The Greatest Explorers

in History

For my girls: Lola, Madison, Mishy, Ellie, Maia and Leila

The Greatest Explorers in History

Michelle Rosenberg

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

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Copyright © Michelle Rosenberg 2022

ISBN 978 1 52673 100 5

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‘Mars is there, waiting to be reached.’

Buzz Aldrin

Foreword:

Reflecting on a Life of Travel

Helen Schreider

I am honoured to be included in this noted group of explorers. At my current age of 93, it’s been a long time since I was engaged in exploration. Looking back at my life, I sometimes marvel that I survived some of my adventures.

Overall, I have led a dual life – as an artist and as an explorer. I started off getting a degree in fine arts at UCLA, with intentions of pursuing a career in art. While at UCLA I met a charming and dynamic engineering student, Frank Schreider, who had a strong desire to explore little known parts of the world. Because I came from a family of travellers, I, too, had an interest in travel. Little did we both know where our travels would take us!

After graduation on our belated honeymoon, we set off in a jeep to see parts of Central and South America. To our surprise, we were blocked by a range of mountains in Costa Rica; this was before the Pan American Highway was completed. Though we turned around and went back home, this initial short journey whetted our appetites for further travel. We wanted to find a way to bypass that wall of mountains, but to complicate matters further, Frank was insistent that our travels would only be ‘under our own power’. He was determined that we never use trains, buses, or any kind of public conveyance. We realized that our only way to get around those mountains would be to head straight into the Pacific Ocean – by amphibious jeep. This was the start of our series of adventures.

To raise funds for our upcoming journey, we went to work in Alaska for a couple of years. While there, we decided that our travels should begin in the northern tip of Alaska and go all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. And so, with our German shepherd, Dinah, Frank and I launched this 20,000-mile journey in ‘Tortuga’, our first amphibious jeep. After many harrowing experiences, all documented in our book, 20,000 Miles South, we completed our dream in January 1956.

Upon our return we were recruited by National Geographic, and for the next 15 years we were engaged in a series of adventures under their direction. We started off in ‘Tortuga II’ on another amphibious jeep exploration, this time travelling the length of the Ganges in India. ‘Tortuga II’ then took us to Indonesia, where we travelled from Sumatra to East Timor. During the ensuing years we explored Taiwan, drove a Range Rover called ‘Bucephelus’ the length of the Great Rift Valley in Africa, and later retracing the footsteps of Alexander the Great in Eurasia, a distance of some 24,000 miles. Our final project for National Geographic involved the Amazon Queen, a boat we built to navigate the length of the Amazon from its headwaters in Peru to the Atlantic Ocean, mapping the entire river for the first time.

In the years after leaving National Geographic, I worked as a museum designer and continued my work as a painter. Frank joined the foreign service and worked as a journalist and editor.

Reflecting now on my time exploring the world, I am filled with the memories of friendships with people whom I could only have met in the far corners of the world; of exotic meals, warm smiles and colourful fabrics; of rough seas, peaceful beaches, and sketching and painting scenes I could have only dreamed of before actually being there. I am so grateful for these moments now and truly hope that generations to come will continue to be bitten by that mysterious travel bug. Their lives will be so enriched by the experiences they open themselves to as they explore places foreign to them at the outset, home to them in the end.

In gratitude for these future generations and to all those who continue to pursue and celebrate exploration,

Helen

Chapter 1

Amelia Earhart

(24 July 1897–1937)

[Women] do get more glory than men for comparable feats. But, also, women get more notoriety when they crash.

Amelia Earhart: the famous American aviator whose story and disappearance has captured the imagination of the world. Until relatively recently, her fate and death remained a fiercely debated mystery.

Born in Atchison, Kansas, she was captivated by the pilots training at a local airfield. During the First World War, she served as a Red Cross nurse’s aide in Toronto in Canada. On her eventual return to the US, she enrolled at New York’s Columbia University as a pre-medical student. She took her first plane ride in 1920 and the rest is history. In 1923, she became the sixteenth woman to receive a pilot’s licence.

She was the first president of the organization of licensed pilots, the Ninety-Nines, and in 1928 she was the ‘aviation’ editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Preferring smelling salts instead of tea or coffee to keep her awake during long flight hours, on 17 June 1928, she embarked from Newfoundland on an epic flight across the Atlantic with pilots Wilmer ‘Bull’ Stulz and Louis E. ‘Slim’ Gordon. Twenty-one hours later, she had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic.

