Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, KCMG, FRGS, (19 March 1821 – 20 October 1890) was a British explorer, army officer, writer and scholar.

[3] Born in Torquay, Devon, Burton joined the Bombay Army as an officer in 1842, beginning an eighteen-year military career which included a brief stint in the Crimean War.

He was subsequently engaged by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to explore the East African coast, where Burton along with John Hanning Speke led an expedition to discover the source of the Nile and became the first European known to have seen Lake Tanganyika.

[5] His best-known achievements include undertaking the Hajj to Mecca in disguise, translating One Thousand and One Nights and The Perfumed Garden, and publishing the Kama Sutra in English.

Although he abandoned his university studies, Burton became a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and academic articles on subjects such as human behaviour, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices and ethnography.

His religious experiences were varied, including attending Catholic services, becoming a Naga Brahmin, converting to Sikhism and Islam, and undergoing chilla for Qadiriyya Sufism.

He donned the guise of a Persian mirza, and then a Sunni sheikh, doctor, magician and dervish, accompanied by an enslaved Indian boy named Nūr.

He further equipped himself with a case for carrying the Quran, but which instead had three compartments for his watch, compass, money, penknife, pencils and numbered pieces of paper for taking notes.

In India, Burton wrote his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, writing that "at Mecca there is nothing theatrical, nothing that suggests the opera, but all is simple and impressive... tending, I believe, after its fashion, to good.

"[14]: 179–225 Although Burton was not the first non-Muslim European to undertake the Hajj, with Ludovico di Varthema doing it in 1503 and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1815,[23] his attempt is the most famous and the best documented of the period.

He adopted various disguises, including that of a Pashtun, to account for any oddities in speech, but he still had to demonstrate an understanding of intricate Islamic traditions and a familiarity with the minutiae of Eastern manners and etiquette.

As he put it, although "... neither Koran or Sultan enjoin the death of Jew or Christian intruding within the columns that note the sanctuary limits, nothing could save a European detected by the populace, or one who after pilgrimage declared himself an unbeliever".

On 29 December, Burton met with Gerard Adan in the village of Sagharrah and openly proclaimed himself as a British officer with a letter for the Emir of Harar.

[28] However, the failure of this expedition (which also resulted in the second blockade of Berbera) was viewed harshly by the British authorities, and a two-year investigation was set up to determine to what extent Burton was culpable for this disaster.

[14]: 265–271 In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society funded another expedition for Burton and Speke, "and exploration of the then utterly unknown Lake regions of Central Africa."

[33] Speke had earlier proven his mettle by trekking through the mountains of Tibet, but Burton regarded him as inferior as he did not speak any Arabic or African languages.

Despite his fascination with non-European cultures, some have portrayed Burton as an unabashed imperialist convinced of the historical and intellectual superiority of the white race, citing his involvement in the Anthropological Society of London, an organisation which supported scientific racism.

[37] Speke undertook a second expedition, along with Captain James Grant and Sidi Mubarak Bombay, to prove that Lake Victoria was the true source of the Nile.

Shortly after this, the couple were forced to spend some time apart when he formally entered the Diplomatic Service as consul on the island of Fernando Po, now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.

In Burton's own words, the main aim of the society (through the publication of the periodical Anthropologia) was "to supply travellers with an organ that would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscript and print their curious information on social and sexual matters".

Deliberately presented by Burton as a translation, the poem and his notes and commentary on it contain layers of Sufic meaning that seem to have been designed to project Sufi teaching in the West.

As well as references to many themes from Classical Western myths, the poem contains many laments that are accented with fleeting imagery such as repeated comparisons to "the tinkling of the Camel bell" that becomes inaudible as the animal vanishes in the darkness of the desert.

[53] The couple are buried in a tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent, designed by Isabel,[54] in the cemetery of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church Mortlake in southwest London.

For this reason Burton, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, created the Kama Shastra Society to print and circulate books that would be illegal to publish in public.

After Burton's death, Isabel burnt many of his papers, including a manuscript of a subsequent translation, The Scented Garden, containing the final chapter of the work, on pederasty.

Rumours began in his army days when Charles James Napier requested that Burton go undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers.

[66] A story that haunted Burton up to his death (recounted in some of his obituaries) was that, during his journey to Mecca disguised as a Muslim, he came close to being discovered one night when he lifted his robe to urinate rather than squatting as an Arab would.

As an obituary described: "...he was ill fitted to run in official harness, and he had a Byronic love of shocking people, of telling tales against himself that had no foundation in fact.

"[70] Ouida reported: "Men at the FO [Foreign Office] ... used to hint dark horrors about Burton, and certainly justly or unjustly he was disliked, feared and suspected ... not for what he had done, but for what he was believed capable of doing.

[72][73] He asserted that there exists a geographic-climatic zone in which sodomy and pederasty (sexual intimacy between older men and young pubescent/adolescent boys) are endemic,[72][73] prevalent,[72][73] and celebrated among the indigenous inhabitants and within their cultures.