River of the Gods

“Jamais on n’a pillé le monde!” he railed scornfully—“the world had never been so pillaged!” As

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As similar encounters from Hispaniola to Peru had amply proved, however, the disparity of power and resources between the two sides in such meetings was fraught with the potential for tragedy and exploitation. The consequences of that dangerous asymmetry had been demonstrated in Africa over the preceding centuries, as European, North American, and Arab traders who moved between two worlds capitalized on their power by enslaving African peoples and selling them for profit. For explorers, that wrenching injustice was as much a reality of the region as geography or climate, shaping everything from the location of ports and availability of food to the paths they would follow. In fact, their own efforts would doubtless lead to the plunder of the very land they wished to explore. As the British writer Samuel Johnson had written less than a century earlier, after the Arctic expedition of Captain Constantine Phipps, “I do not wish well to discoveries for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery.”

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Burton’s goal was to do something that no other Englishman had ever done, and that few had either the ability or audacity to do: enter Mecca disguised as a Muslim. It was an undertaking that simultaneously acknowledged what was most sacred to the Muslim faith and dismissed the right to protect it, making it irresistible to Burton, who studied every religion

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An Oxford dropout, self-taught scholar, compulsive explorer, and extraordinarily skilled polyglot, Burton wanted unfettered access to every holy site he reached, the trust of every man he met, and the answer to every ancient mystery he encountered—nothing less, he wrote, than to see and understand “Moslem inner life.” He also wanted to return to England alive.

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the most sacred of religious rites. Although “neither the Koran nor the Sultan enjoins the killing of Hebrew or Christian intruders,” he knew, “in the event of a pilgrim declaring himself to be an infidel, the authorities would be powerless to protect him.” A single error could cost him his life. “A blunder, a hasty action, a misjudged word, a prayer or bow, not strictly the right shibboleth,” he wrote, “and my bones would have whitened the desert sand.”

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Not only did Burton not feel British, he had often been told, and never in an admiring way, that neither did he look particularly British. No one who met him ever forgot his face. Bram Stoker, who would go on to write Dracula, was shaken by his first encounter with Burton. “The man riveted my attention,” Stoker later wrote. “He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless…. I never saw anyone like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!” Burton’s friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, wrote that he had “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god,” and described his eyes as having “a look of unspeakable horror.” Burton’s black eyes, which he had inherited from his English-Irish father, seemed to mesmerize everyone he met. Friends, enemies, and acquaintances described them variously as magnetic, imperious, aggressive, burning, even terrible, and compared them to every dangerous wild animal they could think of, from a panther to a “stinging serpent.” Equally striking were his thick, black hair, his deep, resonant voice, and even his teeth, which may have inspired literature’s most iconic vampire. Stoker would never forget watching, enthralled, as Burton spoke, his upper lip rising menacingly. “His canine tooth showed its full length,” he wrote, “like the gleam of a dagger.”

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he learned came from a succession of alternately terrifying and terrified tutors. No matter the subject, the tutors were given permission to beat their pupils, until the pupils were old enough to beat them back. In later years, Burton would express his sorrow for the incalculable harm done by “that unwise saying of the wise man, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ ” As a teenager, he fought back. The poor, nervous musician Burton’s parents hired to teach him violin—“nerves without flesh, hung on wires,” as Burton would later contemptuously describe him, “all hair and no brain”—finally quit after his student broke a violin over his head.

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The only childhood teacher Burton respected was his fencing master, a former soldier who had only one thumb, having lost the other in battle. Richard and his brother threw themselves into fencing with such wild enthusiasm that their studies nearly ended in tragedy. “We soon learned not to neglect the mask,” Richard wrote. “I passed my foil down Edward’s throat, and nearly destroyed his uvula, which caused me a good deal of sorrow.” The lessons, however, not only paid off but eventually produced one of the most skilled swordsmen in Europe. Burton earned the coveted French title Maître d’Armes; perfected two sword strokes, the une-deux and the manchette—an upward slashing movement that disabled an opponent, often sparing his life; and wrote both The Book of the Sword and A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise, which the British Army published the same year he left for Mecca. Fencing, he would later say, “was the great solace of my life.”

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His ethnological writings, which in the end would range from Asia to Africa to North America, focused not only on the dress, religion, and familial structures of his subjects, but on their sexual practices. His readers would be shocked by open and detailed discussions of polygamy and polyandry, pederasty and prostitution. Burton, however, had little time for British priggishness and no interest in what he…

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learn one striking thing about himself along the way: He was, in the words of one of his flabbergasted tutors, “a man who could learn a language running.” In the end, he would speak more than twenty-five different languages, along with at least another dozen dialects. To some extent, his gift for languages was a product of natural ability and early training. “I was intended for that wretched being, the infant phenomenon,” he explained, “and so began Latin at three and Greek at four.” It was his fascination with other cultures, however, and his methodical mind that made him one of the world’s most gifted linguists. He had worked out a system early on that allowed him to learn most languages in two months, and he never seemed to understand why others found it so hard. “I never worked more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness,” he wrote. “After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled…

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After engineering his own expulsion from Oxford, where he had been ridiculed, ignored, and bored, Burton had joined the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, a regiment within the East India Company. Realizing that one of the fastest ways to rise through the ranks was to become an interpreter, he learned twelve languages in seven years. He had begun studying Hindustani immediately upon arriving in India and six months later easily passed first among the many gifted linguists taking the exam. Over the following years, one after another, he steadily added languages to his long list:…

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Although he had devoted most of his study to Islam, Burton was fascinated by it all, from Catholicism to Judaism, Hinduism, Sufism, Sikhism, Spiritualism, even Satanism. In fact, he briefly considered writing a biography of Satan, who, to his mind, was “the true hero of Paradise Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary.” Nothing for Burton was out of bounds or impure, and he never feared heavenly and certainly not earthly condemnation. The only aspect of religion that he scorned was the idea that there existed any true believers. “The more I study religion,” he wrote, “the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.”

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was Burton’s triumph, however, much more than his failure that had left him despondent. He expected and did not care that his accomplishments would be questioned and criticized by his suspicious countrymen and jealous rivals. What haunted him was knowing that he now had nothing left to set his mind and talents to. “How melancholy a thing is success,” he would later write. “Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.’ ” He needed another challenge, an escape from this persistent, haunting gloom, and Johann Krapf had just supplied it.

