It’s the birthday of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), explorer, scholar, spy, and hyperpolyglot who wrote more than 40 books about his travels and another 30 books of translations, including the first complete and shockingly accurate English translations of both The Arabian Nights (1884) and The Kama Sutra (1883). He also sported a moustache six inches long and twirlable. Basically, Burton’s life was so fantastically exciting that the rest of us are lichen on a stump by comparison.

Burton was born in Torquay, Devonshire, England, but raised in France and Italy, where he began acquiring the first few of the 25 languages he would eventually master (40 if you count dialects). He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, got kicked out after attending a steeplechase, and went to India as an officer, learning more languages and spying in service of the Crown. Throughout his life, he had issues with colleagues (probably jealous over that moustache) and was often accused of “going native.” His first big journey was a pilgrimage to Mecca, verboten for a non-Muslim. He not only succeeded and wrote about it in Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855-56) but then became the first European to travel to the forbidden city of Harar in East Africa without being executed. (Yay for not being executed—the best part of any trip.)

The adventures continued unabated. On an expedition to find the source of the Nile, Burton took a javelin through the jaw. He was a supreme fencer, fighter, horseman, linguist. He was a participant-observer, picking up malaria and syphilis along the way, and respected many cultures that most Europeans did not, yet deplored practices like infanticide, slavery, and clitorectomy where he encountered them. He served with the British Foreign Office in places like Fernando Po (off West Africa), Santos, Brazil, and Damascus, but all the anthropological data he collected on things like cannibalism and sexual practices made the Foreign Office eye him as One Weird and Slightly Pornographic Guy. All this time, he wrote book after book, including one about the Mormons of Salt Lake City called City of the Saints (1861).

Burton had married devout Catholic Isabel Arundell in 1861; they never had children, possibly because of that syphilis. At his final post in Trieste, Burton continued writing about everything from Iceland to the African Gold Coast. After Burton’s death, Isabel wrote a biography of her husband presenting him as a faithful, modest, Catholic sort of husband, and she burned 40 years’ worth of his diaries and journals. Historians and biographers are still mad at her.

Have a fantastic Tuesday in this brand-new winter wonderland and stay scrupulously honest to the data.