Posted on Oct 20, 2019
Sir Richard Burton | British scholar and explorer
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On October 20, 1890, Richard Burton, English explorer and translator (Arabian Nights), died at the age of 69. From the article:
"Sir Richard Burton | British scholar and explorer
Sir Richard Burton, in full Sir Richard Francis Burton, (born March 19, 1821, Torquay, Devonshire, England—died October 20, 1890, Trieste, Austria-Hungary [now in Italy]), English scholar-explorer and Orientalist who was the first European to discover Lake Tanganyika 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.
Sir Richard Burton
Richard Burton, c. 1880.
died
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, 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, France, 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
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 (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 and in 1855 planned an expedition with three officers of the British East India Company, including John Hanning Speke, 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 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, 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 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, 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."
"Sir Richard Burton | British scholar and explorer
Sir Richard Burton, in full Sir Richard Francis Burton, (born March 19, 1821, Torquay, Devonshire, England—died October 20, 1890, Trieste, Austria-Hungary [now in Italy]), English scholar-explorer and Orientalist who was the first European to discover Lake Tanganyika 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.
Sir Richard Burton
Richard Burton, c. 1880.
died
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, 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, France, 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
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 (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 and in 1855 planned an expedition with three officers of the British East India Company, including John Hanning Speke, 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 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, 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 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, 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."
Sir Richard Burton | British scholar and explorer
Posted from britannica.com
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Source Of The White Nile (1999)
A documentary team retrace Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Spekes journey through Africa, searching for the source of the White Nile.
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on October 20, 1890 English explorer and translator (Arabian Nights) Sir Richard Burton died at the age of 69 in Trieste, Italy.
Source Of The White Nile (1999)
"A documentary team retrace Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Spekes journey through Africa, searching for the source of the White Nile."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvn58oKS_E0
Images:
1. sketch of Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870
2. The 'highly civilized man' Sir Richard Burton in cloak by Claudet 1854.
3. In the garden Richard Burton wearing a fez with a walking stick at Trieste, Italy in 1890. By Dr. F. Grenfell Baker
4. Sir Richard Burton wearing a top hat and Lady Isabel Burton under a tree in their garden at Trieste, Italy
Biography
1.
2. NNDB
1. Background from bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burton_sir_richard.shtml
"Sir Richard Burton (1821 - 1890)
Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870 ©Burton was a Victorian explorer, writer and translator, known for his travels in Asia and Africa.
Richard Francis Burton was born in Devon on 19 March 1821. His father was an army officer. Burton accompanied his parents on their frequent trips abroad and showed an early talent for languages.
Burton was thrown out of Oxford University in 1842 and joined the army of the East India Company where his knowledge of local languages helped his work in surveying and in intelligence. In 1853, taking leave from the company, he undertook a 'Hajj' or pilgrimage to Mecca, in disguise, and his account of this trip made him famous. The following year he explored what is now Somalia with a number of other officers, including John Speke.
In 1857, Burton and Speke embarked on a Royal Geographical Society funded expedition to explore inland from the east African coast, with the hope of finding the source of the Nile. It was a difficult trip. When they arrived at Lake Tanganyika, Speke was almost blind and Burton could hardly walk. Speke travelled on alone and discovered Lake Victoria, which he was convinced was the Nile's source. Burton disagreed and this contributed to a long and bitter public quarrel between the two men which ended in September 1864 when Speke died in a shooting which was either suicide or an accident.
Burton now joined the Foreign Office, and was appointed consul in Fernando Po, an island off the coast of West Africa. His wife Isabel, who he had married in 1861, was unable to join him as the climate was considered too unhealthy. They were reunited when he was transferred to Brazil and then, in 1869, to Damascus. In 1871, he was moved to Trieste, where his position gave him plenty of time to write. He was knighted in 1886.
