BURTON (Richard F.).
Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Fernando Po. By a F.R.G.S.
“It apparently was Burton’s original idea to entirely suppress his name from the above work, and in his own copy… there is no clue given as to the author” (Penzer). In choosing to attribute the work to “a F.R.G.S.” Burton no doubt intended to affront the Royal Geographical Society with whom he was at the time in dispute over the source of the Nile.
The work is an edited version of his journal whilst en route to and serving in Fernando Po, throughout which Burton refers to himself in the third person as “the Consul”. This was what would now be known as a “hardship” posting and Burton notes that: “There is no place where a wife is so much wanted as in the Tropics, but then comes the rub — how to keep the wife alive” (vol. I, p. 296.).
