The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (39 page)

He was born the son of an Anglo-Irish army officer and was educated—though that might be putting too formal a gloss on it—in France (where the
family sometimes lived, Burton's father had itinerant feet), Italy, and England. While already facile with languages, Burton's main interest as a boy was in settling
affaires d'honneur
with his fists. He fenced, boxed, and generally got in trouble of a precociously manly sort with cigars, dueling pistols, and cognac. Naturally, his father believed that Burton belonged at Oxford—and so he duly enrolled and set about frightening the undergraduates with his dark, brooding features and drooping black moustache; he was expelled for attending a forbidden (by the school authorities) horse race.

Much more attractive to Burton was service in the army of the British East India Company, in which he was duly commissioned. He took up the study of Hindustani and every other Indian language for which he could find a teacher, as well as Persian and Arabic, which he had begun teaching himself at Oxford. In the course of his life he would become fluent in more than two dozen languages, and even—as a young officer in India—would keep monkeys hoping to make sense of their chattering (he also taught them to eat at table with him). He became an army translator, which gave him a boost in pay.

When Burton went to Oxford, he had known next to nothing of religion, but now it too became a passion. He learned so much about Hinduism that he was made an honorary Brahmin. On Sunday he attended a Catholic church, thinking Catholicism “a terrible religion for a man of the world to live in, but a good one to die in”
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(his wife later made sure he did just that). Meanwhile, there were consolations to living in it—Burton once tried to pry a pretty nun out of her convent. He also began memorizing the Koran and investigating Sufism.

He joined the survey of Sind and began his hobby of passing as a native and taking notes on everything he could about native life—especially its
vices, the detailed study of which, when his reports leaked from General Charles Napier to the Bombay government, caused a scandal. That put a black mark against his name, and with his health in tatters through cholera and eye trouble, Burton applied for sick leave. He did so in despair; it appeared that curiosity had killed his career. With nothing better to do he wrote the first three of the forty-odd books he was destined to write. The topics might have sounded dull—his reflections on Goa and Sind—but Burton's bluntly expressed prejudices, controversial in his day, would no doubt have him prosecuted for hate crimes today; pick a nationality, race, religion, or tribe, and Burton would have something shockingly bad (and verified by his experience) to say about it. Occasionally he turned his pen to manuals—on falconry, the use of the bayonet, and the art of the sword. Almost invariably his sales were minuscule, and the few readers he gained he offended.

His bad reputation—he was known as “Ruffian Dick”—inevitably made him attractive to women; and to one woman in particular: Isabel Arundell, ten years his junior, from one of the most aristocratic Catholic families in England. Burton was the fulfillment of her every romantic dream. Burton liked what he saw as well, but was too distracted by his other passions to do more than try out his hypnotic stare on her (he had studied hypnotism as he had studied alchemy and other mysterious arts). One of his ambitions at this time was to cross the Arabian Peninsula disguised as an Arab; he had practical and quasi-scientific reasons for his adventure, but the overriding desire was to see Mecca; the penalty for an infidel entering the holy city was death.

His pilgrimage took him from Alexandria to Cairo to Suez, down the Red Sea coast to Yenbo, then inland to Medina, circling down to Mecca through bandit country. One of his traveling companions—an unwanted one that Burton distrusted and tried to shake—suspected his imposture, especially after searching Burton's belongings and finding a sextant. But the other
Muslims who had joined Burton defended him, even if they could not explain away this odd appurtenance of infidel Western science. Lamed by a foot injury, Burton spent part of the journey in a litter, which made his covert note-taking a bit easier. In Medina, which he entered in July 1853, he noted, among other things, the price range for slave girls of different races. (European women should be proud that they fetched far the highest price.) In Mecca he even managed to secretly sketch the interior of the Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam. Burton, inevitably, wrote up his adventures, which were published as a book in 1855.

He returned briefly to his regiment in India, but knowing he had no future there, and his taste for exploration quickened, he solicited and gained permission from the Company to lead an expedition into the interior of Somalia. Burton's goal was Harar, a mysterious city closed to Europeans; he would be the first to enter it. Because of opposition from the British political resident at Aden, Colonel James Outram, Burton's expedition was to be limited to coastal exploration with Lieutenant John Hanning Speke—a man as sober and conventional as Burton was wild and extraordinary. But Speke was an adventurer too in his own careful, accountant-like way. He had explored the Himalayas, was a great hunter, and had carefully earned leave time so that he could spend three years in African exploration. They traveled separate ways to Somalia, because Burton had plans of his own.