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Years later, filled with bitter regret, Burton would wonder what had moved him that day to make such a hasty decision. He had brought onto his long-planned and hard-won expedition a man who seemed to have little to contribute and whom he knew very little about. Speke was smart and skilled, but he was certainly no Stocks, either in ability or in temperament. The wrong personality thrown into the mix, Burton knew, could not only shatter an expedition’s fragile equilibrium but endanger the lives of everyone on it. He could only guess that he had been moved by pity, unable to turn away a fellow traveler asking for help, a young man who perhaps reminded him of his own brother, Edward, who throughout their tumultuous childhood had always followed so closely in his footsteps. “I saw that he was going to lose his money and his ‘leave’ and his life,” Burton would later write of Speke, marveling at his own disastrous decision. “Why should I have cared? I do not know.”

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After overseeing the outfitting of Speke’s expedition, Burton hired two men to travel with him: an interpreter and an Abban, or protector. “The Abban acts at once as broker, escort, agent, and interpreter,” he explained, “and the institution may be considered the earliest form of transit dues.” As well as food and lodging, Abbans were given a percentage of any sales conducted during the expedition and small gifts of beads, clothing, and other luxuries along the way. In return, they were expected to negotiate with locals on the expedition’s behalf, find accommodations, guides, and camels, and, if necessary, fight in any battles that might arise, even against their own countrymen. Although abbanship, which had a long, useful, and respected history in East Africa, had been good for the local economy as well as for the trading and exploring expeditions it served, the system was ripe for exploitation on both sides.

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Although eager to be on his way, Burton felt a growing uneasiness about the newest addition to his expedition. Not only had Speke floundered on what Burton had thought would be an easy journey to the Happy Valley, but, to his shock, before leaving for Berbera the young man had shared disturbing thoughts with his commander. He had “openly declared,” Burton later wrote, “that being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.” It was not what the leader of an expedition wanted to hear from one of his officers just as they were about to travel through a part of the world believed to be dangerous to Europeans. Although Burton himself had often struggled with self-doubt and depression, often in the wake of his greatest triumphs, he “aspired to something better,” he wrote, “than the crown of martyrdom.”

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To the people at home, Cardigan and men like him were portrayed as war heroes, and their fame was used not just to boost morale and encourage support for the war but to sell products. The Industrial Revolution that had fueled British economic power in the previous century had given way to what became known as the Second Industrial Revolution, which was now manufacturing everything from mass-produced firearms to cutlery and portable stoves. The latter could be used at home, manufacturers assured the British public, as could the new styles of clothing that were created for the men fighting on the front. Despite his men’s disdain for him, an open-fronted wool vest that buttoned closed was christened “cardigan” in honor of the Earl of Cardigan, and a distinctive style of sleeve designed by the coat manufacturer Aquascutum for the British commander in chief, FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, became known as the “raglan sleeve.” Stretching in one continuous, diagonal piece from the cuff to the collar, rather than ending at the shoulder, the raglan sleeve allowed Raglan, who had lost his right arm forty years earlier during the Battle of Waterloo, to more easily swing his sword. Years later it would be adopted in the United States for baseball.

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Raglan died in his tent the same day Burton reached Balaklava. “The unfortunate Lord Raglan, with his courage antique, his old-fashioned excess of courtesy, and his nervous dread,” was, Burton wrote, “exactly the man not wanted.” Raglan had never recovered from the infamy of letting thousands of men freeze and starve to death the previous winter. “It did not occur to the Government of the greatest engineering country in the world,” Winston Churchill would write in disgust a hundred years later, “to ease the movement of supplies from the Port of Balaclava to the camp by laying down five miles of light railway.” After issuing the order, tragically misconstrued, that precipitated the charge of the light brigade, Raglan sent thousands of young men, fresh from training, to their death at Sebastopol. “I could never return to England now,” he had told an aide. “They would stone me to death.”

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Burton looked forward to the expedition with a singular relish. “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands,” he wrote. “Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine.”

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Burton knew, however, that the people harvesting the cloves had arrived in a reeking, pitching, perilously overcrowded slave boat that bore no resemblance to the comfort and safety of the Elphinstone. Like others at the time, Burton and Speke were unapologetic in their racism, with all of its attendant arrogance and ignorance, but they were sickened by the slave trade, which, Burton wrote, “had made a howling desert of the land,” and took great pride in their country’s efforts to end it. But although Britain had passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act fifty years earlier and had begun to patrol the Indian Ocean near Zanzibar, looking for slave ships, little had changed in East Africa, where the shackling and selling of human beings was still a common and daily occurrence. “Zanzibar is a peculiar place,” Burton wrote to a friend. “An admirable training ground for damnation.”

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Burton once knew to be “fair and ruddy” but was now “bleached ghastly pale by ennui and sickness.” Although he was “full of amusing anecdotes” and eager to help, it was obvious to Burton that Hamerton was dying. “The worst symptom in his case—one which I have rarely found other than fatal,” Burton wrote, “was his unwillingness to quit the place which was slowly killing him.”

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Bombay had little that he could call his own. Even his name had been carelessly assigned to him by the man who had bought and enslaved him in India when he was still a child. His African name was long forgotten, taken from him decades ago along with his family and his childhood in a single, terrifying night. He would never forget the day he had been kidnapped from his village in the Yao territory, on the border of modern-day Tanzania and Mozambique, although at the time it had been a bewildering blur of sickening screams, pounding feet, and slashing swords. “A large body of Wasuahili merchants and their slaves, all equipped with sword and gun, came suddenly,” he would later recall. “Surrounding our village, [they] demanded of the inhabitants instant liquidation of their debts…advanced in former times of pinching dearth, or else to stand the consequences of refusal.” The men who had descended on Bombay’s village had once been enslaved themselves, an experience that had taught them not only the horrors of slavery but what might be gained by tricking, capturing, and selling another human being.

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the hundreds of thousands of people captured and dragged from their homes in the African interior, Bombay was at least among those who reached Kilwa alive. Many either succumbed to wounds they had sustained during their capture or died from disease, starvation, or sheer exhaustion, having been forced not only to walk barefoot in chains but often to carry elephant tusks, staggering in small groups under the crushing weight of a hundred or more pounds of ivory. Those who survived the journey to Kilwa were put in dhows, small sailboats so tightly packed with people that many more died and were thrown overboard during the more than two-hundred-mile trip to Zanzibar. Bombay, alone and scared, endured this additional misery on the Indian Ocean only to be led to an underground prison made from coral blocks and lime cement after landing on the island. Thick-walled and low-ceilinged, with little air or light and reeking of blood, sweat, sewage, and death, the prison was just steps from the open market, where Arab slave traders waited impatiently in the bright equatorial sun.