She would later become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (where she had a cup of hot chocolate for sustenance) and the first person to fly, solo, from Hawaii to the US.

On 1 June 1937, she set off in an attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. She disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937 in her Lockheed Electra 10E.

In a letter to her husband, George Putnam (they married on 7 February 1931), she had written: ‘Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.’

New evidence and theories suggest that rather than the widely held belief that they crashed into the Pacific, Earhart and her companion and navigator Fred Noonan, low on fuel, were forced to land on the reef of Gardner Island, 2,000 miles from Hawaii.

The theory says that they sent a series of emergency radio signals to Itasca, the Coast Guard vessel in charge of monitoring this particular leg of Earhart’s journey. Those radio signals were sent at low tides, the only times when the water level was low enough for the plane’s engine to safely run without risk of flooding.

Two days after their forced landing, a message from Earhart was received via radio frequency by a listener in San Francisco: ‘Still alive. Better hurry. Tell husband all right.’

On 7 July, another message, intercepted by a listener in New Brunswick, Canada: ‘Can you read me? Can you read me? This is Amelia Earhart … Please come in.’

And then the last message: ‘We have taken in water, my navigator is badly hurt … we are in need of medical care and must have help. We can’t hold on much longer.’

And that was it. Nothing further was intercepted or heard from Earhart.

Most recently, in January 2019, debris of a plane that might have been Earhart’s, has been discovered off Papua New Guinea. At last writing, National Geographic Explorer at Large, Dr Robert Ballard, is leading a team to discover what happened to Amelia.

National Amelia Earhart Day is celebrated on 24 July.

Sources

https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/amelia-earhart

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/24/amelia-earhart-birthday-distress-call/782617002/

https://www.rd.com/culture/amelia-earhart-facts/

Chapter 2

Amy Johnson

(1 July 1903–5 January 1941)

Setting off unknown to face the unknown, against parental opposition, with no money, friends, or influence, ran it a close second. Clichés like ‘blazing trails,’ flying over ‘shark-infected seas,’ ‘battling with monsoons,’ and ‘forced landings amongst savage tribes’ became familiar diet for breakfast. Unknown names became household words, whilst others, those of the failures, were forgotten utterly except by kith and kin.

Born in Hull, the eldest of four sisters, Amy Johnson completed a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at Sheffield University. After a love affair with Swiss businessman Hans Arregger went awry, she moved to London to work as a typist for a firm of solicitors. A chance visit to the Stag Lane Aerodrome in Edgware, north London, led her to start flying in 1929 as a hobby; she received her pilot’s ‘A’ licence in July 1929.

Her father was one of her biggest champions, supporting her financially when she bought her first plane, a second-hand Gipsy Moth that she named Jason, in honour of his fish export and import business.

A true pioneer in aviation and determined to demonstrate that women could compete in what was a male-dominated arena, just a year later, on 5 May 1930, she set off in Jason from Croydon – travelling solo the 11,000 miles it took to arrive in Darwin, Australia, nineteen days later on 24 May.

There was no radio contact with the ground. No weather satellite information systems. Only basic maps and an open cockpit exposing her to the elements and the unrelenting smell of petrol fumes. She would fly up to eight hours at a time before refuelling stops. Up until that point, her longest solo flight was between London and Hull.

The previous record set by Australian Bert Hinkler was sixteen days; although she didn’t break that, she became the first female pilot to fly solo from Britain to Australia, was awarded a CBE for her efforts, and the time she took to fly from Croydon to India did establish a new record flight time for aviation.

That same year, in December, she became the first woman in England to be given an Air Ministry’s ground-engineer licence.

She married pilot Jim Mollison in 1932 (rumour has it that he proposed in the cockpit after flying for eight hours together) but they divorced in 1938. Together they flew a DH Dragon non-stop from South Wales all the way to the USA in 1933. They also took part in the England to Australia air race, flying non-stop to India in 1934 in a DH Comet.

Amy set other records, including becoming the first pilot to fly from London to Russia in one day; she set a record time for Britain to Japan with her co-pilot, Jack Humphreys, and a solo record for the flight between London and Cape Town.

As the Second World War started, she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary as a pilot, tasked with transporting men and aircraft from factory airstrips to Royal Air Force bases. During that time she was made a first officer. She also modelled clothes for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, designed her own travel bag and was president of the Women’s Engineering Society (1935–1937).

