Ruffian Dick Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Kennedy and John Enright

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Jacket design by Laura Klynstra

  Jacket photo: Dreamstime/Tassaphon Vongkittipong

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-102-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-108-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter I: Africa and the Source of the Nile

  Chapter II: Zanzibar and Shihab

  Chapter III: A Proposition, Several Letters and Mr. O’Floyn “One Punch” Powers

  Chapter IV: Arrival in America and Orders from Her Majesty’s Foreign Office

  Chapter V: An American Baseball Game in Hoboken

  Chapter VI: By Rail to the Republican National Convention

  Chapter VII: Down the Mississippi by Paddlewheel Steam Ship

  Chapter VIII: A Slave to a Slave in Old Louisiana

  Chapter IX: The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Her Daughter, and the Undoing of Mr. Geek Baby Jem

  Chapter X: Difficulties at the Debutante Ball

  Chapter XI: Preparations for the Red Indian West

  Chapter XII: By Stagecoach into the Territories

  Chapter XIII: Fort Laramie

  Chapter XIV: The Pony Express and the Travellers’ Travails

  Chapter XV: Trouble on the Trail

  Chapter XVI: Grips Tighten on the Approach to the Great Salt Lake

  Chapter XVII: A Member of the Dangerous Danite Band Encounters Rifle Shot

  Chapter XVIII: The Big Mormon, The Son of Thunder, and a Case of American Justice

  Chapter XIX: Ecce Homo: Burton Finds Himself in Others and Dissects Mankind

  FOREWORD

  IT IS NOT EVERY DAY that the tedium of archaeology manages to unearth something truly spectacular, but I was on the receiving end of such an event last summer while kneeling in a cramped, meter-square excavation pit in the port city of Trieste. This was one of those typical urban archaeology projects that resulted in hundreds of artifact bags being filled with the humdrum slivers of shattered window glass, broken bricks and fragments of yesterday’s domestic discards. However, what the earth gave up on that particular afternoon is something that will rock the world of letters and set our understanding of numerous historical events on their ear.

  On that humid day near a diesel-fume-belching bus stop and from under the rubble of a ruined palazzo, a partially burned book came to light. After freeing it from the ground I slid my trowel mid-way into the volume and gently lifted enough to see that the pages were actually readable and gave the appearance of being a diary of some sort. I confess to not completely understanding the importance of what had happened until I returned to London, uncrated the book and began a detailed examination.

  Once I got started and realized what was in my hands it was like being blasted out of a Victorian cannon and landing in a high-voltage world of 150 years past. The book offered a refreshingly blunt and ultimately convincing portrait of those times and is filled with the most unusual characters and fascinating situations imaginable. From the very beginning it ushered me directly into the contentious conclusion of one of the most celebrated and controversial travel adventures of the nineteenth century—the discovery of the source of the Nile—and the rest of the journal entries only ratcheted up further interest and combined to reach even greater heights.

  Such extravagant claims call for quick explanation and substantiation and so I will get right to heart of these matters. We of course knew that our excavation was in a residential area of Trieste, but when the radiocarbon dates were obtained I was able to determine that we were digging in a palazzo dating to the late 1800s, and at that time this particular home was the residence of the local British Consul.

  It did not take much checking to learn that the person who held that position at that place and at that time was the redoubtable Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton.

  A preliminary but careful checking of dates and places in the book then sent me into a protracted and detailed study of Burton’s life, for I was now fairly certain of what I had and wanted to know everything possible about the man, his work, and especially his movements.

  I spent so many months in the British Museum on Great Russell St. that the staff began greeting me by my first name, and the patrons at the Museum Tavern across the street grew weary of hearing my excited after-hours talk about Sir Richard. I was somewhat careful about what I said, but then there was the exuberance, the setting, and so forth. I began requesting so much material that the librarian at the Foreign Office archives groaned each time I entered the door, and I also think they were beginning to tire of me at the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Geographic Society. After a time, exasperated looks crossed the faces of the guardian matrons in each of these reading rooms. I was in there more than anyone else in recent memory and probably made them work harder than they were used to.

  After a full year of research, correspondence, and cross-checking, it is my belief that the book is certainly one of Burton’s private journals. What is contained in it comes from a carefully hidden and protected side of a mind belonging to one of the great adventurers and rogues in a time of unparalleled exploration and eccentricity.

  The colorful, in-print parts of Burton’s life are well known. As a lad he bashed his music teacher over the head with his violin, and as a young explorer had a spear thrust through his face by a native tribesman in Somali. Later, Burton discovered Lake Tanganyika, was the translator of the unexpurgated Thousand and One Nights Entertainment and numerous other erogenous Oriental texts. He penetrated the Muslim’s holy Meccah in disguise at great risk, and once again using his verbal skills while in disguise, talked his way into the dangerous and forbidden East African city of El Harrar. He authored over one hundred books and articles, spoke twenty languages and dialects, and, more than a century after his death, he is still considered the world’s greatest erotic anthropologist.

