Investor's Business Daily, July 30th, 2007
Richard Francis Burton -- explorer, writer, soldier, translator, diplomat -- lived for his next adventure.
In the months before his death in 1890, Burton was emaciated and barely able to walk without support.
Yet he was planning for a trip to Greece. Having just completed what would be his last book, Burton told his wife, Isabel, that he would start working the next day on their biography.
A lot already was known about Burton. He had written more than 40 books about his global travels, adventures and discoveries.
But it was characteristic of Burton to never rest. He had traversed Asia, Africa, South America, the U.S. and Iceland. He had worshipped at Mecca in Saudi Arabia and the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. He had crossed the Mississippi and the Ganges rivers and helped discover the source of the Nile.
On each trip, he documented the works: the economy, religions, vegetation, food, even people's sexual predilections.
His yearning to travel stemmed from his military service, plus his work as a British ambassador and with the Royal Geographic Society.
Born in England in 1821, Burton could blend in like a chameleon wherever he traveled. He learned to speak 29 languages and a dozen additional dialects. He spoke some so well that people believed he was born in that country of origin -- be it in the Orient, Africa or Muslim-dominated regions.
He was also a master of disguise, tanning his skin with henna to match the local color and knowing the minutia of local customs, from religion to table manners.
Knight And Daze
He was considered a hero by many and knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886, yet some of his high-society fellows thought Burton a rogue and scoundrel, perverse and boorish.
Burton never let the criticism bother him. He reveled in tweaking guests, even strangers, with acerbic stories and occasional insults.
An example comes from "The Life of Sir Richard Burton" by Thomas Wright. Burton was averse to old women made up to look young. Said Burton to one such painted lady: "You haven't changed since I saw you 40 years ago. You're like the British flag that has braved a thousand years of battle and the breeze."
Such behavior led some to rip Burton's accomplishments, but his character created a change in fortune that catapulted him toward fame. That began when he attended Trinity College, Oxford, from 1840 to 1842. Burton antagonized his peers and teachers, even challenging a student to a duel for having mocked his moustache. "I am among grocers," he wrote to his mother.
The school lost its patience with Burton when he attended a horse race. Trinity frowned on that and expelled him.
Angered, Burton trampled the college's flower bed with his horse and carriage, then enlisted in the army of the East India Co., wherein his lust for adventure began galloping.
While battling in India, he became known as Ruffian Dick, according to Wright, for his "demonic ferocity as a fighter and because he had fought in single combat more enemies than perhaps any other man of his time."
A skilled swordsman, Burton used his weapon and toughness to save his life a number of times in India and other lands.
He often entered territory where a white European was most unwelcome. At least twice he and his fellow soldiers were attacked by small armies, such as in Somalia where he was speared through his mouth. The scar from that harrowing event is evident in portraits.
Another time the governor of Syria sent hundreds of armed horsemen and camel riders to attack Burton and his men. He survived again.
Wrote Burton: "I have never been so flattered in my life than to think it would take 300 men to kill me."
During his army stint in India, Burton learned Arabic, Persian, Hindustani and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi.
So passionate was he about languages that, while in the army, he kept a menagerie of tame monkeys in the hopes of learning their communication skills.
Then there was Burton, master of disguise. Sometimes not even his fellow officers would recognize him.
That served him well on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853. His seven years in India made him well prepared for the customs and behavior of Muslims. Though not the first non-Muslim European to make the Hajj, his trip was the most famous and best documented of the time.
Among the customs Burton knew to follow were: don't tie knots in clothes, don't oil the body, don't cut nails or hair. "Transgressions of these and other ceremonial exactments are expiated either by animal sacrifice or gifts of fruit or cereals to the poor," he wrote.
He documented the trip in "The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah."
Though Mecca was one of his most talked-about travels, it was not the most arduous or dangerous.
That came when Burton made an expedition to Harar (in present Ethiopia), where supposedly no European had entered and where he would have been executed had his disguise been uncovered. As for natural problems, Burton said that during the three-month trip he once would have died of thirst had he not seen desert birds and surmised they would be near water.
He then traveled with acclaimed colleague John Speke to explore Somalia, where Burton was speared by attackers estimated to number 200. Speke was captured and wounded in 11 places before escaping.
After that, Burton and Speke headed to Zanzibar in 1856 to explore an inland sea they had heard about and to study tribes. Historians say that two years later Burton became the first European to see Lake Tanganyika, the second largest freshwater lake in the world by volume, along the borders of today's Zambia, Tanzania and the Republic of Congo.
Both men were beset by tropical diseases, such as malaria, on the journey. The two parted ways, but Speke returned and located nearby Lake Victoria, later proved to be the Nile's source, as Speke claimed at the time. But Burton said Speke's documentation was lacking and the two disputed as to whether it was the source. That led to acrimony between the two, with Speke alleging Burton tried to poison him at one point 14d saying Burton was a sickly companion on their trip together.
Speke's End
In 1864, the two were planning a debate at the Royal Geographical Society in England as to whether Lake Victoria was the Nile's source. Yet the day before the event, Speke reportedly shot and killed himself in a hunting accident. Without any eye witnesses, some surmised Speke committed suicide, though the doctor's report did not endorse that view. Upon hearing the news, Burton declined to speak to the society.
Burton constantly railed at societal norms. He wrote, "The more I study religion the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."
His best-known book is the translation of "The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night," commonly known now as "The Arabian Nights." Another was his translation of "The Kama Sutra."
An English lord once said when Burton was middle-aged that he had compressed "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of a half a dozen ordinary men."