Burton was a prolific author, mainly on travel and ethnography. He also translated classical and Renaissance literature, with a particular interest in eastern erotica - he translated and printed the 'Kama Sutra' (1883) and 'The Perfumed Garden' (1886). He also published a complete edition of the 'Arabian Nights' (1885 - 1888).
Burton died in Trieste on 20 October 1890. He and Isabel are buried in a tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent in Mortlake, southwest London."
2. Biography from nndb.com/people/881/000086623/
"Sir Richard Burton
Sir Richard Burton AKA Richard Francis Burton
Born: 19-Mar-1821
Birthplace: Torquay, Devonshire, England
Died: 20-Oct-1890
Location of death: Trieste, Italy
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, St. Mary Magdalene Churchyard, Mortlake, London, England
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Matter of Dispute
Occupation: Explorer, Author
Nationality: England
Executive summary: Translated The Arabian Nights
Military service: Bombay Native Infantry (18th Regiment)
British consul, explorer and Orientalist, was born at Barham House, Hertfordshire, on the 19th of March 1821. He came of the Westmorland Burtons of Shap, but his grandfather, the Rev. Edward Burton, settled in Ireland as rector of Tuam, and his father, Lt. Col. Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an Irishman by birth and character. His mother was descended from the MacGregors, and he was proud of a remote drop of Bourbon blood piously believed to be derived from a morganatic union of the Grand Monarque. There were even those, including some of the Romany themselves, who saw gypsy written in his peculiar eyes as in his character, wild and resentful, essentially vagabond, intolerant of convention and restraint. His irregular education strengthened the inherited bias. A childhood spent in France and Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behavior that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India Company's service in his eyes was that it offered opportunities for studying Oriental life and languages. He had begun Arabic without a master at Oxford, and worked in London at Hindustani under Forbes before he went out; in India he labored indefatigably at the vernaculars, and his reward was an astonishingly rapid proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, as well as Persian and Arabic. His appointment as an assistant in the Sind survey enabled him to mix with the people, and he frequently passed as a native in the bazaars and deceived his own munshi, to say nothing of his colonel and messmates. His wanderings in Sind were the apprenticeship for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and his seven years in India laid the foundations of his unparalleled familiarity with Eastern life and customs, especially among the lower classes. Besides government reports and contributions to the Asiatic Society, his Indian period produced four books, published after his return home: Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley (1851), Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). None of these achieved popularity, but the account of Sind is remarkably vivid and faithful.
The pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 made Burton famous. He had planned it while mixing disguised among the Muslims of Sind, and had laboriously prepared for the ordeal by study and practice. No doubt the primary motive was the love of adventure, which was his strongest passion; but along with the wanderers restlessness marched the zest of exploration, and while wandering was in any case a necessity of his existence, he preferred to roam in untrodden ways where mere adventure might be dignified by geographical service. There was a huge white blot on the maps of central Arabia where no European had ever been, and Burton's scheme, approved by the Royal Geographical Society, was to extend his pilgrimage to this "empty abode", and remove a discreditable blank from the map. War among the tribes curtailed the design, and his journey went no farther than Medina and Mecca. The exploit of accompanying the Muslim hajj to the holy cities was not unique, nor so dangerous as has been imagined. Several Europeans have accomplished it before and since Burton's visit without serious mishap. Passing himself off as an Indian Pathan covered any peculiarities or defects of speech. The pilgrimage, however, demands an intimate proficiency in a complicated ritual, and a familiarity with the minutiae of Eastern manners and etiquette; and in the case of a stumble, presence of mind and cool courage may be called into request. There are legends that Burton had to defend his life by taking others'; but he carried no arms, and confessed, rather shamefastly, that he had never killed anybody at any time. The actual journey was less remarkable than the book in which it was recorded, The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855). Its vivid descriptions, pungent style, and intensely personal "note" distinguish it from books of its class; its insight into Semitic modes of thought and its picture of Arab manners give it the value of an historical document; its grim humor, keen observation and reckless insobriety of opinion, expressed in peculiar, uncouth but vigorous language make it a curiosity of literature.
