Burton’s father was appalled and furious but, recognizing the inevitable, allowed both his sons to join the East India Company army. Edward was posted to Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, while Burton was posted to the subcontinent itself.
Warned of the heat in India, Burton shaved his head and bought a wig as well as learning Hindustani. During the voyage, he boxed, fenced, and practiced his language skills. By the time he landed in India, he was almost completely fluent. He did not know it then, but he was about to begin a relationship with the subcontinent that would provide a driving force to his previously aimless life.
It did not begin well. Burton fell ill with diarrhea and spent time in a sanatorium. He disliked the smell of curry and the lack of privacy in the company rooms. He began to learn Gujerati and Persian, ignoring the distressing presence of a crematorium next door, of which he said, “The smell of roast Hindu was most unpleasant.” He found the tiny society of five hundred Europeans stifling, though he enjoyed the brothels and bazaars. For almost two months he endured, then he was sent at last to his first posting, at Baroda. He took a horse, servants, a supply of port, and a bull terrier with him. He was slowly falling in love with India, in all its endless variety.
Baroda was a baking-hot maze of alleys and exotic sights, with summer temperatures up to 120° F. The lives of the inhabitants were brutal, with appalling punishments for misdeeds, such as placing a criminal’s head beneath an elephant’s foot to be crushed. Burton loved it, from the strange smells of incense, hashish, and opium to the courtesans, shrines, alien flowers, and colorful mosques. Of the white officers, he said: “There was not a subaltern in the 18th Regiment who did not consider himself capable of governing a million Hindus.” He took a temporary native wife, whom he described as his “walking dictionary,” and found the courtesans more playful and less inhibited than their frosty counterparts in England. He threw himself into an exploration of sexual matters that would inform his writings many years later. Hunting and hawking kept him busy for a while, but he quickly lost the taste for it. He kept a company of monkeys, who ate at the table with him. He won the regimental horse race, learned the Indian style of wrestling, and taught his troops gymnastics to keep them agile.
In 1843, Burton took government examinations in Hindustani and made first in his class. He so successfully immersed himself in a Hindu snake cult that he was given the janeo, the three-ply cotton cord that showed he was a Brahmin, the highest caste. This was a unique event, unheard of before or since. In all other cases, a Hindu had to be born into that religion and only attained the highest caste after millennia of reincarnation. This honor came despite the fact that he remained a meat eater and is the more astonishing for it. He went on to discover Tantrism, with its philosophy, as he wrote, “not to indulge shame or adversion to anything…but freely to enjoy all the pleasures of the senses.”
He attended Catholic chapel, then later converted to Islam and then Sikhism, in love with the mysticism of all faiths and throwing himself into one until he found himself drawn to the next. He was not a dilettante, however. In each case, he searched and learned all he could and completed every ritual with steadfast determination and belief, yet somehow his soul wandered as much as his feet and there were always new towns to see.
In 1843, Burton became the regimental interpreter for the Eighteenth Bombay Native Infantry and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai), bound for Karachi to join General Charles Napier and the British forces fighting in Sindh. Napier recognized Burton’s abilities and used him in a variety of diplomatic missions through 1844 and 1845. Many of the details have been lost, but Burton became indispensable, a man who could fight or talk his way out of anything. He became used to traveling in disguise, and his contemporaries whispered that he had “gone native.” In 1845, when Burton was just twenty-four, Napier sent him to infiltrate and report on a male brothel. Burton wrote of what he saw in such grisly detail that his many enemies suggested he had taken part in the activities he witnessed. There is, however, no evidence for this, and in fact Burton was always scathing about “le Vice,” as he called it. Napier had the brothel destroyed after reading the reports, and it is worth pointing out that the famously straitlaced general lost no confidence in his agent as a result of this mission.
Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid
Away from the society of Britons in India, Burton became more and more of an outsider. He wore native clothing constantly, complete with turban and loose cotton robes. His experience of different faiths meant that he could work as a spy among Muslims or Hindus with equal invisibility. He also had himself circumcised so that his disguise would be foolproof even while bathing. In the Indus Valley, he found remnants of Alexander the Great’s forts, as well as far more ancient ruins. He soaked it all up into his prodigious memory and delighted in fables and stories wherever he traveled for Napier. His reports were often inflammatory, and he complained constantly that the English did not understand the natives. Napier, for example, tried to make punishments humane, and thus they lost their effect on a people used to brutal rulers. Instead of cutting off a hand for stealing, the English merely imprisoned a man, who then thought them effete. Napier also issued a proclamation that he would hang anyone who killed a woman on suspicion of unfaithfulness, as was common in Sindh at that time. Burton may have had a personal reason to resent this practice, as his own affair with a high-born Persian woman came to an abrupt and possibly violent end, though details are sketchy.
When Burton was not working, he endured the hottest months, took notes, and drew everything he saw. He was always prolific and either wrote or translated more than fifty books in his time, on subjects ranging from the history of sword making to the strange places and people he saw. He was the first white man to publish details of the Islamic Sufi sect, which he threw himself into with his usual ferocious enthusiasm.