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Although at twelve years old Bombay had already experienced more tragedy and terror than most people would in a lifetime, he had been given at least one small reprieve from misfortune: His ship had sailed east from Africa rather than west. In the United States, where slavery had become a part of the economy, enslaved people were often condemned to working in fields on large plantations. In India, people of lower castes were already forced to do most of the domestic and agricultural work, so owning a person from Africa was largely considered a status symbol for the elite or a means of protection for the powerful. The maharajas, who were often at war with each other, preferred to have Africans rather than Indians in military positions—from soldiers to bodyguards to palace guards—believing that they not only had greater physical strength but were more likely to remain loyal.

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These military, and in some cases administrative, positions gave enslaved people in India a path not only to freedom but to wealth and power. Some even ruled kingdoms of their own. In 1490, an African guard named Sidi Badr seized control of Bengal, where he ruled for three years before he was assassinated. In the late sixteenth century, Malik Ambar, who had been born in Harar, Ethiopia, and, like Bombay, was sold into slavery as a child, became one of the most famous rulers in the Deccan, in southern India. Ambar had begun his steady climb to power as soon as he was freed after the death of the man who had owned him. After he took a position in Bijapur in the northwestern Deccan, which placed him in charge of a small contingent of troops, his followers quickly grew in number until he had seven thousand soldiers, at which point he joined the ongoing fight for control of the neighboring Ahmadnagar kingdom. When he met a young man in Bijapur who was related to the Ahmadnagar royal family, he used him as a secret weapon, marrying him to his own daughter, installing him as sultan, and then making himself the sultan’s regent, from which position he ran the kingdom.

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Whether enslaved or free, powerful or poor, most Africans in India were given one of two titles: Habshi, which is Persian for Abyssinian, a region that now encompasses Ethiopia; or Sidi, possibly derived from the Arabic word “Saiyid,” meaning “lord” or “master.” The title Sidi was most commonly used on the western coast, attached as a prefix to a person of African descent, which is how the young East African who arrived in Gujarat in the 1830s,…

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Later in life, Bombay would explain that, because he was so young when he was enslaved, he did not remember many of the important dates that made up his life—his birth, capture, or liberation. He did, however, know one thing with certainty: Like the famed Malik Ambar, he was given his freedom when the man who owned him died. “I served with this master for several years, till by his death I obtained my liberation,” he said. Unlike Ambar and Sidi Badr, however, Bombay saw his freedom not as a path to power in the country that had enslaved him but as a chance to finally make his way home. He chose to…

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Burton wrote, “that persuasion and paying his debts induced him, after a little coquetting, to take leave of soldiering and follow our fortunes.” Along with daily rations and “an occasional loin-cloth covering whenever his shukka might wear out,” Burton offered Bombay 5 dollars per month, to be paid in full upon their return to Zanzibar, assuming he survived the journey. The dollars Burton carried on the expedition were Maria Theresa thaler, silver bullion coins commonly referred to as “dollars” and used in international trade for more than a hundred years.

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As a harsh reminder of Maizan’s fate, Hamerton had even taken Burton to Zanzibar’s fort so that he could see for himself the man who had beaten the war drum during the murder. Although it was widely believed that the actual murderer was still at large, this man had been convicted of killing Maizan and chained in front of the French consulate for two years before being dragged to the fort, where for the past eight years he had been “heavily ironed to a gun under a cadjan shed,” Burton wrote, hardly able to “stand or lie down.” Burton pitied both Maizan and this innocent man, who had been subjected to years of torture, but he refused to be dissuaded. He would not carry gilded instruments into the interior, but neither would he abandon his expedition before it had even begun. “Rather than return to Bombay,” he wrote, “I would have gone to Hades.”

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travel with him on the expedition, although he treated this man better than he did himself. His name was Mabruki, and like Bombay he was a Yao. Bombay showed Mabruki not just kindness but deep affection, referring to him as his brother. Mabruki “had been selected by his fellow-tribesman Bombay at Zanzibar,” Burton wrote. “He was the slave of an Arab Shaykh, who willingly let him for the sum of five dollars per mensem.” Mabruki appeared to Burton and Speke to be as coldhearted as Bombay was warm. “His temper is execrable, even in extremes,” Burton wrote, “now wild with spirits, then dogged, depressed, and surly, then fierce and violent.” Bombay, however, who understood what it meant to be enslaved, the rage and humiliation that accompanied that condition, “was warmly attached” to him, Speke wrote, though, in his opinion, “Mabruki had no qualifications worthy of attracting any one’s affections.” •

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wrote. They ran to the door of the church, where they learned that the only son of a highly respected local chief had been killed along with two of his men after a hippopotamus had upended their boat. Turning angrily to Burton, Ladha laid the blame for the tragedy at his feet. “Insaf karo! be honest!” he cried, “and own that this is the first calamity which you have brought upon the country by your presence.”

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In Swahili, Burton would later write, the word for caravan is “safari,” from the Arabic safar, meaning journey. For a man without a country, who had felt at home in any land but England, studying any language and culture but his own, it was a word that had long stirred both his mind and his emotions, bringing with it visions of adventure, opportunity, even hope. Later, thinking of all that an expedition meant to him, he would quote the old adage, “The world is a great book, of which those who never leave home read but a page.” Now, however, the journey ahead offered him a more immediate gift: relief from the bleak thoughts of the night before and his fears for the future of his expedition. “The excitement of finding myself on new ground,” he wrote, “and the peculiarities of the scenery, somewhat diverted melancholy forebodings.”

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In truth it was Bombay who most often soothed tensions, reprimanding but also reassuring the men and getting everyone back to work. He had quickly become a favorite among the other men in the expedition, who had given him affectionate nicknames that ranged from Pombe, meaning small beer, to Mamba, or crocodile, in reference to the sharply filed teeth he so often flashed at them with his wide smile. Although he never hesitated to give orders, directing porters to pick up the pace, guards to take their fair share of the loads, he worked harder than any of them. This was especially true of his own enslaved servant, Mabruki. “He toiled like a char-woman to raise our tents and to prepare them for habitation,” Burton wrote, “while his slave…sat or dozed under the cool shade.” Bombay, Speke believed, was one of the most generous men he had ever met. “He would do no wrong to benefit himself,” he wrote. “To please anybody else there is nothing he would stick

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For the first time, the men learned that a mutiny in India had started nearly a year earlier. Although it was unsuccessful, India’s First War of Independence was the first concerted effort to shake off the British Empire’s imperialist rule and would, ninety years later, finally bring about independence. Burton had warned of the simmering resentment in India years earlier in his book on Mecca, writing that Indians would soon decide that “the English are not brave, nor clever, nor generous, nor civilised, nor anything but surpassing rogues…and look forward to the hour when enlightened Young India will arise and drive the ‘foul invader’ from the land.” Now, however, his thoughts were not with the British or the Indians but with his younger brother, Edward, who had been his closest companion in childhood and who was now a surgeon-general in Ceylon. One of Speke’s brothers, also named Edward, was in India as well. Edward Speke, they would later learn, had been killed during the mutiny. Edward Burton had survived, but would return home a deeply, tragically changed man.

