Ruffian Dick mysterious still
Denis Hills
BURTON: SNOW UPON THE DESERT by Frank McLynn
John Murray, £19.95, pp. 428
This book deals less with Burton's footslogging heroics as explorer than with the way his mind worked. In 'Ruffian Dick' — he was a handsome, swarthy man with a great scar on his cheek where it had .been gashed by a spear — Frank McLynn has found a ready-made subject for psycho- biographical study. Burton's fractured per- sonality, his intellectual brilliance, his love- hate relationships, his explosive tempera- ment and his obsessions made him into a classic outsider. Early in his career, as one of General Napier's young Indian Army officers, Burton shocked his colleagues and supervisors (though not Napier himself) by writing a report on the vices and perver- sions practised in the homosexual brothels of Karachi. Burton's curiosity about Orien- tal (and, later, African) sexual customs and the 'anatomical' differences between whites and the darker races, was to last throughout his life. It was a blow to his self-esteem when he discovered from his Indian mistress that he could not compete with the expertise of Oriental love-making. His 'abject failure as a heterosexual lover', as McLynn puts it, his 'wounded hetero- sexuality', gave Burton an inferiority com- plex — indeed a hatred of women — that was the key to his misogyny.
In the account of his journey with Speke to discover the source of the Nile, Burton gives full rein to his contempt for blacks (the Arab slave dealers whom he met, however, he respected as men of a higher breed and culture). The native, he says, is cruel and malevolent, his days torpid, sensual and idle. 'He drinks till he can no longer stand, lies down to sleep, and awakes to drink again . . . improvement has no hold upon him.' Both Burton and Speke were often ill during their East African journey. For long periods they were blind, paralysed and feverish, and they had to be carried in hammocks. Yet neither showed much gratitude to the simple Africans who helped and guided them and had no one to express their own views of the eccentricities, the bad temper and frequent helplessness of the explorers themselves. Burton at his worst was a clever Victorian gentleman poking con- temptuously among the nasty ant-hill life of 'debased and beer-sodden savages'. McLynn, however, may have been too hard on Speke. He portrays him as a dolt and a repressed homosexual with a mania for slaughtering wild life. Yet Speke's journal shows him to have been cool- headed, observant and sensible. He did not, like Burton, consider the native hope- less. 'To say a negro is incapable of instruction is a mere absurdity.' What was needed, Speke thought, was a dose of the white man's government, 'like ours in India — they would be saved.' When in 1861 Speke returned to East Africa with a new companion to confirm his first impul- sive claim to have glimpsed, on a solo jaunt to Lake Nyanza, the true source of the Nile (Burton had dismissed the claim as fanci- ful), Speke showed slyness and some humour in his relationship with Africans, as when he measured the thigh of one of King Rumanika's fat wives — 'a tricky piece of engineering' (they were so fat they had to be moved about on litters), and later at the Kabaka's court, where he ingratiated himself with the Queen Mother Cher royal corpulence'). Furthermore, un- like Burton, Speke paid off his porters.
While Speke, having broken with Bur- ton, was still away on his second Nile adventure, the latter, now British consul in Fernando Po after being struck off the Indian list, travelled to Benin and Dahomey and wrote another book of absorbing anthropological interest. The cruel custom of human sacrifice horrified Burton. But King Gelele's brigade of Amazon warriors did not impress him. 'I looked forward', he wrote, 'to seeing 5,000 African virgins with the liveliest curiosity, having never in my life seen a negress in such a predicament.' Alas, they were mostly old, and fearfully ugly, the officers apparently chosen 'for the bigness of their bums . . . In military terms the Amazons were a farce . . . an equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick would clear them off in a very few hours.'
Meanwhile, Burton's unhappy rela- tionship with Speke was nearing its tragic end. It had started unluckily at Berbera (1855) when the two men were attacked by armed Somalis and Speke, fancying that Butler had impugned his courage, charged into a mob of spearmen and was wounded 11 times. 'A touching lesson', Burton remarked, 'on how difficult it is to kill a man in sound health.' Now, nine years later, the two protagonists agreed to meet in public debate at Bath to argue their conflicting views on the true origins of the Nile. On the day of the debate (16 Decem- ber 1864), while Burton was already stand- ing on the platform, he learned that his rival had accidentally shot himself dead the previous afternoon while going after part- ridge. Butler broke down and wept. He dis- agreed with the jury's verdict that Speke's death had been accidental and not suicide. McLynn is in two minds about the matter. He believes the verdict should have been 'death through misadventure while the balance of the mind was disturbed.'
McLynn's book traces Burton's later career as British consul in Damascus and finally Trieste, and his eccentric marriage to the pious and ultra-Catholic Isabel. It was Isabel who had the last word. At her husband's death in Trieste (1869) she persuaded the priest to give him Extreme Unction though he was a notorious free- thinker and indeed, when the priest ar- rived, seemed to be already dead. Isabel buried him in a mausoleum shaped like a Bedouin tent at Mortlake cemetery, and destroyed his erotic papers.
McLynn has used previously unpub- lished material in his fascinating study of a fascinating man and his 'tortured psyche'. His technique relies heavily on Freudian speculations, which are intriguing though they may not convince every reader. Bur- ton may have" been a Nietzschean, a sadomasochist, a sexologist and other things. His romantic mystique remains.
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