MARY RUSSELL
The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt
Women Travellers and their World

Dedication

For Freya, Deirdre and Russell

In memory of their father,

Ian Rodger

Epigraph

‘It is at these moments you realise the blessings of a good thick skirt … save for a good many bruises here was I with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.’

Mary Kingsley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 ‘A Most Excellent Reason’

2 Pilgrims to Freedom

3 Flights of Fancy

4 At Sea

5 Reaching the Summit

6 Queens of the Desert

7 To Follow or to Lead?

8 A Question of Duty

9 Escape or Compromise?

10 Risks and Dangers

11 Survival Strategies

12 ‘Merely Feminine Curiosity’

Epilogue ‘The Will of a Woman’

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Some works by women travellers

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 ‘A Most Excellent Reason’

‘Then the tall cliff was upon us with a splintering crash. The bowsprit snapped like kindling. The flare was out. The night was dark. We clung to the mainsheets in a pool of light thrown by the lamps in front of the wheelhouse. She began to roll from side to side, rails under with incredible speed as if she would roll right over. A colossal jolt, the shock travelled from stem to stern. The mainmast sagged, came over, seemed to hang suspended. The boom dropped and we leapt from under. Before our horrified eyes the bows of the vessel buried into the very face of the cliff.’

Husband and wife were thrown into the sea. It was a June night off Portland Bill, but the seas were running fast and cold. They clambered onto their float and watched the flares going up from the cliff. At least they, if not their precious boat, would be saved. Later, miserable and helpless, they watched it break up under the relentless pounding of the waves.

Clinging to the float they saw, with relief, the beam of the lifeboat shining through the giant waves. Suddenly it disappeared as the float, caught by a wave, rose and turned over, throwing them into the sea yet again. By the time they had climbed back in again, the lifeboat had passed, missing them in the dark. With the realization that they were not going to be saved came the icy fingers of fear, plucking at their minds.

Again and again they were thrown into the sea, and with their hands rendered numb and clumsy by the cold, the effort of hauling themselves back into the float became increasingly difficult They were both experienced enough to know how remorseless the sea can be, but by now the battering they were getting had numbed even their minds. Then it happened.

‘A monster wave rose above the rest. Fury piled upon fury. Curling foaming crest. Sweeping down upon us. Inescapable. I threw an arm around Frank, leant forward. The little float drove into the wall of water and was lost within it. When it broke free, Frank was dead.’

For her, there was no such release. Instead, flung again from the float, she was hurled through the sea and washed up onto the rocks, a reject of the gods. The float disappeared and with it the body of her husband. She had lost everything.

In the cold dawn, exhausted and alone, she looked up at the high cliff. Like someone who, having attempted suicide, wakes up to find the nightmare of life still continuing, she was filled with the desperate knowledge that at the top she would have to face again all the problems from which she and her husband had fled when they first set out on their tragic journey. The cliff was sixty feet high. Slowly, she began to claw her way up its crumbling face.

With nothing to sustain her but her courage and her will of iron, she pulled together the torn threads of her life and over the next years began life anew. Survival, however, was not enough. She had a further task to perform – the completion of that fatal journey. This second attempt was both an act of homage to her dead partner and, perhaps more important, a personal test of all that had gone before. Although she did something never before achieved by a woman – and with minimal resources – she remains unknown to most people for she was not a publicity-seeker and her memorable journey was made without the razzmatazz of Fleet Street.

Her name was Ann Davison and in 1953 she became the first woman to sail single-handed across the Atlantic. In a tiny sloop not much bigger than a lorry, she sailed the 3310 miles from Plymouth to Antigua, travelling the last sixty-five days in complete solitude.

To those of us for whom a comfortable bed, running water and the probability of living at least until tomorrow is of prime importance, the phenomenon of the traveller appears as incomprehensible as it is intriguing. Here are people who have succumbed to the treacherous seduction of the unknown, who actually choose to put their lives at risk by climbing the sheer and icy face of an avalanche-ridden mountain; who sail alone in frail craft through towering seas; who will eat maggots and river insects if nothing more palatable is on offer and who can live, day and night for months on end, in the shadow, and the promise, of the unknown.

It is easy to dismiss such people as oddities – as indeed they are – to be relegated to the bedlam of flat-earthers, freefall divers or indeed writers. That they exist cannot be denied, but the strange, uncomfortable world they occupy lies well outside our everyday experience and can be dismissed, we tell ourselves, as an irrelevancy. We can shrug our shoulders and return thankfully to the twentieth-century world of microwave food and answerphones, glad that the only risks to our own health are the predictable ones of smoking, eating hydrolyzed animal protein or making a kamikaze dash across a city street.

Yet turning away is not enough. There is a residual, nagging curiosity, an invisible thread that pulls us back to seek an explanation. Travellers consciously choose a life of discomfort and danger and somehow their choice of lifestyle is a challenge to our own. We may even harbour the uneasy thought that in so choosing they have acted with more freedom than the rest of us who remain in bondage to the comforts of materialism.

For Ann Davison and her husband Frank, their fatal attempt to cross the Atlantic was a matter of expediency rather than choice, for the wolf, in bailiff’s clothing, was at the door. Though pressed unwillingly into this last desperate step, it was a logical result of the precarious lifestyle they had chosen. Almost from the start, they were dogged by financial problems.

They had met when she was a commercial pilot, flying planes in and out of the small aerodrome which he at that time owned. Later, they tried to set up a hill farm and when this ran into difficulties they devised the plan of sailing across the Atlantic and capitalizing on what would undoubtedly have been a great adventure. Before they had time to plan it, however, they found that the bailiffs were intending to impound their boat and, in desperation, they fled, leaving home and debts behind. It was a gamble that failed to come off, but there was no other option – the die had been cast a long time ago. They were both adventurous people who could never be content with a nine-to-five existence devoid of challenge. In the air, at sea or out on a lonely, inhospitable hillside, they set themselves tasks the achievement of which took them far beyond the goals aimed at, let alone won, by most people.

The reasons why men and women set themselves the challenge of going beyond the limits of everyday endurance are numerous, complex and mysterious. Few can articulate their motives and fewer still feel it necessary so to do. Their actions speak for themselves. It is usually only after the journey has been completed that travellers will allow themselves the luxury of attempting an analysis, constructing a package of reasons which seem rational and can be presented to the questioner as a sort of peace-offering.

Most, however, are in thrall to a driving force within them which pushes them onward – a force which they seem powerless to resist. The force has no name but its function is to explore the potential of the human species to adapt to conditions that are both challenging and dangerous. By so doing, it increases our potential for survival. One could argue that a few individuals – sailors, fliers, travellers or mountaineers – while appearing needlessly to expose themselves to danger and death may, in fact, be unconsciously serving the interests of us all.

There are, of course, many more mundane reasons why travellers and explorers set out into the unknown, pitting their wits against the elements, testing their physical and mental endurance, and exposing themselves to unforeseen perils.

Commercial interests, religion, and personal satisfaction have all been strong motivating forces. So too has been the craving for adventure, the complicated need for approval and acclaim. All these factors contribute towards that complex spirit known as the explorer, and standing apart from these reasons is the insatiable, intellectual need to know the unknown, to grasp the mercurial mystery of life itself.

And where do women fit in to this? It seems a contradiction and denial of their sex that women should risk the very thing which only they can nurture and sustain, namely life itself. Yet despite being hemmed in by society’s barriers, their vision obscured by fixed horizons, their growth stunted and their potential to develop forced into the narrow channels leading to marriage and motherhood, women throughout the centuries have managed to transcend their condition and reach out for the world. The reason is clear. If they are to do more than simply give life – if they are to enrich it as well – then the journey must be made which takes them beyond the physical and mental confines set by society. That women are capable of grasping this aspect of their destiny has been ably demonstrated by those pioneers who, valuing freedom more than conformity, have walked out into the world and taken possession of it.

This book, however, is less concerned with theories than with the reasons offered by women themselves as to why they soar off into the dawn skies, trudge across deserts, sail into uncharted waters or cling perilously to the peaks of snowbound mountains. And these reasons are myriad: to escape from domesticity or the drudgery of a routine job; to recover from a broken love affair; to experience the thrill of danger; to demonstrate that woman’s name is definitely not frailty; to bring the Bible to China; to study plant life or unknown peoples; to delve into the past; to expiate a private guilt; to honour a dead partner; to glorify their country; to find something interesting to write about – or simply to have fun.

That some set out with no motive other than to enjoy themselves is clear – and to me this is the best reason of all. Our stern society, however, requires reasons for such extraordinary behaviour, reasons which the good-humoured traveller is usually prepared to give. ‘I know in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them. However, I would advise all those who wish to see un wrinkled brows at passport offices to start out ready labelled as entomologists, anthropologists or whatever other ology they think suitable and propitious.’ If a scholar as emminent as Freya Stark advises travellers to don a cloak of respectability then we can safely assume that many of the ‘reasons’ offered are nothing more than protective clothing.

Whatever the reality may be, we would be unwise to ignore the reasons which women travellers themselves offer, for they provide us with a real insight into their minds, backgrounds and attitudes. Nor can we ignore the likelihood that of all the reasons offered, there may be no single one which predominates over all others. Like any spirited individual, each traveller is a conundrum, a tapestry of experiences whose pattern is so complex as to defy the simple definition.

Naomi Mitchison is an energetic and forthright traveller now in her eighties. She has witnessed, over the years, an enormous change in the fortunes of women and has herself been instrumental in that change. Born at the turn of the century into an academic family in Oxford, she grew up during the pre-war years when there was neither the time nor the opportunity for the sort of excitement a spirited young girl such as she might have enjoyed. Instead, marriage at sixteen followed by a large family left her with a yearning for something more than the daily domestic and social round, and with an aplomb that some career-minded mothers today might envy, she left her family – the youngest was only two – in the care of a team of servants and set sail from the Thames for Leningrad, bearing greetings to Russian writers. Later, in America during the 1930s, she travelled to the southern cotton fields, lending support to striking farmers. ‘Pitch it strong, sister,’ they told her. Domesticity could hold little attraction from then on and travelling became not merely an escape, but an essential part of her life.

While a dislike of domestic routine may have prompted some women to travel abroad, others, though not many, left to forget a lost love. In 1810 Hester Stanhope, grieving over the death at Corunna of the man she loved – Sir John Moore – left England on a journey which she hoped would help her forget. She was never to return. Gertrude Bell, forbidden by a possessive father to marry the man she loved, sought solace by immersing herself in study and set out to embark on a lifetime of travel throughout the ageless deserts of Arabia. More recently, Christina Dodwell, explorer and fearless whitewater canoeist, set off on her first trek through Africa as a result of a broken love affair; her heart however, like so many others’, mended quickly – if it had ever really been shattered in the first place – and indeed the travellers’ road is not as littered with the fractured dreams of the heart as the romantic among us might wish to think. Many women have found that the thwarted love which provided the original impulse to set out is swiftly superseded by the real romance of travel.

Travel, of course, can provide not only an escape from love but also its promise. The young and beautiful Lady Jane Digby found herself at the centre of a scandal that was to end in a notorious divorce. Fleeing from England in 1823, she wandered from country to country and from lover to lover, searching for a happiness which she found, unexpectedly, in the tent of a Bedouin chief. Another spirited woman of later times, Margaret Fountaine, fell victim to a similar weakness for Arab men and took her Lebanese guide as her companion in life – a move that was looked at askance by Victorian society, particularly as she chose to flaunt her sin by bringing her lover back to London.