Burton's next journey was more hazardous than the pilgrimage, but created no parallel sensation. In 1854 the Indian government accepted his proposal to explore the interior of the Somali country, which formed a subject of official anxiety in its relation to the Red Sea trade. He was assisted by Capt. J. H. Speke and two other young officers, but accomplished the most difficult part of the enterprise alone. This was the journey to Harrar, the Somali capital, which no white man had entered. Burton vanished into the desert, and was not heard of for four months. When he reappeared he had not only been to Harrar, but had talked with the king, stayed ten days there in deadly peril, and ridden back across the desert, almost without food and water, running the gauntlet of the Somali spears all the way. Undeterred by this experience he set out again, but was checked by a skirmish with the tribes, in which one of his young officers was killed, Captain Speke was wounded in eleven places, and Burton himself had a javelin thrust through his jaws. His First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), describing these adventures, is one of his most exciting and most characteristic books, full of learning, observation and humor.
After serving on the staff of Beatson's Bashi-bazouks at the Dardanelles, but never getting to the front in the Crimea, Burton returned to Africa in 1856. The foreign office, moved by the Royal Geographical Society, commissioned him to search for the sources of the Nile, and, again accompanied by Speke, he explored the lake regions of equatorial Africa. They discovered Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, and Speke, pushing on during Burton's illness and acting on indications supplied by him, lighted upon Victoria Nyanza. The separate discovery led to a bitter dispute, but Burton's expedition, with its discovery of the two lakes, was the incentive to the later explorations of Speke and Grant, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley; and his report in volume XXXIII of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, and his Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860), are the true parents of the multitudinous literature of "darkest Africa." Burton was the first Englishman to enter Mecca, the first to explore Somaliland, the first to discover the great lakes of Central Africa. His East African pioneering coincides with areas which have since become peculiarly interesting to the British Empire; and three years later he was exploring on the opposite side of Africa, at Dahomey, Benin and the Gold Coast, regions which have also entered among the imperial "questions" of the day. Before middle age Burton had compressed into his life, as Lord Derby said, "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men." The City of the Saints (1861) was the fruit of a flying visit to the United States in 1860.
Since 1849 his connection with the Indian army had been practically severed; in 1861 he definitely entered the service of the foreign office as consul at Fernando Po, from where he was shifted successively to Santos in Brazil (1865), Damascus (1869), and Trieste (1871), holding the last post until his death on the 20th of October 1890. Each of these posts produced its corresponding books: Fernando Po led to the publishing of Wanderings in West Africa (1863), Abeokuta and the Cameroons (1863), A Mission to Gelele, king of Dahomé (1864), and Wit and Wisdom from West Africa (1865). The Highlands of the Brazil (1869) was the result of four years' residence and traveling; and Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) relate to a journey across South America to Peru. Damascus suggested Unexplored Syria (1872), and might have led to much better work, since no consulate in either hemisphere was more congenial to Burton's taste and linguistic studies; but he mismanaged his opportunities, got into trouble with the foreign office, and was removed to Trieste, where his Oriental prepossessions and prejudices could do no harm, but where, unfortunately, his Oriental learning was thrown away. He did not, however, abandon his Eastern studies or his Eastern travels. Various fresh journeys or revisitings of familiar scenes are recorded in his later books, such as Zanzibar (1872), Ultima Thule (1875), Etruscan Bologna (1876), Sind Revisited (1877), The Land of Midian (1879) and To the Gold Coast for Gold (1883). None of these had more than a passing interest. Burton had not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of travel. He wrote too fast, and took too little pains about the form. His blunt, disconnected sentences and ill-constructed chapters were full of information and learning, and contained not a few thrusts for the