800 Years of Women's Letters (35 page)

Here in Brazil there are spiders as big as crabs. In the matter of tropical diseases it ranks with darkest Africa; there are slaves, too, often maintained in conditions of utmost savagery. . . . I am becoming painfully acclimatised. There is cholera, and the less dramatic but agonising local boils so close you could not put a pin between them. I battle through these boils on frequent draughts of stout! However I have now unpacked my fifty-nine trunks, set my house in order, and given my first dinner-party – successfully. I believe that the Emperor considers Burton a great addition to the country, because his wonderful conversation holds his audience spell-bound. . . .

Some of these chic Brazilians look askance at me, wading barefoot in the streams, bottling snakes, painting, furbishing up a ruined chapel, or accompanying my husband on expeditions to the virgin interior. The ladies are namby-pamby: They have taken exception, as improper, to four puny English railway clerks rowing at the Regatta, in jerseys. I often think a
parvenue
, or half-bred woman would burst if she had to do as I do, keeping up appearances, lancing boils, coping with insects, with Richard, with everything. I do hate Santos. The climate is beastly, the people fluffy. The stinks, the vermin, the food, the niggers are all of a piece. There are no walks, if you go one way you sink knee-deep in mangrove swamps; another, you are covered with sandflies. Fortunately Richard has even taught me to fence. And with him I do gymnastics, have cold baths, go to Mass and market. Above all I help Richard with Literature. I copy out all the pages of his reports to the Foreign Office. Thirty-two pages on Cotton Report, one hundred and twenty-five on Geographic Report – & cheerfully!

L. BLANCH,
THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE
(1954)

Isabella Bird, born in 1831, rejected conventional life in order to travel to some of the remotest regions of the world. Yet she had been a frail child and suffered from severe back-pain all her life. On foot, horseback, yak, even elephant, she visited Japan, Korea, Kurdestan, Persia, and the Rocky Mountains. She wrote nine books about her dangerous journeys, which became bestsellers in her time. She gave most of the profits to charities, declaring her travels ‘vindicated the right of a woman to do anything which she can do well'. She rode through the Rocky Mountains in 1873.

You must understand that in Colorado travel, unless on the main road and in the larger settlements, there are neither hotels nor taverns, and that it is the custom for the settlers to receive travellers, charging them at the usual hotel rate for accommodation. It is a very satisfactory arrangement. However, at Ranch, my first halting-place, the host was unwilling to receive people in this way, I afterwards found, or I certainly should not have presented my credentials at the door of a large frame house, with large barns and a generally prosperous look. The host, who opened the door, looked repellant, but his wife, a very agreeable, lady-like-looking woman, said they could give me a bed on a sofa. The house was the most pretentious I have yet seen, being papered and carpeted, and there were two ‘hired girls.' There was a lady there from Laramie, who kindly offered to receive me into her room, a very tall, elegant person, remarkable as being the first woman who had settled in the Rocky Mountains. She had been trying the ‘camp cure' for three months, and was then on her way home. She had a waggon with beds, tent, tent-floor, cooking stove, and every camp luxury, a light buggy, a man to manage everything, and a most superior ‘hired girl.' She was consumptive and frail in strength, but a very attractive person, and her stories of the perils and limitations of her early life at Fort Laramie were very interesting. Still I ‘wearied,' as I had arrived early in the afternoon, and could not out of politeness retire and write to you. At meals the three ‘hired men' and two ‘hired girls' eat with the family. I soon found that there was a screw loose in the house, and was glad to leave early the next morning, although it was obvious that a storm was coming on. I saw the toy car of the Rio Grande Railroad whirl past, all cushioned and warmed, and rather wished I were in it, and not out among the snow on the bleak hill-side. I only got on four miles when the storm came on so badly that I got into a kitchen where eleven wretched travellers were taking shelter, with the snow melting on them and dripping on the floor. I had learned the art of ‘being agreeable' so well at the Chalmers's, and practised it so successfully during the two hours I was there, by paring potatoes and making scones, that when I left, though the hosts kept ‘an accommodation house for travellers,' they would take nothing for my entertainment.

I. BIRD,
A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
(1982)

Her last journey was to the Atlas Mountains, from where she wrote this letter in 1901, aged seventy, to relatives at home.