  Burton served in the Crimean War as the commander of a cavalry unit comprised of Turkish delinquents and criminals known as the Bashi Bazook, and by the mid-1800s he was regarded as one of the finest swordsmen in Europe. Sir Richard rode sacred alligators in Karachi, chased sea serpents off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, mined for gold in Midian, founded both the Royal Anthropological Institute and something called the Cannibal Club. He kidnapped a Catholic nun in Goa (allegedly for prurient purposes) and served as British Consul in Brazil, Damascus, Fernando Po, and Trieste. It has been aptly said that Richard Burton led the lives of all Three Musketeers rolled into one.

>   Regardless of his many accomplishments, from early childhood until his death in 1890, Burton was a pariah in starchy Victorian society, if not a man who many considered on the verge of being dangerous. By his early teens he was consorting with Italian whores, was later kicked out of Oxford for placing bets at a horse race, earned a reputation for hashish use and romantic associations with women of color, and some say he even killed a man who discovered his disguise on his way to Meccah. Burton delighted in shocking people, whether it was by conspicuously reading The History of Farting at one of his wife’s stodgy tea parties or his fascination with the bestial side of human nature. His furious and prolific writing, fierce looks and cabalistic countenance only added to his problems. The man who wrote Dracula said that Richard Burton had the darkest eyes he had ever seen, and to underscore this, Burton made it a point of concerning himself with the occult and things satanic and was actually working on a biography of Satan when he died.

  It was these acts and other eccentric manias that troubled the Victorian world in general and his deeply religious wife in particular. In 1861, Richard Burton married Isabel Arundell, a devout English Catholic from a prominent family, and unwittingly set the stage for one of the greatest crimes in literary history. It was well known that Burton kept at least two sets of private journals that detailed the events of his colorful life. Those hidden feelings and observations contained within, along with his erotic texts and personal letters, were a constant source of embarrassment to his wife. They held the soul that she denied throughout her marriage and represented everything she feared and hated. At her husband’s death in 1890, Lady Burton engineered a bizarre post mortem baptism of Sir Richard and directly afterwards sequestered herself for sixteen days of furious and destructive editing. She methodically gathered together every book and scrap of paper she thought objectionable, and then burned them all in the courtyard of the couple’s palazzo in Trieste.

  After the holocaust, only eighteen pages of one of Burton’s private journals and in addition a portion of one complete second journal managed to escape her wrath. Those eighteen pages were rescued by Miss Daisy Letchford Nicastro who was a house guest at the time of Sir Richard’s death. The eighteen pages were sent directly to Great Russell St. by Mrs. Evelyn Lindenmann Letchford and survive to this day. That other complete journal found its way into the hands of Sir Norman Penzer, Burton’s official biographer, but like so many other Burton papers it too was destroyed by fire—this time at the hands of the German Luftwaffe during the London blitz of WWII. Before that, many Burton papers were incinerated in the Grindly’s Warehouse fire in 1861, and there were also letter-burnings by his hated mother-in-law. After Isabel died, her sister even got in on the act and began a campaign of purchasing copies of Burton’s erotic translations that were published abroad and burned every one she could lay her hands on.

  As mentioned, these things are well known. But now Lady Burton and the fate of fires have been defeated, and with this private journal in hand the secret side of Burton’s life can be brought back to life. It may be said with confidence that no one has laid eyes on this book for well over one hundred years, and it is entirely possible that until now Burton himself was the only person who knew what it contained. The first entry was made off the coast of Zanzibar in April of 1859 and the last on September 27, 1860 in Utah Territory. In an examination of just the first dozen pages we find, in surprising and shocking detail, the unexpurgated events which lead to the discovery of the Nile. This story is brought to light for the first time and is certain to ignite a firestorm of controversy. Burton also had a few things to say about Africa and its inhabitants at this time, and it is highly unlikely that one could gain such straightforward insights through any other published source.

  From there the book allows us to follow Burton on a trip across America. Through the journal offerings, we are virtually in attendance at the Abraham Lincoln nomination in Chicago and get a glimpse into the birth of modern American politics. The book also brings us into the crowd at a crazy baseball game in New York City. We hear directly from an African slave about his unfortunate condition in the New World circa 1860 and visit with the Voodoo Queen in New Orleans. The reader becomes familiar with a variety of North American Indians, trappers, soldiers, and scoundrels, and we are even treated to an in-depth, Burtonesque interview with Mr. Brigham Young—and these may be counted as only the highlights, considering what this book has to offer as a whole.