Amy died mysteriously on 5 January 1941, when her Airspeed Oxford crashed into the Thames Estuary. Her body was never found. She had been delivering the plane to Kidlington airbase – the flight time was only an hour and a half – easy for someone who’d conquered the Britain to Australia flight eleven years earlier. There was freezing fog that day; four and a half hours after take-off, and 100 miles off-course, she crashed into the Thames Estuary. There is great suspicion and intrigue over her death, with some convinced she was working as a spy and that there was a great cover-up over her death.

Parts of the plane washed up nearby, as did her travelling bag, her log book and cheque book. She was just 37 years old.

Sources

http://amyjohnsonartstrust.co.uk/her-life/

https://amyjohnsonproject.org/aboutamy/

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-217244391/fashion-takes-flight-amy-johnson-schiaparelli-and

https://www.hullwebs.co.uk/content/l-20c/people/amy-johnson/amy-johnson.pdf

Chapter 3

Annie Smith Peck

(19 October 1850–18 July 1935)

Climbing is unadulterated hard labour. The only real pleasure is the satisfaction of going where no man has been before and where few can follow.

Nineteenth-century suffragette and mountaineer Annie Peck hung a ‘Votes for Women’ banner on Mount Coropuna in Peru. She was 61 years old, it had taken her five attempts over four years and she was the first person to do it. That right there tells you what you need to know. She later referred to the experience as a ‘horrible nightmare’.

Annie was the youngest of five children, and the only daughter. Born on 19 October 1850, in Providence, Rhode Island, into a traditional New England family, her father George, was a lawyer and her mother, Anna Smith Peck, a descendant of Roger Williams, the Puritan minister who founded the Rhode Island colony and was firmly against the confiscation of land from Native Americans and firmly for religious toleration and the separation of church and state.

Annie never married and never had children. Having received a good education, she did one of the few things open to women at the time: she became a teacher, graduating from Rhode Island Normal School (a teaching establishment) in 1872. Keen to continue, she wanted to apply to Brown University, like her brothers and father before her. She was refused admission because she was a woman. She moved to Michigan to teach languages and maths at Saginaw High School, during which time she decided she wanted more. She wanted to go to university. Her father was appalled, telling her it was ‘perfect folly’ for her to consider doing so at the grand old age of 27 years old. Annie wasn’t having it, writing to him that:

Why you should recommend for me a course so different from that which you pursue, or recommend to your boys is what I can see no reason for except the example of our great grandfathers and times are changing rapidly in that respect. I certainly cannot change. I have wanted it for years and simply hesitated on account of age but 27 does not seem as old now as it did. I should hope for 20 years of good work afterwards.

Impressed by her determination, her father acquiesced and Annie enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1875 (it had only recently begun accepting female students), achieving a degree in Greek in three years, followed by a Masters in 1881. That same year she became one of the first women to be given a professorship at an American University (Latin and Elocution at Purdue in Indiana).

Whilst there, she attended a lecture by a professor, detailing both his recent experiences travelling in Europe, including his climb up the Matterhorn, and his fervent belief that a woman would be too frail to take on such an endeavour. So it was that Annie took up mountaineering as a sport in the mid-1880s.

A Classics scholar with a Master’s degree in Greek from the University of Michigan, who took up mountain climbing: neither of those would normally belong in a sentence when referring to a woman in nineteenth century society. Her family didn’t approve of her exploits. She had to support herself through global lectures about her travelling as well as writing four books:

•The Search for the Apex of America: High Mountain Climbing in Peru and Bolivia, Including the Conquest of Huascaran, with Some Observations on the Country and People Below (1911)

•Flying Over South America: Twenty Thousand Miles by Air (1911)

•The South American Tour (1913)

•Industrial and Commercial South America (1922)

‘My home is where my trunk is,’ she is reported to have said.

Rather unsurprisingly, Annie discovered the Classics lecturer’s salary for a woman wasn’t anywhere near as much as her male counterparts; that would all change when she began talking about her climbing exploits.

She climbed in Europe and the US, including California’s 14,380-foot Mount Shasta in 1888, the 300-foot summit of Cape Misenum in Italy as well as summits in Switzerland and Greece. She claimed another ‘first’ in 1892, when she became the first woman to be admitted to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where she studied archaeology.

At the age of 45, after promising herself a decade before that, during a Continental Tour, she’d do it, claiming ‘My allegiance … was transferred for all time to the mountains’, she finally climbed the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps in 1895. Better yet, she did it in trousers: knee-length knickerbockers, boots, a tunic and a veiled hat. (The first woman who had climbed it, Lucy Walker, in 1871, did so in a dress.) Sensibly, although radically for her time, Annie had decided that climbing 4,478 metres in skirts would be too dangerous.