benefit of government or other people, but they were not "readable." There was something ponderous about his very humor, and his criticism was personal and savage. By far the most celebrated of all his books is the translation of the "Arabian Nights" (The Thousand Nights and a Night, 16 vois., privately printed, 1885-88), which occupied the greater part of his leisure at Trieste. As a monument of his Arabic learning and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Eastern life this translation was his greatest achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their most vulgar "Billingsgate", with their philosophy and modes of thought as well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's "anthropological notes", embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from questions of taste, abound in valuable observations based upon long study of the manners and the writings of the Arabs. The translation itself is often marked by extraordinary resource and felicity in the exact reproduction of the sense of the original; Burton's vocabulary was marvelously extensive, and he had a genius for hitting upon the right word; but his fancy for archaic words and phrases, his habit of coining words, and the harsh and rugged style he affected, detract from the literary quality of the work without in any degree enhancing its fidelity. With grave defects, but sometimes brilliant merits, the translation holds a mirror to its author. He was, as has been well said, an Elizabethan born out of time; in the days of Sir Francis Drake his very faults might have counted to his credit. Of his other works, Vikram and the Vampire, Hindu Tales (1870), and a history of his favorite arm, The Book of the Sword, vol. I (1884), unfinished, may be mentioned. His translation of The Lusiads of Camoens (1880) was followed (1881) by a sketch of the poet's life. Burton had a fellow-feeling for the poet adventurer, and his translation is an extraordinarily happy reproduction of its original. A manuscript translation of the "Scented Garden", from the Arabic, was burned by his widow, acting in what she believed to be the interests of her husband's reputation. Burton married Isabel Arundell in 1861, and owed much to her courage, sympathy and passionate devotion. Her romantic and exaggerated biography of her husband, with all its faults, is one of the most pathetic monuments which the unselfish love of a woman has ever raised to the memory of her hero. Another monument is the Arab tent of stone and marble which she built for his tomb at Mortlake.
Wife: Isabel Arundell (m. Jan-1861)
University: Trinity College, Oxford University (1840-42, expelled)
Freemasonry
Royal Geographical Society
Knight of the British Empire 5-Feb-1886
Expelled from School
Religious Mission: Hajj (1853)
White Supremacists
Risk Factors: Marijuana, Opium, Malaria, Syphilis, Gout
Is the subject of books:
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 1893, BY: Isabel Burton, DETAILS: (2 vols.)
The Life of Sir Richard Burton, 1906, BY: Thomas Wright, DETAILS: (2 vols.)
Author of books:
Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851)
Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855–56, travelogue)
First Footsteps in East Africa (1856, travelogue)
Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860, travelogue)
City of the Saints (1861, travelogue)
Book of the Sword (1884, nonfiction)
The Kasidah (1880, poetry)"
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PVT Mark BrownCPT (Join to see) MSgt David Hoffman
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Source Of The White Nile (1999)
"A documentary team retrace Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Spekes journey through Africa, searching for the source of the White Nile."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvn58oKS_E0
Images:
1. sketch of Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870
2. The 'highly civilized man' Sir Richard Burton in cloak by Claudet 1854.
3. In the garden Richard Burton wearing a fez with a walking stick at Trieste, Italy in 1890. By Dr. F. Grenfell Baker
4. Sir Richard Burton wearing a top hat and Lady Isabel Burton under a tree in their garden at Trieste, Italy
Biography
1.
2. NNDB
1. Background from bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burton_sir_richard.shtml
"Sir Richard Burton (1821 - 1890)
Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870Sir Richard Francis Burton, c. 1870 ©Burton was a Victorian explorer, writer and translator, known for his travels in Asia and Africa.
Richard Francis Burton was born in Devon on 19 March 1821. His father was an army officer. Burton accompanied his parents on their frequent trips abroad and showed an early talent for languages.