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“Such tidings are severely felt by the wanderer who, living long behind the world, and unable to mark its gradual changes, lulls, by dwelling upon the past, apprehension into a belief that his home has known no loss,” he explained, “and who expects again to meet each old familiar face ready to smile upon his return as it was to weep at his departure.” As he continued to inspect the supplies, moreover, he realized that they were not the godsend that he and Speke had at first believed them to be. Among the boxes that the porters had carried into Ujiji were packages of ammunition that the expedition did not need, broken bottles of cognac and curry powder, nearly empty canisters of coffee, tea, and sugar, and cloth and beads of the most inferior kind.

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As he had made his way toward the Tanganyika, he now learned, his father had died in England. While Hamerton’s death had left Burton more alone in Africa, his father’s death left him more alone in the world. Burton’s father had never been a warm, reassuring presence in his life, but he had been a symbol of strength and the kind of thirst for adventure and knowledge that had defined his oldest son. It would have been a blow at any time, but it was particularly poignant now, as he was still so sick and so far from any semblance of home.

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unless he also received cloth before the journey,” Burton wrote. “He was too useful to my companion as interpreter and steward to be lightly parted with.” Speke would have given in anyway, willing to do almost anything to keep Bombay, but his heart softened when he found out that the cloth was for Mabruki, the man Bombay had bought as a slave but treated as a brother. “It was for this youth, and not himself, he had made so much fuss and used so many devices to obtain the cloths,” Speke wrote. “Indeed, he is a very singular character, not caring one bit about himself, how he dressed, or what he ate; ever contented, and doing everybody’s work in preference to his own.”

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As soon as he saw Speke, Bombay knew that he was suffering from what was known locally as “little irons,” an agonizingly painful disease for which they had neither cure nor comfort. As another series of violent spasms racked Speke’s thin body, Bombay took his right arm and helped him bend it backward until he was holding his left ear behind his head, “thus relieving the excruciating and torturing twinges by lifting the lung from the liver,” Burton wrote. The spasms, however, kept coming, each one more painful and horrifying to behold than the last. “He was once more haunted by a crowd of hideous devils, giants, and lion-headed demons, who were wrenching, with superhuman force, and stripping the sinews and tendons of his legs down to the ankles,” Burton wrote. “With limbs racked by cramps, features drawn and ghastly, frame fixed and rigid, eyes glazed and glassy, he began to utter a barking noise, and a peculiar chopping motion of the mouth and tongue, with lips protruding—the effect of difficulty of breathing—which so altered his appearance that he was hardly recognizable, and completed the terror of the beholders.”

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Francis Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s cousin. Galton would later not only coin the phrase “nature versus nurture” but, influenced by his cousin’s theory of natural selection, develop the dangerous and discredited practice of eugenics. An explorer and mathematician, Galton also wrote a popular book called The Art of Travel, which offered explorers practical information such as a formula for determining the trajectory of a charging animal and advice to hire women for expeditions, explaining that they like to carry heavy objects and cost little to feed because they can just lick their fingers while cooking. Later, in his memoirs, Galton would sum up Burton’s and Speke’s strengths as explorers and differences as men. “Burton was a man of eccentric genius and tastes, orientalised in character and thoroughly Bohemian,” he wrote. “Speke, on the other hand, was a thorough Briton, conventional, solid, and resolute.”

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knew Burton well…and I have noticed that acts of cruelty and immorality always drove him into a white heat of passion.” Burton found it interesting, moreover, that while his lies were always accepted, his honest tales rarely were. “He said it was so funny to be believed when you were chaffing,” Isabel would recall, “and so curious never to be believed when you were telling the truth.” Burton was still invited to parties, but he was often treated as a curiosity, and with caution. “His usual conversation in those days,” Galton explained, “was not exactly of a stamp suitable to Episcopal society.”

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Zanzibar. As he had sailed to Aden, however, he had believed that he was leaving the dangers of petty jealousy behind. Once again, he had been wrong. His response to Rigby now was barely contained fury. Sir,—I have been indebted to the kindness and consideration of my friend Dr. Shaw, for a sight of your letter addressed to him the 10th of October last from Zanzibar. I shall not attempt to characterize it in the terms that best befit it. To do so, indeed, I should be compelled to resort to language “vile” and unseemly as your own. Nor can there be any necessity for this. A person who could act as you have acted must be held by everyone to be beneath the notice of any honourable man. You have addressed a virulent attack on me to a quarter in which you had hoped it would prove deeply injurious to me: and this not in the discharge of any public duty, but for the gratification of a long-standing private pique. You sent me no copy of this attack, you gave me no opportunity of meeting it; the slander was propagated as slanders generally are, in secret and behind my back. You took a method of disseminating it which made the ordinary mode of dealing with such libels impossible, while your distance from England puts you in a position to be perfectly secure from any consequence of a nature personal to yourself. Such being the case, there remains to me but one manner of treating your letter, and that is with the contempt it merits.

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wrote. “This was…to write my opinions versus Burton’s and now the matter is lying before the Gov’t.” At the same time, he asked Rigby to protect their personal correspondence so that Burton would not see the extent to which they had jeered at him in their letters, laughing at his “weak legs and rotten gut” and the “loathing” that they felt for him. “Burton I believe will require my letters to you,” Speke wrote. “If this be the case grant him a sight of them, after erasing all matter which does not relate to the subject at issue—but give up those only which induced you to act against him.”

