The seaside town of St Ives, in the west of Cornwall, is home to a tiny museum dedicated to one of Trinity’s most remarkable and flamboyant alumni – the linguist, poet, explorer and diplomat Sir Richard Francis Burton. I visited this weekend.

The owner, Shanty Baba, welcomes you to his terraced home, up the hill from the town’s cinema, and shows you through to what was once a ground floor bathroom. As you sit with a cup of tea, a 45-minute soundtrack introduces Burton’s extraordinary life and explains the various items of numbered memorabilia that cover its walls.

Burton was born in Torquay in 1821. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica: “A childhood spent in France and Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an education so little prepared him for academic proprieties that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued”.

After leaving Trinity, Burton’s adventures included a commission in the Bombay army, a hazardous pilgrimage to Mecca (disguised as a Sheikh), a controversial search for the source of the Nile (during which his cheek was pierced by a javelin), an interview with the Mormon prophet Brigham Young, an attempt to find sulphur deposits in Iceland, a failed quest to locate ancient goldmines in present-day Saudi Arabia and periods as the British consul in Fernando Po, Damascus and Trieste. He combined typical mid-Victorian attitudes to race with a genuine fascination for the cultures he studied.

Burton’s prodigious literary output included Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, Etruscan Bologna and A New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry. Setting up a fake society based in ‘Cosmopoli’, to evade Britain’s anti-obscenity laws, he translated several classics of erotica, including the Kama Sutra, The Perfumed Garden and the Arabian Nights. With its explicit content and extensive footnotes, the last of these was a smash hit: “I have struggled for 47 years… I never had a compliment, nor a ‘thank you’, nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and immediately make 16,000 guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.”

Burton has been the subject of several biographies, but they often rely heavily on his own accounts and those of his wife Isabel - which may have been embellished for effect. The standard account of Burton’s departure from Trinity is that he contrived to get himself expelled by attending an out-of-bounds steeplechase meeting and then left the college in a horse and trap, trampling the flower beds, blowing kisses to shop girls and loudly playing a tin trumpet. There is no corroboration of this story in the College archives, but (to adopt the old journalistic maxim) it is surely too good to check.