Richard Francis Burton was born in Torquay, England, on March 19, 1821. He had an unconventional education, while his family moved around in Italy and France, and developed remarkable powers as a linguist at an early age. He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1840 but was expelled two years later for misbehavior. He spent the next eight years in India and became proficient in several of the Indian vernaculars as well as in Arabic and Persian. Eventually he learned about 40 languages and dialects. To gather reports for the British, he mingled with people in the bazaars while passing himself off as a native.

In 1853 Burton—bearded, stained with henna, and disguised in Muslim dress—made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest cities of Islam. The extraordinary journey was recorded in his vivid and intensely personal book, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1855–56). Burton led a party into the interior of Somali country in northeast Africa in 1854. Undertaking the most difficult part of the journey alone, he was the first European to visit the forbidden city of Harer (now Harar, Ethiopia) without being executed. He described his adventure in his classic First Footsteps in East Africa (1856).

After Crimean War duty Burton resumed his expedition in Africa, reaching Lake Tanganyika in 1858. In 1861 Burton married Isabel Arundell and entered the British foreign service. He served as consul at Fernando Po (now a province of Equatorial Guinea); Santos, Brazil; Damascus, Syria; and Trieste, now in Italy. Burton wrote 43 volumes on his explorations and the peoples he encountered and almost 30 volumes of translations. His most celebrated translation was a definitive, uncensored edition of the Arabian Nights (1885–88) in 16 volumes, with explicit footnotes (see “Arabian Nights”).

Burton was knighted in 1886. He died in Trieste on Oct. 20, 1890. After his death his wife burned most of his diaries and journals, apparently because of the erotic content of most of the material.