"Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy."

“I’m proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.”

--Sir Richard Francis Burton

He was a Victorian force of nature; a devil-driven, raging-to-live legend in his own time. Richard Francis Burton wrote The Book of the Sword and translated the--Arabic--Book of Love. He was an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a geographer, a linguist, a poet, a mystic, a spy and a sexologist. Withal and besides, RFB still found time to be the best horseman, swordsman and pistol-shot in the British Army...when he wasn't romancing the ladies and infuriating polite society.

Earlier today, David Hardy wrote a fine blog post on Burton that was a little over two thousand words long. As Mr. Hardy and I both know, one could write two hundred thousand words on RFB and still just be scratching the surface. So, I'm going to hit some other high points in Burton's life and maybe expand on a few points that Dave brought up.

Richard saw his first sunrise in Torquay, Devonshire--smack dab in Solomon Kane country. Born with flaming red hair, RFB could boast the blood of Rob Roy MacGregor in his veins, along with being the cousin of Lord Dunsany's mother. His father was a tall, swarthy Anglo-Irish colonel with peripatetic and spendthrift ways. In other words, the Burtons were constantly moving and short on money. Richard was born wandering and never really stopped. His lifelong motto would be: ‘Omne solum forti patria’. Roughly translated: ‘Anywhere is home to the brave man’. Or, as James Hetfield might put it, “Where I lay my head is home”.

The Burtons spent several years in Italy and France. RFB, always passionate and unruly, showed his lack of reverence for pedagogical authority early on, smashing a violin over one teacher's head. By the age of fifteen, he was already fluent in several languages and dialects. At the same age, he was caught writing salacious letters to prostitutes. A precocious lad.

In 1840, Burton was sent off to Trinity College, Oxford. At nineteen, he already sported an impressive moustache. Soon after arriving at Oxford, some impudent twit tried to talk trash on the Burtonian 'stache. Richard challenged the mocker to a duel, which silenced the poltroon in short order.

By this time, Richard's childhood red hair was long gone. He was now dark-haired and dark-eyed, around six feet tall. Much like his father in many ways. There was an air of smoldering ferocity about the man which was noted at the time and for the rest of his life. One acquaintance remarked that Burton had 'panther eyes'. His exploits at Oxford--and rumours of things he hadn't quite done--earned him the epithet of 'Ruffian Dick'; 'ruffian' at that time equating pretty closely to 'thug' now. Burton deliberately broke a university rule regarding attending horse races--he loved horses--and was permanently expelled by the Oxford dons as an example to the more timid students.

The Notorious RFB.

At loose ends, Burton was persuaded to join the army of the East India Company in 1842 by some of his former Oxford chums. In his own words, he was "fit for nothing but to be shot at for six pence a day". Burton soon learned the North Indian languages and customs with his usual ease and speed. His superiors put him to work performing deep-cover assignments, his dark hair and eyes facilitating the imposture. At the same time, he earned a reputation among his fellow soldiers for ferocity and deadliness.

While Burton is known to have said his years in India were "wasted", he learned much while there that would serve him in good stead in later years. Also, those seven years provided the grist for his first five books, published in 1851 and 1852, after he took a leave of absence.

David Hardy discussed RFB's infiltration of Medina and Mecca in his post earlier today. He didn't mention that Burton had himself circumcised in order to pull off that exploit, since to be uncircumcised would be absolute proof that he was an infidel. Of course, since the three options for being discovered as an infidel in the forbidden city of Mecca were crucifixion, impalement or brutal slavery, being circumcised as an adult doesn't sound that bad. One tough, determined bastard, that Burton.

The publication of his account of the journey, A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, made Burton a literary superstar. It sold like Harry Potter. A few Europeans had sneaked into Mecca in days past, but neither had written anything that came close to matching RFB's account. The Anglophone world ate it up.

Richard's arrival in the forbidden city of Harar occurred in January of 1855. Upon his return to the Somali coast, he and a few fellow Englishmen were attacked by well over one hundred Somalis; what I like to call a ‘Somali Aloha’. Dave Hardy does a good job of describing the assault, but leaves out a couple of things. That Somali javelin went clear through Burton's face. In one cheek and out the other. Burton still managed to saber a few Somalis and escape. He wasn't able to get the spear removed until the next morning. One tough sumbitch. Maybe not Hugh Glass tough, but a hard mofo.

Something else not mentioned is the fact of why the Somalis--later--said they launched the ambush. It was because they were afraid that the Brits were there to shut down the slave trade. Muslims had been enslaving non-Muslim East Africans for well over a thousand years at that point. The British Empire had abolished slavery two decades before and the British Navy was suppressing it wherever Her Majesty's writ held sway. The Somalis figured they were the next in line. The suppression of slavery--and the Muslim revolt against it--would be at the root of the later Mahdi Uprising which would see Burton's friend, Charles 'Chinese' Gordon, killed in Khartoum.

