This remarkable output totals nearly three thousand pages in three years. Burton had become a veritable writing machine. Immediately I wrote him a laudatory letter and asked to hear from him if ever he could find a moment (pun intended) to write.
He did write. I got occasional notes from distant world ports, and once a year, more or less, he wrote long catch-up letters. These always closed with fond memories of the weeks we had spent together and the hope that our paths might someday cross again.
The years passed and his books kept the spirit of our friendship alive and well. I lived in his words, traveling with him in my mind to Brazil, Zanzibar, Iceland, and the gorilla land of the Congo, and when he was no longer the great explorer, I marveled at his philosophical works and translations. I always found it curious that he never wrote about our days traveling in the South. Never a line or a word, but I kept my silent vow not to doubt his motives again. The curiosity would remain, long after his death, and it remains today in my own old age.
I had my one opportunity to josh him into some kind of comment in 1877. Captain Doubleday, then brevetted to major-general, had just published his short memoir of Fort Sumter and I sent a copy to Richard. In my covering note I referred him to page 58.
By Doubleday’s account, he and others had repeatedly urged that the garrison be moved to Fort Sumter as the situation grew more critical. But Anderson had always replied that he was specifically assigned to Fort Moultrie and had no right to vacate it without orders.
At some point he had changed his mind. Either that, or he had hidden his true thoughts, even from his officers, giving them just twenty minutes’ notice on the night they slipped across the harbor in rowboats.
Had Doubleday brought about this change of mind, which had seemed fixed on a very different course?
Did Anderson wrestle with the question of authority, and finally turn it on its head, as Burton had immediately done with the phrase “no orders to the contrary”?
Had Burton been the source of the act that started the war?
Richard never acknowledged it. He never mentioned the Double-day book at all.
Richard’s handwriting, never easy to read, became almost impossible in the last year of his life. I managed to decipher it with the aid of my daughter, the two of us hunched over a thick magnifying glass, sometimes for an hour with a single page. “I have not been feeling well,” he wrote in 1890. “It would be grand to see you again and to laugh over those olden days when we were young and the world was ours to discover.”
Halfheartedly I said, “I should go see him,” and my daughter immediately took up this cause. “You
“It would be an indulgence,” I said. “That’s all been so long ago now.”
But on the spur of that moment I decided to go to England. That afternoon I wrote Richard a long letter asking if I might visit, say in a month or two or perhaps in the spring. I sent it away on the first of October and waited for a reply.
Less than three weeks later I was shocked by the newspaper headline: sir richard f. burton, noted British explorer, dead at 69.
I was inconsolable. I hadn’t seen him in almost thirty years and his sudden death was a deeper wound than even the loss of my younger brother all those same years ago at Gettysburg. I broke down in tears over the paper, shocking my daughter, who had brought it to me. I deplore displays of sentiment, and she had never seen a tear fall from my eyes except at her mother’s graveside. But in that moment I felt I had lost the only friend who had ever mattered in my life, and I cried. She hugged my head and she cried also at my obvious distress.
How do I explain such a reaction? Burton was certainly not my best friend: How could he have been in so short a time? Still, time doesn’t always tell a true story. You can know a man for years and not know him at all, and another man rises up in a brief acquaintance and is closer than a brother.
I thought of him constantly after his death: the young Burton who had come here defeated and renewed himself on a journey down and across this vast continent. I had been part of that. I know what we did and no one can take that away from me. Even today I hear his voice in the night, fascinated by the power and durability of music, humming Negro spirituals that reach across two continents.
In the spring I got a formal note from his widow. She had come across my letter suggesting a trip to London and had written to ask what it meant. She was intrigued by the familiarity in my lines, frankly because she had no idea who I was.
“Now you have your reason to write it all down, Daddy,” my daughter said.
Over the next week I wrote Lady Burton a long reply. I told in detail how I had come to know Richard and most of what we had done together. But when I read it over I felt like a carpetbagger, a charlatan trying to trump up his own importance on the coattails of a far greater man, and instead I sent her a short note.
I never mentioned his journal and I never looked in it. It couldn’t matter then, after his death, but there was something between us, his spirit and mine, that made me keep that trust.
