The Devil Drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton

Date of first publication: 1967
Eland publication date: July 7, 2002

"Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself "Why?" and the only echo is "damned fool! ...the devil drives!"

So wrote Richard Francis Burton, while preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863. Tormented by the question of "why?", his answer "the devil drives" applies not only to his explorations, but to the whole of his turbulent life. The nature of his demon, the source of his restlessness, has baffled many biographers.

It is hardly surprising that many biographers were baffled because Richard Francis Burton was no ordinary man. Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. He penetrated the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and explored the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. He searched for the sources of the White Nile and discovered Lake Tanganyika.

Drawing from Burton's own published works and from the few manuscripts that managed to escape destruction by Lady Burton (unfortunately for posterity, Burton's wife burned many of his diaries and journals after he died, in order to depict her husband in a light that was acceptable to Victorian sensitivities), Fawn Brodie explains the "why?" and in doing so creates a fascinating portrait in what is widely regarded as the definitive portrait of this complex man. But this wonderful book is far more than a biography of the magnificent Burton; it's also a thrilling adventure story, an important historical document and a thumping good read, or as the New York Times Book Review puts it: "Brilliant...the scholarship is wide and searching, and the understanding of Burton and his wife both deep and wide. Brodie writes with clarity and zest. The result is a first class biography of an exceptional man." Three decades ago, Graham Greene hailed the eleventh account of Burton's life as "by far the best, and surely the final, biography" but Brodie's work is now widely acknowledged as the definitive work.

With a fast-paced, fascinating, yet concise, writing style that impels the reader forward page after page, Brodie takes us through Burton's own early formative years, his adventures in India, his pilgrimages to the forbidden cities of Mecca and Harar, his exploration for the source of the Nile, his rivalry with fellow explorer and nemesis, John Hanning Speke, his strangely sexless marriage to Isabel, and his profound accomplishments as an intellect and writer. This is a masterful work that deserves to be read, re-read and savoured for years to come.

However, the strength of this book lies in the fact that and even the most blasé 21^st-century traveller is in no danger of underestimating the skill, effort, and courage Burton required to reach places that today are often no more than a few hours away by plane. Burton very nearly died on two of his expeditions to Africa; once nearly being killed in an attack on his camp and once nearly succumbing to fever. That attack of fever explains why he never won what he richly deserved, the credit of being the first man to discover the source of the Nile: he was prostrate, recovering from it when his companion Speke set out alone and triumphed, though there was controversy for some years to come about whether Speke had actually reached the true source.

In its sketches of figures like Speke, a hunting fanatic with an odd fetish for shooting pregnant animals, the book becomes even more valuable than it already is as a record of an extraordinary man and his life and work. Brodie sets Burton in his age, and shows how out of place he was in it. A free thinker in a society dominated and controlled by religion, and a pioneering sexologist at a time when writers could be fined for publishing books on contraception, he was never at home in Britain and never at home out of it, which explains much of the restless spirit and energy that drove him endlessly on, physically in his youth, and scholastically in his middle and old age, when he translated and published such works as The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra.

This is a remarkable book about a remarkable man and one that deserves to be on every traveller's bookshelf.