INTO THE UNKNOWN.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 227, 25 September 1929, Page 6

INTO THE UNKNOWN.

BURTON'S WANDERINGS IN MANY LANDS.

(By CHARLES CONWAY.)

(Copyrighted.)

Sir Richard • Francis Burton was one of the most versatile and indefatigable of English travellers. He was a skilled swordsman, horseman and shot, a prolific writer and a most remarkable linguist, being master of over thirty languages and dialects, and it was truly said of him that "before reaching middle age he had compressed into his life more of study, more of hardship and more of successful enterprise and adventure than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men."

During the time that he served as an officer in the army of the East India Company he frequently disguised himself as a Hindu native, and, by mixing with the people in the bazaars, he was able to secure the intimate knowledge of Eastern life and customs, especially among the lower classes, which enabled him in later years to pass himself off as an Oriental, and in that guise to travel through lands where no European would have been allowed to pass.

He was thirty-two years of age when he made his pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca in 1853, and lie was the first Englishman to visit those holy cities of the Mohammedan religion. When he started on this hazardous trip, which made his name world-famous, he had planned to extend hi& journey into the unknown interior of Arabia, but was prevented from doing this by the outbreak of war between the Arab tribes. His clever disguise enabled him to attach himself to a party of genuine pilgrims at Suez without arousing suspicion, and in their company he made a perilous and arduous journey to the sacred cities, where he was successful in gaining access to the most strictly-guarded sanctuaries of Islam, but for many months ho carried his life in his hands, for one false step, the mispronunciation of a word, or the omission of some slight detail in the daily ritual, would have ensured his death.

In the following year he headed an expedition to explore Somaliland in East Africa, but he accomplished the most difficult part of the enterprise alone, when, disguised as an Arab merchant, he passed through one hundred and fifty miles of strange and difficult country, infested by bloodthirsty savages, and visited the town of Harar, which had never before been entered by a white man. He remained there for ten days in deadly danger, and during the return journey across the desert his great physical strength and wonderful powers of endurance were tested almost to the breaking point. On rejoining his party Burton was badly wounded in a skirmish with the natives, and the expedition came to a premature ending.

In 1850 Burton started on the greatest of all his adventurous journeys, which had for its object the exploration of the lake'regions of equatorial Africa. The journey proved one of exceptional peril and hardship, for the party had to frequently Lick a path through impenetrable undergrowth and was constantly exposed to the treachery of the savage native tribes, to say nothing of its daily fight against the diseases of the deadly climate and its privations from the scarcity cf food. After discovering Lake Tanganyika Burton was stricken down with a fever, with the result that J. H. Speke, who was a member of the expedition, travelled on without his leader and made his epoch-marking discovery of Lake Victoria Nyanza.

Burton entered the service of the British Foreign Office in 1861, and while acting as consul in various parts of the world he made a number of eventful journeys. While.at Fernando Po, in West Africa, he travelled in the Cameroons and in Dahomey, and when stationed at Santos, in Brazil, he made a trip across the Soutli American continent to Peru, crossing and recrossing the Andes, travelled by canoe for 1500 miles down the San Francisco River in Brazil, and voyaged many hundred miles up the Amazon and La Plata Rivers.