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To Burton, what was more baffling even than Speke’s betrayal was his righteous anger. Even after he understood the extent of Speke’s ambition and the depth of his resentment, Burton had found it difficult not to think of him as the young man whom he had invited onto his expeditions, introduced to scientists, explorers, and patrons, advised when he was unsure and nursed when he was unwell. “He had doubtless been taught that the expedition had owed to him all its success: he had learned to feel aggrieved,” Burton wrote, trying to make sense of what had happened. “No one is so unforgiving, I need hardly say, as the man who injures another.” Now when he thought of the time he had spent with Speke in Africa, Burton was reminded of a couplet he had learned in Arabic years ago: I taught him archery by day— when his arm waxed strong, ’twas me he shot.

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Just as she was considering giving up altogether and joining a convent, an anonymous letter arrived from Zanzibar. The envelope had been addressed to her, but inside it held nothing but a small poem on a single sheet of paper. TO ISABEL That brow which rose before my sight, As on the palmer’s holy shrine Those eyes—my life was in their light; Those lips my sacramental wine; That voice whose flow was wont to seem The music of an exile’s dream Two days later, Isabel read in the newspaper that Burton was finally on his way home. “I feel strange,” she wrote in her diary, “frightened, sick, stupefied, dying to see him, and yet inclined to run away lest, after all I have suffered and longed for, I should have to bear more.” The next day she was visiting a friend, waiting in an upstairs parlor, when she heard the doorbell ring, announcing another visitor. After the door was opened, she heard a man’s voice drifting up the stairs. “I want Miss Arundell’s address.” It was a voice that, she later wrote, “thrilled me through and through.” Moments later Isabel heard the door to the parlor open behind her and turned around, astonished to find Richard Burton standing in the doorway. “For an instant we both stood dazed,” she wrote. “I felt so intensely, that I fancied he must hear my heart beat, and see how every nerve was overtaxed.”

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Speke and Grant fell prey to diseases that turned their strong, healthy bodies into limping, coughing, shivering shells. Speke developed such a severe cold that he could hardly sleep or stand. “The symptoms, altogether, were rather alarming,” he later admitted. “The heart felt inflamed and ready to burst, pricking and twingeing with every breath, which was exceedingly aggravated by constant coughing, when streams of phlegm and bile were ejected.” Finally, as he had on the Tanganyika when a beetle crawled into his ear, Speke attempted to take matters into his own hands. “Thinking then how I could best cure the disease that was keeping me down,” he wrote, “I tried to stick a packing needle, used as a seton, into my side.” Too weak to force the dull point through his flesh, he asked one of the men to do it, but even he was unable.

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bathe in the holy river, the cradle of Moses.” Bombay politely declined. “We don’t look on those things in the same fanciful manner that you do,” he explained to Speke. To Speke, the land that surrounded the Nile was the perfect place not just for European commerce but for Christian conversion. “What a place, I thought to myself, this would be for missionaries!” he wrote. Just as the Nyanza already had a name, however, Bombay gently reminded Speke that he and the other men in the expedition already had a faith, and it was as strong and deep as Speke’s own. “We could no more throw off the Mussulman faith,” Bombay told him, “than you could yours.”

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of anthropology, born from a natural love of learning and a genuine interest in other cultures, had begun to transform into something new, not just tainted by imperial arrogance but infected by personal bitterness. As he had everywhere he had traveled, Burton studied the languages he encountered among Native Americans, particularly sign language, and he compared traditions, rites, and religions to those that he had either observed or read about in other cultures. Fascinated by scalping, he argued that it had originated not in North America but in northeastern Asia. “The underlying idea,” he wrote, “is doubtless the natural wish to preserve a memorial of a foeman done to death.” But his descriptions of Native Americans were often callous and cruel, devoid of compassion or even honest perspective. In The City of the Saints, his book about his travels through North America, he characterized Native Americans not simply as members of a different culture, deserving of respect and protection, but as a different species. “I do not believe that an Indian of the plains ever became a Christian,” he wrote in a discussion of American missionaries. “He must first be humanized, then civilized, and lastly Christianized; and, as has been said before, I doubt his surviving the operation.”

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Burton had long derided the desperate efforts of Christian missionaries to “save the savages.” Speke, who frequently described Africans as children, admired the work of missionaries, insisting that “to instruct him is the surest way of gaining a black man’s heart, which, once obtained, can easily be turned in any way the preceptor pleases.” Burton, on the other hand, despite Isabel’s best efforts, had little time for religious men, especially missionaries. He had seen them at work in Africa and found their methods at best ineffective and hypocritical, at worst brutal. He dryly pointed out that, while missionaries often flew into a fury over talismans of other religions, they encouraged reverence for Christian symbols and objects, from medals to palm leaves. “Priests may be good servants, but they are, mundanely speaking, bad masters. The ecclesiastical tyranny exercised upon the people from the highest to the lowest goes far to account for the extinction of Christianity in the country where so much was done to spread it,” Burton wrote. “Whilst the friars talk of ‘that meekness which becomes a missioner’…they issue eight ordinances or ‘spiritual memorandums’ degrading governors of cities and provinces who are not properly married, who neglect mass, or who do not keep saints’ festivals. Flogging seems to have been the punishment of all infractions of discipline.” In much of East Africa, Burton enjoyed telling his readers, evil spirits were white.

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“The dog that refuses the Governmental crumb shall never be allowed by a retributive destiny to pound with his teeth the Governmental loaf.” He had hoped for something better, believed that his years of service if not his dozens of languages and encyclopedic knowledge of Asia and East Africa, would warrant it, but he had known that it would probably never happen. Years later, the Irish-American journalist Frank Harris would ask Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, why Lytton had never recommended Burton for the post. “They’d never send him,” Lytton had cried. “He’s not got the title or the position; besides, he’d be too independent. My God, how he’d kick over the traces and upset the cart!”

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Burton was worried about dying not of disease in Fernando Po but of boredom. In an effort to fend off monotony and perhaps even achieve something worthwhile, he filled every day with frenzied activity. He wrote his best-known epic poem, The Kasidah, which he signed as F.B., using the pseudonym Francis Baker—his middle name paired with his mother’s maiden name—and pretended to have translated it from Arabic. He took 2,500 pages of notes and collected enough native proverbs to fill a 450-page book, which he published as Wit and Wisdom from West Africa. He explored the Niger River delta and the Bonny River; searched for gorillas along the Gabon River; and climbed Mount Cameroon, then known to Europeans as Mount Victoria, claiming to be the first European to reach its summit. “To be first in such matters is everything,” he wrote, “to be second nothing.” He also twice visited the Kingdom of Dahomey, then known for its human sacrifices, admiring the “protracted reigns of a dynasty, whose eight members have sat upon the throne 252 years, thus rivalling the seven Roman monarchs whose rule extended over nearly the same period.” As he left, having witnessed a mass ritual execution, Burton shook hands with the Dahomey king. “You are a good man,” the king told him, “but too angry.” Burton could not help but agree. “Travelers like poets,” he admitted, “are mostly an angry race.”

