Richard Francis Burton: The Man of Twenty-Nine Languages
In 1853, a British Army officer walked into Mecca disguised as a Persian physician, having undergone circumcision specifically to survive inspection if discovered. He was not the first European to make the pilgrimage in disguise, but his account of it remains the most famous and best documented of the period — one exploit among dozens in a life that also produced the first unexpurgated English *Arabian Nights*, an English *Kama Sutra*, a near-fatal spear through both cheeks in Somaliland, and a public feud with his own expedition partner over the source of the Nile that ended only with that partner's mysterious death.
A Childhood Without a Fixed Address
Richard Francis Burton was born on 19 March 1821 in Torquay, Devon, to Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, an Anglo-Irish army officer, and Martha Baker. His family moved constantly through England, France, and Italy during his childhood, exposing him early to multiple languages and cultures in a way conventional English schooling of the period did not. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840, but spent more effort on fencing, rowing, and falconry than coursework, reportedly impressing peers by speaking authentic classical Latin and Greek pronunciation rather than the anglicized versions taught in English schools. He was permanently expelled in April 1842 after attending a forbidden steeplechase, by his own account a deliberate challenge to college authority.
Languages as a Weapon and a Passport
Commissioned into the Bombay Army in 1842, Burton spent eighteen years in India, earning the nickname "Ruffian Dick" for his combativeness. Stationed in Gujarat under General Charles Napier, he passed six formal language examinations, becoming proficient in Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Marathi — the Royal Asiatic Society notes he passed the Company's language examinations at the very top of the field. He studied Indian religious traditions with equal intensity, reportedly earning authorization to wear the sacred thread from a Hindu teacher and gaining recognition as a hafiz, someone who has memorized the Quran, through his study of Islam. Over his lifetime he is credited with mastery of at least twenty-nine languages, and by some counts as many as forty if dialects are included — a command of language that functioned less as an academic accomplishment than as a practical tool for moving unnoticed through societies that would have refused a visibly foreign Englishman entry.
Mecca, Harar, and a Spear Through the Face
In 1853, using that linguistic and religious fluency, Burton undertook the Hajj disguised successively as a Persian mirza, a Sunni sheikh, a physician, and a dervish, traveling from Alexandria through Cairo to Medina and entering Mecca that September, where he documented the Kaaba and the Zamzam Well in detail few outsiders had ever recorded. The following year, backed by the Royal Geographical Society, he led an expedition into Somaliland disguised as an Arab merchant and reached the walled city of Harar in January 1855 — a place local tradition held would fall the moment a white Christian entered it. He stayed ten days as the Emir's guest, effectively a prisoner, and made it out. The expedition ended badly: camped near Berbera that April, Somali warriors attacked the party at night, and Burton was impaled by a javelin that entered one cheek and exited the other, leaving a permanent scar. His companion, John Hanning Speke, was wounded eleven times.
The Nile, and the Partner Who Broke Away
The Royal Geographical Society funded Burton and Speke again in 1857 for an expedition into Central Africa's Great Lakes region in search of the Nile's source. Both men suffered severely from malaria and disease along the way, often needing to be carried; Burton was nearly blind when the expedition reached Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, awestruck by the sight even as Speke, temporarily sightless himself from an eye infection, could not see it at all. Their surveying instruments lost, the pair returned to Zanzibar in 1859 with the question still unresolved. Speke sailed for London immediately and began lecturing that Lake Victoria, which he had glimpsed separately during the expedition, was the Nile's true source — a claim Burton disputed and viewed as a breach of an agreement to present their findings jointly. The dispute became a public, bitter feud. It was scheduled to be settled in formal debate before the British Association for the Advancement of Science on 16 September 1864; Speke died of a gunshot wound the day before, in circumstances officially ruled accidental but never fully resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
A Consular Career and a Library of Translations
Burton's later career took him through a string of difficult diplomatic postings — Fernando Pó, Santos in Brazil, and Damascus, where his closeness to Islamic and Sufi circles cost him his post amid local political tension. He settled into a quieter consulship in Trieste in 1872, calling himself "a broken man" even as the light workload gave him time for his most enduring work. Through the privately organized Kama Shastra Society, created with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot specifically to sidestep British obscenity law, he published English translations of the *Kama Sutra* (1883, worked from a later Sanskrit-derived text rather than the ancient original, which he could not read), a ten-volume unexpurgated *Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night* (1885), and *The Perfumed Garden* (1886), an Arabic erotic manual. His "Terminal Essay" accompanying the *Nights* included a fourteen-thousand-word study of pederasty across cultures — for decades the most explicit published discussion of homosexuality in the English language — built around his own theorized "Sotadic zone," a geographic band where he argued male homosexuality was culturally normalized.
The Honest Reckoning on Race
Burton's record is not simply that of a broad-minded linguist among narrow contemporaries. He co-founded the Anthropological Society of London in 1863 with James Hunt, an organization that gave institutional cover to scientific racism, and his travel writing at times asserted the intellectual superiority of the white race even as his fieldwork depended on genuine immersion in the cultures he studied. He was made Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1886, a late honor for a career the Foreign Office had repeatedly sidelined over his reputation for provocation. He died of a heart attack in Trieste on 20 October 1890. His wife Isabel, despite his lifelong avowed atheism, arranged a Catholic last rite, and afterward burned a substantial portion of his papers, including a planned new translation of erotic material she judged would damage his reputation — an act of posthumous editing still debated by his biographers, though twenty-one boxes of manuscripts and correspondence survived and are held at the Huntington Library.
Why Richard Is Called a Genius
Burton's claim to genius is the least contested of any explorer of his era, and it rests specifically on linguistic and ethnographic absorption at a scale almost no contemporary matched: near-native command of dozens of languages, religious fluency deep enough to be accepted, at least provisionally, inside traditions he was not born into, and a documentary output — geographic, religious, sexual, literary — that professional scholars still consult. The Royal Asiatic Society, which established the Burton Medal in his name in 1923, credits him specifically with pioneering long-term field research that combined cultural investigation with genuine local engagement, a standard the medal still honors. The honest counter-case sits alongside that record rather than erasing it: Burton's own writing on race was frequently condescending and occasionally worse, his co-founding of the Anthropological Society lent respectability to pseudo-scientific racial theory, and his rupture with Speke, however Speke's conduct is also judged, ended in a death neither man got to explain. Genius, in Burton's case, described an extraordinary capacity to absorb and perform other cultures convincingly — not a claim to moral clarity about them.
Legacy
The Royal Asiatic Society's Burton Medal and a body of translations still in print more than a century later are the durable record of a man whose reach exceeded almost every explorer of his generation, in languages if not always in geography — he never did settle the Nile question himself, and left that argument, unfinished, in Speke's hands and then in history's.
Achievements
- Educated at Trinity College
