James Holman: the Blind Traveller

“He had eyes in his mouth, eyes in his nose, eyes in his ears, and eyes in his mind” – William Jerdan

James Holman: restless chap

JAMES HOLMAN TRAVELLED a whopping quarter of a million miles in his lifetime - further than anyone had ever travelled before. It was a record that stood well into the twentieth century. And he did it, incredibly, despite being totally blind.

And not just blind. Holman also suffered from an acute form of rheumatism. The pain was often so bad he couldn’t get out of bed. But when the worst agonies had passed, he would always pick himself up, grab his battered walking stick and carry on globetrotting. The man was awesome. He was unstoppable.

James Holman was a Devonian, born in Exeter in 1786. A healthy boy with perfect vision, he dreamed of seeing the world. At the age of twelve, he joined the Royal Navy and set sail for the Atlantic. He served there for a dozen years, patrolling the freezing waters off Canada and New England, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

But life at sea was brutal and the Exeter lad was unlucky. The constant cold and wet started to get to him. Mysterious pains began to shoot through his bones. His feet and ankles became inflamed. Soon he was barely able to walk. No use to the navy, Lieutenant Holman was sent back to England in 1810, an invalid.

And it got worse. While recuperating in the spa city of Bath, his eyesight too began to fail. It’s not clear why; perhaps there was some link to the rheumatism. But the deterioration was rapid and catastrophic. In a matter of weeks, poor Holman was left not only crippled, but completely blind. He was just twenty-five years old.

Lesser men might have jacked it all in right there. In the early nineteenth century blind people were viewed, at best, as creatures to pity. No one would dream of hiring a man who couldn’t see – even a bright one like Holman. The blind were expected to settle for a life of begging in the street, a rag tied round their damaged eyes to avoid upsetting sensitive passers-by.

But from the start Holman had other ideas. He wasn’t going to be treated as a charity case. As soon as he was able, he began venturing out alone, learning how to navigate city streets with his metal-tipped walking stick. He wore his blue Royal Navy uniform wherever he went. He refused to wear a blindfold.

He secured a small income by getting accepted as a Naval Knight, an honorary position for disabled sailors which came with a yearly allowance and free lodging at Windsor Castle. He worked hard at sharpening his wits, honing his sense of touch, hearing and smell to make up for being sightless. He got used to people mysteriously raising their voices when speaking to him as if he must also be hard of hearing. And then he got himself an education.

Studying medicine at Edinburgh University was a mad idea. Holman had left school at twelve. He was a decade older than most students. And braille hadn’t been invented so he couldn’t read text books. It’s a testament to his doggedness that he completed his studies by repeatedly attending lectures – once, twice, three times – till all the information stuck. Then, on the advice of his doctor, he left Scotland and set off to Mediterranean for its healing sunshine.

A leisurely cruise to the South of France accompanied by a nurse and servants is what the doc had in mind. But Holman’s modest budget didn’t stretch to that. So instead he hobbled aboard a bog-standard ferry to Calais and went south overland, travelling entirely alone. It was the best decision of his life.

The journey that followed would have been hell for a healthy man. France’s roads were a muddy, pot-holed mess after years of war. Coach journeys were spine-jolting, soul-destroying ordeals that rumbled on painfully through the night. Passengers were crammed in on top of one another. Holman couldn’t speak a word of French.

But the Exeter lad who’d once dreamed of seeing the world loved it. “Behold me, then, in France!” he writes joyously, “Surrounded by a people, to me, strange, invisible, and incomprehensible.”

His health improved. His spirits lifted. Sometimes, on slow stretches of road, he’d hop out of his coach, tie a bit of string to its wooden frame – then jog along behind holding the cord. The exercise invigorated him. He was becoming a man of adventure.

Holman trundled steadily through France like that for a year, pausing in Paris, Toulouse and Montpellier. He must have been a curious sight: a tall, thin, sightless Englishman, still wearing his navy uniform. And now he wore a big straw sunhat too.

