MONT BL B AN M C I L I N C A O S T K I W R O T H M IC EY K CONEFR A HANDBOOK FOR THE LADY ADVENTURER A Oneworld Book First Published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth by Oneworld Publications 2011 This paperback edition published in 2012 Copyright © Mick Conefrey, 2011 The moral right of Mick Conefrey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library paperback ISBN: 978–1–85168–961–3 ebook ISBN: 978–1–85168–866–1 Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India Cover design by designedbydavid Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Oneworld Publications 185 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7AR England Stay up to date with the latest books, special offers, and exclusive content from Oneworld with our monthly newsletter Sign up on our website www.oneworld-publications.com CONTENTS Preface ix Chapter One WHO, WHY, AND HOW? 1 Chapter Two WHERE? 25 Chapter Three PEOPLE 123 Chapter Four WOMEN TRAVEL TO VENUS, MEN TRAVEL TO MARS 169 Chapter Five HOW TO SURVIVE FOREIGN TRAVEL 201 EPILOGUE 225 Bibliography 227 Index 231 Chapter One WHO, WHY, AND HOW? Few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. —GERTRUDE BELL, TWENTIETH-CENTURY DESERT EXPLORER If women can be railway workers, why can’t they fly in space? —VALENTINA TERESHKOVA, COSMONAUT HOW TO CLIMB MONT BLANC IN A SKIRT u u2 u WHO, WHY, AND HOW? WHO? Ask someone to describe a typical explorer and they will usually have a pretty good idea. Explorers have lined faces, scraggy beards, skin that has been punished by the wind and sun. Sometimes they wear furs; sometimes they wear khaki. They either smile at the camera in triumph or they stare with gritty resolution. And they are men. Or are they? Which explorer found the lost city of Cana in the Middle East? Which mountaineer first mapped the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas? Who was first to the top of Huascarán in Peru? Which European was first to visit the Ottoman harem in Con- stantinople? Who held the world record for the fastest flight from Britain to Australia for 44 years? You’ll find the answers to all of these questions within these pages, and none of the protagonists will have a scraggy beard. This book is about female explorers and travellers. Who were they? What did they achieve? And what can we learn from them? The lost history of female exploration includes women who trav- elled to every corner of the globe: mountaineers like Fanny Bullock Workman and Annie Smith Peck, sailors like Ann Davison and Naomi James, desert explorers such as Rosita Forbes and Freya Stark, polar explorers such as Ann Bancroft and Pam Flowers, and “African queens” such as May French Sheldon and Mary Kingsley. A handful of them are still well known today, some enjoyed just a few fleeting months in the headlines, and others never saw the limelight at all. Of course, for most of them, fame was not what spurred them into a life of exploration. They were not travelling for posterity; they were driven by what Martin Luther King called the “fierce urgency of now.” u 3 uu HOW TO CLIMB MONT BLANC IN A SKIRT Ella Maillart didn’t make incredible journeys through central Asia hop- ing to join Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott in the pantheon of great explorers; she did it because she was desperately excited to en- counter other cultures. It would be a tragedy, though, if the exploits of Maillart and the other great women explorers were forgotten. Their stories are just as entertaining and just as inspiring as any of the more famous exploration tales. We’ll begin, though, by posing the question that no explorer likes to hear: WHY? For most adventurers and travellers, male or female, the answer to “why?” is a complex mixture of desires and emotions, often combined with a lot of vagueness and happenstance. “Because it is there,” in order to go beyond “the far blue mountains” or “the far horizon” are just some of the many stock answers trotted out by reluctant inter- viewees who cannot or do not want to explain their wanderlust. This is an important question, though, for anyone trying to look at the dif- ferences between male and female travellers, so it is worth a closer look. Many reasons are common to both sexes. Isabella Bird, for exam- ple, was one of several people who first went abroad for health reasons. At home in Victorian Britain, she was a virtual invalid who suffered from insomnia, spinal prostration, boils, severe headaches, hair loss, muscular spasms, and depression. But once on the trail, she was trans- formed into a fearless adventurer and expert horsewoman who trav- elled all around the world, from Australia, to Japan, to Hawaii, to the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of Kurdistan. The British journalist Beatrix Bulstrode was one of many male and female explorers who went in search of an alternative to modern civi- lization. She made an expedition to the wilds of Mongolia in 1913, hoping to “revert to the primitive,” only to discover that, after a couple of months, the primitive had become “rather predictable.” The American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of the few people who confessed her motivation, though undoubtedly it was shared by u 4 uu WHO, WHY, AND HOW? many others. As her autobiography proclaimed, she made a series of daring, long-distance plane journeys quite simply “for the fun of it”. You’ll find versions of these common “whys” in the biographies of both male and female explorers, but there are some answers that seem to be more gender specific. WHY WOMEN EXPLORE For Womankind? No man ever climbed a mountain or crossed a river to prove what a man could do, though several might have done it for Mankind, with a capital M. For women, it was different. To a much greater extent, they were going against expectations and trespassing in a male realm. Some u 5 uu HOW TO CLIMB MONT BLANC IN A SKIRT politely ignored this, but others saw their successes and failures very much in terms of gender. Alexandra David-Néel wrote that she made her famous journey to Lhasa in 1924 to show what “the will of a woman could do.” A decade earlier, the American mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman was photographed on top of a mountain pass in the Karako- ram, holding up a banner calling for “Votes for Women.” It would be a mistake, however, to think that all female explorers were feminists. In fact, some were at pains to point out the opposite. Gertrude Bell, one of the most famous women travellers of the early twentieth century, was a founder member of the British Women’s Anti-Suffrage League. And more recent women, from the mountaineer Julie Tullis to the sailor Clare Francis, have written about their dislike of so-called “women’s lib”. To Change Sex Apart from Jan, née James, Morris, the famous travel writer who had a sex change operation in the early 1970s, few male explorers have admitted to complex gender identity issues. To put it more simply, not very many of them have had to spend a lot of time dressed up as u 6 uu WHO, WHY, AND HOW? women. However, several notable women explores had to pass themselves off as men, and not just for a day. Stella Court Treatt drove all the way through Africa from the Cape to Cairo in the 1920s dressed as a boy. Isabelle Eberhardt wandered around North Africa disguised as an Arab scholar, and Lady Hester Stanhope spent much of her strange life decked out like a well-to-do Turkish merchant. For some, cross-dressing was a necessary evil that facilitated their travel, but in the behaviour of certain women, you get a whiff of something more transgressive. Dressing as men made their travels smoother, but it also gave them the opportunity to explore their sexuality and gender. When in the early 1970s Sarah Hobson trekked around Iran masquerading as a young British man, not only was she propositioned by Iranian women and their fathers who saw her as a good catch for their daughters, but she also found herself flirting with local girls and enjoying the crude jokes of the young men she hung out with. Isabelle Eberhardt certainly had a very complex and active sex life, and she clearly enjoyed playing with gender and identity. For the Sake of Their Dead Husbands There are no male explorers who travelled for the sake of their wives’ reputation, but a small and fascinating group of women took to the trail to settle their dead husbands’ unfinished business. In 1903, for ex- ample, Mina Hubbard became the first person to cross Labrador in Canada by canoe. It took considerable guts: her husband, Leonidas, had starved to death on his attempt. Not only did Mina Hubbard have to battle against the environment, but she also had to race against her husband’s old friends who were determined to beat her to the prize. Similarly, Ruth Harkness, a New York socialite and fashion designer, went to China in 1936, aiming to bring the first live panda back to the United States. Her husband, Bill, had died in Shanghai earlier that year, having spent 13 frustrating months trying to capture the mythical crea- ture.