Sir Richard Burton was best known as an intrepid explorer with a voracious appetite for adventure who penetrated the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina and was the first European to discover and identify the African Great Lake Tanganyika, the second largest - and deepest - body of fresh water in the world. But he was also a geographer, writer, soldier, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. Here, in this essay by award-winning historian Fawn M. Brodie, is his extraordinary story.