He became expert at making his way around strange cities, tap-tap-tapping with his walking stick, soaking up the sounds and smells of town squares and market places, feeling his way around new buildings. Always the perfect gentleman, women quickly warmed to him and would let him explore their faces with his hands. Holman loved that. Blind or not, he had quite an eye for the ladies.

People asked him how a sightless man could enjoy sightseeing. He told them that his blindness heightened the pleasures of travel. It gave him what he called “a stronger zest to curiosity”, forced him to pause and examine everything deeply. The journalist William Jerdan, who knew Holman, grasped what he meant. “[Holman] had eyes in his mouth, eyes in his nose, eyes in his ears,” he writes, “and eyes in his mind, never blinking.”

After France, Holman should have headed home. Naval Knights had obligations as well as privileges. He’d been given a year’s leave from Windsor Castle, no more. Now he was expected to return and fulfil the main duty of a knight: attending chapel twice daily. But Holman couldn’t do it. He was on a roll. He had the bug. Instead of turning around, he kept on going down the boot of Italy.

In Rome, the blind adventurer climbed up inside the dome of St Peter’s Basilica and tried (unsuccessfully) to get out a window and scale the cross on its roof. Fired up, he then hiked to the top of Mount Vesuvius – while the volcano was active. He was the first blind person to reach the summit. He tapped his way gingerly round the crater, singeing his walking stick in the process and filling his boots with ash.

In nearby Naples, Holman hooked up with an old navy pal, a guy he calls Mr C. The anonymous Mr C had gone deaf since the pair served together in the Atlantic. But he too had developed a passion for travel. So the blind man and the deaf man teamed up and went north together through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. It was the one and only time that Holman chose to travel with a companion.

The friends parted in Amsterdam. Then, when he was good and ready, Holman took a ferry back to Britain. It was now 1821. He’d been gone more than seven hundred days. He’d overstayed his leave from Windsor Castle by almost a year.

Yet six months later he was off again. He stuck around in England just long enough to dictate a book about his adventures in Europe*. By the time it hit the bookshelves, he was gone. Wandering around Europe had been a warm-up. Now he was going to attempt the mother of all journeys: a complete circuit of the world.

Circumnavigating the globe in the 1820s was the stuff of fantasy. A few sailors and merchants had done it. But independent travellers didn’t go there – the seas were too dangerous, berths on sailing ships too expensive, and the trip would take forever. Only a nutcase would even consider it; a nutcase like the half-crippled, totally blind Royal Navy Lieutenant James Holman.

Holman had a plan: he’d cut down the cost of sea voyages by travelling as far as possible overland in public transport, sleeping in cheap hostels and eating local food. That meant he had only one route open to him, a path no circumnavigator had tried before. Instead of sailing west to the New World, he would have to start by going east into the vast Russian Empire. He was going to try to cross Siberia.

The journey began okay. Holman took a boat to St Petersburg, then a public sledge to Moscow. But when he told people there he was going to continue east, Muscovite jaws dropped in amazement. They called him insane. “The name of Siberia seemed connected in their minds only with horror,” he reports.

But Holman was fixed on getting to Russia’s far eastern coast where he hoped to find a whaling ship to take him across the Pacific. His determination was unshakeable. He bought a rickety old wagon, hired a driver, packed a good supply of tea, medicine and brandy – and trundled off into the frozen wilderness with “a feeling of happy confidence” in his heart.

The journey, as predicted, was a horror show. Passenger and driver went for days eating nothing but bread. One week they faced subzero temperatures; the next they were in a swamp with gnats and mosquitoes feasting on their faces. When Holman heard the rattle of chains he knew his cart was passing another column of convicts being force-marched into Siberian exile.

The bone-rattling ride went on for 3,500 miles across some of the harshest, bleakest wilderness on the planet. Three months after leaving Moscow the bruised and frozen travellers arrived in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. And there, after initially being given a warm welcome, Holman was suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a spy - and whisked right back the way he’d just come.

