Wanderings in Three Continents

BURTON was a many-sided man. The following volume of posthumous essays reveals him in the aspect in which he was best known to the world—as a traveller and explorer. It will add comparatively little to the knowledge of the Burton student; to the general reader it will contain much that is new, for though Burton wrote and published many bulky volumes of travel in years gone by, none of them assumed a popular form, and it may be doubted if any, save his “Pilgrimage to Meccah and El Medinah,” reached the outer circle of the great reading public. Most of his books are now out of copyright, many are out of print, and few are easily obtainable. This volume, therefore, will supply a need, in that it gives in a popular form a consensus of his most important travels in three continents. It will also, I hope, remind his countrymen of the achievements of this remarkable man, and bring home to many a deeper sense of what we have lost in him. This was the view taken by Lady Burton, who had hoped to incorporate these essays in her memorial edition of “The Labours and Wisdom of Sir Richard Burton,” a work cut short by her death. Upon me, therefore, has devolved the task of editing them and preparing them for publication. They form the second volume of the Burton MSS. which have been published since Lady Burton’s death, and I am the more encouraged to give them to the world by the success which attended the previous volume, “The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam.” The reception of this book, though published under obvious difficulties, and eight years after the author’s death, showed that the interest in the great traveller’s work was in no degree abated.

The essays that follow were all prepared by Burton himself, and most of them were read by him in the form of lectures before sundry geographical and scientific societies at different times. For instance, the description of his expeditions to El Medinah, Meccah, Harar, and Dahomé were delivered by him as a course of four lectures before the Emperor and Empress of Brazil at Rio in 1866. The account of his Central African expedition was read, I believe, at Bath, the one on Damascus and Palmyra at Edinburgh, the one on the Mormons in London. I have deleted the local and topical allusions, which arose from the circumstances under which they were delivered; I have filled in a word or two where the notes were too sketchy; but that is all. Otherwise, the manuscript is reproduced exactly as it left the author’s hands. In his own words, simply and unaffectedly, Burton here gives an epitome of his principal travels in three continents.

In this condensed form the essays necessarily lose something. On the other hand, they gain much. Careful and accurate as all Burton’s books of travel were, his passion for detail sometimes led him into tediousness. He crammed his notebooks so full that he had occasionally a difficulty in digesting the large mass of information he had acquired. He was addicted to excessive annotation. For instance, in his book on the Mormons, the large text occupied on some pages only three lines, the rest of the page being broken up by closely printed notes, extracts from Mormon books and sermons, which can only be considered as superfluous. Extraneous matter of this kind has been omitted here, and the result is a clear gain to the narrative.

The book covers the period from 1853 to 1870, the most active years of Burton’s active life. It opens most fitly with an account of his pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah. This famous expedition was the turning-point of Burton’s career; in a sense it may be said to have been the beginning of it. Though he had already shown much promise and some performance, and was known to many in India as a linguist, soldier, writer, and man of unusual ability, he was yet unknown to the greater world outside. But after his pilgrimage to Meccah his fame became world-wide and enduring. I say this in no spirit of exaggeration. When all that Burton wrote and wrought has passed away into that limbo of forgetfulness which awaits the labours of even the most distinguished among us, this at least will be remembered to his honour, that he was the first Englishman to penetrate to the Holy of Holies at Meccah. I write the first Englishman advisedly. Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer, had gone part of the way before him, and since his day one or two have the made the pilgrimage, but, though it was a sufficiently difficult task when they performed it, it was much more difficult when Burton did it in 1853. He was not a man to do things by halves. He made the pilgrimage thoroughly, living absolutely the life of the Moslems, wearing their clothes, eating their food, joining in their prayers, sacrifices, and ritual, and speaking their language; he did all this, carrying his life in his hand, for one false step, one prayer unsaid, one trifling item of the shibboleth omitted, and the dog of an infidel who had dared to profane the sanctuary of the Prophet would have been found out, and his bones would have whitened the desert sand. Not that Burton went to profane the tomb of the Prophet. Far from it. From his early manhood he had been a sympathetic student of the higher aspects of El Islam. He had come to see that in it, above and beyond all the corruptions and abuses which clung around the Saving Faith, there existed an occult force which had made it a power among men. Not only in his achievement, but in the way he did it, Burton manifested those great qualities which have made the English race what it is; he showed tenacity, pluck, and strength of purpose, and, withal, he accomplished his purpose unobtrusively. None knew until he came back how great a task he had achieved.