Burton's brief participation in the Crimean War was nothing to remark upon. However, the British military did approach RFB with a plan for him to make liason with the Sufi Imam Shamil in Dagestan with an eye to stirring up trouble on the Imperial Russian flank. That's right: the same Shamil and Dagestanis that later inspired Frank Herbert's Fremen. Richard's knack for languages and deep knowledge of Sufism were looked upon as making him ideal for such a mission. RFB couldn't see it panning out and declined. Might Richard Burton have become the Muad'Dib of Dagestan?

Leaving the Crimean debacle behind him, Burton returned to England and fired up an expedition to ascertain the source of the Nile. The journey was plagued by misfortune and RFB's co-explorer, Speke, would die--quite possibly by suicide--upon their return to the Sceptred Isle.

Now is as good a time as any to point out that Burton's main income during this entire period came from his travelogues; books he wrote about his travels. The man was a proto-pulpster. Malaria, Somali spears through the face...it didn't matter. The man would crank out eight hundred pages of good prose in two months...writing with a quill pen. Yep. Just one reason why Richard Francis Burton was well-nigh superhuman. Between 1851 and 1890, RFB would write over forty books, many of them bestsellers--filling in blank spaces on the map and learning new languages, all the while. For a full bibliography, check out this link at the Burtoniana site.

Richard's wife, Isabel, managed to get him a job as British consul in West Africa in 1861. Burton is reported to have drank heavily during this period. He never seems to have been a foe of the grape or John Barleycorn at any point in his adult life. As I recall, someone asked him how he managed to survive all the tropical diseases in both India and equatorial Africa. His reply was that he drank a quart of brandy every day. Considering that he was consul in the 'White Man's Grave' of equatorial Africa for four years, exploring and climbing mountains all the while, he seems to have had something figured out.

Burton visited the kingdom of Dahomey twice during his consulship. He found Dahomey--famed for its human sacrifices and 'Amazon' army--underwhelming. Here is an excerpt, in his trademark, laconic, gallows humor:

“I have been here 3 days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed or a fellow tortured… At Benin… they crucified a fellow in honour of my coming – here nothing! And this is the blood-stained land of Dahome!!”

The Dahomean king upped his game for RFB's second visit. Eighty prisoners were killed, with the king himself decapitating the first victim. Burton--who was raised in a military family and had seen war at close hand--still wasn't impressed by the king's royal guard of 'Amazons'.

Richard was transferred to Brazil in 1865. One British visitor described RFB in this fashion:

“He reminded me of a black leopard, caged, but unforgiving.”

Burton's Brazilian sojourn did provide us with a classic RFB quote. Telling Lord Houghton about an escapade in western Brazil, Burton said this:

"Starting in a hollowed log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?' and the only echo is 'damned fool!... the Devil drives'."

Using her aristocratic connections, Isabel Burton then managedto get Richard assigned to Damascus. After that went wrong, Burton was reassigned in 1872 to the languid port city of Trieste in Austria-Hungary. Now in his fifties, his days of exploration and adventure were done, but much of what RFB is remembered for now--his literary, non-travelogue work--was accomplished during the years in Trieste. Such works would include The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi and Burton's legendary translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, which is still considered—almost a century and a half later—the standard by which all others are judged.

This is also the period of 'Burton the Archaeologist'. Whereas before, he studied cultures of the present, during this period he delved into the civilizations of the past. Etruscan Bologna: A Study and The Gold-Mines of Midian and The Ruined Midianite Cities are two examples, but so is The Book of the Sword, the first serious treatise of its kind to trace the history of 'the queen of weapons'.

There are the two sex manuals that Burton had a hand in. Regarding the Kama Sutra, he appears to have been primarily the editor. Much of the work was completed by Burton’s friend and fellow scholar, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, working in collaboration with the Indian archaeologist Bhagwan Lal Indraji and a student named Shivaram Parshuram Bhide. In the case of The Perfumed Garden, Burton translated directly from the Arabic.

Burton would die in 1890. He had finally been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) by Queen Victoria in 1886. That is how he gets the ‘sir’ in front of his name. He earned it. His creed had always been, “Honour, not honours.” In other words, ‘Your honor is the most important thing; awards and medals mean nothing in the end’.

After hearing the news, Richard’s friend, the poet, Algernon Swinburne—a poet also admired by Robert E. Howard—wrote his ‘Verses on the Death of Richard Burton’. Below is an excerpt.

But him we hailed from afar or near

As boldest born of his kinsfolk here

And loved as brightest of souls that eyed

Life, time, and death with unchangeful cheer,

A wider soul than the world was wide

Whose praise made love of him one with pride...

Who rode life's lists as a god might ride.

Well, there you have it. My take on ‘the most interesting man of the 19th century’. There was never another like Richard Burton before him, and there will likely not ever be another again. His was a confluence of genetics and circumstances that will probably never be replicated.

The Burtoniana website can be found here.