Richard Francis Burton’s career ranged from the Bombay Army and a disguised pilgrimage to Mecca to an expedition to Lake Tanganyika, consular postings overseas and translations that challenged Victorian publishing conventions. A formidable linguist and prolific writer, he made himself both an influential interpreter of other societies and a controversial figure. His achievements are best understood alongside the rivalries, arguments and difficult questions about his scholarship and attitudes that accompanied them.
A restless education and a career in India
Burton was born in Torquay, Devon, on 19 March 1821. His father was an officer in the British Army, and his childhood included years in France and Italy as well as England. He learnt several languages while young and entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840. His university career ended in 1842, when he was permanently expelled after attending a steeplechase event forbidden by the college. Burton later disparaged the teaching there; the available account connects his departure to the college’s disciplinary decision, rather than to a voluntary choice to leave because he found formal education stifling.
In 1842 he joined the Bombay Army, beginning an eighteen-year military career with the East India Company’s forces. Posted to the 18th Regiment of Native Infantry, he studied languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki and Marathi, passing six formal language examinations. He also took a close interest in the cultures and religions he encountered in India. His combination of language study and practical familiarity with local customs helped prepare him for travel beyond his military posting.
Burton’s linguistic reputation grew across a lifetime spent moving between regions and fields of study. The number of languages attributed to him varies according to how dialects are counted: the biographical account says he spoke up to 29, while its language section gives a range of at least 26 and possibly 40. The exact total is therefore uncertain. What is clear is that languages were not a decorative claim to learning for Burton; they informed his military work, travel, diplomatic service and writing.
The pilgrimage to Mecca
In 1853 Burton undertook the Hajj, travelling in disguise to Medina and Mecca. His preparation drew on years in India, language study and close attention to Muslim customs. He travelled under assumed identities, first through Egypt and then with caravans across the Arabian Peninsula. He reached Medina in July and Mecca in September, where he took part in the pilgrimage rites. His account, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, recorded the journey and his observations.
Burton’s expedition was daring, but he was not the first European non-Muslim to make the pilgrimage: the account identifies Ludovico di Varthema’s journey in 1503 and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s in 1815. Burton’s became one of the best-documented and most famous accounts of the period. That distinction matters: the journey’s significance lies in its detailed record and in the skill needed to travel without discovery, not in an unsupported claim to priority.
His earlier travels included an 1854–55 expedition to Somaliland with John Hanning Speke. Burton entered Harar in disguise and stayed there for ten days. On the return journey, the expedition was attacked near Berbera. Speke was wounded, and Burton was impaled by a javelin that passed through his cheek. He later described the episode in First Footsteps in East Africa (1856). The expedition’s failure and the investigation that followed damaged his professional prospects.
Lake Tanganyika and the Nile dispute
In 1856 the Royal Geographical Society funded another journey with Speke, this time into the East African Great Lakes region. The expedition set out from Zanzibar in June 1857, travelling inland with a large caravan. Illness, loss of supplies and the deaths of pack animals repeatedly hindered progress. In February 1858, Burton reached Lake Tanganyika, becoming the first European known to have seen it. He was ill, and Speke, temporarily blinded, could not see the lake at the time.
Speke continued north while Burton was incapacitated and reached Lake Victoria in August 1858. He came to believe that it was the source of the Nile, but the expedition lacked the supplies and instruments needed for a proper survey. Burton’s account appeared in Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860); Speke published his own account and returned to London before Burton. Their disagreement over the source became a public quarrel that harmed both men’s reputations. The evidence does not settle every dispute between them: Burton said they had agreed to speak publicly together, while later assessment cited in the biographical account considers the evidence against such a pledge strong.
Burton’s explorations did not end in East Africa. He travelled in the United States in 1860, including to Salt Lake City, and later served as a consul in West Africa, Brazil, Damascus and Trieste. His journeys in Brazil included travel through the central highlands and a canoe trip down the São Francisco River. In Damascus, where he took up the consular post in 1868, local tensions and his relationships with different communities brought him into conflict. He was recalled in 1871 and reassigned to Trieste the following year.
Writing, translation and controversy
Burton wrote widely on travel, languages, religion and other subjects, producing more than 40 books as well as articles and letters. His works included First Footsteps in East Africa, Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, The City of the Saints and The Highlands of Brazil. In 1863 he helped establish the Anthropological Society of London, whose stated purpose included publishing travellers’ observations. His writing and scholarly interests were wide-ranging, but they were not detached from the assumptions of their time: his involvement in an organisation that supported scientific racism complicates any uncomplicated description of him as a respectful cultural interpreter.
His most famous literary project was The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, commonly known in English as The Arabian Nights. The Kama Shastra Society, which Burton founded with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, privately circulated books that risked prosecution under Victorian obscenity laws. The first ten volumes of Burton’s translation appeared in 1885; seven supplementary volumes followed between 1886 and 1898. Its subscribers-only circulation and frank treatment of sexual subjects made the work controversial. Burton also translated The Kama Sutra in collaboration with Arbuthnot; he was not its sole translator, and the original Sanskrit was beyond his ability to read.
In 1886 Queen Victoria appointed Burton a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. He died in Trieste on 20 October 1890. His wife, Isabel, later burned many of his papers, including a manuscript of a further translation, while substantial collections of his surviving papers are held at the Huntington Library. Burton and Isabel are buried in a tomb shaped like a Bedouin tent at St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church in Mortlake, south-west London.
Why Sir Richard Francis Burton deserves a place in British Legacy
Burton belongs in British Legacy not as a simple emblem of heroic exploration, but as a figure whose work shows how travel, language and imperial institutions intersected in the nineteenth century. His record of the Hajj, his journey to Lake Tanganyika and his many books brought distant places and unfamiliar practices into British readers’ view. Those accounts are valuable evidence of his powers of observation and of the ambition of his travels, while also requiring attention to the limits and prejudices of the perspective from which they were written.
His literary legacy is equally specific. Burton’s Thousand Nights translation and the Kama Shastra Society challenged the restrictions imposed on publishing sexual material in Victorian Britain, even as their private circulation reflected those restrictions. His collaboration on the Kama Sutra, his translation projects and his travel writing helped make translation and cross-cultural scholarship part of his public reputation. His career also offers a useful counterweight to celebratory accounts of exploration: the Nile-source dispute with Speke, controversy surrounding his scholarship and his consular conflicts all belong to the story. Remembering Burton in British Legacy means recognising both the knowledge he helped circulate and the contested, historically situated methods through which he pursued it.
Sources
Richard Francis Burton — revision 1379337730 · Richard Francis Burton
Adapted in part from Richard Francis Burton by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
