He walked into Mecca disguised as an Afghan doctor, took a spear through the face in Somalia, and translated the Kama Sutra into English before dinner. Sir Richard Francis Burton was the closest thing Victorian England ever produced to a comic-book character. He spoke twenty-nine languages fluently. He could break the back of a new one, he claimed, in six weeks. He was a master swordsman. He was reputed to have fought more men in single combat than any other British officer of his generation. He had "panther eyes" and a moustache that terrified junior lieutenants. His fellow Bombay Army officers gave him the nickname Ruffian Dick — not affectionately. He was born in Torquay, England, on March 19, 1821, to an Anglo-Irish army officer and an English mother. He spent his childhood on the continental European boarding-school circuit — France, Italy, back to France. By the time he was fifteen he was fluent in five languages and had been in fistfights on three countries' worth of playgrounds. At Oxford he lasted less than two years. On his first morning at Trinity College, another undergraduate walked past him in the courtyard and made a comment about his moustache. Burton challenged him to a duel on the spot. The other student wisely declined. Burton spent the next eighteen months treating the entire Oxford establishment with open contempt. When the dons caught him attending a horse race in defiance of a specific college rule, they expelled him for good. He drove out of Oxford in a horse-drawn carriage, blowing a bugle at the professors as he left. He joined the East India Company's Bombay Army the same summer. They sent him to India. He spent the next seven years posted to the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry in Gujarat and Sindh. His fellow officers hated him. He preferred the company of the locals. He learned Hindustani, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki, Persian, and Arabic, and passed six formal army language examinations. He kept forty tame monkeys in his officer's quarters, trying to reconstruct their vocabulary. He claimed to have identified sixty distinct "words" before his commanding officer forced him to release them. He worked undercover for the army in the brothels of Karachi. In 1853, he disappeared. The Bombay Army knew he had taken leave. They did not know that Burton had grown a full beard, memorized the Quran in Arabic, adopted the identity of an Afghan doctor named Hajji Mirza Abdullah, and joined a caravan of Muslim pilgrims heading east. Non-Muslims caught inside Mecca were executed on sight. Burton walked the entire Hajj pilgrimage circuit. He drank from the Zamzam well. He touched the Kaaba. He returned to his tent each night and mapped the interior of the Great Mosque from memory, drawing floor plans the British military had wanted for a century. He came home alive, a Hajji. Two years later he was back on the Horn of Africa, leading a Royal Geographical Society expedition to find the source of the Nile. On the morning of April 19, 1855, at approximately 2:30 AM, two hundred Somali warriors of the Isaaq clan attacked his camp on the Berbera coastal plain in what is now northern Somalia. Burton grabbed his sabre and fought back in the dark. In the chaos, a Somali warrior drove a javelin through the left side of his jaw. The metal shaft entered his left cheek and came out the right side. His mouth was pinned shut by an iron spear the length of his forearm. He fought his way out of the camp anyway. Lieutenant William Stroyan, one of his fellow officers, was killed in the same attack. John Hanning Speke, Burton's second-in-command, was wounded eleven times. Burton escaped on foot with the javelin still lodged through his face. He carried the visible scar on his left cheek for the next thirty-five years. He was back in the field within a year. In 1858, still healing, he trekked with Speke deep into the interior of East Africa. They became the first Europeans to see Lake Tanganyika. Speke pressed on alone and discovered Lake Victoria, which he believed was the true source of the Nile. The two men returned to England as bitter enemies. Speke died of a gunshot wound the afternoon before their public debate at the Royal Geographical Society was to be held. It was officially ruled an accident. Burton always believed Speke had killed himself rather than face him. Burton took a diplomatic posting instead. He spent the next thirty years as a British consul — in Fernando Pó off West Africa, then Santos in Brazil, then Damascus, and finally Trieste on the Adriatic coast. He wrote. Across those thirty years he authored forty-three books and translated thirty more. He gave English readers the first unabridged translation of One Thousand and One Nights — the Arabian Nights — in sixteen volumes between 1885 and 1888. He translated the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit in 1883. He translated The Perfumed Garden from Arabic in 1886. He translated Camões' Lusiads, the Portuguese national epic, in 1880. He wrote three books on swordsmanship: A New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry in 1876, The Book of the Sword in 1884, and The Sentiment of the Sword, published after his death. He wrote poetry. Geography. Anthropology. A whole book on falconry. He died at his consular residence in Trieste on the morning of October 20, 1890, of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-nine. His widow Isabel Arundell Burton — a devout Catholic who had spent thirty years married to the least Catholic man in the British Empire — arranged last rites over his still-warm body. Then she took his forty years of private journals, his unpublished translations, and the entire supplementary appendix to The Perfumed Garden, and burned them all in the garden behind the consulate. She said she was protecting his soul. Historians have been trying to reconstruct what was in those journals for a hundred and thirty-five years. The scar on his left cheek was visible in the last photograph taken of him. He never had it removed. If his story stayed with you, drop one word in the comments — Ruffian, Berbera, Mecca, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.