration. He possessed the same passion for geographical study that produced great British African explorers such as Speke, Stanley, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker, and others. Unlike his fellow explorers, Burton was a scholar, who described much more than his expeditions. In carefully footnoted and annotated books, he described tribes, customs, religions, climate, geography, and countless other topics. He wrote forty-three volumes on his explorations and travels, two volumes of poetry, and more than a hundred articles, and he translated twenty-eight volumes from other languages.

Burton’s translations of Oriental erotica, including the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), The Perfumed Garden of Cheikh Nefzaoui, and the unexpurgated “Arabian Nights” tales, earned for him greater literary fame and financial rewards than his heavily documented works on exploration, swordsmanship, falconry, religion, gorillas, and archaeological ruins.

In the field of human sexual behavior, Burton anticipated the psychological insights of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis. Burton has been recognized by modern scholars as one of the pioneers in anthropology. Unfortunately, many of Burton’s scientific achievements were overshadowed by his adventures in Mecca and Harar, his expeditions to Africa, and his public anger over the cant and hypocrisy of Victorian prudery. He approached all challenges with enthusiasm, earnestness, dedicated scholarship, and courage. Burton’s adventurous life and difficult disposition dominated the books that he wrote, but he lived according to his personal creed that he preferred honor to honors.

Bibliography

Assad, Thomas J. Three Victorian Travellers: Burton, Blunt, Doughty. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. An interpretive character study. Concentrates almost exclusively on Burton’s preoccupation with Arabia and the Muslim world.

Brodie, Fawn M. The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. A highly respected psychoanalytic biography that argues that Burton was “devil-driven” as an explorer-adventurer.

Farwell, Byron. Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. One of the best biographies of Burton: objective, straightforward, and engagingly written.

Hastings, Michael. Sir Richard Burton: A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1978. A popular biography. While it lacks documentation, it does provide some information lacking in earlier biographies.

Lovell, Mary S. A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. A dual biography of Burton and his wife, Isabel, who is depicted as Burton’s collaborator, editor, and staunchest advocate.

McLynn, Frank. Burton: Snow upon the Desert. London: John Murray, 1990. Like Brodie (above), McLynn takes a psychoanalytical approach to his subject, explaining Burton’s confused inner life. While crediting Burton’s genius and unparalleled accomplishments, McLynn points out his subject’s destructiveness, lack of a stable identity, racial bigotry, and sexism.

Moorehead, Alan. The White Nile. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. A marvelous and powerfully written account of the quest for the source of the Nile. Excellent integration of Burton’s role in the exploration of East Africa.

Mountfield, David. A History of African Exploration. Northbrook, Ill.: Domus Books, 1976. A well-illustrated coverage of African exploration. The sections on East Africa and Burton’s expeditions are excellent.

Rawling, Gerald. “Ruffian Dick.” British History Illustrated 5 (February/March, 1979): 6-18. Brief, colorful coverage of Burton’s controversial life. Excellent description of Burton’s African explorations.

Rice, Edward. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the “Kama Sutra,” and Brought the “Arabian Nights” to the West. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Well-written and researched biography of Burton.