The media focused more on her choice of clothing than her incredible accomplishment. There were even rumblings of a possible arrest for her clothing misdemeanour. She was, according to The New York Times, only the third woman to have achieved the summit. It was tough to find anyone who would climb with a woman – and those that did agree gave her a tough time; one group of guides deliberately cut her ropes after she’d crossed crevasse fields and left her to it. They were apparently stunned when she later returned to camp, alive and well.

The indomitable Amelia Earhart was a fan, saying she ‘felt like an upstart compared to Miss Peck’. She wasn’t alone in feeling inspired; the Singer Sewing Machine Company had the bright idea of including picture cards of her in their machines’ packaging, to encourage other women to tread in her footsteps.

In 1897 she triumphed by climbing the 18,406-foot Pico de Orizaba and Popocatepetl in Mexico in 1897; the Orizaba ascent was, at the time, the highest climb in the Americas ever made by a woman. Just three years later, in 1900, she conquered Monte Cristallo (Italy), the Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps and Austria’s Fünffingerspitze.

One of four founding members of the American Alpine Club in 1902, she set off to South America, competing with fellow adventurer Fanny Bullock Workman to be the first person to summit the tallest mountain in the Americas: Aconcagua.

After two failed attempts, at the age of 58 years, she climbed Mount Huascarán (22,204-feet) in 1908 accompanied by two Swiss guides. She thought it was the highest peak in the Western hemisphere; one of the Swiss guides lost most of his left hand and half of his foot to frostbite. In honour of her achievement, the Peruvian government named the north peak of the mountain Cumbre Ana Peck.

Though she thought it was the world record for highest altitude climb, Fanny Bullock Workman had other ideas, claiming that her ascent of the Himalayan Pinnacle Peak at 22,740 feet, bested her. She actually paid engineers to prove her right, which they did: establishing that Annie had misjudged her achievement by 2,000 feet. The upshot was that that Annie secured the Americas record in the Western Hemisphere, whilst Workman remained the world record holder for highest altitude climb.

Her historic ascent and declaration of suffragette solidarity came next, with her climb of one of the five peaks of Peru’s Coropuna in 1911. Further incredible accolades and accomplishments followed: she became president of the Joan of Arc Suffrage League in 1914, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1917 and gained admittance into the hallowed halls of the Society of Woman Geographers in 1928.

Her final climb was Mount Madison in New Hampshire in 1932 – she was 82 years old. Whilst climbing the Acropolis in Greece in 1935 (she was 84), she fell ill with bronchial pneumonia. Annie died on 18 July 1935, in New York City, New York. Her tombstone is engraved thus: ‘You have brought uncommon glory to women of all time.’

Sources

https://www.biography.com/people/annie-smith-peck-215064

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-things-know-about-pants-wearing-mountaineer-annie-smith-peck-180965297/

https://www.loe.org/series/story.html?seriesID=13&blogID=2

http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2018/02/08/annie-smith-peck

A Woman’s Place is At The Top, Hannah Kimberley

https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/peck-annie-smith-1850-1935

https://www.revolvy.com/page/Annie-Smith-Peck?cr=1

Chapter 4

Beryl Markham

(26 October 1902–3 August 1986)

Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

Two weeks from now I am going to set out to fly the Atlantic to New York. Not as a society girl. Not as a woman even. And certainly not as a stunt aviator. But as a pilot-graduate of one of the hardest schools of flying known, with 2000 flying hours to my credit. The only thing that really counts is whether one can fly.

So wrote the British-born Kenyan aviator, adventurer, racehorse trainer and author to the Daily Express ahead of her twenty-one-hour solo, non-stop flight, without a radio, across the Atlantic from east to west, against the prevailing winds. She was the first woman to do it and wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, which was re-released to the public in 1983, a full forty years after its original publication.

Beryl Clutterbuck was born on 26 October 1902 in Ashwell, England, and moved to Africa with her father, Charles, when she was four years old. The family split – neither her mother, Clara, nor her older brother, Richard, stayed with them. Clara abandoned her, running back to England with a colonel, and Beryl never forgave her.

She was raised in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where her father established a horse racing farm in the town of Nojoro. She rode horses, joining Nandi warriors on spear-hunting expeditions in the savannah, dispatched rampaging wild warthogs, and hung on for dear life for seven miles when thrown by a horse. Education took a backseat to the opportunity to shed the social restrictions and gender confirms of Britain, enabling her to embrace her independence and individuality.