It is not difficult to see how she and her predecessors found the aristocratic Arabs – courteous and sandalwood-sweet – more pleasing than the well-meaning, dull men whom they were intended to marry and serve.

If sheiks were the answer to some travellers’ prayers, there were others who had no time for such frivolities and whose reasons for travelling were altogether more serious – they had work to do. As far back as 1669, Maria Merian, a serious and high-minded German matron, made a perilous sea journey to Surinam in order to make a study of insect life there. Two hundred years later, Marianne North journeyed to Java, Ceylon and India to study plant life and the collection of her paintings at Kew Gardens is a unique example of what could be achieved by a woman of determination, who, though without any formal education, was blessed with an abiding curiosity which found its fulfilment in travel.

By the turn of this century, education was more accessible to women and a driving force of intellectual enquiry was released which took women like Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell across the Arabian desert to study past times and the history of its peoples. It is rare nowadays to find women travellers similarly committed to a lifetime of study. Instead, mortgaged to the twin despots of Time and Jet Travel, researchers and PhD candidates take themselves off on carefully funded field trips, limited in scope and structured round the so-called objectivity of academic study; those of us who like to indulge in second-hand travel must be thankful that there are still some travellers left with the time to stop and stare and write about what they have seen.

Perhaps the most poignant reason for certain women embarking on their travels has been the need to finish the task begun by their partners. The widow of a lost explorer feels a special kind of grief, for she has both to endure the loss of a beloved partner and to live with the knowledge of something uncompleted. For some, the healing has come through retracing the journey to its end and finding in its completion a place to rest the ghosts.

Jane Franklin was a nineteenth-century reformer, committed to working for improved conditions for women prisoners in Van Diemens Land, where she lived for a time after marrying its Governor, John Franklin. A distinguished traveller and mountaineer – she was the first woman both to climb Mount Wellington’s 4000-foot peak and to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney – she became anxious for the safety of her husband when he failed to return from a major expedition to the Arctic begun in 1845. For many years she organized search vessels to look for him, the last of which found evidence that he had discovered the Northwest Passage before succumbing to the icy grasp of an arctic death. While the seven-year-long search for her husband was going on, Jane Franklin herself travelled widely in Japan, India and Hawaii and later, while in her eighties, she sent out a final expedition to the spot where her husband had died. It was her last farewell.

Five years before Jane Franklin died, a small girl was born in Canada who was to make travelling history there, though not in the way she might have wished. Mina Hubbard was thirty-five when her husband perished of starvation before he could complete the journey he had started across the uncharted wastes of the Labrador peninsula. She was a slight young woman with a fragile beauty, whose unsuspected inner strength uncoiled as her plan took shape: she herself would retrace the journey her husband had failed to complete. Two years after his death, she did just that, becoming the first white traveller to follow the hazardous route from North West River to Ungava Bay. She was spurred on not only by the memory of her husband’s bravery but also by a determination to vindicate the way in which he died. She was convinced that had his travelling companion, Dillon Wallace, acted more wisely, her husband would have survived.

Mina’s journey, however, was more than a memorial to a lost explorer – it was also a race in which stamina and honour were at stake, for on that same day, 25 June 1905, Dillon Wallace too set out to retrace the fateful journey, perhaps seeking to lay the ghost of the previous one. There was no communication between their two camps; Mina’s feelings towards Wallace were too bitter to allow that. Two months later she achieved the goal her husband had failed to reach, six weeks ahead of the hated Wallace.

Other women equally unwavering in their iron-willed determination to reach their destination, though for very different reasons, were the Victorian missionaries who felt themselves called upon to bring the word of God to the unwary and who were ready to risk imprisonment and death in order to do it. Their initial testing ground, curiously enough, was usually England, for if commitment to religion and a willingness to undergo hardship were essential requirements of the lady missionary, so too was a mental tenacity in the face of parental opposition. No Victorian father wanted to see his daughter renounce a comfortable home – evidence of his own success – in favour of an impecunious life devoted to bringing religion to distant and inscrutable heathens.

Such a father was John Taylor, prosperous director of a fleet of sailing ships. When Annie, his beloved but independent-minded daughter, announced, at the age of thirteen, that she intended to be a missionary, it was the beginning of many years of conflict between the two. To prepare herself for missionary work, she put her cards firmly on the table by enrolling in a London medical school. John Taylor retaliated by stopping her allowance. It was at this point that the courage and determination which later got her across the hostile Tibetan border began to show itself. Authority, especially paternal authority, was at its most repressive in Victorian times and for a young woman to defy her father was similar to flying in the face of God. Yet for Annie there was no alternative and, selling her jewellery, she left home. It was this last, desperate move that finally broke her father’s will. In September 1884, Annie Taylor sailed for Shanghai to take up a post with the Chinese Inland Mission. Her father offered her the return fare, certain that she would soon be back, but he was wrong. She was to be gone for the next twenty years.

When the voyage is an inner one, however, twenty years is not enough – it must last a lifetime. The road towards self-knowledge has been travelled by many but it is a route that women in particular seem drawn to. This is understandable, for when the identity of a group has been overlaid by the over-riding demands of society, it is inevitable that some individuals within that group will reach out for an alternative, spiritual home in which to find their true identity.

Alexandra David-Neel was such an individual. Opera singer, journalist and oriental scholar, she travelled to Darjeeling where she met the exiled Dalai Lama and began to study Tibetan Buddhism. While there, she managed to make two unofficial visits across the border into Tibet, spending some time in a lamaserie before returning to Sikkim to spend the winter of 1914/15 living as a hermit in a cave, her food pushed through the curtain that covered the entrance. The local Sikkimese lamas were so impressed with her steadfastness that they invested her with the title of lamina and gave her the lama’s red robe to wear.

Annoyed by the audacious toing and froing of this determined Frenchwoman, the British authorities ordered her out of the area. It was this move – red rag to a bull – that finally concentrated her resolve: she would go to Lhasa.

‘What right have they,’ she asked, ‘to erect barriers around a country which is not even lawfully theirs?’

She made her way across to Peking and finally, in 1923, set out on the magnificent journey which was to end with her secret entry into the Forbidden City – the first European woman to reach it. Lhasa was journey’s end.

‘What an unforgettable vision! I was at last in the calm solitudes of which I had dreamed since my infancy. I felt as if I had come home after a tiring, cheerless pilgrimage.’

Such personal pilgrimages of the soul sometimes ran full circle when the traveller learned to accommodate the life which she had previously found irreconcilable. Ella Maillart, who made a memorable solo journey across Turkestan in the 1930s, found herself bewildered by a warring Europe that seemed bent on destroying itself. She left her native Switzerland and spent the war years in southern India in order to understand why ‘cousins killed cousins’. ‘… to understand my innermost soul, I had to live in the immensity of Asia [which] … is so vast that man, aware of his own littleness, has given first place to the divine life, bestowing on it alone the glory of true reality.’

Not every traveller, of course, can justify her lifestyle in such a high-minded way. For some, there is simply the unashamed joy of staring at strange places, the pleasure of discovering what lies over the next hill and – most delightful of all – there is the fun and freedom of being alone, unhampered by family or phone, ready for whatever adventure may be on offer. Such are the women, the loners, to whom travelling offers a means of giving rein to that contrary element of human nature which rises belligerently when roads appear impassable, when disinterested border officials shrug their shoulders and well-meaning friends advise against the whole impossible undertaking. Such travellers are adventurers, the intractable die-hards who have caused teachers to shake their heads and would-be employers to despair. They are society’s square pegs: the guardians of our right to deviate, should we ever feel brave enough to do so. Compelled always to move on, they travel for the joy of it and often – fortunately for us – can find no way of earning a living other than by writing about their experiences. They have no rational excuse, and can offer no justification for their apparently frivolous way of life.

Distinguished and cheerful, their predecessor is Isabella Bird Bishop, that most exuberant of Victorian travellers who so enjoyed her first solo journey – a six months’ ride through the Rockies at the age of forty – that she became an incurable traveller unable to stay put for long. A sickly child, she suffered from a spinal complaint which miraculously disappeared whenever she went abroad but flared up again on her return home. She had originally been sent abroad by the family doctor who thought – rightly enough – that the sea breeze and the whiff of strange places would be beneficial. Dr John Bishop, whom she finally agreed to marry after a long and persistent courtship, commented that her amazing resilience was due to the fact that she had ‘the appetite of a tiger and the digestion of an ostrich’. Isabella died in Edinburgh at the age of seventy-three, her bags packed and ready for a trip to China.

She was followed by others equally intrepid. The daughter of a doctor who was himself a bit of an adventurer, Mary Kingsley worked as his unpaid literary assistant (he refused to spend money on her education) until the death of both parents left her free to travel. She had been warned to avoid the rays of the sun and to get an early introduction to the local Wesleyan missionaries as, her death being the most likely outcome of her ill-advised journey, they were the only people on the West Coast of Africa, her destination, who would be able to give her a decent burial, with hearse and black funeral feathers. Despite the morbid advice, she went. ‘My mind,’ she wrote, ‘was set on going and I had to go.’

With a practical rather than a romantic attitude to travel, she set off in 1893 on the first of her two famous journeys to the West Coast, the precursor of many anthropologists who found the tribes of Africa rich in tradition and culture. Armed with a waterproof sack packed tight with books, blankets, boots, mustard leaves, quinine, and a hotwater bottle, she marched up the gangway of the steamer, eager to dispense with prejudices which she regarded as both cumbersome and irrelevant. The other passengers, all male except for the stewardess, viewed this unexpected apparition with alarm, fearing that she was somehow connected with the World’s Women’s Temperance Association.

Mary Kingsley was thirty when she finally got the chance to break loose from the stultifying drudgery of housekeeping for others. Dervla Murphy was another dutiful, unmarried daughter who devoted herself to caring for an invalid mother until, released by her death, she too set out, at the age of thirty, to cycle all the way to India, for biking and foreign travel had fascinated her since childhood. If asked, however to give a more detailed explanation, she is uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Sitting in her old, stone house in rural Ireland, drinking home-made beer and smoking a cigar, she laughs in amazement when asked if she has a reason for travelling. ‘None whatsoever,’ she says with the complacent look of a cat who has just swallowed the family goldfish, ‘I just go to enjoy myself – I’m completely irresponsible, absolutely no commitment to anything.’ Did she never feel she had to justify her journey, pretend she was off to learn about new places?

‘Not a bit of it,’ she replies, firmly tapping her cigar on a saucer. For such women, there is no way of combatting the compulsion to travel. Like Mary Kingsley, she had to go.

There is nothing new about women travelling the highways of the world and from the early centuries, the Christian Church has offered a useful umbrella to women who had the will and the money to travel the pilgrim route to Rome and Jerusalem.

In 383, Egeria, a Roman citizen from Gaul, travelled to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Land. Luckily for posterity, she was an insatiable pilgrim, recording in detail everything she saw. Writing home to her religious sisters, whom she addressed as ‘Lovely Ladies, light of my heart’, she unearthed for them as much information as she could, for ‘you know how inquisitive I am’.

