Victorious Victorian*

BURTON, ARABIAN NIGHTS ADVENTURER --Fairfax Downey--Scribner ($3).

"One of the greatest explorers the world has ever known, if not the greatest . . . one of the two, or possibly three, most proficient linguists of whom we have historical authentication. None could match his peculiar ability in disguising himself. In almost all his undertakings the odds were against him, and it was his lot to be robbed of most of the glory he earned." Capt. Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), most scholarly of adventurers, most swashbuckling of scholars, seems fated to be famed chiefly as translator of an "uncastrated" version of the Arabian Nights./- If his wife had not burned many of his unpublished, scandalous and scholarly papers, his fame might have been even greater among orientalists, more shocking to laymen.

As a child he was independent, not to say ferocious. With his brother and their sister, he used to knock down their nurses, jump on them. They smashed shopwindows to get at cakes. At Trinity College, Oxford, young Richard got into plenty of trouble, was "sent down" after two stormy years. But his interest had already fastened on Oriental languages which he studied by himself with no other help than a grammar and dictionary. "He used to say that when he set out to acquire a language, he learned swear words and after that the rest was easy." Burton was big, bearded, muscular. When he took up fencing it was in no garden-party spirit; he became one of the foremost swordsmen of Europe.

Burton's soldier father was glad to further his son's military ambition, but was too poor to buy him a commission in a crack regiment. Young Richard had to be content with the native army of the East India Company. But the routine of army life soon bored him; he was always putting in for risky assignments: investigations in disguise among the natives, a journey to Harrar in Somaliland, whence no white man had ever returned; searching for the source of the Nile (his companion Speke got the credit for discovering Victoria Nyanza, but Burton led the expedition). He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise, went to Salt Lake City in the reign of Brigham Young, made an engineering trip to Iceland, wrote many a book on erotic craft & customs of the Orient. Some spoke of him as "ruffian Dick" and "that blackguard Burton," but nobody ever called him a coward or a bore. The East India Company was glad to get rid of such an embarrassingly spectacular servant. Her Majesty's Government grudgingly gave him poor, unimportant consular posts--Fernando Po, Damascus, Trieste--afraid of what he would do. In his last post (Trieste) the aging adventurer made his only lucky strike--a translation of the "Arabian Nights," The Thousand Nights & A Night, which brought him -L-12,000.

Burton was of the genus lion, even in society. "When a princess gave him a 'high handshake' he grasped her elbow and lowered her arm. That cured her." Once an archbishop ventured to tease him about his interest in monkeys, asked if he was studying his ancestry. "Well, my lord," said Burton, "I at least have made a little progress, but what about your lordship who is descended from the angels?"

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