Almost missed a History Thread for this week because of my erratic work schedule. In the future I’ll try and put together a header exploring the weird phenomenon of skeletons sailing ships, but for now here’s explorer Richard Francis Burton, the oddball explorer, diplomat, orientalist, eroticist and all-around weirdo whose various exploits in Africa and the Middle East have inspired novels, movies, miniseries and a library’s worth of nonfiction books, from Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile to Candice Millard’s recent River of the Gods. While there’s much to be said about Burton as a product of his times – he wasn’t an imperialist per se, but his racism seems pretty extreme even by standards of the Victorian era – and thus not particularly admirable by modern standards, he’s one of those larger-than-life figures who, at the very least, earned his place on the historical stage. After all, who among us can claim to have had our jaws impaled by a spear, and spent a whole day walking around with said spear sticking from our skull and lived to tell the tale?