Burton, Sir Richard

Burton, Sir Richard (Francis)

(born March 19, 1821, Torquay, Devonshire, Eng.—died Oct. 20, 1890, Trieste, Austria-Hungary) English scholar-explorer and Orientalist. Expelled from Oxford in 1842, Burton went to India as a subaltern officer. There he disguised himself as a Muslim and wrote detailed reports of merchant bazaars and urban brothels. He then traveled to Arabia, again disguised as a Muslim, and became the first non-Muslim European to penetrate the forbidden holy cities; he recounted his adventures in Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855–56), a classic account of Muslim life. In 1857–58 he led an expedition with John Hanning Speke in search of the source of the Nile River; stricken with malaria, he turned back after becoming the first European to reach Lake Tanganyika. His travels resulted in a total of 43 accounts of such subjects as Mormons, West African peoples, the Brazilian highlands, Iceland, and Etruscan Bologna. He learned 25 languages and numerous dialects; among his 30 volumes of translations were ancient Eastern manuals on the art of love, and he larded his famous Arabian Nights translation with ethnological footnotes and daring essays that won him many enemies in Victorian society. After his death his wife, Isabel, who was a devout Catholic, burned his 40 years of diaries and journals.