Later, with England converted to Christianity, the daughters of the great Anglo-Saxon noblemen were sent abroad to France to be educated in the Christian and classical mode. It was an opportunity they seized on eagerly, for their new learning offered them an alternative to marriage – a life of religious scholarship. And if the more ambitious women were to achieve any status in their religious communities they would certainly have to spend some time abroad in one of the major monastic centres of learning. This new development in women’s education marked the beginning of a trend which continued through the centuries, giving women of means and status both the opportunity and the incentive to travel.

By the seventeenth century, the pilgrimage had given way to the Grand Tour and it was not unusual for women to travel between the major cities of Europe, sometimes without their husbands but always with a startling entourage of servants and baggage. Products of a sober, post-revolutionary England which offered an enlightened education to its more privileged daughters, women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eliza Craven toured Europe, Russia and Turkey, studying the architecture, admiring the paintings, dining with the local nobility and wondering at the strangeness of places like Moscow and Istanbul. They were avid collectors of information and assiduous at recording everything they saw.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the energy and drive that characterized the great days of the British Empire were beginning to show themselves among travellers. Lady missionaries were storming the citadels of China and Africa and the young Victorian miss – middle-class and energetic – was starting to travel on her own, savouring the freedom of climbing in the Alps or walking in Italy while the older, more intrepid maiden lady was pressing onwards to India, Japan, Hawaii and America. By the turn of the century, the New Woman – confident, educated and financially independent – was further liberated by the arrival of the bicycle and the aeroplane. Fanny Workman’s bike took her to North Africa and India and another American, Harriet Quimby, took England by surprise by becoming, in 1912, the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Women such as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark who found satisfaction in combining travel with serious scholarship became professional travellers, bringing with them an aura of respectability that some equally serious travellers have since sought to cast off.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women travellers and explorers were again soaring towards their dreams, breaking new records in the sky, on land and by sea. Jerrie Mock became the first woman to fly solo round the world, and Sheila Scott, having failed her driving test three times, became the first British woman pilot to solo the earth. Ann Davison, as we have seen, became the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic and in the 1950s the first British all-women expedition set out for the Himalayas. The small but steady stream of women travellers and explorers continues, hell-bent on getting up and away into the skies, over mountains, down rivers or across deserts, travelling on foot, by bike, in a canoe or on their wits alone.

Robyn Davidson needed all her wits about her when she went to spend a year in the incomparable town of Alice Springs learning how to handle camels before setting out with a dog and two camels (one of which was pregnant) on an astonishing trek across 1700 miles of Australian scrubland. Her stay in Alice Springs was a baptism by alcoholism and sexism, and at times was nothing less than sheer misery, but the experience provided her with the protective armour she needed in order to make the journey.

A university girl, she had been accused of being a bourgeois individualist – an insult too terrible to contemplate. ‘For one who associated herself for years with the Left, it was the political equivalent of having VD.’ Soon however, the pressing need to organize her trek pushed any such self-centred concerns to the back of her mind. She learned how to scout in the desert, how to saddle a camel and, when one of them became ill, how to inject it with massive doses of antibiotics. More important for her own survival, she learned how to supplement her diet with witchetty grubs. She wasn’t altogether sure what she was doing in the middle of this vast nowhere. Perhaps she was expiating a collective guilt? The misery caused by her mother’s death had affected her whole family and at times she felt that all the stupid, meaningless pain our family had suffered might somehow be symbolically absolved, laid to rest through this gesture of mine’.

Robyn Davidson was twenty-seven when she made her solitary and memorable journey across Australia. She has blond hair and a determined smile and though there is a gentleness in her eyes there is also the self-knowledge she gained during her own remarkable pilgrimage. ‘You are as powerful,’ she wrote when she reached the Indian Ocean and the end of her journey, ‘and as strong as you allow yourself to be.’

Lucy Irvine was strong too, but despite that she nearly succumbed to poisoning on three occasions while spending a year as a castaway on the island of Tuin, which lies between the north coast of Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a 24-year-old tax clerk when she saw a newspaper notice advertising for a wife to live on a desert island for a year. Gerald Kingsland, who had placed the ad, liked what he saw – her ‘bubbling, bucaneering spirit … her delicate wrists … unwavering eyes – and long, shapely legs’.

On her twenty-fifth birthday they made love. A month later, for his fifty-first birthday, she took him to the Royal Festival Hall and the following month they married. It was a marriage merely of convenience. The Australian immigration authorities would feel happier, they said, about allowing a couple to live together on a deserted island if they were married.

‘I’m not in love with you,’ Lucy told him, ‘but I feel very closely attached to you and who knows what the year will bring?’

How could they have guessed what it would be like? They’d brought only the minimum of food with them – two hundred tea bags, a packet of spaghetti, two kilos of dried beans, a bottle of cooking oil and a few other bits and pieces. It would be enough to keep going until they could grow some things of their own. They drank the milk from the large green coconuts that hung overhead and caught and cooked their own shark. It was an idyll that wasn’t to last. Three times Lucy became violently ill from eating wild berries. They ran dangerously short of water and Gerald’s extra years began to tell on him. He developed a gangrenous ulcer and they both lost weight Their affection for each other degenerated into a strained uneasiness and it wasn’t until their year was ending that they managed to recapture their earlier feelings. At the end of the year, however, she left both the island and Gerald just as she had always planned to do, marriage or not.

‘“I know you’ve got to go,” he said. “Christ, you’re only twenty-six, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” … And with that he pulled me closer and our faces bumped together in a brief kiss.’ The year was over.

There have been other women propelled by the same curious combination of determination and vulnerability – a blind woman sets out to climb Kala Patthar, 500 feet above Everest base camp, a grandmother cycles solo across America and Eve Jackson, a young Englishwoman, plans to fly solo in 1986 from England to Australia in a frail microlight aircraft. The list lengthens each year, but spread across the world as they are, spanning the years from youth to old age, these women appear linked by nothing more than their sex and the common experience of travelling. Surprisingly, the link that initially might appear to be a vital one – that of feminism – is rarely to be found.

It may be thought that because a woman attempts to achieve something in what has hitherto been considered a male area she is doing so with the primary intention of making a statement about women. It is abundantly clear, however, that in the case of most women travellers, this is not so. It is true, certainly, that some of them have consciously and deliberately laid their motivations and success on the altar of their womanhood. Others, in the course of travelling, have taken on the mantle of their sisters, as their physical journey has evolved into one also of the soul. But to describe all women travellers as feminists would be to take away from them that very quality which makes each one unique – their individuality.

Put them in a room together, and there is no guarantee that harmony will prevail. In the 1880s, when Marianne North and Constance Gordon Cumming accepted an invitation to meet Isabella Bird Bishop, their lion-hunting London hostess was overjoyed. ‘Three globe-trotteresses,’ she trilled, unwisely. The two were not especially amused. Isabella was decked out in gold-embroidered slippers, a silver and gold petticoat from Japan and was sporting a favour presented to her by the King of the Sandwich Islands. ‘We withdrew,’ said Miss North, somewhat loftily, ‘leaving Miss Bird unruffled and equal to the occasion.’

Miss Gordon Cumming, in fact, was not unlike the unruffled Isabella. Born into a wealthy Scottish family – her home was at Gordonstoun – she got her first glimpse of the outside world at the age of thirty-one when she received an invitation from her sister to visit her in India. Visit! She was amazed at the idea and almost turned it down since no one, she felt, went to India unless they had to. Yet on arrival, she was immediately captivated by its mystery and sense of history and especially by the similarities between Hindu and Celtic customs. After a two-year stay, she returned to England and wrote an ecstatic two-volume account of what she saw. A few years later, she received an invitation from the Bishop of Colombo to visit him in Ceylon and her reputation as a traveller began to grow. As soon as she got back home to England, people started asking her where next, to which she replied: ‘Fiji, because that was the most absolutely improbable idea that could suggest itself.’ But improbable or not, she went, and then on to Japan, Tahiti and San Francisco. Mistress of the throwaway line, her books – she wrote one about each journey – are littered with tantalizing phrases such as ‘our acquaintance with camels had hitherto been limited to the Arabian dromedary …’ An inquisitive, studious lady, she observed misery and poverty with compassion but from a distance and, in common with many travellers, she was not always around when her publishers needed her. In a foreword to one of her books, there is an apology for some inadequacy or other, explained by the telling phrase: ‘In the absence of the author, who sailed unexpectedly for Fiji …’ The proofs, on this occasion, were read by none other than the unruffled Miss Bird.

It is perhaps surprising that the paths of the travelling sisterhood did not cross more often, though had Fanny Workman met up with her contemporary, Gertrude Bell, the political sparks might well have turned into a conflagration. At the very time that Fanny was conducting a series of major climbing expeditions in the Karakorams, resolutely advertising the cause of women’s suffrage, Gertrude was helping to found, in England, the Anti-Suffrage League.

Both these women were products of their respective worlds, moulded and influenced by the whims, attitudes, needs and prejudices of those around them. Certain women have set out on their journeys happy not only to take the attitudes of society with them but also to impose them on those they have encountered along the way, whom they perceived to be in some way in need of improvement Others have found such values false and insufficient, and have felt compelled to go in search of qualities which they feel are lacking in the world they leave behind.

Whatever their needs and motivations have been, travelling has over the centuries offered to women a means both of discovering and expressing their own individuality, for the change in their needs has been one only of degree. Women, said a seventeenth-century writer, should stay at home and attend to their duties, which he kindly characterized as ‘subjection, helpfulness and gracefulness’. The tedium of such advice was unbearable. ‘The truth is,’ commented Margaret Lucas, flamboyant and eccentric Restoration writer, ‘we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms.’

Three hundred years later, Sabina Shalom found herself fat, middle-aged and menopausal – and with a bee in her Miami Beach bonnet about hitch-hiking to Australia: ‘The idea obsessed me simply because it was right off the map. It became an excuse, not a reason, for getting away … I longed to be free of duties and obligations. Free of thinking, worrying, protecting, mothering. Free of feeling everyone’s burdens and making them mine.’

The distant horizon beckons even more urgently now, as the blandness of the mid-twentieth century threatens to render us anonymous, our identity emerging as symbols on a computer printout or fashioned as fodder for the consumer society, for the marketing and media world. Within this murderous matrix, women are tamed and packaged, their new ‘liberated’ image as steeplejacks, truck-drivers or soldiers glamourized, glitzy and unreal – suitable copy for the propaganda machine anxious to demonstrate society’s stifling generosity towards them. For those with the will to escape, a journey outwards into the unseen may be the only hope of finding what lies within. Better the reality of the unknown than the artificiality of the known.

CHAPTER 2 Pilgrims to Freedom

‘Nothing could hold her back, whether it was the labour of travelling the whole world … the perils of sea and rivers … the dread crags and fearsome mountains …’

Valerius on Egeria.

Travellers, like the rest of us, need to communicate with someone even if, by writing a journal, it is at one remove. In 1884 a remarkable book was discovered which tells of a journey made by a woman who travelled to Jerusalem around the year AD 383.

