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Sir Richard F Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains; or, Six Months of Sick Leave, London: Richard Bentley, 1851, first edition

pp. viii, 368 pages including 4 tinted lithographic plates (including frontispiece) and folding engraved map printed by Hullmandel & Walton after drawings by Burton; later full polished calf, gilt rules to the front board, gilt text at the spine with 5 raised bands, top edges gilt, inner dentelles with marbled end papers; enclosed in a customised cloth solander box
18.8 x 12.5 x 2.3 cm

Richard F. Burton was a noted nineteenth-century British explorer, best known for discovering the source of the Nile.

This is Burton's first book and is an account of his travels in southwestern India while on sick leave from the British Indian Army in 1847. While on sick leave from the British Indian Army after contracting rheumatic ophthalmia in 1846, Burton traveled through Bombay to the Portuguese colony of Goa (present-day southwest India), he went through Calicut and other cities on the Malabar coast, ending up in the Nilgiri Mountains at the hill station of Ootacamund. It shows Burton’s early development as a travel writer and bears all the hallmarks of his efforts in this genre.

This book provides "a revealing look at the people who inhabited a part of India that was generally off the beaten track in the nineteenth century. The Portuguese and Mestizo inhabitants of Goa, the Todas of Ootacamund, as well as the fellow Britons Burton meets on his journey are all subject to his penetrating scrutiny. Burton's clever, ascerbic, and unorthodox personality together with his irreverence for convention and his bemused disdain for humanity come through clearly in these pages, as does his extraordinary command of the languages and literatures of various peoples.” “Burton mingled with everyone in India: he posed as an English gentleman looking for a wife to gain entrance into a school for girls and attended balls at the palaces of tarnished royalty. He met an old beggar in Goa from whom he elicited the tragic story of a failed romance. When Burton offered aid to the man, he refused: death held no danger for this former soldier, and Burton was genuinely touched.” (Introduction from Dane Kennedy's book of the same title as the present lot)

Sir Richard Francis Burton (19 March 1821 - 20 October 1890) was an English explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat but he is probably best understood as a writer. He was famed for his travels and explorations in Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. Burton travelled to India in 1842, just as the first Afghan war came to an end. His interest in the region took him on journeys across the Indian subcontinent, often disguised as a Muslim man. An Indophile, he was at home with the Indian classics, and this retelling provided some of the first insights into these texts to Westerners.

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