Burton, Sir Richard

▪ British scholar and explorer

Introduction

in full  Sir Richard Francis Burton  

born March 19, 1821, Torquay, Devonshire, Eng.

died Oct. 20, 1890, Trieste, Austria-Hungary [now in Italy]

      English scholar-explorer and Orientalist who was the first European to discover Lake Tanganyika (Tanganyika, Lake) and to penetrate hitherto-forbidden Muslim cities. He published 43 volumes on his explorations and almost 30 volumes of translations, including an unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights.

Early life and career

      Burton was of mixed English, Irish, and possibly French ancestry. His father, retiring early from an unsuccessful army career, chose to raise his two sons and daughter in France and Italy, where young Richard developed his astonishing talent for languages to such an extent that before matriculating at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840, he had become fluent in French, Italian, and the Béarnais and Neapolitan dialects, as well as in Greek and Latin. But his continental upbringing left him ambivalent about his national identity. He called himself “a waif, a stray . . . a blaze of light, without a focus,” and complained that “England is the only country where I never feel at home.”

      Expelled from Oxford in 1842 because of a minor breach of discipline, he went to India as subaltern officer in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry during England's war with the Sindh (now a province of Pakistan). He mastered Arabic and Hindī and during his eight-year stay became proficient also in Marāṭhī, Sindhī, Punjābī, Telugu, Pashto, and Multānī. Eventually in his travels over the world he learned 25 languages, with dialects that brought the number to 40.

      As a favoured intelligence officer of Sir Charles James Napier (Napier, Sir Charles James), commander of the English forces in the Sindh, Captain Burton went in disguise as a Muslim merchant in the bazaars, bringing back detailed reports. Napier in 1845 asked him to investigate the homosexual brothels in Karāchi; his explicit study resulted in their destruction; it also resulted, after Napier's departure, in the destruction of Burton's promising career, when the report was forwarded to Bombay by an unfriendly officer who hoped to see Burton dismissed in disgrace. Though the effort failed, Burton realized his reputation was irreparably clouded and returned, ill and disconsolate, to England.

      From his 29th to his 32nd year he lived with his mother and sister in Boulogne, Fr., where he wrote four books on India, including Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), a brilliant ethnological study, published before the new science of ethnology had a proper tradition against which its merits could be evaluated. Meanwhile he perfected his long-cherished plans for going to Mecca.

Exploration in Arabia (Arabia, history of)

      Disguising himself as a Pathān, an Afghanistani Muslim, in 1853 he went to Cairo, Suez, and Medina, then traveled the bandit-ridden route to the sacred city of Mecca, where at great risk he measured and sketched the mosque and holy Muslim shrine, the Kaʿbah. Though not the first non-Muslim to penetrate and describe the “mother of cities,” Burton was the most sophisticated and the most accurate. His Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855–56) was not only a great adventure narrative but also a classic commentary on Muslim life and manners, especially on the annual pilgrimage. Instead of returning to London to enjoy his sudden fame, however, he organized a new expedition in 1854 to the equally forbidden East African city of Harar (Hārer) (Harer) and became the first European to enter this Muslim citadel without being executed. He described his adventures in First Footsteps in East Africa (1856).

      By this time Burton had become fascinated by the idea of discovering the source of the White Nile (White Nile River) and in 1855 planned an expedition with three officers of the British East India Company, including John Hanning Speke (Speke, John Hanning), intending to push across Somaliland. Africans attacked the party near Berbera, however, killing one member of the party and seriously wounding Speke. Burton himself had a javelin hurled through his jaw and was forced to return to England. After recovery, in July 1855, he went to the Crimea to volunteer in the war against Russia. At the Dardanelles he helped train Turkish irregulars but saw no action at the front.

      The Crimean War over, he turned again to the Nile search, leading an expedition inland from Zanzibar with John Speke in 1857–58. They suffered almost every kind of hardship Africa could inflict. When they finally arrived on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Burton was so ill from malaria he could not walk, and Speke was virtually blind. Ailing, and disappointed by native information that the Rusizi River to the north poured into rather than out of the lake, Burton wished to return and prepare a new expedition. Speke, however, who had recovered more quickly, pushed on alone to the northeast and discovered Lake Victoria (Victoria, Lake), which he was convinced was the true Nile source. Burton's unwillingness to accept this theory without further exploration led to quarrels with Speke and their eventual estrangement.

      Speke was the first to return to London, where he was lionized and given funds to return to Africa. Burton, largely ignored and denied financing for a new exploration of his own, felt betrayed. His Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) attacked Speke's claims and exacerbated their by then public feud.

      In 1860 Burton went off unexpectedly to the United States, where he traveled by stagecoach to the Mormon capital, Salt Lake City. The resulting volume, City of the Saints (1861), showed that he could write with sophistication about the nature of the Mormon church, compose a vivid portrait of its leader, Brigham Young, and also be dispassionate about the Mormon practice of polygamy, which was then outraging most Americans. Shortly after his return from the United States, in January 1861, he and Isabel Arundell, the daughter of an aristocratic family, whom he had been courting since 1856, were married secretly.