I left Tangier and had a severe two days' voyage to Mazagan, where the landing was so terrible and the sea so wild that the captain insisted on my being lowered into the boat by the ship's crane, in a coal basket. The officers and passengers cheered my pluck as the boat mounted a huge breaking surge – no cargo could be landed. Before leaving the steamer I had a return of fever; and when the camping-ground turned out to be a soaked field with water standing in the furrows, and the tent was pitched in a storm of wind and rain, and many of the tent-pegs would not hold, and when the head of my bed went down into the slush, I thought I should die there – but had no more illness or fever. After an awful night when the heavy wet end of my tent, having broken loose, flapped constantly against my head, things mended. The rain ceased, and we left with camel, mule, donkey and horse and travelled here, 126 miles in six days.

Marrakesh is awful; an African city of 80,000 people, the most crowded, noisiest, filthiest, busiest city I have seen in the world. It terrifies me. It is the great Mohammedan feast, lasting a week, and several thousand tribesmen, sheiks and retainers, are here, all armed, mounted on their superb barbs, splendidly caparisoned, men as wild as the mountains and deserts from which they come to do homage to the Sultan.

I have seen several grand sights: the Sultan in the midst of his brilliant army, receiving the homage of the sheiks and on another day, similarly surrounded, killing a sheep, in memory of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, and as an atonement for the sins of the year. I was at the last in Moorish disguise, pure white and veiled.

I have a Moorish house to myself with a courtyard choked with orange-trees in blossom and fruit. I also have what is a terror to me, a magnificent barb, the property of the Sultan; a most powerful black charger, a huge fellow far too much for me, equipped with crimson trappings and a peaked crimson saddle, 18 inches above his back. I have to carry a light ladder for getting on and off!

With mules, horses and soldiers I left the din and devilry of Marrakesh, as the Sultan's guest. We have been travelling six hours daily since, camping four nights and sleeping two in the castles of these wild tribes till tonight, when we are camped in the fastness of the great Atlas range at the height of 1000 feet, in as wild a region as can be imagined. This journey differs considerably from any other as it is as rough as the roughest. I never expected to do such travelling again. You would fail to recognise your infirm friend astride a superb horse in full blue trousers and a short full skirt with brass spurs belonging to a generalissimo of the Moorish army, and riding down places awful even to think of, where a rolling stone or slip would mean destruction. In these wild mountains we are among tribes which Rome failed to conquer. It is evidently air and riding which do me good. I never realised this so vividly as now.

This is an awful country, the worst I have been in. The oppression and cruelty are hellish – no one is safe. The country is rotten to the core, eaten up by abominable vices, no one is to be trusted. Every day deepens my horror of its deplorable and unspeakable vileness.

The journey of twenty-one days is over. The last day I rode thirty miles and walked two. Is it not wonderful that even at my advanced age this life should affect me thus? We were entertained everywhere as guests of the Sultan. The bridle tracks on the Atlas are awful, mere rock ladders, or smooth faces of shelving rock. We lamed two horses, and one mule went over a precipice, rolling over four times before he touched the bottom. We had guides, soldiers and slaves with us. The weather was dry and bracing. Today I had an interview with the Sultan, the first European woman to see the Emperor of Morocco! It was very interesting, but had to be secretly managed, because of the fanatical hatred to Christians.

ED. C. PALSER HAVELY,
THE TRAVELS OF ISABELLA BIRD
(1971)

Mary Kingsley was born in 1862, to a middle-class family, and lived a respectable Victorian life until her parents died in 1892. For the next eight years she travelled in West Africa, alone, making copious notes of her adventures. Considering herself an anthropologist, she studied African religion and law. As the family money had been spent educating her brother, she paid her way by trading fish-hooks and matches. She preferred traders to missionaries, since they did not try to change African customs. She enjoyed staying with traders, as this gave her freedom to criticize, which she eschewed in her published works, but not in private letters, such as this undated one to the trader John Holt.

I could not be a parson's guest and then abuse them, so seeing staying with missions tied my hands I settled with traders to their great alarm at times. I don't mean to say I could ever half pay them, but I spent my money at their stores to the tune of £500 while in West Africa. The three missions I stayed at are the Mission Evangelique. I hold my tongue for the sake of those men and women I respect, but I have never forgiven one of the best of the white women from saying to me when I said I was going down that night to nurse a sick man, white, who was ill with fever, with no other Christian close by, ‘Miss Kingsley, you can not, it's not respectable'.