It was a kind of nineteenth century extraordinary rendition. A shady character from the Tsar’s secret police appeared with orders to escort Holman out of Russia. The Englishman was plonked on a sledge and driven thousands of miles westwards at breakneck speed. It was no sleep till Poland. He was dumped at the border and told to cross it.

A baffled and bewildered Lieutenant Holman made his way home across Europe, arriving in Hull in June 1824. He’d been away two years and one day. His round-the-world jaunt had failed. But there was good news awaiting him: his European travel book was selling well. He was famous. He’d become the celebrated Blind Traveller.

After producing a second best seller about his Siberian adventure*, he was on the move again. And with royalties in the bank, he could now afford to attempt a round-the-world trip by sailing ship. He told the bigwigs at Windsor Castle he had to travel to the sun again for health reasons. Then, without a trace of irony, he sailed for West Africa – the white man’s grave.

He left on the HMS Eden, a Royal Navy frigate sent to establish a British settlement on the island of Fernando Po, just off Africa’s west coast. Unlike the mainland, Fernando Po was thought to be free of malaria, cleansed by a brisk sea breeze. The crew of HMS Eden expected to find a little tropical heaven. Instead they found hell.

Fever quickly ripped through the European settlement. Of the one hundred and thirty-five men who sailed on the Eden, just twelve would survive the expedition. Yet despite the appalling death toll, Holman stuck it out on that toxic little island for a year, helping his friend Captain Owen get a base up and running. And for once he had luck with his health: he made it out alive.

It was on Fernando Po that Holman grew a whopping great beard that he kept for the rest of his life. According to William Jerdan, it “would have done credit to the Chief Rabbi of the Jews”. And it was there that he met a young African woman who, unlike the ladies of Europe, let him touch more than just her face. “Perceiving that I did not immediately recognise her… [she] placed my hand on her bosom,” he tells us happily. “Her relatives and countrymen all laughed heartily and appeared to enjoy my astonishment much.”

Hitching a ride in a Dutch ship, he moved on to Brazil. And from there he began an astonishing series of sea voyages that would finally realise his round-the-world dream. South Africa, Zanzibar and Mauritius came first. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Calcutta and Canton (now Guangzhou) followed. From China he headed to Australia. Then it was across the Pacific, round the tip of South America, back to Brazil, and home.

On boarding a new boat Holman would sometimes treat the crew to his little party trick: he’d clamber up the rigging, right to the very top, then shout and wave to the gobsmacked men below. If anyone was tempted to treat him like an invalid that usually put a stop to it. And when he went exploring on land he made a point of behaving exactly like a man who’d never lost his sight.

In Brazil he accepted an invitation to inspect a gold mine (he didn’t bother bringing a lantern). In South Africa he taught himself to ride a horse and went off into the wilds with a young African sidekick who didn’t speak English. In Ceylon he took part in an elephant hunt. He crossed Zanzibar and Tasmania on foot. And in China he toked on an opium pipe.

It wasn’t all plain sailing: he was assaulted by a swarm of wasps, he was thrown from a horse, and his rheumatism sometimes crippled him. But he always pressed on, patiently and tenaciously, still wearing his old naval uniform and carrying his stick. He relied, he says, on “divine protection and on the sympathies of mankind”. And they didn’t let him down: in five years circling the globe he was never once ripped off or robbed.

The Blind Traveller got back to England in 1832 and set to work on his third book, “A Voyage round the World, including Travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America &, from 1827 to 1832”. But it was less well received than his previous efforts. The novelty of a sightless sightseer was wearing thin. The inspirational adventurer had somehow become a bit of a joke.

It was eight years before he got to travel again. In 1840, Holman (now fifty-four) once again set out alone and on a shoestring, this time for the Mediterranean and Middle East. He visited Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Syria and the Holy Land. He passed through Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. He went up into Bosnia, Montenegro and Hungary. He was gone six years. And by the time he got back, he was pretty much forgotten. No one was interested in even publishing his account of that last epic journey, the swansong of the most travelled man of all time.