In 1845, suspecting that the British were about to annex the Punjab, a Sikh army crossed into British-held territory. It was a short war but hard fought, and by 1846, the Sikhs were brought to the negotiating table. The Punjab came under British rule. Around this time, Burton became ill with cholera and recovered very slowly. During his sick leave, he explored the Portuguese colony at Goa. He left his regular mistress behind in Sindh and spent some time trying to get a nun out of a local convent to be his next one. In one attempt, he visited the wrong room in the night and found himself being chased by an elderly nun. He pushed her into a river as he made his escape.
In the company of Englishwomen, he found himself a man apart, almost unable to communicate or remember the strict rules of contact and flirtation. In the end, he managed to find another “temporary wife.” By this time, Burton dressed and acted as a man of the East rather than the West and had been made very dark by the constant sun. He continued to study Sufism but around 1847–8 also had himself inducted into Sikhism, a “conversion” that was never likely to last long with this firebrand of a man.
Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid
In 1848 war with the Sikhs broke out again. Burton was passed over for duties as an interpreter, a decision he later claimed was due to his report on the brothel. Ill and thin, he decided to return to Europe in 1849 after seven years in India. He made a partial recovery on the voyage, but poor health continued to plague him. He traveled to Italy and settled for a time in France, where he began further study of sword work, becoming a renowned master of the blade. In one exhibition he disarmed a French master seven times in a row.
In the relative peace of France, Burton completed many of the manuscripts that survive today, such as Falconry in the Valley of the Indus and A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise. In Boulogne he met the woman who would become his wife, Isabel Arundell. She was beautiful, of an ancient English family, and nineteen years old. Perhaps surprisingly, he would remain faithful to her always. She wrote in her diary: “Where are the men who inspired the ‘grandes passions’ of bygone days? Is the race extinct? Is Richard the last of them?” Burton adore
d her, but at the same time, the world of France and England was too small for him. He was given a year’s leave from the East India Company for a journey to Arabia, where he would need all the skill and knowledge he had won in India to survive. The Royal Geographical Society backed him, and he set off in 1853. Once again he fell into the role of a Muslim, even working under the guise as a doctor in Alexandria for a month. He traveled from Cairo to Suez, the number of his companions growing to a large party as he met others making journeys to Medina, where the tomb of Muhammad lies. Burton was not impressed by the place, finding it “mean and tawdry” after great expectations. He took notes on everything he saw and learned, from folklore and the prices of slaves to the practice of female circumcision. The discovery of such notes would have meant his death, and he kept them in numbered squares that only he could reassemble.
From Medina he traveled to Mecca itself. Burton saw the fabled black stone there, deciding to his own satisfaction that it was a meteorite. He completed the tour of the pilgrim sites and got out alive. He was due back in Bombay by 1854 and was not able to return to London in time, though he would have been lionized there for his achievement.
After Mecca, Burton became famous and his exploits were widely reported. He had a free hand in choosing other expeditions. With company approval, he visited the fabled Ethiopian city of Harar, where he was held prisoner for ten days. Around that time, in 1855, his brother was badly wounded by natives in Ceylon. Though Edward recovered for a time, he lost his health and sanity and spent his last forty years in a sanatorium in Surrey, a sad end for the less turbulent Burton brother.
Meanwhile, Richard Burton went from triumph to triumph. At that time, Africa was truly “the Dark Continent,” a place of mystery, strange animals, and vast unknown lands. With John Speke, Burton attempted a trip into the continental interior, known as the “Mountains of the Moon,” but was badly wounded by a Somali spear. Speke was wounded in eleven places, and they were lucky to survive. However, Burton was still the man of choice when the Royal Geographical Society wanted to organize an expedition to find the fabled “inner sea” of Africa and the source of the Nile in 1856. He became secretly engaged to Isabel before he and Speke became the first white men to see Lake Tanganyika. Speke went on to find what is now known as Lake Victoria, though the journey almost killed both men. It was Burton’s most celebrated exploration, though he fell out publicly with Speke afterward. On their return to London, Burton and Speke wrote viciously about each other, each one claiming the glory for himself and ignoring the other’s contribution.
In 1861, Burton married Isabel at last in a Catholic ceremony, though with his history, it is likely to have been merely expedient. He continued to explore West Africa after his marriage and became consul in Damascus for a time. He also continued to write and in 1863 founded the Anthropological Society of London. By then an establishment figure, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886.
He is perhaps best known for his translation into English of the Kama Sutra, an Indian sexual manual, as well as Arabian Nights, The Perfumed Garden, and Vikram and the Vampire, a collection of Hindu stories. He died in 1890 of a heart attack, and his wife had the Catholic last rites performed for him. Sadly, she then burned all his surviving notes and manuscripts, just as Byron’s were burned before him. It was a truly great loss to both literature and culture. There are some men who rise above the period of their lives and the cultures in which they are born. Burton was a man of insatiable curiosity and endless wonder. His example has inspired many explorers after him, both of the world and the spirit. He and his wife are buried together in a tomb shaped like a Bedouin tent in Mortlake, near Richmond in London.