Its author, Egeria, was a devout Roman citizen of noble birth, who journeyed from Gaul to the Holy Land and recorded everything she saw, thus leaving us with both a fascinating traveller’s tale and the only complete account we still have of the fourth century liturgy. So timeless are some of these liturgical ceremonies that her description, written sixteen hundred years ago, captures that odd mixture of gloom and glitter, superstition and ritual that haunts the dark interiors of present-day Jerusalem: ‘All you can see is gold and jewels and silk; the hangings are entirely silk with gold stripes, the curtains the same and everything they use for services at the festival is made of gold and jewels. You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and the lamps …’

Travelling through fourth-century Palestine was not without its dangers. Wild animals roamed the purple hills and the inhospitable locals, weary of seeing endless bands of well-to-do foreigners pass through their lands, were liable to attack without warning. It was a formidable undertaking for anyone, let alone a woman on her own, but as long as travellers stuck to the straight and narrow Roman roads, they were relatively safe.

By the time Egeria set out on her journey, the pilgrim way was well established. Monasteries dotted the route and quite a few hospices had been set up for the use of Christian travellers, many of whom, of course, were women. In fact, the hospices themselves were often run by women, among them Paula, a Roman matron whose business acumen and managerial skills led her to establish a chain of hospices. Her contemporary, the scholar Jerome, was amazed that a mere woman should be so successful: ‘With a zeal and courage unbelievable in a woman she forgot her sex and physical weakness and settled in the heat of Bethlehem for good in the company of many virgins and her daughter’ – whom we must charitably assume was one too.

These journeys were far from being temporary religious fads, indulged in by rich women with time on their hands. Egeria and Paula were followed by wave after wave of women who put down lasting roots in Jerusalem and refused to return home. A guide book written nearly four hundred years after Egeria’s arrival comments on the presence, just outside the East Gate of the Holy City, of a hundred women living in an enclosed convent, receiving gifts of food which were pushed through a hole in the wall.

By the eighth century, the pilgrim route had become something of a tourist trek with many of the delays, frustrations and unexpected expenses that one might encounter today. Sea-captains refused to allow their passengers to leave ship until they had paid the airport tax of the day, known euphemistically as a ‘disembarcation fee’. Travellers passing through non-Christian areas were subjected to poll taxes which varied according to their apparent wealth, and one traveller commenting on the bureaucracy of the day, no less autocratic then than now, noted in disgust that ‘anyone who is found by night or day without a paper or a stamp issued by one of the kings or princes of that country is sent to prison … until he can prove he is not a spy’.

None of these inconveniences, however, deterred women from the journey, and indeed so numerous were they on the road to Rome that they presented a special problem to the church authorities whose attempts to restrain this restless tide were at first paternalistic and benign but were soon revealed in their true, repressive colours. ‘It would be well and favourable,’ wrote Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘… if your synod would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.’ To have wives and mothers straying so far from home was an obvious threat to the institution of marriage. Not only that: despite their respectable status, such matrons, it seems, were in danger of falling by the wayside as so many of their sisters had done previously. ‘For,’ the anxious cleric continued, ‘there are few towns [along the way] in which there is not a courtesan or a harlot of English stock.’ He might have taken a more charitable view of his fallen sisters, as one of his predecessors did. St Marcianus, in the fifth century, persuaded a number of prostitutes to reform and to demonstrate their new way of life by making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem – a journey which he thoughtfully financed himself.

Banditry, piracy, prostitution and smuggling – it was all a long way from the vision of a young, wistful, Anglo-Saxon girl, exiled in a German monastery, who had to content herself with being a second-hand traveller.

I, unworthy child of the Saxon race, the last of those who have come hither from their land who am, in comparison with these my countrymen, not only in years but in virtue also, only a poor little creature … Yet I am a woman, tainted with the frailty of my sex, with no pretensions to wisdom or cleverness to support me, but prompted solely by the violence of my own will like a little ignorant child plucking a few flowers here and there from numerous branches rich in foliage and in fruit.

With painful humility the young Huceburg, amanuensis for the first Englishman to travel to Jerusalem, sat down to write what is the earliest English travel book still available to us.

She had been sent from England to the monastery of Heidenheim, in Germany, where her cousin was Abbess. While there, another member of her family, the monk Willibald, now an old man, returned from his travels to dictate his book to the wide-eyed young girl. The guidebook. The Hodaeporicon, written about 780, is full of stories that must have amazed her – how the party saw a lion, how they were arrested by the Saracens on suspicion of spying, how Willibald, later Saint Willibald, smuggled balsam through the customs. First he filled a calabash with the balsam, then he took a hollow cane, filled that with petroleum and concealed it in the calabash so that when the officials came to examine the calabash they were distracted by the smell of petroleum and the balsam went undetected.

Huceburg was the product of her religious education, trained to view herself as a woman and therefore less than nothing, but there was nothing humble about Margery Kempe, the mayor’s daughter from Bishop’s Lynn who, in 1413, set sail for Jerusalem with a party of pilgrims whose collective and determined aim was to lose her as quickly as they could.

By the fifteenth century, women, despite the prohibitive antics of the church, had established themselves as regular and seasoned travellers on the pilgrim run. Their enthusiasm and ebullient response to religious ceremonies could, at times, be somewhat of an embarrassment but their presence was vital to a church which thrived on ignorance and superstition. It is the women, after all, who keep the candles burning and who see, through the hypnotic haze, the strange shadows of moving statues.

Margery Kempe, voluble, energetic, given to hearing voices and seeing visions, was born in 1373 and at the age of forty set out on a five-month journey to Jerusalem. Margery was obsessed with holiness – her own and everyone else’s – and constantly harangued her companions to pray when they would rather have been carousing. Although the threat of piracy had lessened since the Venetian Senate had required all galleys to carry bows, arrows and lances for their own protection, it was still a nerve-wracking journey and most of Margery’s companions preferred to take their minds off their fears by drinking and playing cards.

When the pilgrim band reached Jaffa, Margery was so excited at the prospect of seeing Jerusalem that she fell off her donkey and two kind Germans had to help her back on, one of them even going so far as to feed her with spices to ward off travel sickness. It was in Jerusalem that the pilgrimage proper began, with a seemingly endless round of visits to churches, to the River Jordan, and to Bethlehem. Here, Margery’s sanctity took hold of her in earnest and ‘she fell down because she could not stand or kneel and rolled and wrested with her body, spreading her arms and crying with a loud voice as though her heart burst asunder’. Understandably, the rest of the group thought it best to disassociate itself from this excessive and unseemly display of fervour. On the journey home, they frequently managed to give her the slip and she often found herself trudging alone along unknown roads through foreign countries fearing for her good name. Occasionally, she managed to attach herself to another party or, when the worst came to the worst, to hitch a lift on a passing haycart.

Margery Kempe holds an important position in the history of women travellers. Like many before and after her, she took to the whole paraphernalia of travel with the noisy delight of a drake getting her first sight of water. Although a matron of comfortable means, she stoically endured hardship, danger and illness during the two years she was away from home. Despite the unchristian behaviour of her companions, who cut up her clothes, stole her bed sheets and walked too fast for her, she displayed a dogged determination to complete what she had set out to do. Like many women travellers, however, she enjoyed a privileged position in her own society and it was this which enabled her confidently to deal with officials and critics alike.

In one major aspect, however, she differed from most of the women travellers who were to follow her. She was both ill-educated and ill-prepared to benefit intellectually from her experiences. She died in 1438, untouched by the ripples of humanism and radical religious thinking that were beginning to disturb, yet again, the relatively calm pond of English society. She left behind, however, a record of her travels and the final irony in her tale is that this unique book – the earliest autobiographical travel account still in existence to be written in the vernacular – had to be dictated, for this most exuberant and talkative of women travellers could neither read nor write.

Such a state of ignorance would have been unendurable for those women living around the time of the English Civil War whose lives, for a time, depended on their wits, and consisted of a series of hurried and dangerous escapes made under cover, frequently in disguise and usually at dead of night. Their journeys – hazardous and solitary – were ones they would rather not have made.

Anne Harrison was nineteen when she married Sir Richard Fanshawe, in 1644. Brought up to sew and play the virginal, Anne soon found herself thrust into the role of political refugee, both in her own country and abroad, for Sir Richard, who sided with the King in the Civil War, was frequently on the run from the Roundheads. In the course of her happy marriage, she gave birth to six sons and eight daughters and spent much of her time moving her surviving children from country to country, from safe house to safe house, the burden of planning and negotiating the journeys falling on her shoulders alone. When her husband was finally captured in 1651, she had to make a perilous journey through the London streets to see him.

‘During this time of his imprisonment, I failed not constantly to go, when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot from my lodging in Chancery Lane, and then I would go under his window and softly call him … sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’

Like other women travellers who came after her, she became adept at talking her way out of difficult situations – not only her own survival but that of both her husband and her family depended on it When, on Cromwell’s death, Sir Richard left for France, she had to forge a document and disguise herself in order to get past the watchful eye of the Roundhead official. It was a testing time and one to which women responded with courage and vigour. The Restoration period which followed seemed for women so dull, superficial and frustrating in comparison that one of its most famous writers – Margaret Lucas – made a special plea that all women should be ‘free, happy and famous as men’. It was a brave, vociferous demand, made at a time when, in fact, changes both economic and social were slowly beginning to take place which would allow women a far greater freedom to move out of the domestic milieu to which Margaret Lucas felt herself to be so unwillingly chained. During the latter part of the seventeenth century trade and commerce were expanding, the navy was growing and women found themselves running import and export businesses, dealing in insurance and acting as shipping agents. It was against this increasingly prosperous setting that Celia Fiennes was born in 1662, of a well-to-do family of Dissenters.

At the age of twenty, she set out on a series of journeys round England and Scotland which would take her ten years to complete. She was a prim and serious young woman who undertook her journeys, usually riding sidesaddle, with the aim of improving both her health and her intellect: ‘so that my mind,’ she wrote severely, ‘should not appear totally unoccupied’. More disconcerting in one so young – she hoped that the account she planned to bring back would give people more serious things to think about than cards or dice. If people were to concern themselves with ‘observing the pleasant prospects and the different produces and manufactures of each place … they would undoubtedly be cured of the endemic sicknesses of laziness and the vapours’. More to the point, she felt, knowledge of their own country might ‘cure (in others) the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts’.

The English countryside into which she forayed was not altogether hospitable and it took a considerable sense of adventure, allied to a strong puritan desire for self-improvement, to set out on such a venture. Roads were rough and badly signposted. On horseback, she had to negotiate water-filled potholes so big that a man could drown in one. Since the ending of the Civil War soldiers had turned to vagrancy, and it was a sign of their prosperity that footpads had recently taken to horseback in order to make their getaway more efficient. Travellers were especially vulnerable on open heaths and in forests, Epping, Hampstead and Hounslow being the well-known danger spots. A sixteen-year-old heiress was attacked no less than eleven times and women took to travelling with a spare purse of money ready to hand over to robbers. Clearly, even a short journey to market was not to be undertaken lightly.

Without children to leaven her solemn attitudes, Celia Fiennes’ view of life tended to be staid and devoid of humour, but her insatiable curiosity and sturdy determination more than compensated for this. Her description of a meeting with highwaymen is typical of her style not only of writing but of living: ‘… two fellows all of a sudden from the wood fell into the road and they looked all trussed up with great coats and as it were, bundles about them which I believe were pistols.’ They jostled her horse and tried to get between it and those of her servants and when asked the way said they didn’t know the area though later it became obvious that they did. The Fiennes party was saved by the presence of men haymaking nearby. ‘It was the only time I had reason to suspect I was engaged with some highwaymen,’ she remarked, characteristically omitting to say whether or not she had been frightened.