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inductive science the cherished unity of mankind.” There had been a schism within the society, however, dividing those who believed in monogenism, that all human beings shared a common ancestry, from those who argued for polygenism, the belief that different races had different origins. The polygenists left the society, among them Richard Burton, who now placed his powerful intellect and years of research at the service of a pseudoscience so twisted, destructive, and vile it would do incalculable damage for years to come.

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kneed brethren fell away.” In a back room of Bertolini’s, a restaurant near Leicester Square, Burton started his own, secretive society: the Cannibal Club. Surrounded by white men in black top hats and tails, Burton called the meetings to order using a mace carved to look like the head of an African man with a human thighbone in his mouth. No subject was taboo at the Cannibal Club, but its specialty was pornography, which drew to it men like Burton’s old friend, the poet parliamentarian Monckton Milnes. It also attracted Milnes’s most promising young protégé, Algernon Charles Swinburne. A petite, frail man with a small mouth, a strikingly large head framed by loose curls, and a nervous temperament, Swinburne had been born into a wealthy Northumbrian family and attended Eton and Oxford before, like Burton, leaving without a degree. He now devoted most of his time to drinking himself unconscious, engaging in self-flagellation, and writing intensely lyrical but, for Victorian England, shockingly explicit poetry. Only twenty-seven years old when he joined the Cannibal Club, Swinburne would go on to become one of the most noted British poets of the nineteenth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1903 to 1909, the year of his death.

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had a surname that made Speke’s blood boil: Burton. John Hill Burton was a well-known and respected author in his own right, having written a literary biography of David Hume as well as a seven-volume history of Scotland. “Burton is a thorough good fellow,” John Blackwood wrote, “& if we could only get Speke to comprehend the infernal absurdity & incomprehensibility of the style in which he expresses himself the two would suit each other & work well together as they are both gentlemen.” Speke moved into Burton’s Edinburgh home, where he spent day after day working closely with him on the manuscript. The collaboration was respectful and productive, but far from happy. Burton described Speke’s prose “like an endless thread [that] required no end of breaking,” and Speke, bored and frustrated, complained to Blackwood that he was “sick of proofs.”

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A third of the Nyanza’s massive western shoreline was too far to the east; the water levels were not even close; and based on his calculations, the Nile ran uphill for ninety miles. Even Rigby criticized the book, writing to Grant that “Speke tells far too much of his disputes…and not enough about the country, and his account is so vague that you cannot follow him.” Rigby’s criticism must have been particularly galling when Speke learned that he was also being ridiculed for his reverential reference to the “ancient Hindu map” that Rigby had shown him in Zanzibar. Unknown to either man, the map was a famous fraud, long dismissed in geographical circles. Humiliated, Speke asked Blackwood to remove it from future printings, but the damage had been done.

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Petherick’s defense, telling a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society that the accusations had been “most unjustly brought against M. Petherick,” and writing to Grant that Speke had sent him a “most violent telegram [about Petherick]. So violent that if I had made it public he could have been very injured.” Burton railed that Petherick had been “thrown overboard without pity, his private fortune wasted, the health of himself and his heroic and attached wife, altogether and perhaps irretrievably ruined, and his character as a merchant and a public servant blasted in the eyes of his countrymen and of the civilized world, by being charged with a dereliction of duty, and with the crime of slave dealing, at the moment he was doing everything in his power to put it down.”

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Isabel knew that the most malignant of those influences now was Laurence Oliphant. Oliphant, who had just returned from the trip to France with Speke, had long known exactly how to enflame his friend’s hatred of Burton. “Such a breach once made,” Burton knew, “is easily widened.” Now Oliphant turned his attention to Burton, casually mentioning that he had had a conversation with Speke about the proposed debate. Speke, he claimed, had said that “if Burton appeared on the platform at Bath he would kick him.” Burton reacted exactly as expected. “Well, that settles it!” he spat. “By God, he shall kick me.” Witnessing the conversation, Isabel was surprised neither by her husband’s reaction nor Oliphant’s meddling. Oliphant, she knew, had a “habit of sundering friends.” Years later, Isabel would

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took place only a few miles away and just hours before they were to face one another in a tense debate, Burton now struggled to convey both raw emotion and simple honesty. “The differences of opinion that are known to have lain between us while he was alive,” Markham read on his behalf, “make it more incumbent on me to publicly express my sincere feeling of admiration of his character and enterprise, and my deep sense of loss.”

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For Burton, the idea that Speke may have intentionally ended his own life seemed to have been not just a possibility but his first assumption. “By God,” he was said to have muttered after reading the letter announcing Speke’s death. “He’s killed himself.” Although he had managed to make it through the meeting that day, delivering with trembling voice his paper on Dahomey, as soon as he was home, he had given in to grief. “He wept long and bitterly,” Isabel wrote, “and I was for many a day trying to comfort him.” Burton’s niece Georgiana was also struck by the force of her uncle’s sorrow. Speke “was not easily forgotten by the companion of his many wanderings,” she wrote. “Burton’s emotion was uncontrollable.” Not only was he stunned and sickened by Speke’s sudden death, but he knew that his own fate would forever be linked with Speke’s. “Nothing will ever be known of Speke’s death,” he wrote to a friend just a few months later. “The charitable say that he shot himself, the uncharitable that I shot

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Burton’s own slow transformation was internal but equally visible. When he returned for visits to England, it was clear to anyone who knew him that he was not just dejected but ravaged. His niece Georgiana was sickened by the stark changes she saw in her once bright and charming uncle. “Never had we known him so wretched, so unnerved; his hands shook, his temper was strangely irritable, all that appreciation of fun and humour which rendered him such a cheery companion to old and young had vanished,” she wrote. “He could settle to nothing; he was restless, but would not leave the house; ailing, but would take no advice.”

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the porters as relentlessly and ruthlessly as Stanley demanded. Nonetheless, by the fall of 1871, Bombay had led the caravan to the Tanganyika, the lake Burton still insisted might be the Nile’s source. There, Stanley found Livingstone on its shores and, he later claimed, uttered the four words that were to become more famous than either man: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

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There was by now little interest in anything Burton had to say, on any subject. After years of being the object of intense, often malignant attention, regarded with either fascination or fear, adulation or revulsion, considered a strange and possibly dangerous outsider, he was now something far worse: a forgotten man. Poor, aging, sick, and angry, he found himself with no one to fight and nothing to fight for. He continued to write books and articles, but they earned neither public acclaim nor financial reward.