Foreign office

      Burton now entered the British Foreign Office as consul in Fernando Po, a Spanish island off the coast of West Africa. During his three years there, he made many short trips of exploration into West Africa, gathering enough material to fill five books. His explicit descriptions of tribal rituals concerning birth, marriage, and death, as well as fetishism, ritual murder, cannibalism, and bizarre sexual practices, though admired by modern anthropologists, won him no favour with the Foreign Office, which considered him eccentric if not dangerous.

      Returning to London on leave in September 1864, Burton was invited to debate with Speke before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Speke, who with the British soldier and explorer James Augustus Grant (Grant, James Augustus) had made a memorable journey from Zanzibar to Lake Victoria and then down the whole length of the Nile, was expected to defend his conviction that Lake Victoria was the true Nile source. After the preliminary session on September 15, Speke went hunting, dying mysteriously as a result of a shotgun wound in his chest. The coroner's jury ruled the death an accident, but Burton believed it to be a suicide. He wrote in anguish to a friend, “The charitable say that he shot himself, the uncharitable say that I shot him.”

      Burton spent the next four years as consul in Santos, Braz., where he wrote a book on the highlands of Brazil (1869) and translated Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry (1870). He also began translating the works of the romantic Portuguese poet-explorer Luís de Camões (Camões, Luís de), with whom he felt a deep sense of kinship. Yet his work did not help him to overcome his increasing aversion for Brazil. He took to drink, and finally he sent his devoted wife to London to obtain a better post for him. She succeeded in persuading the Foreign Secretary to appoint Burton consul in Damascus.

      Back in the Middle East, which he loved, Burton for a time was highly successful as a diplomat; but Muslim intrigue, complicated by the proselytizing indiscretions of his Roman Catholic wife, resulted in his humiliating dismissal in August 1871. The details of this event were recorded by Isabel Burton in her lively, defensive Inner Life of Syria (1875).

Trieste

      In 1872 Burton reluctantly accepted the consulate at Trieste, and although he considered it an ignominious exile, he eventually came to cherish it as his home. There he stayed until his death, publishing an astonishing variety of books. He wrote a book on Iceland, one on Etruscan Bologna (reflecting his passion for archaeology), a nostalgic volume on the Sindh, two books on the gold mines of the Midian, and one on the African Gold Coast (now Ghana), none of which matched the great narratives of his earlier adventures. His Book of the Sword (1884), a dazzling piece of historical erudition, brought him no more financial success than any of the others. In 1880 he published his best original poetry, The Kasidah, written under a pseudonym and patterned after the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

      In Trieste, Burton emerged as a translator of extraordinary virtuosity. He translated and annotated six volumes of Camões, a volume of Neapolitan Italian tales by Giambattista Basile, Il Pentamerone, and Latin poems by Catullus. What excited him most, however, was the erotica of the East. Taking it upon himself to introduce to the West the sexual wisdom of the ancient Eastern manuals on the art of love, he risked prosecution and imprisonment to translate and print secretly the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883), Ananga Ranga (1885), and The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui (1886). He also published openly, but privately, an unexpurgated 16-volume edition of the Arabian Nights (1885–88), the translation of which was so exceptional for its fidelity, masculine vigour, and literary skill that it has frightened away all competitors. Moreover, he larded these volumes with ethnological footnotes and daring essays on pornography, homosexuality, and the sexual education of women. He railed against the “immodest modesty,” the cant, and hypocrisy of his era, displaying psychological insights that anticipated both Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. His Nights were praised by some for their robustness and honesty but attacked by others as “garbage of the brothels,” “an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice.”

      In February 1886 Burton won belated recognition for his services to the crown when Queen Victoria made him Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George. He died in Trieste four years later. His wife, fearful lest her husband be thought vicious because he collected data on what Victorian England called vice, at once burned the projected new edition of The Perfumed Garden he had been annotating. She then wrote a biography of Burton in which she tried to fashion this Rabelaisian scholar-adventurer into a good Catholic, a faithful husband, and a refined and modest man. Afterward she burned almost all of his 40-year collection of diaries and journals. The loss to history and anthropology was monumental; the loss to Burton's biographers, irreparable.

Fawn McKay Brodie

Additional Reading

Biographies by contemporaries include Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 2 vol. (1893, reprinted 1977); Thomas Wright, The Life of Sir Richard Burton, 2 vol. (1906, reprinted 1968), largely hostile; Georgiana Stisted, The True Life of Capt. Sir Richard F. Burton (1896, reissued 1985, a panegyric by Burton's niece. Later works are Alan Moorehead, The White Nile, rev. ed. (1971, reissued 1983); Byron Farwell, Burton (1963, reissued 1988); Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967, reprinted 1984); Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990); and Frank McLynn, Burton: Snow Upon the Desert (1990).

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