While Celia was exploring her native England, a contemporary of hers had been making a name for herself first as a spy and later as a writer. Aphra Behn was born in 1640 and brought up in Kent. Details of her childhood are uncertain but in her early twenties she sailed with some of her family to live as part of the household of the Governor of Surinam. Life in the tropics seemed strange to the young girl, but she had a generous, open mind, receptive to the wonder of it all and when, with her brother, she encountered some slaves recently uprooted from their African homes she was ready to approach them with friendliness and compassion. In a long, full dress and with a bonnet covering her unconventionally short hair, her appearance must have seemed as strange to them as theirs did to her. ‘They touched us, laying their hands on all the features of our faces, feeling our breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat then wondering to see another; admiring our shoes and stockings but more our garters which we gave them and they tied about their legs, being laced with silver lace at the ends.’ The arrival, however, of the chieftains of war was another thing altogether, for they seemed a ferocious bunch with their marks and self-mutilations: ‘… so frightful a vision it was to see them … some wanted their noses, some their lips … others cut through each cheek’. They wore ‘girdles of cotton with their knives naked stuck in it … a quiver of arrows on their thighs and feathers on their heads’. Nevertheless, she found them both humane and noble.

Returning to England in 1663, Aphra married a merchant called Behn who died within three years, and she was then sent to Antwerp as a spy, with little more to live on than forty pounds and money from the sale of her rings. It seems that she never married again, for she regarded that institution as ‘the cheap drug of a church ceremony’. She received little thanks for the political and naval information she sent back from Antwerp, and on her return she devoted herself to earning a living from her writing, becoming the first Englishwoman to do so and drawing copiously on her travels in Surinam which she recounted as the background to her autobiographical novel Oroonoko, published a year before her early death at the age of forty-eight.

It is one of life’s small ironies that women – their own position in society not unlike that of a colonized country – were themselves able to take a ride on the great wave of colonization that burst outwards into the unclaimed world. The more ambitious and adventurous among them were quick to grasp the opportunity to travel far beyond the tamer shores of Europe to the unknown excitements of distant colonies. While Aphra Behn was working in Holland to undermine any plans the Dutch might have to defeat the English navy, another woman – also in Holland – was starting to build up a career that would eventually take her, also, to Surinam.

It was unusual for women to travel to the colonies on their own and those who did were usually making the journey in order to marry a merchant or planter. A contemporary writer, therefore, found it ‘a kind of phenomenon to see a lady actuated by a love of insects so truly heroic as to induce her to traverse the seas for the purpose of painting and describing them’. To go after a husband was understandable but to endure a journey into the tropics merely to paint insects was another thing altogether!

The amazing lady was the entomological artist, Maria Sibylla Merian who, ten years after Aphra Behn’s death, received a grant from the Dutch government which allowed her, at the age of fifty-two, to set out for Surinam. At that time, according to a contemporary report, it was the black spot of the Dutch Empire. If the destination proved unsavoury, the means of getting there was a positive death-trap. Sea travel in the seventeenth century was neither pleasant nor healthy. Scurvy abounded, hygiene was virtually non-existent and the only air that filtered down below deck came through hatches which often had to be battened down to keep out the driving rain. Sailing into the tropics, the air became steamy and foul and this, acting upon the decaying food left lying round the galley, meant that sailors and passengers often fell victim to dysentery. Maria, taking her daughter with her as a companion, survived the journey – no mean feat for a woman who would have hitherto led a very sheltered life. Surinam lies just north of the Equator and the combination of high temperatures and a copious rainfall meant a plentiful vegetation for Maria to sketch. It was the low, unhealthy marshlands, however, that were too much for this middle-aged matron and she had to return to Holland after two years.

The travels of these three women – and of many others that must go unremarked – are a reflection of the new horizons perceived, for the first time, by people interested in the special qualities of the places they visited and especially, in the case of Aphra Behn, in the lives of those they encountered in the course of their journeys. Celia Fiennes noted with obvious disapproval the increasing interest in things foreign and chose instead to confine herself to a thorough study of her own country. The other two travellers accepted the challenge of adventure and, like so many women before them, found it to their taste.

By the eighteenth century, a steady wave of women travellers was regularly leaving England’s shores, some to accompany their husbands on diplomatic missions, and some to participate with them in that great cultural institution – the Grand Tour. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went with her husband to Constantinople in 1716, where she became a keen and amusing observer of life. She was one of the first travellers daring enough to try out a strange, foreign practice: while in Turkey, she studied the habit of vaccination for smallpox, adopted it for her own children, and later introduced the practice to England.

In 1810, Hester Stanhope left England in search of a new and more exciting life than anything she could possibly find at home. There was no way in which an intelligent and independent-minded woman such as she could satisfy her hunger for both knowledge and adventure. She was the daughter of an illustrious family: her grandfather had been Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, and her uncle was William Pitt for whom she had acted as hostess during his years of office as Prime Minister. After his death in 1806 there was a vacuum to be filled, and she began to think about ways of satisfying the unbounded curiosity which had ruled her since childhood. She recalled her governesses admonishing her for this awkward trait: ‘I was tired of all those around me who to all my questions invariably answered, “My dear, that is not proper for you to know – you must not talk about such things until you are older.”’ That she was clever was certain; had not her father, himself hungry for knowledge, said that she was the best logician he knew?

The only man she might have married. Sir John Moore, had been killed at Corunna, and having left behind the suffocating standards of English society, she felt free to take as her lover a man much younger than herself – though she refused to marry him. With a settled home in Syria, she found it possible to live a life of freedom that would have been impossible in England. A commentator of the time noted that she was impervious to public opinion: ‘Her intentions were pure but only God was the judge of that and she cared not a fig what men thought.’

Perhaps that was just as well, for England could be unforgiving of those who strayed from the preordained path – and never more so than in its treatment of Hester who, having given her services to her country by acting as advisor, secretary and hostess to its Prime Minister, found her meagre pension cut off by Palmerston in an attempt to get her to mend her profligate ways. It was an attempt that failed, for in protest she walled herself up in her Arab mansion at Dar Djoun, near Mount Lebanon. There, in a bed covered in pipe burns – she had taken to the hookah with as much enthusiasm as she had adopted male Arab dress – and in a room heavy with smoke and scattered about with phials, calico and papers, she died a pauper at the age of sixty-three, owing £12,000 invested in an archaeological dig that had failed to reveal anything startling.

Misunderstood and unforgiven, she was one of those early women travellers who pursued their goals of excitement and learning, encountering discomfort and danger to a degree that could only be imagined by those who were so quick to criticize them.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, conditions were slightly easier for the woman who wanted more from life than anything home and marriage might offer. Attitudes had softened, travel conditions had eased and it was no longer necessary for women travellers to cut the umbilical cord in such dramatic fashion. Moreover, it was now seen that in one area at least, the missionary field, women could serve a very useful purpose indeed. The Victorian era was marked by the great surge of enthusiasm with which its women took to the new lands of Africa, America and China, defying convention, daring fate and stepping outside their appointed positions with a cheery disregard for the consequences. They enjoy a special place in the affections of anyone interested in the history of travel, for the journeys they made were not merely physical ones – they were the embodiment of the female spirit that would never again be content to flutter helplessly at the bars of its cage.

The position of women in the Christian Church – and in many other religions – has always been an ambivalent one, their ability to give birth robed in superstition and their power to nurture life feared. Yet their very closeness to the miracle of life has in the past invested them with a mysticism which the Christian Church saw as a strength upon which it might capitalize.

In Victorian times, bemused and bewildered, women found themselves plucked from the blood and sweat of childbirth and placed high upon the pedestal of perfection – the Angel of the Drawing-Room presiding over her own prison. Marriage, however, was not the destiny of every woman, nor was every woman prepared to be held within this domestic cage, and no book about women travellers would be complete without reference to the band of women who in those days set out with courage and conviction to present their foreign god to the unsuspecting peoples of Africa and China.

Women had always played an important role as missionaries, women whose lives had been illuminated by a vision so compelling that they left family, home and country to pursue it. The great mystic, Teresa of Avila, took to the rough roads of sixteenth-century Spain, preaching reform of the Carmelite Order. In the following century, a Frenchwoman, Marie Guyard, abandoned her child in order to become a missioner. In 1617, at the age of seventeen, she had been forced into marriage much against her will, for she had hoped to become a nun. Within three years, she was widowed and left with a small son. This child she put in the care of a sister before sailing to Canada to set up a convent. Attacked on numerous occasions by the Iroquois Indians whom she had come to convert, she nevertheless survived to the age of seventy-three.

The English tradition of the woman preacher travelling the countryside had been established by the Quakers in the seventeenth century. Later, the wave of energy which surged through England during the Industrial Revolution was reflected in the blossoming of Victorian evangelism, its success due in part to the army of women who carried the message with enthusiasm and vigour to the furthermost points of the empire. It was a time when there was work to be done, coal to be mined, lessons to be learned, money to be made and a Queen to be honoured.

For many women, missionary work provided a most satisfying alternative to marriage or stay-at-home spinsterhood. The empire offered men numerous opportunities to travel abroad: they could serve in the army, take a posting as an army chaplain, or make a career for themselves as administrators. They could even make a name for themselves as explorers. No such options were open to women, who had to content themselves, if they were single, with a position as a governess or lady’s companion – both lowly states of existence. There were few acceptable occupations open to the single woman in a society which regarded marriage as the only proper state and in which spinsters were regarded as second-class citizens.

Their value in the missionary field lay in the fact that as members of the gentler sex, they presented little threat to the local people; furthermore they had easy access to the local women – a great advantage, since it was commonly held among missionaries that to convert a family, you need only convert the mother. Their most attractive quality, however, was the simple fact that they were unmarried. As such, they could be relied upon to pursue their goals with a single-minded disregard for the hardships encountered along the thorny path to heaven. Staunch and sensible, they were admirably suited to unceasing and unquestioning labour in the name of all they – and the empire – considered decent.

The rationale of religion is, of course, an excellent ingredient to throw into the traveller’s brew. It can be used as an elixir, giving fresh and unsuspected strength to a mind and body exhausted by lack of sleep or sustenance. The missionary traveller knows that despite rejection and ridicule, despite the alien climate, the strange customs and only half-understood language, despite the isolation, discomfort and danger, reward will follow, if not by the end of the day, at least at the end of a lifetime. And which of the ungodly among us can be sure of that? In a perverse way, the hardships suffered reinforced both the missionary’s zeal and her determination to carry on, her mental state not unlike that of a patriot waging war. ‘I am,’ said one, ‘a soldier of Christ.’

