The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell
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 Many women have found that the thwarted love which provided the original impulse to set out is swiftly superseded by the real romance of travel.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