And surely nobody in the history of feminine emotion was more irresistibly animated by romantic love than Lady Jane Digby, who was born in 1807. Sometime wife to an English earl and a German baron; mistress of an Austrian prince; lover at one time or another to a Corfiote count, a Greek bandit leader, Ludwig I of Bavaria, and, some say, Honoré de Balzac, this brilliant woman spent the last quarter century of her life blissfully wed to a Bedouin sheikh, Abdul El Mezrab. For six months of every year, she lived in the black tents with him, bathing his feet as a good Bedouin wife must and milking his camels. She dressed like a Bedouin woman, blackening her eyelids with kohl, and on at least one occasion rode on camelback into tribal battle (victoriously, of course). She died at the age of 74, and her sad old husband was moved to sacrifice a camel in her honor.
Lady Jane was a woman, it was said of her by Sir Richard Burton, the explorer, “whose life’s poetry never sank to prose.” It strikes me, though, that most of these women embarked upon their travels in a spirit that was less than poetical. Unlike men, they seldom set off into desert or bush just for the hell or the escape of it. Having embraced the impulse to live dangerously, they nearly always felt the need to transmute it into solid purpose.
Marianne North, for example, was an unmarried naturalist and painter from Sussex. When in 1869 she was released from domestic duties by the death of her widowed father, she threw herself into a mighty project: to record the flora of the whole world. To paint the tropical flowers of Brazil, she lived in a hut deep in the rain forest. She painted blossoms in the jungles of Borneo, in the mountains of Ceylon, and all over India. She became a universal success—her paintings proving invaluable as a record of vanishing flora—and when she came to write her memoirs, she called them Recollections of a Happy Life.
Isabella Bird, too, was a decidedly purposeful adventurer. Among the most popular travel writers of her time, she was as observant as she was courageous, and often very funny. “There was never anybody,” a London critic wrote, “who had adventures as well as Miss Bird,” and to my mind this remains true to this day. She was the sickly daughter of a clergyman, but there was nowhere she would not go, nothing she would not do, for the sake of her craft. From the Japanese island of Yezo (now Hokkaid-o) to the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa, from the Australian outback to Tibet, from Morocco and Korea, Armenia and Kashmir, Persia and Malaya, Bird wrote about it all with gusto.
And as the years went by, she developed a second purpose: to devote herself to supporting medical missions around the world. For during her travels she had come to realize, she said, “the desperate needs of the un-Christianized world.” This dogmatically improving instinct was rare among our lady adventurers. Some, like Miss Bell, were out-and-out imperialists, but most of these women were far more open-minded than their male contemporaries and more ready to adapt to foreign ways.
My own favorite among all these splendid women, Mary Kingsley, was utterly without bigotry: Her first public lecture, at the London School of Medicine for Women, was entitled “African Therapeutics from a Witch Doctor’s Point of View.” Kingsley was 30 and unmarried when, in 1892, both her parents died, freeing her from housekeeping. She had left England only twice before in her life, but she upped and sailed away to West Africa, most of it unknown to foreigners and all of it then known familiarly as the White Man’s Graveyard. She wanted to investigate its ancient laws and religions, but over the subsequent years her interests greatly widened and she became an expert on every aspect of West African society, history, fauna, and flora.
Dressed always with decorous elegance, she seemed afraid of nothing (there must have been something, Rudyard Kipling thought, but he never discovered what). She paddled canoes through mangrove swamps full of crocodiles, taking soundings now and then with her furled umbrella. She hacked her way through forests accompanied only by half-naked indigenes. She slept in tribal huts and ate what to her must have seemed awful local food.
But most marvelous of all, Kingsley was among the first Europeans to get to know the West African tribespeople as people. She liked them, and they liked her. She even liked their habitats. According to the European ideology of the day, West Africa was a hellhole of ill health, heat, fearful animals, and frightening people. To Kingsley it was, in her own word, “charming.”
These were women of not very long ago. They were almost the contemporaries of the great pioneering woman fliers—Amelia Earhart, Amy Mollison (née Johnson), Beryl Markham—and it was only a few years ago that the last of them died. Freya Stark was born in 1893, still a child of the Victorian age, and she lived to be a television celebrity toward the end of the next century. Like so many of her peers, she traveled inexhaustibly and indomitably through some of the earth’s most difficult places, but she was never anything less than a woman. In Who’s Who she listed as her recreations “travel, mountaineering, and embroidery.” She kindly wrote to me once, a little too girlishly I thought, to welcome me “among all our little feminine secrets.” I have her picture in my mind’s eye as I write. It is a memory from one of her TV programs, showing her in her 80s fording some remote river on a pony. She wears a floppy white hat, has an umbrella propped across her saddle, and sports a small blossom pinned to her jerkin. There she goes, splash, splash, stumble, and scrape through the rocks and rushing water, and although the pony looks a little apprehensive, Stark is smiling broadly—not a triumphant or a conceited grin but a smile of pure delight.
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