The British Government was quick to see how useful these women could be with their energy, local knowledge and reputation for being fair. Indeed, in the colonies, the link between Church and state was thinly drawn with no distinction at all existing in the minds of some. Born in 1848 in Aberdeen, little Mary Slessor was a millhand by the time she was eleven – the family of seven children needed her earnings. Her mother was a weaver and her alcoholic father a shoemaker. Determined to free herself from the evils of poverty though not from her family commitments, she educated herself as best she could and in the process learned a lot about the famous Doctor Livingstone, another Scot who had become the inspiration of the empire. She too, she decided, would become a missionary. In 1876, at the age of twenty-eight, she sailed from Liverpool on the SS Ethiopia, bound for the Niger region of West Africa. Her salary, as a missionary, would be £60 a year. In Calabar, her practical approach to her work and her expertise in dealing with local disputes led to her appointment as British government agent. She saw nothing incongruous in this dual role, simply viewing her job of conducting judicial courts as an extension of her religious duties. Nor did she feel it was unchristian to administer an occasional box on the ear to a local chief when he spoke out of turn.

It was her humanitarian work in saving the lives of twins that evinced uncharacteristic praise from Mary Kingsley and the two formed an immediate if unlikely partnership, for they were both intent on promoting better understanding of tribal customs. Local animists believed that each person was born with a guardian spirit – an invisible companion. When a woman gave birth to twins, however, the Efiks – among whom Mary Slessor was living – believed that the spirit companion had been displaced and its place taken instead by the human child. There could be only one explanation, the Efiks believed. The woman must have secretly mated with the devil. The punishment was horrific. Both children must be killed – for who could be sure which was the devil-child and which the good one? The mother too must be banished, driven out of her home and away from the tribe. The whole thing, as Mary Kingsley noted, was seen ‘as a sort of severe adultery’. Mary Slessor devoted herself to saving the lives of both the babies and their mothers, doing so with such tact and understanding that she was soon able to set up a refuge for the unhappy victims.

Hers was a lonely life, far from family and home, living in the bush surrounded by her African helpers. Her red hair was shorn to a boyish crop and the climate took its toll on her health. At the age of thirty-two, another missionary appeared on the scene and the two formed a friendship that looked as if it might end happily in permanent companionship, but circumstances forced them apart and she devoted the rest of her life to her beloved Africans, to whom she was known simply as Ma. Mary Kingsley, despite her dislike of missionaries, afforded her the highest praise: ‘The sort of man Miss Slessor represents is rare.’

Mary Kingsley herself, of course, was something of a rare bird, and through her studies of local customs and beliefs she too hoped to make the African better understood. She drew attention, for instance, to the damage she observed being done in girls’ schools in Calabar by ill-informed missioners. It was the custom for the girls to wind a long strip of cloth round their waist and to leave a part of this to trail behind them on the ground to be held by their guardian spirit In the safety of their homes, this train could be caught up and tucked into their skirt but outside in a public place, where danger lurked, the cloth had to trail along the ground. The missionaries briskly forbade this practice, seeing it as yet another example of the lazy, slovenly habits of the Africans. The girls were torn between the two: no respectable girl would go about without the protection of her guardian spirit; if she did, she must be bad. It was a war, Miss Kingsley noted, between native and Presbyterian respectability and it is not difficult to imagine which practice she favoured.

While she found the work done by Slessor admirable, Mary Kingsley would have found it difficult to applaud the zeal with which Annie Taylor, another of her contemporaries, pursued her missionary work in China and Tibet, for Annie’s arrogance fed upon her ignorance: ‘I was shocked to see men and women near Ta’ri’si,’ she wrote, ‘prostrating themselves the whole length of the road … Poor things, they know no better; no one has ever told them about Jesus.’ How different was Alexandra David-Neel’s objective and careful observation of the same scene some fifty years later, written with the intention of understanding, not dismissing, the custom:

Many of the pilgrims [she wrote] went round the mountain, prostrating themselves at each step, that is to say, stretching their arms as they lay on the ground, and marking with their fingers the length they had covered with their bodies. They would get up and stand at the exact place which their fingers had touched, after which they would again prostrate themselves and measure their length once more, and so on, all the way round.

Annie’s was the fixed and limited view of the missioner whose commitment prevented her from appreciating the culture and beliefs of those she wanted to save. But it was that very commitment that led her to journey across China and into Tibet, hopeful of finally entering Lhasa. After Africa, China had become the next focus for nineteenth-century missionary activity. British traders made important economic links there, and in 1878 the first woman missionary was sent into the interior. The fact that the economic links had been forged on the sale of opium – in 1839 British ships were bringing in 2000 tons of opium annually – seems not to have bothered the missionary ladies. Their task was to bring God, not change, to the Chinese millions.

Annie Taylor was accompanied on her journey by her faithful servant, Pontso, and the two of them disguised their true identity by dressing as Tibetans; Annie also cut her hair to look like a Buddhist nun. For the length of their 1300-mile trek they had to ward off bandits and robbers, sleep out in the open and seek sanctuary wherever they could. The rivers they had to cross were often flooded and swollen, posing a considerable obstacle. ‘The river is quite impassable, so they say, barring our way, but we are waiting until tomorrow to see if it will be lower in the morning. The Lord can do this for me. My eyes are unto him who made a passage in the Red Sea for the children of Israel.’

When the river finally abated, they had to force their way through biting waters which froze to icicles on the spot. Pressing on along the tea road from China, Annie’s difficulties continued. One of the three men she had hired to carry her goods and care for the horses turned troublesome and threatened to reveal her identity. This was dangerous, for Tibet feared invasion both from Britain and China and justifiably viewed all foreigners with suspicion. Another of her men died along the way and a third turned back shortly after the journey had begun. Although armed with a pistol, her real trust lay in the Lord.

Undeterred by the icy nights made worse by the altitude, she sold her tent in order to buy another horse. So high up did the route take them that you could plunge your hand unscathed into a saucepan of boiling water and when she put her Christmas pudding on to boil – for certain traditions after all had to be maintained – its centre was still cold after two hours of cooking. Nevertheless, on that Christmas day in 1892, far from the blazing log fire and roast turkey of childhood days in Egremont, she was cheerful and optimistic, doing what she had chosen to do: ‘Quite safe here with Jesus,’ she wrote happily in her diary. Her seven-month long journey to Lhasa proved fruitless in the end; she was apprehended within twelve miles of her goal, tried by the local elder and arbitrarily expelled from Tibet. What a long way this rocklike and forceful woman had travelled from a Victorian childhood plagued by heart trouble.

Annie Taylor was a simple, solid soul, well suited to the sort of work which the Inland Mission to China required of its members. She plodded her way through some of the most intriguing places in Tibet, totally unaware of their significance, intent only on revealing to the impoverished peasants the golden gates of heaven through which they could walk one day if only they embraced the Bible. The town of Kum Bum is clustered round the famous Buddhist settlement – then the third largest monastery, housing three thousand lamas – and there the stalwart Annie braved the annual Butter Fair, distributing her evangelical leaflets and urging the holiday crowd to forsake their ancient religion and follow the Lord.

What would have happened to Annie had she been forced to stay at home in England? Perhaps she would have found some satisfaction in evangelical work among the wretches who worked the dark satanic mills of the Midlands. Those places, after all, were every bit as godforsaken as Lanchow or Shanghai, or even Kum Bum. Instead, she chose to set out for the most impenetrable of countries, circled as it is by a fortress of snow-covered peaks. Like scores of travellers before and since, she was drawn towards Lhasa as if mesmerized by its inaccessibility. Her motivation was religion, but it was a drive fuelled by the challenges which her chosen life had laid before her – challenges to which her brave and adventurous spirit rose with stoical determination.

Consumed by the same missionary zeal was the aptly named Evangeline French. With her sister Francesca and friend Mildred Cable, the three, known as ‘the trio’, spent fifteen years dining the 1920s and 1930s evangelizing in China; they crossed the Gobi Desert five times during that period. Wearing Chinese dress and learning the local dialects, the three women brightly and happily revealed the treasures of the Bible to the nomad tribes until forced to leave by the vagaries of the Chinese/Japanese war.

Sublimely indifferent to their supposed weaknesses, Victorian women missionaries breached the wall of prejudice and proved themselves to be as vigorous and as tenacious as any man, giving practical expression to their spiritual message by setting up schools and hospitals, drawing attention to the difficulties under which the indigenous women laboured, and making representations to governments and royalty on behalf of the poor, the sick and the forgotten.

Four years younger than Annie Taylor, Kate Marsden was caught up in the same wave of religious fervour that swept through Victorian England. After only eight months’ training as a missionary nurse, she was sent to Bulgaria in 1877, to tend to Russian soldiers injured in the Russian/Turkish war. The sights she saw were terrifying, for she was still only eighteen and until then had been sheltered by a middle-class upbringing. Especially traumatic was her first and unexpected meeting with two men whose bodies had been hideously eaten away by leprosy. It was this meeting, however, that was to give a focus to her religious zeal and a sense of mission to her life.

Back in England, she continued her nursing career, see-sawing between rationality and periods of disabling self-doubt culminating in a mental disorder which eventually engulfed her. When she recovered, she felt ready to begin her life’s work, and started off across Russia to set up a hospital for lepers in the outer reaches of Siberia.

Kate Marsden, above all else, had a sense of humour which got her through many terrible experiences. Her description of her journey across Siberia, undertaken in 1891 before the Trans-Siberian railway had been built, would be unbearable even to imagine were it not for the black humour with which she managed to invest it She and her woman companion travelled by sledge at night, through forests peppered with the gleam of wolves’ eyes. The manic speed at which the sledge was driven was usually due to the intoxicated state of the driver and, on one occasion at least, the company was unceremoniously tipped out into the snow. ‘… we hardly knew whether to laugh or cry,’ wrote Kate, ‘and chose the former alternative and merrily awaited events.’

The journey soon began to resemble a descent into hell. The dark nights of ice and snow gave way to days of suffocating heat. On horseback now, they traversed a region which trembled beneath them, shaken with subterranean fire: ‘Blinding clouds of smoke every now and then swept into our eyes and the hot, stifling air almost choked us. We had to go through the fire: there was no escaping it, unless we chose to turn back. After looking on, aghast, for some time, and trying to prevent our terrified horses from bolting, we moved slowly forward, picking our way as best we could in and out of the flames …’

Her journey took her another 1000 miles and led to hell itself where lepers crawled out from the forests, dragging themselves painfully towards this foreign woman who had come to help them. Dressed as she was in trousers to the knee, bag slung over her shoulder, riding whip in hand and the whole thing topped off by her London deerstalker, no one could possibly have mistaken her origins. To the leper colony, she must have seemed like some god-sent apparition. She unpacked her medical supplies, distributed gifts among the stricken people and naively offered up a prayer for the health of her Imperial Majesty the Empress of Russia, noting – no doubt with approval – that the poor lepers joined in heartily. Like the Light Brigade, hers was not to reason why.

It is hard to believe that in her twenties Kate Marsden had suffered so badly from a lung disease that she had been pensioned off from her job in a hospital. She had proved that she would stop at nothing. Bureaucracy, war, the icy wastes of Siberia – all were mere stumbling blocks to be demolished in her personal campaign to bring help to the lepers whose banishment to Siberia was effectively a way of removing such an unwelcome sight from the public eye.

The Victorian women missionaries formed a travelling brigade that was as unique as it was misguided, but whatever the consequences of their ill-advised activities, we cannot but admire the manner in which these delightful ladies dispensed tea, sugar and the Word of Life.