This is bizarre. According to his biographer, Jason Roberts, Holman had now clocked up a staggering quarter of a million miles. “None could even approach the achievements of the Blind Traveller…” writes Roberts in “A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller”. “Alone, sightless, with no prior command of native languages and with only a wisp of funds, he had forged a path equivalent to wandering to the moon.”

James Holman lived out his remaining years in east London, down by the docks. It was a dodgy part of town, full of sailors’ pubs and brothels. No place for a gentleman. But it was the ideal spot for a sick, old, white-bearded wanderer who now needed the sounds and smells of the world to come to him.

The Blind Traveller died on 28 July, 1857, aged seventy. A week before his death he finished work on his autobiography. No one was interested in publishing that either. The manuscript has now been lost.

*FOOTNOTE 1: Holman’s first book was snappily entitled, “The Narrative of a Journey, Undertaken in the Years 1819, 1820 & 1821, Through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, Parts of Germany Bordering the Rhine, Holland, and The Netherlands”.

*FOOTNOTE 2: Another memorable title: “Travels through Russia, Siberia, Poland, Austria, Saxony, Prussia, Hanover & & Undertaken During the Years 1822, 1823 and 1824, While Suffering from Total Blindness and Comprising an Account of the Author being Conducted a State Prisoner from the Eastern Parts of Siberia”.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

SOURCES
Books
Roberts, Jason, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveller (London, 2006)
Jerdan, William, Men I Have Known (1866)
Keay, John, Eccentric Travellers (London, 1982)

Websites
www.jasonroberts.net/holman
 

Sir Richard Burton: Gone to the Devil

“I have been here 3 days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed or a fellow tortured…” – Ruffian Dick

Author of "A History of Farting"

RICHARD BURTON – THE EXPLORER, NOT THE ACTOR – has got to be the most up-for-anything bloke this country’s produced. The man’s a legend. His entire life was a mad adventure filled with danger, sex, scandal and drugs.

He was a Victorian rolling stone, always on the move, always searching for new experience. He hated what he called the “slavery of civilisation” and rejoiced in shocking polite society. A young vicar once asked if it was true that he’d killed a man in the Arabian desert. “Sir,” he replied coolly, “I’m proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.”

Burton was exceptional from the start. Raised in France and Italy by roaming Anglo-Irish parents, he was an unruly and angry schoolboy who smashed his violin over one teacher’s head. At fifteen, he was caught writing passionate letters to prostitutes. By his late teens, he was experimenting with opium. He went to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840, already sporting an impressive moustache – and within an hour of arriving had challenged another student to a duel for laughing at it

Nicknamed Ruffian Dick at university, Burton was an impressive-looking bloke: six foot in his socks with a big head and fierce facial features. He had an air of smouldering ferocity about him. His eyes were dark and burning - “panther eyes” one guy called them. The prize-fighter look would later be crowned by a huge, grisly scar on his cheek earned while fighting for his life in Africa, but all that was yet to come for the youthful Ruffian Dick.

Burton could have had a brilliant academic career at Oxford. He had a stunning talent for languages – by the end of his life he would speak twenty-five of them. He was a gifted writer and translator. And he would also go on to make his mark as an explorer, soldier, diplomat, archaeologist and swordsman - not to mention amateur doctor, hypnotist and heroic boozer and brawler.

But dusty old Oxford was no place for Dick. He hated it and felt like an outsider, in his words “a waif, a stray… a blaze of light, without a focus”. So he deliberately got himself chucked out for breaking petty rules, joined the infantry and sailed to India instead.

Dick’s first army job was as a spy in the Sindh, a newly conquered area in the north that’s now part of Pakistan. His role was to collect information on the region’s people and geography. And he really went for it, disguising himself as an Indian and bravely wandering around the streets chatting to unsuspecting locals in flawless Sindhi.