Burton was thrown out of Oxford University in 1842 and joined the army of the East India Company where his knowledge of local languages helped his work in surveying and in intelligence. In 1853, taking leave from the company, he undertook a 'Hajj' or pilgrimage to Mecca, in disguise, and his account of this trip made him famous. The following year he explored what is now Somalia with a number of other officers, including John Speke.
In 1857, Burton and Speke embarked on a Royal Geographical Society funded expedition to explore inland from the east African coast, with the hope of finding the source of the Nile. It was a difficult trip. When they arrived at Lake Tanganyika, Speke was almost blind and Burton could hardly walk. Speke travelled on alone and discovered Lake Victoria, which he was convinced was the Nile's source. Burton disagreed and this contributed to a long and bitter public quarrel between the two men which ended in September 1864 when Speke died in a shooting which was either suicide or an accident.
Burton now joined the Foreign Office, and was appointed consul in Fernando Po, an island off the coast of West Africa. His wife Isabel, who he had married in 1861, was unable to join him as the climate was considered too unhealthy. They were reunited when he was transferred to Brazil and then, in 1869, to Damascus. In 1871, he was moved to Trieste, where his position gave him plenty of time to write. He was knighted in 1886.
Burton was a prolific author, mainly on travel and ethnography. He also translated classical and Renaissance literature, with a particular interest in eastern erotica - he translated and printed the 'Kama Sutra' (1883) and 'The Perfumed Garden' (1886). He also published a complete edition of the 'Arabian Nights' (1885 - 1888).
Burton died in Trieste on 20 October 1890. He and Isabel are buried in a tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent in Mortlake, southwest London."
2. Biography from nndb.com/people/881/000086623/
"Sir Richard Burton
Sir Richard Burton AKA Richard Francis Burton
Born: 19-Mar-1821
Birthplace: Torquay, Devonshire, England
Died: 20-Oct-1890
Location of death: Trieste, Italy
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Buried, St. Mary Magdalene Churchyard, Mortlake, London, England
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Matter of Dispute
Occupation: Explorer, Author
Nationality: England
Executive summary: Translated The Arabian Nights
Military service: Bombay Native Infantry (18th Regiment)
British consul, explorer and Orientalist, was born at Barham House, Hertfordshire, on the 19th of March 1821. He came of the Westmorland Burtons of Shap, but his grandfather, the Rev. Edward Burton, settled in Ireland as rector of Tuam, and his father, Lt. Col. Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an Irishman by birth and character. His mother was descended from the MacGregors, and he was proud of a remote drop of Bourbon blood piously believed to be derived from a morganatic union of the Grand Monarque. There were even those, including some of the Romany themselves, who saw gypsy written in his peculiar eyes as in his character, wild and resentful, essentially vagabond, intolerant of convention and restraint. His irregular education strengthened the inherited bias. A childhood spent in France and Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behavior that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India Company's service in his eyes was that it offered opportunities for studying Oriental life and languages. He had begun Arabic without a master at Oxford, and worked in London at Hindustani under Forbes before he went out; in India he labored indefatigably at the vernaculars, and his reward was an astonishingly rapid proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, as well as Persian and Arabic. His appointment as an assistant in the Sind survey enabled him to mix with the people, and he frequently passed as a native in the bazaars and deceived his own munshi, to say nothing of his colonel and messmates. His wanderings in Sind were the apprenticeship for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and his seven years in India laid the foundations of his unparalleled familiarity with Eastern life and customs, especially among the lower classes. Besides government reports and contributions to the Asiatic Society, his Indian period produced four books, published after his return home: Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley (1851), Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). None of these achieved popularity, but the account of Sind is remarkably vivid and faithful.
The pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 made Burton famous. He had planned it while mixing disguised among the Muslims of Sind, and had laboriously prepared for the ordeal by study and practice. No doubt the primary motive was the love of adventure, which was his strongest passion; but along with the wanderers restlessness marched the zest of exploration, and while wandering was in any case a necessity of his existence, he preferred to roam in untrodden ways where mere adventure might be dignified by geographical service. There was a huge white blot on the maps of central Arabia where no European had ever been, and Burton's scheme, approved by the Royal Geographical Society, was to extend his pilgrimage to this "empty abode", and remove a discreditable blank from the map. War among the tribes curtailed the design, and his journey went no farther than Medina and Mecca. The exploit of accompanying the Muslim hajj to the holy cities was not unique, nor so dangerous as has been imagined. Several Europeans have accomplished it before and since Burton's visit without serious mishap. Passing himself off as an Indian Pathan covered any peculiarities or defects of speech. The pilgrimage, however, demands an intimate proficiency in a complicated ritual, and a familiarity with the minutiae of Eastern manners and etiquette; and in the case of a stumble, presence of mind and cool courage may be called into request. There are legends that Burton had to defend his life by taking others'; but he carried no arms, and confessed, rather shamefastly, that he had never killed anybody at any time. The actual journey was less remarkable than the book in which it was recorded, The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855). Its vivid descriptions, pungent style, and intensely personal "note" distinguish it from books of its class; its insight into Semitic modes of thought and its picture of Arab manners give it the value of an historical document; its grim humor, keen observation and reckless insobriety of opinion, expressed in peculiar, uncouth but vigorous language make it a curiosity of literature.
Burton's next journey was more hazardous than the pilgrimage, but created no parallel sensation. In 1854 the Indian government accepted his proposal to explore the interior of the Somali country, which formed a subject of official anxiety in its relation to the Red Sea trade. He was assisted by Capt. J. H. Speke and two other young officers, but accomplished the most difficult part of the enterprise alone. This was the journey to Harrar, the Somali capital, which no white man had entered. Burton vanished into the desert, and was not heard of for four months. When he reappeared he had not only been to Harrar, but had talked with the king, stayed ten days there in deadly peril, and ridden back across the desert, almost without food and water, running the gauntlet of the Somali spears all the way. Undeterred by this experience he set out again, but was checked by a skirmish with the tribes, in which one of his young officers was killed, Captain Speke was wounded in eleven places, and Burton himself had a javelin thrust through his jaws. His First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), describing these adventures, is one of his most exciting and most characteristic books, full of learning, observation and humor.
After serving on the staff of Beatson's Bashi-bazouks at the Dardanelles, but never getting to the front in the Crimea, Burton returned to Africa in 1856. The foreign office, moved by the Royal Geographical Society, commissioned him to search for the sources of the Nile, and, again accompanied by Speke, he explored the lake regions of equatorial Africa. They discovered Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, and Speke, pushing on during Burton's illness and acting on indications supplied by him, lighted upon Victoria Nyanza. The separate discovery led to a bitter dispute, but Burton's expedition, with its discovery of the two lakes, was the incentive to the later explorations of Speke and Grant, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley; and his report in volume XXXIII of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, and his Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860), are the true parents of the multitudinous literature of "darkest Africa." Burton was the first Englishman to enter Mecca, the first to explore Somaliland, the first to discover the great lakes of Central Africa. His East African pioneering coincides with areas which have since become peculiarly interesting to the British Empire; and three years later he was exploring on the opposite side of Africa, at Dahomey, Benin and the Gold Coast, regions which have also entered among the imperial "questions" of the day. Before middle age Burton had compressed into his life, as Lord Derby said, "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men." The City of the Saints (1861) was the fruit of a flying visit to the United States in 1860.
