For better or for worse, I am one of those persons who, by some hormonal misunderstanding, began life in the male gender and moved on to the female. I lived adventurously as a man, and like everyone else, I used to suppose that this was because I had been subconsciously trying to prove my masculinity, if only to myself.
I have lately reached a very different conclusion. I think now that in those days, when I deliberately courted danger or discomfort I was obeying not the masculine in me but the feminine. It was Eve, after all, who plucked the apple in the Garden of Eden.
I have come to think that the female is instinctually more adventurous than the male, and that when we read of women being especially daring—venturing alone into howling wildernesses, crossing limitless seas, climbing mountains of ghastly inaccessibility—they are demonstrating not the exception but the rule. Perhaps the faculty of childbirth, which is never without its dangers, makes women intrinsically more akin than men to the thrills of hazard—not thrills of the communal, fighting kind but more introspective, solitary excitements. More the cat’s kind than the dog’s.
The archetypal woman adventurers—or “lady adventurers,” as it would perhapsbe more proper to call them—were found among the upper-class daughters of Victorian England, if only because in their society women in general were particularly stifled by convention. Let us consider, as an index to them all, one of their later representatives, Gertrude Bell, who was born in 1868 and died in 1926 after a lifetime of astonishing accomplishment. She became one of the most influential officials of the British empire in the Middle East after World War I. From Trabzon to Tripoli it was said of her:
She rolls the Pashas flat, and tells them what to think of this, and what to think of that.
There is a photograph, taken in 1921, that shows this remarkable individual as a delegate to an important political conference in Cairo. There are 40 men present. Lawrence of Arabia is there, and Winston Churchill, and sundry generals in red tabs and statesmen with watch chains. Symbolically, a pair of lion cubs plays in the foreground under the care of a man in a tarboosh. At the edge of this imperial galaxy stands the only woman, Miss Bell, beneath the potted palms of the décor. Does she look commanding? Is she flexing her authority? Do the men seem threatened by her presence?
On the contrary. She stands there, in a flowered hat and what appears to be a fox fur, like an unassuming poor relation at a grand wedding. Yet fox-furred Gertrude was not only a woman of real power but a death-defying adventurer, too. She was a fearless mountain climber, a resilient field archaeologist, an intelligence agent, and a famous desert traveler. As fashionable as she was, she could also ride a camel across the burning sands as hard as any Bedouin. She never got over her one great love, killed in World War I, and she would take the most perilous risks all alone in the most desolate places. In many ways she was characteristic of lady adventurers—a very womanly woman. And that is why, I see now, she liked to live dangerously.
Lady adventurers were generally childless. For most women of their time, childbirth was hazard enough, and the instinct to protect one’s offspring dictated caution in life. Perhaps it was only when the Victorian bravas were excused (or denied) those grand responsibilities that their female instinct for adventure found its fulfilment. It was certainly no macho tendency in them. However rough and tough their lives, few of them abandoned the usual female preoccupations of their time and class, and—like Miss Bell beneath the potted palms—they seldom wanted to appear dominant: resolute always, manipulative frequently, condescending sometimes, arrogant occasionally, bossy not often.
They famously disdained, of course—it is part of their legend—to wear trousers, even in the most demanding terrains. Isabella Bird, born in 1831 and one of the most widely traveled people of her day, was infuriated when a journalist claimed that on horseback she wore “masculine habilements for greater convenience.” She thought he ought to be horsewhipped for the very suggestion—why, she wore a silk skirt and an elegant cloak even for her toughest riding expeditions. Even Gertrude Bell, intellectually the most formidable of the lot, drooled over the hats sent to her in Baghdad by her London milliner. And explorer Mary Kingsley wore a high-necked white blouse, a cummerbund, and a long, black skirt in the depths of the West African rain forests.
Some, indeed, were married and journeyed with their husbands. They proved the most wifely of wives. “Not a screamer” is how Sir Samuel Baker, an English explorer, described his wife, Florence; and a good thing, too, for she had plenty to scream about during her epic travels with him in the 1860s, looking for the source of the Nile. At times she was paralyzed by sunstroke or delirious with malaria, she was weakened by months of ox-back riding, and she once sank beneath the rotting weeds of the Kafue River. One time a Bunyoro chieftain offered Samuel a nubile local virgin in exchange for her—a proposition hastily withdrawn when Florence rose from her sickbed and shattered the chief with invective.
Isabella Bird temporarily gave up traveling when she married, and when someone commiserated about a canceled trip to New Guinea, she replied that, well, anyway, it was “not the sort of place one could take a man to.”
Even the toughest of these characters was, of course, at times pursued by the usual complications of love. Miss Bird herself, a supremely self-possessed voyager, apparently lost her heart to Rocky Mountain Jim, a trapper and stock raiser of violent reputation and alcoholic tendencies. She described him as a lovable and terrible desperado, with “a wild eloquence that was truly thrilling.” She emerged from this heady affair to wed a mild-mannered English country physician.
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