She enjoyed teasing, as here to Professor E.B. Taylor in 1898:

‘My cannibal friends never eat human heads unless for religious purposes. By the way, did I tell you of my friend James Irvine, the Elder of the Presbyterian Church, late of Calabar, now Liverpool, who came across a black friend boiling human heads in an oil cauldron – he expressed his opinion and the African let him run on and laughed and finally demonstrated he was not soup-making but only preparing the skulls to keep in a way that would not attract flies.'

VALERIE GROSVENOR MYER,
A VICTORIAN LADY IN AFRICA
(1989)

Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) toured the Middle East and North Africa as an opera singer. In 1904 she married a distant cousin, Philippe Néel, but she felt trapped by marriage, and they separated within a matter of days. Nevertheless, they continued to correspond, and he supported her financially, enabling her to study and travel abroad. In 1911, when the Dalai Lama was in exile in Darjeeling, she became the first Western woman to interview him. Her meeting with him inspired her to concentrate on Tibetan Buddhism in her studies. These letters were sent to her husband.

7 December 1913    Sikkim

Dear Philippe,

I love you very much for what you have done to support me. I know you make sacrifices to provide me with a life that displeases you. This journey to Sikkim [in the Himalayas] has restored my spirits. I visited villages and monasteries with the Prince, travelling much in the manner of a medieval court, like a dream of a very old world. The Prince encouraged me to exhort the monks to practice a purer Buddhism. I took to the task with zeal, lecturing at the monasteries on the pure doctrine. I have been given a lama's red robe to wear and the designation of ‘lamina' [woman lama].

I have found a tutor to instruct me in Tibetan. At my age [fortyfour] I must not delay learning the language. I am in a singular position as a woman, and a militant practising Buddhism. Orientalists in the West would be severely critical of my writing. What I want above all is to be completely accurate and document my findings so thoroughly that I'll be able to return home a person of some importance in the world of Orientalists. All I need is a bit more time and experience. Don't you think, given our situation and our characters, we can make the sacrifice to be separated a little longer? My hope is to spend time in Tibet if the authorities will let me. Then I'll leave India, and travel home via Japan, with my cycle of studies on Buddhism in northern Asia completed.

March 1914

Now the Prince's father has died he has become ruler so I travelled alone, except for my interpreter and a few porters to carry my camping gear through the azalea and rhododendron forests. We went up and down nearly vertical hills on my way to the north, where Sikkim borders Tibet. It was one of my most memorable journeys. The track enters a fantastic region near the frontier passes. In the intense silence of these wild solitudes only brooks chat gently. Up and up we went, skirting glaciers, catching occasional glimpses of valleys filled by huge clouds. And then, without any transition, as we issued from the mists, the Tibetan tableland appeared before us, immense, void and resplendent under the luminous sky of Central Asia. . . . Nothing can dim that first sight of Tibet in my mind.

A. DAVID-NÉEL,
MY JOURNEY TO LHASA
(1938)

Illegally entering Tibet in 1914, she spent time in a monastery, lived as a hermit in a cave, and became a lama herself. In 1923, disguised as a Tibetan beggar on pilgrimage with her adopted son, Yongden, she became the first Western woman to enter the ‘Forbidden City' of Lhasa, where she remained for two months before her identity was discovered. This letter, written in 1923, is again to her husband.

Next morning, leaving my old friend, the Mekong, we turned westward through the rocky gorge at the entrance of which we had slept. Soon it opened out into a narrow, densely wooded valley. The weather was sunny and walking easier. We passed two mounted Tibetan traders, who gave us scarcely a glance. Perhaps they thought we were Chinamen, for Yongden and I both wore Chinese dresses. Nevertheless this first meeting, precursor of the many which were to follow, gave us a little shock. Although we were yet in that part of Tibet, still under Chinese rule, wherein foreigners can travel freely, though at their own risk, it was most important that rumours of my wanderings in the neighbourhood of the border should not spread. For the Tibetan officials, once warned and on the alert, would have the road carefully watched, which would greatly increase the difficulties of our entering the forbidden area.