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.
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.