Since 1849 his connection with the Indian army had been practically severed; in 1861 he definitely entered the service of the foreign office as consul at Fernando Po, from where he was shifted successively to Santos in Brazil (1865), Damascus (1869), and Trieste (1871), holding the last post until his death on the 20th of October 1890. Each of these posts produced its corresponding books: Fernando Po led to the publishing of Wanderings in West Africa (1863), Abeokuta and the Cameroons (1863), A Mission to Gelele, king of Dahomé (1864), and Wit and Wisdom from West Africa (1865). The Highlands of the Brazil (1869) was the result of four years' residence and traveling; and Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) relate to a journey across South America to Peru. Damascus suggested Unexplored Syria (1872), and might have led to much better work, since no consulate in either hemisphere was more congenial to Burton's taste and linguistic studies; but he mismanaged his opportunities, got into trouble with the foreign office, and was removed to Trieste, where his Oriental prepossessions and prejudices could do no harm, but where, unfortunately, his Oriental learning was thrown away. He did not, however, abandon his Eastern studies or his Eastern travels. Various fresh journeys or revisitings of familiar scenes are recorded in his later books, such as Zanzibar (1872), Ultima Thule (1875), Etruscan Bologna (1876), Sind Revisited (1877), The Land of Midian (1879) and To the Gold Coast for Gold (1883). None of these had more than a passing interest. Burton had not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of travel. He wrote too fast, and took too little pains about the form. His blunt, disconnected sentences and ill-constructed chapters were full of information and learning, and contained not a few thrusts for the benefit of government or other people, but they were not "readable." There was something ponderous about his very humor, and his criticism was personal and savage. By far the most celebrated of all his books is the translation of the "Arabian Nights" (The Thousand Nights and a Night, 16 vois., privately printed, 1885-88), which occupied the greater part of his leisure at Trieste. As a monument of his Arabic learning and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Eastern life this translation was his greatest achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their most vulgar "Billingsgate", with their philosophy and modes of thought as well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's "anthropological notes", embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from questions of taste, abound in valuable observations based upon long study of the manners and the writings of the Arabs. The translation itself is often marked by extraordinary resource and felicity in the exact reproduction of the sense of the original; Burton's vocabulary was marvelously extensive, and he had a genius for hitting upon the right word; but his fancy for archaic words and phrases, his habit of coining words, and the harsh and rugged style he affected, detract from the literary quality of the work without in any degree enhancing its fidelity. With grave defects, but sometimes brilliant merits, the translation holds a mirror to its author. He was, as has been well said, an Elizabethan born out of time; in the days of Sir Francis Drake his very faults might have counted to his credit. Of his other works, Vikram and the Vampire, Hindu Tales (1870), and a history of his favorite arm, The Book of the Sword, vol. I (1884), unfinished, may be mentioned. His translation of The Lusiads of Camoens (1880) was followed (1881) by a sketch of the poet's life. Burton had a fellow-feeling for the poet adventurer, and his translation is an extraordinarily happy reproduction of its original. A manuscript translation of the "Scented Garden", from the Arabic, was burned by his widow, acting in what she believed to be the interests of her husband's reputation. Burton married Isabel Arundell in 1861, and owed much to her courage, sympathy and passionate devotion. Her romantic and exaggerated biography of her husband, with all its faults, is one of the most pathetic monuments which the unselfish love of a woman has ever raised to the memory of her hero. Another monument is the Arab tent of stone and marble which she built for his tomb at Mortlake.
Wife: Isabel Arundell (m. Jan-1861)
University: Trinity College, Oxford University (1840-42, expelled)
Freemasonry
Royal Geographical Society
Knight of the British Empire 5-Feb-1886
Expelled from School
Religious Mission: Hajj (1853)
White Supremacists
Risk Factors: Marijuana, Opium, Malaria, Syphilis, Gout
Is the subject of books:
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 1893, BY: Isabel Burton, DETAILS: (2 vols.)
The Life of Sir Richard Burton, 1906, BY: Thomas Wright, DETAILS: (2 vols.)
Author of books:
Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851)
Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855–56, travelogue)
First Footsteps in East Africa (1856, travelogue)
Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860, travelogue)
City of the Saints (1861, travelogue)
Book of the Sword (1884, nonfiction)
The Kasidah (1880, poetry)"
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Excellent history share, wonder if the actor was named after him.
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