Nothing was taboo for Captain Burton: he smoked opium with addicts, supped bhang (a cannabis drink) with holy men, shagged local women. He took lessons from a snake charmer, tried riding alligators. Then he dived into the homosexual brothels of Karachi.

Dick was ordered into the brothels by General Charles Napier who was worried they were corrupting his troops and wanted to find out more. His enthusiastic young captain didn’t disappoint: Burton filed a shockingly explicit report that must have made military whiskers stand on end.

After many nights hanging out with prostitutes, Dick concluded there were three brothels in Karachi “in which not women but boys and eunuchs… lay for hire”. He listed the prices and services on offer. And he noted that the lads cost twice as much as the eunuchs because – brace yourself for this - “the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movement of the animal”.

Napier took the report at face value and used it to shut down the dodgy meat markets. But others weren’t so pragmatic. Gay sex was for many Victorians a grave sin. And the idea that Burton could write about it so coolly and clinically, without judgment or moralizing… well, what the deuce did he think he was up to?

Many were convinced Dick must have mixed business with pleasure during his undercover operation. Knowing him, he probably did (some historians suspect he was bisexual). Fellow officers already called him “the white nigger” because he hung out with “natives”. Now he was seen as something worse still: a sexual deviant.

So the reward for Dick’s bravery and honesty was humiliation. His army reputation was in tatters. Sick from cholera and fed up with the lot of them, he quit India, returned to Europe and began planning his next dramatic move: a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Non-Muslims have always been barred from entering Mecca and over the centuries many curious Christians and Jews who tried to penetrate the sacred city have been impaled, crucified or sold into slavery. It didn’t bother Burton. With his language skills, he was sure he could pull it off. It was just a question of holding his nerve.

In the spring of 1853, disguised as an Afghan pilgrim, his skin stained with walnut juice, his penis recently circumcised, he sailed to the Middle East and travelled first to Medina, the second holiest city in Islam, before crossing the desert to Mecca itself.

He took with him a small tent, a goatskin water bag, and a bright yellow umbrella to keep off the sun. Hidden beneath his robes were a pistol, a dagger and a secret journal. Hanging from his belt was a large rosary which, if things got hairy, could be “converted into a weapon of offence”.

The journey was a brutal and violent affair. Bedouin bandits attacked the caravan he was travelling with, killing 12 men and several camels. A quarrel between a Turkish pilgrim and an Arab ended with the Turk being stabbed in the gut and left by the roadside for the jackals to finish off. Every day the desert wind blew like the “breath of a volcano”.

Yet here’s the great thing about Burton: despite the hardships and dangers and the constant deadly risk of being exposed as an infidel, he found he was having a rare old time. Life in the desert, he reports, is exhilarating: “Your morale improves… the hypocritical politeness and the slavery of civilisation are left behind you in the city.”

Once inside Mecca, Burton was in heaven. He met pilgrims from every nation. He visited and measured every shrine. He prayed every prayer, performed every ritual. He even had the balls to sketch Islam’s holiest building - the Kaaba – onto his white pilgrim’s robe, putting himself at huge risk of being rumbled. And after six euphoric days he turned around and headed for home.

Burton wasn’t the first non-Muslim to see Mecca and survive; a few plucky Europeans had managed it before him. But none produced such a rip-roaring account of their travels as Ruffian Dick. His “Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca” is part adventure story, part beginner’s guide to Islam. No one in Britain had seen the like of it; it sold like Harry Potter.

Fired up, Burton now turned to Africa. His next goal: to become the first European to visit the forbidden city of Harar in present-day Ethiopia.

Like Mecca, Harar promised death to infidels. Legend held that if an unbeliever penetrated its walls the city would fall within a generation. At first Burton toyed with the idea of trying to enter in disguise. But in Africa he could never pass for a local, so instead he brazenly rode up to its gates alone wearing his British army uniform and simply asked to come in. To his amazement, they said okay.