Disguised as an Arab, he was determined to press on to Harar regardless of the wishes of Colonel Outram. Arriving in Somaliland on 31 October 1854, he impressed the natives with feats of strength and slowly assembled an expedition for the interior, though he was warned it would surely lead to his death, for strangers were not welcomed in Harar and fierce tribes haunted the way. As he approached the city he tore away his native disguise because, “my white face had converted me into a Turk, a nation more hated and suspected than any European, without our prestige.”
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When he approached the city gates, he announced that he had a message for the emir from the British government in Aden. He was escorted into the presence of an unprepossessing young sultan whom Burton bombarded with compliments and who, surprisingly, did not order him killed. He instead ordered him to meet the wazir of Harar, to whom Burton spoke of Britain's desire for friendship and trade. The message appeared well received—all the more remarkable because the Harari believed their downfall would come from the first European to enter the city. Now, however, having boldly made his way in, Burton had to convince the emir and wazir to let him go, which they seemed in no haste to do. It was a relief when, after ten days, he was given a letter to take back with him to Aden.

There he planned his next expedition into Somalia. It literally scarred him for life. One night, camped on the Somali coast, Burton's party was attacked by hostile tribesmen. The natives fled, leaving Burton, Speke, and two other British officers to repel the attack with revolver and sword, which they did, though likely outnumbered by at least ten to one. At one point in the fighting Burton almost crashed his sabre into a native guide; when he paused, a Somali warrior drove a spear through Burton's face, knocking out several teeth. Burton staggered, the spear sticking through one cheek and protruding from the other. Somehow he survived and was discovered the next morning by the crew of the ship that had left him on the coast; one of the crew members had to yank the spear from his face. Of the four attacked officers, one was killed; two made miraculous escapes (though Speke was badly wounded); and Burton gained a most fitting scar.

Though needing a little time to recuperate, Burton volunteered for active service in the Crimean War, only to find that hostilities were winding down by the time he arrived. He was, however, eventually sent to Turkey to help raise a unit of Turkish irregular cavalry (bashi-bazouks) that would be under British command. The cavalry, alas, terrorized its allies more than the enemy—Burton thought they were misunderstood—and Burton resigned his post, putting another black mark on his army career. Thinking entrepreneurially, he envisioned creating a business that would help Muslims on their way to Mecca—The Pilgrimage to Mecca Syndicate, Limited—though this plan too was abandoned; and one has to wonder how Muslims would have taken to doing business with an infidel who had tricked his way into the holiest site in Islam. A better plan, and one that would make him famous, was to search for the source of the Nile.

In 1857, Burton, joined by Speke, led an expedition sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society to find the great lakes of Africa, from which the Nile presumably sprang. It was an epic journey of calamities—Speke went temporarily blind; had a beetle penetrate into his ear; and was inevitably beset by fever—but Burton, though he had to be carried part of the way, kept on. Burton saw Lake Tanganyika, which Speke could not because of his blindness, but when Burton was the sick one, Speke discovered Lake Victoria, which is indeed the chief source of the Nile, though Burton doubted it and Speke couldn't prove it. Their separate discoveries and separate accounts of the expedition led to an unbecoming rivalry and rift between the two men. In modern accounts of this affair, Burton generally comes off better, because he is, well, Burton; and perhaps this is just. Speke, though undoubtedly courageous, comes through in his letters as insecure
and boastful. As Burton's best biographer, Byron Farwell, concludes, while Speke had a reputation for modesty, “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the discoverer of the major source of the Nile and the largest lake in Africa was a cad.”
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Burton was no less an imperialist than the conventional Speke and no less contemptuous of the natives. This is the man, after all, who called East Africans “an undeveloped and not to be developed race.”
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Still, liberals like to claim Burton because of his scholarly interest in erotica (fulfilling the great liberal desire to “break down taboos”), his weakness for shocking Victorian Christian moral sensibilities (there is nothing liberals like to do more), and a misreading of his worldly adventures to qualify Burton as an early multicultural citizen of the world. But to know anything of Burton is to know that he was a political and social Tory, that he would view modern liberals as weak and decadent (for all his unflinching interest in men's vices, he knew decadent civilizations when he saw them), and that he believed absolutely in Western superiority (even given his predilection for Sufism) and in advancing the British Empire.