CHAPTER 3 Flights of Fancy

On a spring day in 1928, a small light aircraft taxied along the runway at Cairo Airport and drew to a halt. Out of the cockpit door swung a slim leg clad in a silk stocking followed by the rest of the pilot dressed in white gloves, necklace, an elegant coat fur-trimmed at neck and wrist, and a natty little cloche hat. 28-year-old Sophie Pierce, who came to be better known later as Lady Heath, news-conscious as well as fashion-conscious, posed for the cameramen before climbing down from the wing of her Avro Avian III aircraft having completed part of her historic flight from South Africa to London – the first woman to fly solo from the Cape to Cairo.

The silk stockings had been put on in rather a hurry, for the last lap of the journey had taken less time than she had expected, largely because it had been relatively trouble-free – unlike the unpropitious start. Setting out from South Africa on 17 February, she had fallen victim to a dangerous attack of sunstroke and, landing in a feverish daze in what she later found was a region of Bulawayo, she immediately blacked out.

Africans are nothing if not flexible and are rarely surprised by the strangeness of European behaviour. The local girls who rescued her cared for her and in a few days she was off again. Flying over Nairobi there were more problems, this time with the engine, and although she was forced to jettison her tennis racquet and a few novels to lighten the load she hung on to six dresses, her Bible and a shotgun.

Before flying over Sudan, she set about making arrangements to find a man to escort her northwards. The number of people flying the African sky was on the increase, as was the number falling out of it. An accident, were the pilot lucky enough to escape death, could be costly. Ransoms were often exacted by locals, and European governments, landed with the task of searching for their own nationals, often found themselves picking up a hefty bill. It was for reasons of safety and economy, therefore, allied to the belief that the sky was really no place for a woman, that women were refused permission to fly over the country. Not at all put out by this restriction, Sophie wrote later: ‘… the Sudanese had forbidden women to fly alone owing to recent outbreaks among the natives who killed a District Commissioner last December … an entirely sensible regulation.’

Shortly before setting out from South Africa on her flight northwards, she had waved goodbye to a young man and his bride who were spending their honeymoon flying up through Africa. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, England was gripped by flying fever and pilots were setting out like swallows for destinations which grew more and more distant with each year. Lieutenant Bentley had gained fame the previous year by being the first person to fly solo from England to Cape Town and no doubt this was a spur to Sophie’s flight.

Catching up with the honeymooners in Uganda, she now sought Bentley’s aid. Chivalry took second place when he was persuaded – or perhaps he even volunteered – to escort the Lady Heath as far as Khartoum. Once they were in the air, however, and all the regulations had been strictly observed, the two planes lost sight of each other and Sophie happily flew on alone. From Khartoum to Cairo the journey was relaxed and carefree. Since maps were a bit dodgy in those days, she navigated by following the course of the Nile.

The gallant Bentley, meanwhile, now back in Khartoum, found his services again required, this time to escort a woman pilot who was flying in the opposite direction. No doubt a trifle exhausted by the excitements of his honeymoon as well as having to escort Sophie up through Sudan, he nevertheless took on the task of escorting the indefatigable Lady Mary Bailey who was on her way south to Juba on her historic flight – the first solo round trip between England and South Africa to be made by a woman.

It is interesting to observe the similarities and differences between these two pioneering fliers. They were both Anglo-Irish and had married titled men with enough money to keep their wives in planes and fuel. Lady Mary Bailey – herself the daughter of an Irish peer – married a South African millionaire, and Lady Heath’s husband contributed to her fleet of four planes. Apart from their love of flying and their fearlessness, however, the similarities end there.

Lady Mary, the elder by ten years, was the mother of five children – a scatty individual, easy-going in the extreme. Described by those who knew her as a disorganized will o’ the wisp, her flight to South Africa was made simply to pay a visit to her husband there – or so she said. Obviously an astute woman, whatever the impression she gave, she may simply have offered this explanation in order to fend off curious journalists, for she was certainly no stranger to ambition. The first woman to gain a certificate for flying blind, she also broke a number of records including an altitude one for light aircraft. As if to promote further her scatter-brained image, she set out for Africa in a Cirrus II Moth not altogether sure of her precise route and without all the necessary maps. Coming in to land at Tabora in order to enquire the way, she miscalculated her speed and the plane did a spectacular somersault. Not at all deterred, she waited while her compliant husband arranged for a pilot to fly up another Moth – at a cost of about £300. The round trip was completed early the next year, 1929, and newspaper photos show her muffled in leather and scarves with a hat jammed unceremoniously on her head, being welcomed back by two daughters at Croydon Aerodrome.

If Lady Mary Bailey presents a picture of a woman living in comfortable harmony with the many aspects of her life, Lady Heath was a different matter altogether. Born and brought up in Limerick, she went to Trinity College, Dublin where she took a science degree before moving to lecture at Aberdeen University. She began flying at twenty-two and, having taken her A Licence in 1925, she got her commercial B Licence the following year which allowed her to carry paying passengers. An energetic exhibitionist, she took up aerobatics and parachuting and on one occasion, when the engine failed, stood on the wing of the aircraft as it came in to crash land.

She was a courageous person who rushed at life full tilt. Her father was something of an eccentric, given to playing practical jokes on the local Irish constabulary. There had been no joke, however, about the murder charge brought against him when his wife was found dead in their home. Sophie, then a small girl, was put in the care of her paternal grandfather.

By the time she made her historic flight up through Africa, she was married for the second time, to a rich industrialist who was able to finance her flying. The year after the flight, however, tragedy struck. Injured in a flying accident in the US, she suffered severe brain damage which, allied to an increasing drink problem, led from one disaster to another. By the time she made her third and final marriage, to an American flier, things were going badly wrong.

She always made a point of dressing stylishly but never succeeded in totally disarming her critics – the press nicknamed her Lady Hell of a Din because of her feminist stand. She was the sort of pioneer with whom society is ill at ease – daring, outspoken and demanding – and the establishment turned with relief to the less threatening Lady Mary Bailey whose heroic image as an intrepid flier was tempered by her motherly dottiness. It was she who was made a Dame of the British Empire while the vociferous and lively Sophie went without official recognition.

In 1939, eleven years after she had delighted the world’s press with her glittering and triumphant flight to Cairo, she fell down the steps of a London bus and died of her injuries.

Flight has preoccupied and delighted the human mind for centuries. The Queen of Sheba’s lover promised to give her anything she asked for including of splendid things and riches … a vessel wherein one could traverse the air and winds which Solomon had made by the wisdom that God had given unto him.’ In 1020, Oliver, a Benedictine monk, took off from a tower in Malmesbury and was lucky to break only a leg, and in 1507, John Damian broke his ‘thee bane’ jumping off the tower of Stirling Castle. Where, you might ask, were the women while their menfolk were flinging themselves into oblivion with such misplaced optimism? Sensibly, they stayed at home by the hearth for, though without the benefit of da Vinci’s aeronautical knowledge, they nevertheless shared with him the commonsense view that inspiration and genius must be wedded to appropriate technological development before the body can break free and follow the spirit into the blue.

Until the Age of Reason, the longing to fly had been fulfilled only in myths and legends. Hermes, Icarus and Wayland the Smith soared to the skies while below, earth-bound by reality, women were left to languish, taking to the air only as discredited and troublesome witches. When eventually women did take to the skies, it was with a burst of spectacular and daring exhibitionism.

In 1783, the first balloon went up and the following year the first woman made her ascent. By 1810, Napoleon’s Chief of Air Service was the noted balloonist Madame Blanchard. Described as combining ‘a rugged character and physique with the charity and delicate exterior demanded of femininity of that period’, she was dedicated to ballooning, often staying up all night and descending only at dawn. Appointed by Louis XVIII, she planned for him one of the spectacular aerial firework displays for which she was famous. The Parisian crowd watched enraptured as she ignited a surprise rocket which sprayed a bright light across the sky, unexpectedly, however, sending the balloon with its solitary passenger on a rapidly descending course across the rooftops. The Parisian crowd roared its delight as the balloon disappeared from view. Madame Blanchard’s battered body was picked up later by passing workmen. While igniting what was to be her final firework, a rush of hydrogen had escaped from the envelope and the soaring flames had set the balloon alight.

Women, if not actually born managers, must quickly learn the skills of management in order to run their homes, and many found they had great aptitude for organizing public aeronautical displays. The public itself was more than happy to enjoy the intriguing sight of a woman elegantly clothed in empire dress and bonnet leaning langorously over a soaring gondola, one hand graciously scattering rose petals upon the awed, upturned faces, the other waving the national flag.

In England an astute mother of seven built up a whole career for herself as a balloonist. The posters, devised by herself, naturally gave her top billing:

Mrs. Graham, the only Female Aeronaut, accompanied by a party of young ladies … in the balloon The Victoria and Albert, will make an ascent at Vauxhall on Thursday July 11, 1850.

Intrepid and resourceful, Mrs Graham understood well the psychology of theatre. To whip up the anticipatory excitement, she had the preparations for the flight take place in public. Barrels of acid and old iron were set to bubble near the balloon to form the gas that was piped into it For a heightened effect she used illuminating gas which she bought from the local gas works. Then the balloon, bedecked with ribbons, streamers, plumes and silks and often filled with delightful young girls chaparoned by the matronly Mrs Graham herself, would waft slowly heavenwards. A keen businesswoman, her capacity for self-advertisement was matched only by her ability to stay alive in this dangerous business. She continued performing for forty years, spanning both the rise and the decline of ballooning in Britain.

After going up in a balloon basket the next thing was to jump out of one, and the organizers at Alexandra Palace, the Londoners’ playground, soon realized that the sight of an apparently vulnerable female figure with nipped-in waist and small, buttoned boots was more likely to produce a delicious sense of danger than was a burly, male aeronaut. To that end, and certainly to her own delight, Dolly Shepherd, daughter of a detective in the London Metropolitan Police, was chosen to become part of a parachute team.

In 1903, the 17-year-old Dolly was a smart Edwardian miss, with a good steady job as a waitress at the Ally Pally – steady, that is, until offered the chance of joining Bill Cody’s parachute team. Undeterred by the circumstances of the offer – the death of another girl parachutist in Dublin – she seized the chance and was soon being billed all over the country. In her breeches, knee-length boots and brass-buttoned jerkin, Dolly was soon the darling of the Edwardian crowd, who turned up to see her hitched to a trapeze bar and carried thousands of feet into the air by a balloon from which she then freed herself to float gracefully back to earth. Paid £2 10s for each ascent – a lot of money when a portion of fish and chips cost a penny halfpenny – her reputation was hard earned for she frequently took her life in her hands. Apart from a few unrehearsed landings on rooftops, she once drifted helplessly two miles above the earth and was only released from her ethereal prison by the unexpected deflation of the balloon. She came closest to death when, making a spectacular dual ascent, her partner’s parachute broke. Eight thousand feet up, she had to swing across to her partner, and strap the other girl to her own parachute so that they could make the dangerous descent together. She escaped with her life but badly injured her back on impact.

Dolly was the last of an era for the skies were now being invaded by a noisier sort of aerial creature – the flying machine. In 1903, the same year that young Dolly made her first ascent in a balloon, the Wright brothers made their first wavering flight at Kitty Hawke. From then on, the skies of Europe and America were filled with machines taking off like feverish gnats and before long, women were up there among them, not only flying but also building their own aircraft.