  The African episode will speak for itself, but from a letter I uncovered in the British Foreign Office we can get a glimpse of what was expected of Burton in America as a secret agent, where he was to go, and what he should and should not do when he got there. Even at this early date the British Government knew their man.

  To: Dr John Steinhaeuser

  Civil Surgeon

  Her Majesty’s Port of Aden in Arabia

  From: R. Rafton Stiggins

  2nd Consular Officer

  Her Majesty’s Foreign Office

  King Charles St London

  January 15th, 1860

  Dear Dr Steinhaeuser:

  It has come to the attention of our office that you are both professionally and socially attached to Lt Richard Burton of the Bombay Army who is at present ending his leave in Central Africa. It is our understanding that you attended to Burton after some hard knocks came his way in Berbera, and since then have cemented a friendship of some depth with the man.

  In consequence of the aforementioned we believe that you may hold some considerable sway in the direction of his life. I dare say that this is not an easy thing to accomplish, for our records indicate a history of Burton’s single-minded independence, which borders on insubordination, and a marked disinclination to do as he is told.

  While there is a recurring theme of indifference to authority in his make-up, there is also an issue of conduct. For example, when reprobates such as Rashid Pasha and the Baluchi Ramji weigh in with complaints of his recent and scandalous actions, as I am afraid they have recently done, one has to pause and take measure. We are frankly at a loss as to how Lt. Burton manages repeatedly to find if not manufacture trouble, associate with such shocking characters, and get himself into sticky situations that are to our way of thinking embarrassments.

  Nevertheless, it has been decided here in the Foreign Office that Burton is needed at the moment. There are reports that he may be a bit chalked from Africa and in any case he could, given his authority problem, resist a directive from this office. But as demonstrated several times in both India and Africa he is a plucky and daring traveler who is likely to be able to navigate through a dangerous land, he enjoys a reputation as being a non-political scientific observer, has exceptional and quickly-adapted linguistic skills, and he is certainly not behind hand in describing what he sees in an unusually direct fashion. We have fears there will be an American civil war and we need a savvy ear to the ground—not just in Washington, D.C., but throughout the length and breadth of that country.

  Your orders are to begin in New York, move to the Conventions that will elect the new President of the United States, roam the heartland for more detailed observations, and finally cross into the Indian Territories West of the Mississippi River with the ultimate goal of reaching the Mormon settlements in greater Utah Territory, a place and a people we have grave concerns about. We suggest adding the enticing idea that Burton could penetrate still another Holy City—this time the polygamist Mormon citadel in Salt Lake City. The Director thinks this is just his sort of meat and will provide Burton with ample temptation to begin another one of the adventures he seems to crave so much.

  Finally, please exercise great caution, Doctor, and be on guard at all times. This will not be a conventional assignment, I assure you—and it will not be an easy one.

  God Save The Queen,

  R.R. Stiggens

  2nd Consular Officer

  Her Majesty’s Foreign Office

  There is an unmistakable intensity and frankness attached t
o the writing in Burton’s private journal, and the things he comments on are personalities and situations that only a special kind of individual can perceive. Burton had a genius for getting himself positioned as a participant at important and interesting events and was a virtuoso in turning the ordinary into the remarkable. He was a magnet for controversy and everyone who knew him or knows of him associates his name with one of the most colorful lives in history and links it to seminal and often surprising happenings.

  Now that I have read his diary I can see why. What is in the journal surpasses even what has been written about him, and that is saying a great deal. This is Richard Burton unplugged and uncensored, and in a way it is probably fitting that his thoughts on so many matters make their debut in an era that can handle it.

  What the journal has to say about his time and Burton himself is perhaps the most important part of what the book has to offer. Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde have all left lasting impressions of early America but combined they have not, nor could not, provide us with a portrait comparable to Burton’s.

  While this is indeed a new and significant look at a celebrated event in African exploration, it is a brief one. Much more important is the change in Richard Burton, and it is his transformed self that offers us a portrait of seminal America that was forged in a mud hut in Zanzibar. It is that place that this entire story is linked to and driven by. It was there in a spiritual divination that the raw power inherent in Burton’s personality was unleashed and refocused by a tribal mystic who launched him on the hunt for himself and an unexpurgated explanation of nothing less than the human condition.

  INTRODUCTION

  A FULL APPRECIATION OF THE first chapter in Burton’s journal cannot be obtained without some background information. By the mid-1800s, the greatest jewel of exploration in the Western world was the discovery of the source of the Nile. The Portuguese and Arabs had entered Central Africa over the preceding fifty years but neither produced any reliable maps of the region, and no one alive ever attempted to properly identify what had come to be known as “The Coy Fountains.”