First Footsteps in East Africa

Burton walks into Harar, the forbidden city of Somaliland, disguised as an Arab merchant, and comes out alive — the first European to do it and return. He was thirty-three, wrote the book in 1856 from field notes, and packed it with grammar, geography and opinions that offended nearly everyone. The expedition that followed ended in a spear through his cheek; the scar is in every later photograph. Fifty-eight plates ranging from a Dutch East Indiaman to maps of New York and Harar itself, with paintings by Vereshchagin and Church, trace the wider world Burton moved through between 1505 and 1908.