Sir Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton was born on March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devon. Displaying astonishing linguistic genius from boyhood, Burton attended Trinity College, Oxford, before joining the British East India Company army in Gujarat and Sindh. Immersing himself in Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and Sindhi, he lived disguise-clad among local populations, studying falconry, Sufism, and local folklore.

In 1853, Burton achieved international fame when, disguised as an Afghan Pashtun merchant and physician named Mirza Abdullah, he successfully completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina under penalty of death, sketching the Kaaba and documenting the sacred rituals with ethnographical precision. In 1857, Burton and John Hanning Speke ventured into unexplored East Africa in search of the source of the White Nile, becoming the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika in February 1858.

Burton later served as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos (Brazil), Damascus, and Trieste. A prolific scholar who published over forty volumes of travel and ethnography, his unabridged 16-volume translation of 'The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night' (The Arabian Nights, 1885–1888) and his English publication of 'The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana' broke Victorian censorship taboos. Knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886, Burton died in Trieste on October 20, 1890, buried in an elaborate Bedouin-tent stone tomb in Mortlake, London.