Recommended
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography by Edward Rice A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton by Mary S. Lovell
Daniel Boone
I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
—Daniel Boone
Daniel Boone is the iconic backwoods frontiersman. A mixture of fact, legend, and mythology, the story of this colonial adventurer and explorer who blazed trails from the coastal plains into the interior makes him the first folk hero of modern America. The popular images of the real-life Davy Crockett and the fictional Hawkeye—their exploits, their fame, even their clothes—are based upon Daniel Boone.
Boone’s family was from Devonshire, in the southwest of England. Daniel’s father, Squire, and grandfather George were among those who took that adventurous step to start a new life in the colonies. Squire arrived in Philadelphia in early 1713, followed by George in 1717. The family worshipped with the Society of Friends, so it was natural for them to settle in Pennsylvania as did many other Quakers. Thomas Paine was another, sixty years later.
Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley
Quaker William Penn had founded Pennsylvania in 1681. Using a land grant from Charles II, he established a colony where all religions could worship freely. Very few people then imagined what might be the future of the many British colonies in America, but Penn got it right when he predicted: “Colonies…are the seedlings of nations.” Squire Boone married a Welsh Quaker, Sarah Morgan, in 1720 and ten years later bought 158 acres near Reading in Berks County. In the sparsely populated Oley Valley he felled trees and built a simple log cabin—just one room above a cellar and spring. The two-story stone addition with a front porch that remains today was built later. In the original cabin, the sixth of their eleven children was born in 1734. They named him Daniel for the biblical hero. According to the family Bible, when grandparents George and Mary died, they left seventy descendants: eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. There are now many Boones across the United States.
Daniel and his siblings spoke with the broad, soft Devonshire accent of their father, overlaid by their mother’s Welsh lilt. Their childhood in and around the Oley Valley was peaceful, for the Quakers had a treaty of friendship with the Delaware and Susquehannock nations that lasted into the 1760s. Daniel helped his father with the farming, fished, trapped, and hunted with a crude spear for food. He received his first squirrel gun when he was twelve. He learned his reading and writing skills from his family and his woodcraft and hunting skills from Native Americans.
One early story tells of Daniel and other boys hunting in the wilderness when they were attacked by a puma. All the boys except Daniel scattered. He stood his ground, cocked his gun, and, as the puma leaped toward him, shot it through the heart.
In 1750, Squire Boone sold his land to relative William Maugridge and moved south. His eldest son, Israel, had married a “world-ling,” a non-Quaker, and as a result had been “read out” of the local meeting. By refusing to criticize his son’s conduct Squire was also read out. So the family made the long trek down the Owatin Creek, through Maryland and Virginia. Plodding oxen hauled the wooden wagons for more than a year until they reached North Carolina. The Boone family built their new homes in the Yadkin Valley, a few miles west of Mocksville.
Back in the Oley Valley, Maugridge moved on to the first Boone farm but soon landed in debt. He was forced to mortgage the property for two hundred pounds to an insurance friend in Philadelphia—Benjamin Franklin.
Adventure in the shape of the French and Indian War (internationally, the Seven Years’ War) beckoned the young Daniel Boone, and he left home in early 1755 at age twenty. He became a wagon driver in Major General Braddock’s unsuccessful campaign to clear the French from the Ohio country. It was here that he first met volunteer Colonel George Washington of the Virginia militia. Having returned home, Boone married neighbor Rebecca Bryan a year later. On his father’s farm, like his father before him, they built a log cabin for their home.
Victories at Quebec and Montreal in 1759 turned the war in Britain’s favor. However, a pointless conflict arose in the Carolinas between settlers and their Cherokee allies. When Cherokee warriors raided Yadkin Valley in 1759—in retaliation for British executi
ons—the Boone family and others moved north to Culpeper County in Virginia. Boone remained to serve with the North Carolina militia, for which he traveled west across the Appalachian Mountains into Tanasi (Tennessee) country. This journey set the pattern for the rest of his life.
Through the passes of the Alleghenies, the Cumberlands, and the Shenandoah Valley lay a great unspoiled wilderness of woods and forests, hills and plains, clear streams and broad rivers. In Britain and Europe no one had been able to step through such a door for centuries. It offered both a geographic and a spiritual freedom, though a freedom with its own particular dangers and its own requirements for survival. Boone was enchanted. Still in Tennessee today is a tree bearing the deeply carved inscription: D. BOON CILLED A. BAR ON TREE IN THE YEAR 1760. He didn’t return home for two years.
A truce and peace was arranged between the Cherokee and the colonies in 1762; three Cherokee chiefs visited Britain, and the Boones returned to their Carolina homes. The following year, the Peace of Paris saw the end of the French and Indian War, the French being forced to withdraw from most of North America so that Canada, the American colonies, and Florida were all British.
The Carolinas were peaceful, but a northern alliance of Native Americans led by Ottawa chief Pontiac successfully rebelled against further white settlement westward. The British government saw their argument, and George III’s 1763 Royal Proclamation banned colonization west of the Appalachian Mountains. This proclamation remains today the legal baseline for Native American claims in Canada and the United States.
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