Expelled from Oxford, Richard Burton went on to master up to 29 languages
Richard Francis Burton got himself permanently thrown out of Oxford for lecturing the dons who had just lectured him. He then joined the army in India, passed six formal language exams, kept a troop of monkeys hoping to learn their speech, and later reached Mecca in disguise and saw Lake Tanganyika before any other known European.
Burton was born in Torquay on 19 March 1821, though his autobiography wrongly placed his birth at the family house in Elstree. His asthmatic father, an Anglo-Irish army officer, dragged the family around France and Italy, from Tours and Blois to Pisa, Siena and Naples. The boys ran half wild, but Richard soaked up French, Italian, modern Greek and Neapolitan. When he reached Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840 he irritated tutors by pronouncing Latin the Roman way and Greek with an Athenian accent, and spent his energy on rowing, fencing and falconry.
Oxford disappointed him. He called its paid teaching worthless, refused to shave a moustache until formally ordered and challenged a mocking classmate to a duel. The Regius Professor declined to teach him Arabic individually, so he taught himself. In April 1842 he went to a steeplechase the college had banned; the other culprits were suspended, but Burton answered back and was expelled for good.
Classmates already serving in India helped get him commissioned into the Bombay Army. The First Anglo-Afghan War had ended by the time he arrived, and he served in Gujarat under General Charles James Napier, earning the nickname Ruffian Dick for his ferocity in fights. He learned Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki and Marathi, claimed to have collected sixty words of monkey speech, and threw himself into local religions, from Hindu rites to Sikhism, Sufi retreats and Islam; his biographer Ed Rice wrote that he could recite the Qur'an from memory.
The Royal Geographical Society later sent him to East Africa, where with John Hanning Speke he searched for the source of the Nile. He made the Hajj to Mecca in disguise, translated One Thousand and One Nights and published the Kama Sutra in English, and wrote on subjects from fencing to ethnography. He served as consul in Fernando Pó, Santos, Damascus and Trieste, was knighted in 1886 and died on 20 October 1890.
Source: Richard Francis Burton