By 1909, the first fatal air accident had happened, Blériot had flown the Channel and Lilian Bland, granddaughter of the Dean of Belfast, had built and flown her own machine, known as the Bland Mayfly. Constructed of steamed ash, piano wire, bicycle pedals and treated calico, the Bland Mayfly sold for £250 – or £350 with an engine. Lilian’s first ad hoc fuel tank consisted of a whisky bottle and an ear trumpet. ‘It was not a good engine,’ she noted, ‘a beast to start and it got too hot … as the engine is English, its sense of humour is not developed sufficiently.’ An issue of Flight Magazine shows her flying her magnificent machine across a foggy, frosty field.

It would be unusual these days to read of a woman building her own aircraft but the style, in those early days of flight, was strictly trial and error and anyone who had the inclination and the money could have a go. Surprisingly, for one who had worked so hard and achieved so much, it all came to an end in what seemed, for her, an uncharacteristic way. ‘As a consequence of the marriage of Miss Bland,’ read the notice in Flight in 1911, ‘we learn that she is disposing of her aeroplane engine, propellers, plant and machines.’

Although Lilian Bland threw it all up for love, there were countless other young women following her who took to the air with equal joy and alacrity. In 1909, Madame la Baronne de Laroche of France was the first woman ever to gain a pilot’s licence. Three years later, on the day following the shattering loss of the Titanic, a young American journalist, Harriet Quimby, flew solo across the English Channel, taking less than an hour to do so.

In the States, during the recession, many young people – mostly men – found they could earn a living wing-walking and performing other aerial stunts. For a tired and dispirited populace, these dangerous exploits provided some sort of relief, the contemplation of others in danger somehow lessening the boredom and misery of their own dull or inactive lives. For women fliers, the practice served another, useful purpose. Generally thought not to be such good fliers as their male counterparts, anything which offered them a chance to display their skills could not be ignored. For one woman, at least, the strategy paid off. Phoebe Omlie, a talented and daring wing-walker, became the first person in the States to get a transport licence. For the spirited woman who liked excitement and adventure, flying provided an opportunity for both and once she had access to a plane, she could attain a freedom in the skies not available to her on the ground at all.

By the mid-1920s, however, state bureaucracy had begun to assert itself – almost always a bad omen for women. In 1924, the International Commission for Civil Aviation resolved that ‘women shall be excluded from any employment in the operative crew of aircraft engaged in public transport’. Another resolution stated categorically that candidates for such posts ‘must have use of all four limbs, be free from hernia and must be of the male sex’. Although these restrictions were later removed, the attitudes which prompted them were not. Some twenty years later, Jacqueline Cochrane, the first woman to break the sound barrier, was ‘allowed’ to deliver a bomber to England, as part of the war effort, provided that the take-off and landing were done by a male pilot.

Well aware of the problems faced by women in the field of aviation, Stella Wolfe, a journalist specializing in flying in the 1920s, made some points about the suitability of women which might now make us smile but which obviously needed stating then. Women, she said, were eminently suited to flying because they were lighter in weight and could endure cold better than men. Nor did they drink or smoke as much as men. Further, she believed that women, when able properly to sublimate their sex instincts, could use their maternal powers as a driving force in other fields. ‘Deprived of the right of motherhood and doomed to enforced celibacy by the ravages of war … she can put all that marvellous creative power, that tremendous endurance that enables the mother to undergo the agony of childbirth’ into flying. It was unfortunate that she should then have cited Lady Bailey as an example of a woman who had raised a large family and still had energy left for other activities. The privileged Lady Bailey only had surplus energy because she could afford to pay other women to look after her family and home. The Wolfe argument is not one that would appeal to the more independent-minded women of today but it was representative of the feminist thinking of the 1920s.

It was not until a few years later, in the early 1930s, that the public got the full benefit of America’s bright star: Amelia Earhart, that stalwart flier whose views on women and their place in society were as clear and determined as her own attitude to flying. ‘Unfortunately,’ she wrote, ‘I was born at a time when girls were still girls.’

Amelia Earhart was brought up in the early years of the century, in a large, pleasant clapboard house in Kansas. Her childhood years were happy and carefree although she learned early on that certain activities were considered ‘rough’ for a girl. Her father, an amiable man whose weakness for drink eventually led to the break-up of his marriage, made a living as a poorly paid lawyer on the railroad. Any extras the family might need were provided by Amelia’s maternal grandfather, who was a judge. Life for the small girl was unruffled and unexciting and there was nothing in her formal education nor in the girls’ literature of the day to stimulate a spirit of adventure. ‘… who ever heard of a girl – a pleasant one – skipping on an oil tanker, say, finding the crew about to mutiny and saving the captain’s life while quelling the mutiny? No, goings on of this sort are left to the masculine characters …’

If there was to be any excitement in her own life then clearly she herself would have to generate it. She enrolled as a medical student in New York but threw this up after a year. Unsettled, she moved to live with her parents in Los Angeles, then the centre of America’s aircraft industry. Soon, she had found the activity that was to dominate her whole life – flying. She took a job with a telephone company to pay for her flying lessons and with financial help from her mother, the judge’s daughter, she bought a second-hand plane. By 1922, at the age of twenty-four, she not only had her pilot’s licence but had also set a women’s altitude record for 14,000 feet. When her parents’ marriage finally broke up she drifted back across the States and took a job working with deprived children. Her life still had no clear direction. What was she, people asked, a social worker or a woman pilot?

‘Personally, I am a social worker who flies for sport,’ she tried to explain. ‘I cannot claim to be a feminist but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems, new for them, that is.’

Then, in 1928, everything fell into place. Could she, someone asked, take part in a flight across the Atlantic? She wouldn’t have to fly or anything, just simply be a passenger. The backer, a woman, was financing the flight in order to cement the friendship between America and England and wouldn’t it be nice, she said, to have a woman on the plane? Amelia was now thirty and had been drifting for too long. She accepted with alacrity. When a great adventure is offered, she said, you don’t refuse. But on this first Atlantic crossing Amelia was merely the token female taken along because the woman sponsor thought it a good idea. Not everyone shared that point of view. Commenting on the landing at Burryport in Wales, a Flight editorial said: ‘… in these days of sex equality such a feat should not arouse any particular comment Compared with the solo flights of such lady pilots as Lady Heath and Lady Bailey, the crossing as a passenger does not appear to us to prove anything in particular.’ Such a comment, ungainly as it was, had some justification and Amelia herself felt her presence had added little to aviation history: ‘All I did was to sit on the floor of the fuselage like a sack of potatoes.’

To add insult to injury, when the sponsorship money was being handed out, the pilot received $20,000, the mechanic received $5000 and she got nothing. Already an accomplished flier, it must have infuriated her to realize she had allowed herself to be used, and the experience spurred her on to reclaim what she felt she had lost ‘Some day,’ she said, ‘I will redeem my self-respect. I can’t live without it.’

She travelled round the country campaigning on behalf of women pilots but in the midst of it all took a surprising step. Marriage had never appealed to her and in any case, as she remarked to her sister, having babies took up too much time. She had had a suitor, however, for a number of years. George Putnam, the publisher, had been involved in her first transatlantic flight and found himself attracted by the slight, serious young woman with her open, gamine face and gap-toothed smile. He himself was married but on his divorce offered himself to Amelia. She refused over and over again and then, to his surprise, in the middle of her feminist campaign, she agreed to marry him.

There were now a number of people in the States all sharing Amelia’s desire to promote women fliers but it was a difficult time of social change and the women, well aware of the dangers of projecting a feminine image that might be damaging to their reputation as serious pilots, carefully chose to dress without any show of female frippery. The press, reflecting the prejudices of the time, saw only the stereotype woman and not the individual, constantly referring to these early fliers as Petticoat Pilots, Ladybirds and Sweethearts of the Air. It was an uphill struggle and perhaps it was this continuing battle that finally led Amelia Earhart to make her momentous decision – she would fly solo across the Atlantic. It was five years since Charles Lindbergh had made his great flight across to Paris and since then, although a number of women pilots had tried the transatlantic flight, none had succeeded.

On 20 May 1932, flying a red Lockheed Vega, she set out from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on her long and lonely journey – not altogether sure why she was doing it. ‘To have a purpose,’ she wrote, ‘is sometimes a deadening thing.’

Things went wrong from the start. Within hours of take-off the altimeter failed. If she went too high she risked the wings icing up and if she flew too low she was blinded by sea fog. She flew on, trying to strike a balance between the two. In the dark Atlantic night, her engine was suddenly illuminated by an eerie blue light. Exhaust flames were beginning to lick out of a broken weld in the engine manifold. There was nothing she could do except watch with horror – and fly on, listening to the increasing noise the manifold made as it started to vibrate in a dangerous manner. On and on through the lonely night until, fifteen hours later, she landed in a boggy field in what she hoped was Ireland. It was. You’re in Derry, said Mr Gallagher, the farmer whose cows had been so startled by her noisy arrival.

Her earlier London critics remained unimpressed:

Miss Earhart is reported to have made the flight for no other reason than that she had long thought she could do it … Very probably, Miss Earhart would never have rested content until she had proved to her own satisfaction whether or not she was, if we may use the expression, man enough to do it. She has succeeded and we may congratulate her on her success. But her flight has added precisely nothing to the cause of aviation.

An American reporter was more generous in his praise:

… she isn’t a bit pretty but if you can be with her without being conscious of something quietly beautiful you are a peculiarly dull fellow and wholly insensitive. There is a charm there and a sense of perfect control over self and that delightful quality infrequently found in the workers of the world – a rare sense of humour.

Calm and undisturbed by the differing responses she seemed to generate, she smiled her way through the razzmatazz of civic welcomes and tickertape hysteria. She had done it, she said, just for the fun of it. Later she offered something more: ‘It was a self-justification, a proving to me and to anyone else interested that a woman with adequate experience could do it.’

With Putnam, she was now leading the life of a socialite, fêted wherever she went Soon, her face was as well known as her name for, although a non-smoker herself, she appeared in cigarette advertisements to help finance her many flying projects. These advertisements produced a spate of criticism as did her uncompromising stand on feminism but, with her usual single-minded commitment, she refused to allow herself to be distracted.

Her solo transatlantic flight had been a vindication of all the women fliers before her who had set out to do the same and perished in the attempt, and she exulted in her achievement: ‘There is no telling now,’ she wrote, ‘where the limitations to feminine activities, if any, will be henceforth.’

Sadly, she encountered her final limits when her plane disappeared mysteriously in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly round the world.

In the year that Amelia Earhart agonized over her decision to enter the ‘attractive cage’ of marriage, a very different young woman set out to make another famous solo flight.

Born in Hull in 1903 – an auspicious year for a flier – Amy Johnson was five years younger than her American counterpart. After taking an Arts degree from Sheffield University she found life in the north of England unexciting and moved to London where she took a job in the silks department of a large store, earning £5 a week. Amy Johnson’s life till then had been taken up with the ephemera of the 1920s: jazz, college rags and a love affair that lasted through her twenties. Despite the three hundred love letters – skittish and innocently provocative – which she wrote during that time, the affair ended dismally; by then, however, she had discovered another passion: flying.

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