“The man wants to wander, and he must do so, or he shall die”- extract from Burton’s Arabian Peninsula, 1856

A fitting abridgment of the life and times of vivacious Victorian explorer and writer, Captain Sir Richard Burton, whose famously documented travels to Asia and Africa were explored last week by actor Rupert Everett in a witty Channel 4 documentary: The Victorian Sex Explorer

Defining Burton as the ‘ultimate escapologist’, similarly flamboyant narrator-actor Everett venerates Burton for his maverick attitudes towards death, pain, and the forbidden. Exalting the journey of the unknown above and beyond the ordinary, Burton was no simple observer, but a kind of active anthropologist.

Although he was a man of action and empirical values, Burton was an anti-hero of sorts, perpetually facing prosecution by the British authorities. A courageous and esteemed captain in the army of the ‘Honourable’ East India Company, Burton’s fascination with the indigenous people and customs of 19th century Bombay was much maligned by his army after he published detailed accounts of a male brothel he was sent to spy on.

As Everett walks the streets of Egypt, a gay white man in a religious world that staunchly rejects him, he describes the feeling of being an outsider, perhaps the same attraction that Burton had to a culture to which he did not belong. But exclusion is the handmaiden of observation, and it is precisely this alienation, observes Everett, which enabled Burton to detach himself and therein understand this unlikely paradise.

What masculinity meant in Burton’s time is not the same as it means today, in particular current attitudes towards sexuality, pain, and death. Burton, however, was an exception. His arcane existence made him a man of dubious sexual orientation in an age where homosexuality was a crime.

Last month The Daily Telegraph printed an extract from TV Historian (think Castaway) Neil Oliver’s new book, Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, in which Oliver laments the spurious decline of so-called ‘manly men’. By Oliver’s definition, such ‘manliness’ can be qualified by a man’s striving towards and ability to succeed within the realms of heroism, honour, and recognition, whereby ‘heroic’ status is obtained on an ill-fated mission, typically upon death.

According to Oliver, in addition to the loss of ‘manly’ values, the so-called ‘decline of the manly man’ is ultimately to do with the loss of clearly defined roles between men and women. I wonder what Mr Oliver would make of Captain Burton, whose courageous trans-continental excursions and honourable literary achievements belie his contentious penchant for eunuchs and the bizarre.

Yet the act of corset-wearing as principle attire was not limited to females in Victorian Britain. ‘Gentlemen’ of the period were also advocates of the male ‘girdle’, by ‘gentlemen’ of the period, and boys in their early teens were encouraged to lose an inch off their waist every year – a manly and venerable practice, indeed!

The Victorian repression of the body (as in corset-wearing) and ignorance surrounding its erogenous zones was in stark contrast with Eastern lovemaking practices, laid out in the Karma Sutra, and controversially translated into English by Burton in the 1840s. In spite of its explicit sexual content, in its native India the Karma Sutra is considered a lifestyle guide, and by enabling people of the Western World to access its secrets, Burton had a manifest influence on the burgeoning sexual revolution of the 20th century.

Herein lies the dichotomy: as Everett implores, ‘up for empire, up for a fight’, yet Burton was horrified by the treatment of natives by fellow officers, to whom hundreds of illegitimate children were born and baptised to avoid infanticide. A noble cause, no doubt.

But is Neil Oliver’s laboured lament about the loss of nobility really just a sentimental deprecation of female entitlement, and a diminution of male values?

These days, in the Western world, we at least have a chance (if not a choice) to close the gap between out-dated masculine and feminine ‘distinctions’ that undermine the fortitude of cultural integrity that Burton’s boundless zeal for understanding and knowledge sought to liberate.

Rather than doing things ‘for the sake of doing them’ (as Oliver would have men do) Burton’s intentions were honourable. Pioneering ‘sexual adventurer’, maverick writer, and explorer, he did things for the sake of self-discovery - the ultimate journey - in the name of Discovery. If anything, his aptitude for disguise and his uninhibited nature pays tribute not to ‘manly men’ but to the very spirit of nobility.

History is not, as Everett claims, so much ‘what you want it to be’ than what you make of it.

By Amanda Carey/MOLI