A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome

Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890) the famous Victorian explorer, began his career in the Indian army in 1842. While in India he developed his linguistic talent, mastering more than forty different languages and dialects. He turned to writing books in the 1850s and, over the remaining forty years of his life, published dozens of works and more than one hundred articles. He spent part of his career as British consul in Fernando Po (present-day Equatorial Guinea) in West Africa, and used this as ...