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Burton’s amusement, the only books of his that now captured the public’s attention were those translations considered by Victorian England to be obscene. He and his old friend Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot became the first to translate into English the Kama Sutra, a fifth-century Sanskrit manual on the art of love. To circumvent British obscenity laws, Burton created a fictional publishing house called the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares. The book, which became, in the words of one scholar, “one of the most pirated books in the English language,” was as publicly vilified as it was privately devoured. Even the Kama Sutra, however, paled in comparison to the indignation and excitement that surrounded his release, two years later, of a ten-volume translation (with a supplementary six volumes later added), of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, known popularly as The Arabian Nights. “Probably no European has ever gathered such an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice,” the British journalist Henry Reeve wrote of Burton’s translation in The Edinburgh Review. “It is a work which no decent gentleman will long permit to stand upon his shelves.” Comparing Burton’s work to that of earlier translators, Reeve sneered that “Galland is for the nursery, Lane is for the library, Payne for the study and Burton for the sewers.” Having expected nothing better, Burton laughed off the criticism, all the way to the bank. “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguishing myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a ‘thank you,’ nor a single farthing,” he said wryly to Isabel. “I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.” As Burton delved even deeper into the sexual studies that had absorbed much of his time at the Cannibal Club, he began to pull away from the radically racist ideas promoted there. Finally abandoning polygenism, he admitted that Africans had “shown themselves fully equal in intellect and capacity to the white races of Europe and America.” When a Sudanese man named Selim Aga wrote a memoir that was published in The Geographical Magazine, Burton defended him against those who refused to believe that he could be the author. Having hired Aga as his factotum and traveled with him for three years in West Africa, Burton knew that he had been educated in Scotland, spoke English with a Scottish accent, and was perfectly capable of the article’s sophisticated prose. “Those who noticed the article generally declared that it had been written by a European, and not a few suspected that it was by myself,” Burton wrote to the magazine, but there was no question, he assured its readers, “of its being written by any one but ‘Selim Agha.’ ” Burton’s dawning understanding, however, had come too late and was far too little to counteract his ethnological writings and his…

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curiosity and completely forgetting about the party to which he had been racing only moments before, Smalley asked Burton what he was reading. Burton answered that it was the epic poem The Lusiads, which tells the story of Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the sea route around Africa to India. Burton had been slowly translating the poem, written in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, for nearly twenty years. Smalley commented that “it seemed an odd place for such work,” to which Burton answered, “Oh, I can read anywhere or write anywhere. And I always carry Camoëns about with me…. I have done most of my translating in these odd moments.”

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Smalley had met countless famous men in his years as a journalist, from military heroes to icons of industry, but he had never met a man like Burton. “I looked at him with that sort of curiosity one has in the presence of a perfectly unique, or at any rate, original person, whose character and capacities are both evidently beyond the common,” he later wrote. “Are you never tired?” he asked Burton. “Never,” Burton answered. “What do you mean by ‘never’?” Smalley said, shocked. “I mean,” Burton replied, “that I cannot remember that I ever knew what it was to feel tired or to be unable to go on with any work I wanted to do.”

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When Burton’s translation of The Lusiads was finally released, Isabel feared that, like her brilliant if deeply flawed husband, it would never be understood. “If a thousand buy it, will a hundred read it, and will ten understand it?” she wondered. “To the unaesthetic, to non-poets, non-linguists, non-musicians, non-artists, Burton’s Lusiads will be an unknown land, an unknown tongue.” Her husband, however, was not only unconcerned, he expected nothing more. He had faced critics and detractors his entire life, had been betrayed and forgotten, and had allowed his fury to infect his own work, causing lasting damage both to his innocent victims and to his own name. What did it matter now if this work near the end of his life was ignored? “If a concurrence of adverse trifles prevent my being appreciated now,” he wrote from Cairo, “the day will come, haply somewhat late, when men will praise what they now pass by.” The years he had devoted to this single translation, a homage both to exploration and to poetry, was not for the critics or for the public but for himself. Far more than any expedition or adventure, any long-sought geographical prize, this might serve as his legacy after death. If not, it was at least a comfort in old age. “I have spared no labor on the work; I have satisfied myself if not Malebouche,” he wrote near the end of his preface to The Lusiads, braced once more for attack. “I repeat my motto: poco spero, nulla chiedo.” Little I hope, nothing I ask.

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Although he had solved the mystery that had captivated philosophers and frustrated explorers for millennia—had answered, in the words of the Royal Geographical Society, “the problem of all ages”—John Hanning Speke was quickly forgotten. He had been lucky and he had been right, and he had clung to those facts, hoping that they would protect him from becoming lost in the long shadow of Richard Burton. In the end, however, being right had not been enough. While more than a dozen biographies would be written about his deeply troubled, endlessly fascinating nemesis, Speke would be the primary subject of only one slim volume, written more than a century after his death.

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Although Speke would have seethed at the idea, Burton remembered him better and longer than most. Not only did he contribute to Murchison’s fund for the memorial, but he helped in the creation of a bust of the fallen explorer. A few months after Speke’s funeral, which he had not attended, knowing that he would not be welcome, Burton was invited to the studio of the sculptor Edgar George Papworth, the artist commissioned to make the bust. Papworth came from a long line of artists and builders, from his grandfather, the “master plaisterer” at both St. James’s Palace and Kensington Palace; to his father, a builder and architect; to his son, Edgar George Papworth Jr., who was among the most admired sculptors of his generation. Papworth knew stone and clay as well as any man then living in Britain, but he did not know Speke. Worried that his bust would have none of the qualities that had animated his subject in life, he asked for help from the man whose name had been linked with Speke’s for the past ten years. “I only took the cast after death and never knew him alive,” he told Burton as they stood in his studio in Dorset Square, staring at the incomplete bust. “But you who

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who had been both his intimate friend and greatest foe, would later memorialize the moment in a poem she titled “Who Last Wins.” A Moulded mask at my feet I found With the drawn-down mouth and the deepen’d eye, More lifeless still than the marbles round— Very death amid life’s mimicry

