Mystery Solved ....

Sir Richard Francis Burton by Léopold Flameng, after Frederic Leighton, Baron Leighton etching,

(circa 1872-1875).  A huge thank you to Grosvenor Prints of Covent Garden, London, for their kind assistance in identifying this etching - http://www.grosvenorprints.com/.  Grosvenor Prints is one of the few remaining shops exclusively serving collectors of antique prints.

So, not Russian after all.  I wanted to bring you the short version of this man's life, but after reading, found it difficult to decide which bits to omit.  If you have five minutes, you should not miss this ....

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, KCMG, FRGS, Serious SOB, was the manliest man of the Victorian era. He was, at various points, a soldier, linguist, spy, explorer, anthropologist, diplomat, and sexologist. He was a massive, incredibly strong man with some of the greatest facial hair grown in an era defined by beards, moustaches and sideburns. He spoke 29 languages and another 12 dialects, wrote over 50 books, was regarded as the best fencer in Europe, and had more adventures than easily fit into the dozen-or-so full-length biographies written about him. Let’s look at the highlights.

Burton was born in 1821 to a retired British army officer, who spent the next 16-odd years dragging his family all over Western Europe; Burton was similarly restless his entire life, and eventually took the motto omni solum forti patria – every land is a brave man’s country. Burton and his brother Edward, like all boys, got into trouble. Their version of “trouble,” though, included things like beating their tutors with musical instruments, acting as undertakers during a cholera epidemic, cavorting with prostitutes in their teens, experimenting with opium and pummelling anyone who got in their way with fists, stones, blades and guns. In the midst of all this mayhem, Burton demonstrated his astounding capacity for learning languages, and somehow got enough education to squeak into Oxford. He didn’t last long at university: between challenging students to duels, correcting his professors on their pronounciation of Latin, Greek and Italian, and generally acting like a Victorian Bluto Blutarsky, expulsion wasn’t long coming.

Free from school, Burton shipped off to India as a soldier. To his disappointment, there were no wars going on, so instead he started learning local languages and customs (mainly through living with local women). He quickly became known as the best linguist in the Indian Army, and was snapped up for intelligence work in today’s Pakistan. A master of disguise, Burton would pass himself off as a local and disappear into the countryside, alone, for months on end, gathering information around campfires and coffeehouses about threats to the British occupation. It was a ballsy, “un-gentlemanly” way for a British officer to work, but he got the job done, gained the respect of his superiors, and was immortalized in literature as Colonel Creighton in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. During his Indian period, Burton dabbled in anthropology, converted to Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam in succession, fell in love with a Persian princess and tried to kidnap a Portugese nun.

After swashbuckling his way through the subcontinent, Burton embarked on the craziest exploit of his career. He disguised himself as a half-Afghan Muslim and made the Hajj, or Muslim pilgrimage, to Mecca and Medina. It took him over a year, during which he (almost) never broke character; if he had been discovered as a non-Muslim, he would have been righteously murdered on the spot. Leaving aside whether he really believed in Islam or not, that’s a hell of a risk. But he did it, made some major geographic and religious discoveries, and wrote a bestseller about his experiences. That escapade would have made most men’s careers, but Burton was only getting started.

Burton next turned to Africa. He explored the eastern coast, was the first foreigner into the sacred city of Harar (again, punishable by death), and took a spear through the face while battling tribesmen. He almost died from the wound, but got a gnarly scar and an awesome cocktail party story instead. Burton led a 2-year expedition to find the source of the Nile that ended in conflicting claims, lawsuits between the expedition members and finally, dramatically, the suicide of one of the claimants.

Burton then “retired” into life as a diplomat, in West Africa, Brazil, Syria and finally the city of Trieste. However, he was never at his desk: he preferred exploring rivers in dugout canoes, singlehandedly disrupting the slave trade, climbing mountains, finding lost manuscripts, etc. Imagine Indiana Jones as a bureaucrat. With a beard. And drunk and/or ripped on opium all the time. He took a tour of the United States in 1860 that was almost certainly an espionage mission on the eve of the Civil War; however, his book about the trip focuses on the food (he hated it), the whiskey (he loved it), Mormons (he wanted to join them) and scalping (he tried to convince some Apaches to demonstrate).

Yet Burton was not just an impulsive man of action; he was an intellectual, and a prolific writer on almost every topic conceivable. His personal experiences made him an expert on a half-dozen religions, and he wrote authoritative guides to swords, falconry and sex – he was the first to translate both the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights into English. (He also felt that the biggest problem facing British society was that British women were not taught to enjoy sex.) Burton cranked out a travel book every time he went anywhere. He was fascinated with the occult (and coined the term “ESP”), invested in doomed mining and archaeological ventures, and was the master of angry Letters to the Editor that threatened to reach out from the page and punch you right in the monocle. He loathed hypocrisy, greed, sexual repression and cultural imperialism; in other words, the favourite pastimes of his age. This attitude, combined with his exploits, made him one of the most famous men of his time. If you were a Victorian, you either loathed or loved Richard Burton.

Imagine him at a cocktail party: a huge and imposing figure covered in scars, easily dancing between topics and languages in every conversation, as likely to quote you thousand-year-old Arabic poetry as he is to beat you to a pulp with his bare hands. He could out-drink, out-smoke, outfight, hell, out-anything any other man in the room. Oh, and ladies, let’s not forget that he was the translator of a half-dozen sex guides and works of erotica. And he’s only at this party to kill time before his next insane expedition into the unknown.
Sir Richard Francis Burton was… the most interesting man in the world. Maybe ever. (http://mantalitymag.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/profile-in-manliness-captain-sir-richard-francis-burton/)

WOW!  I think I may keep him.