‘Ruffian Dick’ spoke 40 languages, infiltrated male brothels and Mecca and is remembered as Britain’s most flamboyant adventurer
In 1842, a group of Oxford dons glanced up from their game of bowls to see a horse trotting out of the main gates of Trinity College. Seated in the dog cart it was pulling was a young man they had expelled for the crime of attending a steeplechase. Richard Burton had already acquired something of a reputation at the university — for challenging another undergraduate who had laughed at his droopy moustache to a duel, for his debts to his tailor, for rowdy parties and for caricaturing the teachers who believed he might one day be turned into a clergyman. Informed of his sentence, Burton gave a low bow and wished his judges every future happiness. As the wheels of his dog cart ploughed over the college flower beds, Burton sounded a tin trumpet and blew kisses to passing shopgirls. While the dons spent the next 20 years mouldering away in Oxford, the man they “sent down” rose to become the most exotic explorer in the world, simultaneously confident of the pre-eminence of the west and beguiled by the mysticism of the east, driven partly by a passion to discover “Gnosis”, or the meaning of existence, and partly by pure egotism. Like many noteworthy men, he was slightly nuts. “Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race,” he boasted.
Burton was described in his Times obituary as “one of the most remarkable men of his time”. Yet his tomb in the suburban Catholic cemetery at Mortlake is one of the great unvisited sites of London, a striking sandstone mausoleum copied from an elaborate desert tent made for him in Damascus. It is perhaps not surprising that it is adorned with a crucifix. But it also carries a Star of David and the Islamic crescent-and-star.
Burton’s name is inscribed on the roll of winners of the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal “for his various exploratory enterprises, and especially for his perilous expedition with Captain JH Speke to the great lakes in Eastern Africa”, when the two men discovered the source of the Nile. The following name inscribed on the roll of honour inside the Society’s doors in Kensington is that of Jane, Lady Franklin, “for self-sacrificing perseverance in sending out expeditions to ascertain the fate of her husband”, Captain Sir John Franklin, who had been frozen to death attempting to discover the Northwest Passage in 1847. The battered boards list name after name of Victorian explorers who left Britain to chart unmapped wildernesses and turn the map pink — Baker, Burke, Fitzroy, Ross, Stanley, Thompson and dozens of others. David Livingstone may be the most famous of them. But Richard Burton is easily the most colourful. . . .
For a while the rejected undergraduate toyed with emigrating, or enlisting in the Austrian army, the Swiss Guards or the Foreign Legion, until finally deciding to be “shot at for sixpence a day” with British forces in India. Imperial service was the route taken by many a young man sick of the limitations of life in Britain and at the time the army was desperate for officers, having just been cut to pieces during its retreat from Kabul.
The loss of the war in Afghanistan was one of the greatest imperial disasters of the 19th century. How could an expeditionary force from the world’s greatest military power be reduced to a single survivor by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen? But Burton “blessed the name” of the Afghans for giving him the chance of a new life.
Since the majority of the papers dealing with his childhood were destroyed in a fire, most of what we know of his life to this point comes from what Burton chose to disclose in an autobiography. He was certainly the eldest son of an army officer who considered him something of a prodigy. Burton claimed (he was not overburdened with modesty) that he had learnt Latin at three and Greek at four. Since his father had settled the family in France, he certainly spoke fluent French as a child. It was said that he could play chess blindfolded by 14, at which age he was already a skilled fencer. By the time he went to Oxford (his father had the bizarre idea that he might make a clergyman), the young Burton had brought his music lessons to an end by smashing a violin over the head of his teacher, but had learnt to box, drink and find his way around a brothel....MUCH MORERichard Burton, Victorian explorer