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Even Speke’s most lauded accomplishment was muted over time. Although the Nyanza is the principal source of the White Nile, the lake itself is fed by many smaller rivers and streams, pouring into it from the surrounding mountains. In 2006, nearly 150 years after Speke and Bombay first saw the Nyanza, a British explorer named Neil McGrigor claimed to have made the first full ascent of the Nile from sea to source, and then to have traced the…

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his expeditions nor any memorial built in his honor but his reckless, baseless theories connecting race and religion. For Speke, “the history of Noah, and the disposition of his sons on the face of the globe” explained what he believed was a fundamental difference between races. When Bombay, the man upon whom he relied most heavily while in East Africa and to whom he owed so much, had asked him about “the origin of Seedis, his caste, and…by what law of nature I accounted for their cruel destiny in being the slaves of all men,” Speke had confidently answered. Bombay, he said, was “of the black or…

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Hamitic Myth, which had been used for decades to justify slavery. His popularity in Victorian England, however, as well as his fervent belief in the myth and his eagerness to discuss it, led to its increased acceptance. The stunning achievements of the ancient Egyptians, which the British Empire had been so eager to study and appropriate, were explained away by yet another distinction, this time between the sons of Ham. Only the youngest, Canaan, had carried the curse of his father, the argument went, but Mizraim, the ancestor of the Egyptians, did not. By 1994, the Hamitic Myth would not only feed racial prejudice but give rise to one of the most devastating civil wars in African history: the Rwandan genocide. Speke’s argument that the Hutu majority in the region were descendants of Canaan, “a primitive race,” and that the Tutsi minority were the sons of Mizraim, descended from “the best blood of Abyssinia,” had led to decades of…

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Sidi Mubarak Bombay, would live a life that was longer, more eventful, and more accomplished than Speke’s own. While for both Burton and Speke the tantalizing, fleeting opportunity to map East Africa ended the day Speke died, for Bombay, the work of mapping his own continent continued unabated. He would spend the rest of his life exploring the home from which he had been stolen as a child and which he had reclaimed through quiet courage. In the ensuing years, he added to his already astonishing achievements not only by helping Stanley to find Livingstone but, with the British explorer Verney Lovett Cameron, becoming the first to cross the entire continent from east to west, sea to sea. In the end, Bombay would become not only one of the most accomplished…

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That same year, the Society awarded Livingstone’s aides, James Chuma, Abdullah Susi, and Jacob Wainwright, silver medals after they carried the missionary-explorer’s body nearly a thousand miles to the coast, a journey of nine months, so that it could be buried at Westminster Abbey. Bombay, although he was never invited to England to receive the awards he had earned over many decades of exploration, was given a silver medal and a lifetime pension. The following year, a gold medal was awarded to Nain Singh, an Indian explorer who helped to map much of Central Asia and Tibet, surveying the Brahmaputra River and determining the location and altitude of the Tibetan city of Lhasa.

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2009, the Royal Geographical Society took a serious step toward trying to change the misguided perception that European explorers alone mapped the world. A major exhibition titled Hidden Histories of Exploration, researched in the Society’s archives and written by Professor Felix Driver and Dr. Lowri Jones, was featured at its headquarters in London. “The history of exploration has often invited celebration…. But what, and whom, shall we celebrate?” the exhibition asked. In answer, it highlighted men whose work had been essential to some of the most famous expeditions in history, among them Sidi Mubarak Bombay.

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Enslaved people themselves also took decisive and effective action to end slavery and to offer support to those who had regained their freedom. Hundreds of thousands escaped from slavery, facing extraordinarily dangerous and uncertain conditions. Others used the abolition laws of the colonial powers that had seized so much of Africa to put pressure on the men who owned them. Among the most powerful and lasting efforts to end slavery were those steps taken by “Bombay Africans,” people who had been kidnapped as children, rescued from slave ships in the Indian Ocean, and raised in orphanages in Bombay (now Mumbai). After being recruited by Europeans to help in exploring Africa, many of these men and women, including James Chuma and Abdullah Susi, David Livingstone’s famous aides, mounted anti-slavery campaigns. They also helped to found settlements in East Africa, such as Freretown and Rabai, which became places of safety and opportunity for those who had once been enslaved.

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1885, Sidi Mubarak Bombay died at the age of sixty-five. No memorial was built for him after his death, nor any biographies written about him in subsequent years. His name is rarely seen in the annals of exploration, but it could be argued that he accomplished more than any single explorer ever to enter the continent of his birth. More than that, he had lived and died in Africa a free man. •

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Richard Burton’s life would last longer than either Speke’s or Bombay’s, but its final years bore little resemblance to the twilight of a national hero. Moving from consulate to consulate, he was ignored by the British government, the Royal Geographical Society, and the wider public, despised by Speke’s family and friends, and relegated to near poverty. Early in 1886, he was surprised by a cable informing him that the queen had approved for him a knighthood. By then, however, he had become so angry and resentful that Isabel worried he would not accept it. “You know I suppose that they have K.C.M.Gd me,” he wrote to his friend the novelist Maria Louise Ramé, known by the pen name Ouida, “and I’m ungrateful enough to comment ‘Half gives who late gives.’ ”

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In the end, all that Burton had left was what he had begun with—literature and languages. His controversial translations of ancient Arabic texts became, in many ways, his salvation. Not only did they bring in sorely needed funds, but they filled his days and engaged his mind. They also gave him one aspect of public life that he had missed the most: a good fight. “I don’t care a button about being prosecuted,” he told Isabel with relish as he worked on his translation of The Arabian Nights. “If the matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that, before they condemn me, they must cut half of them

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view,” she wrote. “He dissected a passion from every point of view, as a doctor may dissect a body, showing its source, its origin, its evil, and its good, and its proper uses, as designed by Providence and Nature.” Her husband, famous not just for his languages, writings, and travels, but for his outrageous stories and unblushing interest in the sexual proclivities of every culture, was, she insisted, personally irreproachable in thought and action. “In private life he was the most pure, the most refined and modest man that ever lived,” she declared. “He was so guiltless himself that he could never be brought to believe that other men said or used these things from any other standpoint.”

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Picking up the first sheet of the manuscript, Isabel stretched her quivering hand toward the fire. “Sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling,” she wrote, “I burnt sheet after sheet, until the whole of the volumes were consumed.” She expected to be judged harshly, even hated, by the thousands of people who admired her husband and worshipped his work, and she was right, but she cared only for the judgment of one man. “Will he rise up in his grave and curse me or bless me?” she asked herself as she watched Richard Burton’s final work turn to ashes in the flames. “The thought will haunt me to death.”

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