Harar was a disappointment – a drab, dusty old place, not a patch on Mecca. But there was soon to be action a-plenty. Back at the coast he teamed up with three other British explorers, William Stroyan, G E Herne and John Hanning Speke. And at 2am one morning the men were attacked in their tents by Somalis armed with spears, daggers and war-clubs.

Stroyan was killed in the unexpected raid. Speke was taken prisoner and tortured (he later escaped, bleeding from eleven wounds). Herne got away lightly. But a Somali threw a spear directly into Burton’s face, the weapon entering his left cheek, smashing out his back teeth and part of his palate, and re-emerging from the right side.

Despite having a bloody great javelin sticking out of his head, Burton too managed to get away. He made it to a friendly ship berthed nearby. And there the weapon was removed, his face sewn up and Dick was sent home with a souvenir of Africa – a massive, ugly scar that gave his fierce image an even more sinister edge.

Back in England, Burton’s mind turned to marriage and he proposed to a young Catholic aristocrat called Isabel Arundell. But no sooner had she said yes than he was off back to Africa with Speke, this time to try to find the source of the world’s greatest river, the Nile. Isabel would not see her husband-to-be again for three years.

The Nile was the big one, the greatest prize a nineteenth century explorer could hope for. People had been dreaming of unravelling its mystery since ancient times. Many had tried and died. But so far every expedition sent up the mighty river had foundered in scorching deserts or the vast swamplands of southern Sudan.

Some believed the Nile sprang from great fountains in central Africa. Others thought it flowed from two enormous lakes. Arab stories placed the source among mysterious snow-covered mountains. Basically, no one had a clue.

Burton and Speke would try a fresh approach. Instead of following the river all the way upstream from Egypt in the north, they would march inland from Africa’s east coast. Their route would take them through an enormous unmapped wilderness, across what’s now Tanzania. It was an area ravaged by the Arab slave trade. There would be hostile tribes and tropical diseases. They were going into hell.

The pair were on the march for more than a year and faced appalling suffering in Africa. Both men’s eyes became swollen and infected, Speke’s so badly there were times when he couldn’t see at all. Burton’s legs were paralysed by malaria and he had to be carried by his African porters for months. They endured ulcers, depression, insomnia and repeated bouts of fever and delirium. On his return, Isabel would describe Dick as “a mere skeleton, with brown-yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding, and his lips drawn away from his teeth…”

Speke, meanwhile, suffered a bizarre injury when a beetle burrowed into his ear and he tried to root it out with a penknife, cutting himself in the process and causing an infection. “It was the most painful thing I ever remember…” he writes, “For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the orifice and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.”

Tsetse fly killed their mules, ants with jaws like bull dogs drove them crazy, their bearers deserted in droves – and still the two Englishmen trudged on until, after seven hard months, they found themselves standing beside the mighty Lake Tanganyika.

Burton and Speke were the first Europeans to set eyes on Tanganyika, a whopping fresh-water lake in central Africa, the longest in the world. Surely this was the prize they were after. Surely it only remained for them to canoe round its shore and find a river flowing out to the north. This had to be the Nile’s source.

But it wasn’t. There is no river going north. The Nile doesn’t begin here and the mystery remained unsolved; Burton and Speke had failed.

The two explorers fell out spectacularly after that. On the return journey, Speke left Dick and struck out northwards alone, discovering – almost as an afterthought - another great lake, which he patriotically named Victoria after his hard-to-amuse queen.

Lake Victoria of course is the Nile source – and although Speke had no proof, he knew in his heart he’d cracked it. Burton, however, wasn’t convinced. Their row escalated into a vicious public feud. And several years later Speke was mysteriously killed the day before he was to face Dick in a head-to-head debate on the controversy. Cause of death: self-inflicted shotgun wound.

A court ruled the tragedy was a hunting accident. But Burton was convinced it was suicide and that he was to blame. “The charitable say that he shot himself,” he wrote to a friend, “the uncharitable say that I shot him.”

