The Man No One Could Stop

Sir Richard Francis Burton spoke twenty-nine languages. Not casually — fluently enough to disguise himself as a Pashtun merchant named Mirza Abdullah, walk into Mecca during the Hajj, and walk back out again. Non-Muslims who entered the city faced death. Burton took notes.

He translated the Kama Sutra into English. Then he translated the Arabian Nights — all sixteen volumes, unexpurgated — and published them through a private subscription society to sidestep the obscenity laws. He fought in sword duels. He was, by the standards of Victorian England, essentially ungovernable.

In 1855, during an expedition in Somaliland, a warrior hurled a javelin at Burton's face. It entered one cheek and exited through the other. Burton pulled the spear out himself, and kept fighting. He wore the scars for the remaining thirty-five years of his life the way other men wore medals.

He spent those decades filling journals — forty years of observations, translations, and manuscripts no publisher would touch. He was still writing when he died in 1890.

His wife Isabel, devoutly Catholic and convinced she was saving his soul, burned them. All of them. Decades of work, an unpublished translation of The Perfumed Garden, notebooks from expeditions no one else had survived.

Burton had pulled a javelin through his own face. His papers, he could not save.