Lisbon to Brazil via Cape Verde & The Brig Harriet (Burtoniana Editions)

This is a collection of Sir Richard Francis Burton's series of travelogues, originally known as `Letters to a friend', written between 1865 and 1866. These describe the waypoints between London and Brazil on a cross-Atlantic steamship voyage: Lisbon, the Cape Verde Islands, and Pernambuco. They were written while Burton was en-route to his new consular posting at Santos in Brazil. His wife Isabel returned from Lisbon to London---to pursue, among other things, a dispute with elements of the Foreign Office---and would join him in South America a few months later. Burton's consular salary had just been stopped over the disputed sale by auction of the `Brig Harriet' at Fernando Po.The series of letters was originally published in Fraser's Magazine, but was badly typeset and is very hard on modern eyes in facsimile form. It has been reset here, judiciously glossed and carefully verified against the original. The `friend', thinly-disguised as `A****' in the original text, was the poet Algernon Swinburne (1837--1909), a fellow-member of the Anthropological Society and the irreverent `Cannibal Club'.A very substantial appendix forensically examines the Brig Harriet affair, badly mangled by Burton's biographers, which was quickly gathering steam as he set off for Brazil. It shows that when all the documents in the Foreign Office file---many of which are reproduced here verbatim for the first time---are considered, Burton was really the victim. As he protested at the time, he was mulcted of £280 (worth at least £17,000 today), thanks to the ineptitude of the Foreign Office. Read more