Burton’s personality was certainly at the heart of the row. Speke was a teetotaller and a prude, a Christian who would get himself in a flap at the sight of a half-naked African woman. He couldn’t handle his wild companion who revelled in the nudity he saw around him and was up for trying anything, the more shocking the better.

Burton sampled every intoxicant on offer in Africa. He discovered first-hand that its women were “well disposed towards strangers of fair complexion, apparently with the permission of their husbands”. He was fascinated by African phallic worship. And he had that weird old-school racist obsession with the size of black guys’ knobs, even going so far as to measure several obliging fellows.

When the warring explorers got home, Speke put it about that Burton was a sicko; that he had gone to the devil in Africa. Good old Isabel didn’t care though. She stuck by her untamed fiancée and the couple were secretly married in January 1861, the groom turning up to the ceremony in a rough shooting coat with a cigar between his teeth.

The newlyweds were together seven months and then Dick was off again, this time taking a job as British consul on Fernando Po, a disease-ridden island off the west coast of Africa. Isabel stayed put: the so-called White Man’s Grave was no place for a lady. But for Burton, it was a perfect springboard for more mad African adventures.

Any excuse to leave official duties and he was away. During his three years in Fernando Po he made countless trips to the mainland where he climbed mountains, hung out with cannibals and searched for gorillas (which some Europeans still believed were a fictitious creature).

He produced five books while he was there covering everything from juju and facial scarring to ritual murder, female circumcision and peculiar sexual practises. By the time he was finished there was probably not a colleague left in the Foreign Office who didn’t consider him weird, if not downright dangerous.

Burton also made two trips to Dahomey, a kingdom famous for human sacrifices and its army of Amazon warrior women. Victorian newspapers were obsessed with the place. But on first seeing the country for himself, Burton suspected half of what had been written was “bunk”.

“I have been here 3 days and am generally disappointed. Not a man killed or a fellow tortured…” he writes with gallows humour. “At Benin… they crucified a fellow in honour of my coming – here nothing! And this is the blood-stained land of Dahome!!”

Things were different on his second visit. Eighty prisoners were killed that time, the king himself decapitating the first victim. But Dick still wasn’t impressed with the Amazon army, concluding that “an equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick, would… clear them off in a very few hours.”

After Africa, Burton was transferred to Santos, then a swampy backwater on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Isabel joined him. But he hated it, spending four unhappy years there, drinking hard, writing little and travelling only rarely. “He reminded me of a black leopard, caged, but unforgiving,” wrote a British traveller who met him at this time.

A dream job followed: British consul for Damascus in Syria. This was a chance to recapture his glory days in the East. But Burton made a hash of it, upsetting half the city’s Christians, Jews and Muslims with his flamboyant, my-way-or-the-highway style. After just two years, he was recalled in disgrace.

And that might have been the sum of it for Ruffian Dick. He was now in his fifties. His career was a mess. His next posting was a demotion: consul in the sleepy Adriatic port city of Trieste. He took to pottering around his house in a fez and pointed-toe slippers like an eccentric old gent, bored out of his restless brain.

One afternoon he marched into a room where Isabel was entertaining her chattering lady friends, slapped his latest manuscript down on the coffee table and stomped from the room without a word. It was entitled “A History of Farting”.

But Burton wasn’t at the end of the road just yet. He still had one last great journey in him, a climactic adventure that would be his parting two-finger salute to British “civilisation”. This final journey was different - it was a literary one. With the same fearlessness he’d shown at Mecca and Harar, he now plunged into the forbidden world of Eastern erotica.

It’s a miracle anyone was born at all during the Victorian Age. Sex wasn’t the done thing. Publishers were prosecuted for producing “obscene” books. Oscar Wilde got two years hard labour for “gross indecency”. Even doctors believed masturbation caused heart disease and insanity.

