He spoke 29 languages, wrote a book on sword-making, translated the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra¹, converted to Hinduism, Islam and became a Sufi mystic and studied the Kabbalah. He went on a Hajj to Medina in disguise (at the risk of his life), discovered Lake Tanganika and the source of the Nile. He coined the word 'safari'. A spear through his face left him with scars on both cheeks. By any standards, he was extraordinary.

Marriage

Attitudes to the people he met

In some ways, Burton reflected the attitudes of the times to the people he met on his travels and his description of them seems to have varied according to his audience. He has been protrayed as an imperialist with typical Victorian attitudes to other peoples. However, unlike most of his contemporaries, he seems to have had an attitude on interest rather than of one of superiority. In his travels with John Hanning Speke², his one-time friend, he records details of the private lives of the peoples he meets and shows a sympathy for their cultures.

A speech from the film, Mountains of the Moon, although fictitious, serves to illustrate this.

I heard an Englishman say this:'"The black man is indolent. Lazy by nature. He drinks his beer at sunrise and sleeps all day.' Well, perhaps. It can be one hundred and twenty degrees at the Equator. That man is consumed with the same daily tasks: gathering food, gathering wood. He does it with primitive tools and he does it at sundown. And then he dances. He tells stories.
'What does he accomplish?' asks the Englishman. Well, what does the Englishman accomplish if he mines coal all day, sips his beer at night, and then succumbs to fatigue, failing to make love and then forgets how? If my travels, if my books, have meaning, if geography itself has significance, it is that we are made to lift our eyes from our own small provincial selves to the whole complex and magnificent world.

The truth is more likely to be somewhere in between the imperialist man and the tolerant man, interested in learning from other cultures.

Life and Works

Unfortunately, many of his writings were destroyed by his wife on his death. She destroyed all his journals and diaries and then published a biography of him showing him as she would have liked him to be - a good Catholic and a refined and modest man. Posterity will not thank her.

BBC Links

• Find out more about this extraordinary man with
  BBC History.