But Dick found prudery offensive. He loved sex and he loved to upset people by talking about it. His friends included decadent poets, pornography collectors and a sadist called Fred Hankey who once asked him to bring a human skin back from Dahomey (even Burton drew the line at that one).

So, in one last great act of defiance, Dick set about publishing a series of sex guides to open British eyes to the joys of shagging. These were translations of the “pillow books” used by lovers in Asia for hundreds of years, including India’s famous “Kama Sutra”. Any of them could have landed him in jail.

As every schoolboy knows, the Kama Sutra contains more acrobatics than Billy Smart’s Circus. Burton’s translation has illustrations of all that stuff plus tips on aphrodisiacs, spanking, oral sex, you name it. Nothing’s cut from the explicit original. It was the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day 1884.

Burton avoided prosecution by publishing his sex guides anonymously. The Kama Sutra became one of the most pirated books in the English language. On a roll, he then decided to produce a no-holds-barred translation of the “Arabian Nights”.

Earlier English versions of the “Nights” had cut out its cruder, earthier tales and concentrated on the family-friendly stuff - Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor. Not Burton. His massive 16-volume edition of the ancient collection restored all the saucy stories to their original glory.

Dick also daringly added essays outlining his thoughts on homosexuality, pornography and the sexual education of women. He spiced up his text with hundreds of footnotes on everything from lesbianism and harems to incest and hashish. And to cap it all, this time he put his name on the front cover.

It’s mad stuff for the 1880s and the Pall Mall Gazette was appalled, calling the book a “revolting obscenity”. The Echo declared it “morally filthy”. The Boston Daily Advertiser memorably found it “offensive and not only offensive, but grossly and needlessly offensive”.

But to Dick’s surprise, other newspapers praised his “Arabian Nights”, saluting his courage, skill and impressive knowledge. Thirty years after his “Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca”, he found himself with another hit on his hands. The vice squad didn’t come knocking. And when a knighthood followed, the lifelong rebel thought someone must be pulling his leg.

Sir Richard Burton died shortly after that, in 1890, aged sixty-nine. And as with so much about his life, the story of how it came to an end is a bizarre one.

Dick woke gasping for breath at 4am one October morning at his home in Trieste. Isabel summoned a doctor who diagnosed a heart attack but could do nothing to save him. She sent for a Catholic priest and by the time he arrived it looked like Burton was dead.

But Isabel wouldn’t accept it. She insisted her husband was only unconscious. Then she told the priest he was a secret convert to Rome (which seems about as likely Dick bumping into the Pope at Mecca). And she persuaded the clergyman to administer the Catholic Last Rites to the dying over Burton’s clearly lifeless body.

It wasn’t till 7pm that night – more than twelve hours later - that she finally accepted he was gone and that she was “alone and desolate for ever”.

If Isabel’s behaviour that day was odd, what she did next was unforgivable. Within a fortnight of Burton’s death, she had burned nearly all his papers: intimate diaries, notebooks, letters and manuscripts. Forty years of work by a brilliant man up in flames.

She did it, she said, to protect public morality. She saw her husband’s interest in sexuality as purely scientific, but feared others would read his journals “for filth’s sake”. Her God might take a dim view of that and be reluctant to let Dick through the Pearly Gates.

Determined to save his immortal soul, Isabel requested a series of masses for Burton. Two Catholic funeral services were held. Then the scandalous old ruffian, the wild wanderer who spent his life shocking the pious and offending the saints was tamely laid to rest in a Catholic cemetery in the suburbs of west London. Burton’s friends and family were outraged; some never spoke to Isabel again.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post on this blog, but have started a new one called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow me on Twitter @historynuts or at  facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

SOURCES
Books:
Brodie, Fawn, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (London, 2002)
Kennedy, Dane, The Highly Civilised Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Harvard, 2005)
Burton, Sir Richard, To the Holy Shrines (extracts from Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah) (London, 2007)

Films:
Mountains of the Moon, Momentum Pictures, 1989