She became a horse trainer at the age of seventeen and qualified for her racehorse trainers licence in 1920, when she was eighteen – the first woman in Africa to do so. Charles’s financial situation drastically declined and he fled to Peru, leaving Beryl behind – a parent had abandoned her for the second time.

To earn money, she worked as a pilot between 1931 and 1936, flying supplies, passengers and post across Kenya, to the Sudan and Rhodesia.

She married three times: Jock Purves (m. 1919–1925), Mansfield Markham (m. 1927–1942) and Raoul Schumacher (m. 1942–1960). Each marriage would end because she was unfaithful, embarking on numerous affairs.

She married Captain Jock Purves when she was seventeen years old only to divorce shortly afterwards. She went on to marry Mansfield Markham, with whom she had one son, Gervase Markham, with whom she never showed any particular maternal warmth or interest (she readily handed him over to her mother-in-law; he would be brought up by his father’s family). She became part of the decadent ‘Happy Valley Set’ of English adventurers who lived a life of wild, extravagant sexual debauchery in Kenya and Uganda.

She went on to have a passionate love affair with Denys Finch Hatton, the second son of an English earl, during a brief pause in his own affair with writer Karen Blixen, Beryl’s own close friend, and the author of Out of Africa. He invited her to join him on a flying tour in May 1931 – but at the urging of her friend and flying mentor and instructor Tom Campbell Black not to, she declined. The decision, and Tom’s prescience, saved her life. Denys, aged just 44, died when his plane crashed soon after take-off.

Beryl threw herself into work, taking flying lessons, acting as a rescue pilot and bush pilot. She would also scout for herds of animals for safari companies. It was during this time that she met Ernest Hemingway. He wanted her, she turned him down and he eviscerated her in print, remarking that ‘… this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers.’

She had an affair with the Duke of Gloucester (Prince Henry), the third son of King George V, and it became public knowledge in 1929. There were also rumours that she had a dalliance with his older brother, Edward, who would go on to renounce the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson. (Rumour has it that the Palace paid her off to stay away from both of them). Beryl had a cavalier, ‘love ’em and leave ’em’ attitude to both her lovers and her social acquaintances.

Debauchery and divorce aside, she is most famous for her incredible pioneering trans-Atlantic achievement in September 1936. Her plane was called The Messenger and it required six tanks of fuel for the journey; she left on Friday 4 September 1936 (taking five flasks of coffee, a cold chicken, dried fruit and a flask of brandy), successfully flying twenty-one hours before landing in a bog in Nova Scotia (although she had been planning on reaching New York), securing her place in the pioneering aviation adventurers hall of fame alongside America’s Amelia Earhart.

After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone … it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. … And the days of clipper ships will be recalled again – and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.

(https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/12/magazine/no-headline-271186.html)

She met her third and final husband in California, writer Raoul Schumacher, and during her time in the States, wrote her memoir. Published in 1942, it detailed her life in the Kenyan savannah, her experiences as a horse trainer and her aviation achievements. It would go out of print for a number of years before being resurrected in the 1980s. There is still some dispute over its authorship – whether it was her or Raoul.

Ernest Hemingway:

Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? … She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen … it really is a bloody wonderful book.

She died in Nairobi, Kenya, following a bout of pneumonia on 3 August 1986 at the age of 83.

Sources

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6669533/Beryl-Markham-Britains-Amelia-Earhart.html

http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-many-lives-of-beryl-markham.html

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/beryl-markham

https://www.thoughtco.com/beryl-markham-biography-4175279

https://explorethearchive.com/beryl-markham-flies-west-with-the-night?fbclid=IwAR180jIwz9cV8mbkWExjDd3D_1BRHR2QsAUJYg06vLHlCLUmkqr7uEjYsww

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/12/magazine/no-headline-271186.html

http://www.edrants.com/west-with-the-night-modern-library-nonfiction-85/

https://www.headstuff.org/culture/literature/introducing-beryl-markham/?fbclid=IwAR2QrX4LPb1KbiI9samD2qwyOefl8Mrbnq7DtD2xqloYe5op7A3iRsVVi0c

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-borne-out-of-africa-to-run-wild-the-lives-of-beryl-markham-errol-trzebinskiheinemann-2321587.html

Chapter 5

Egeria

(dates unknown)

The place where was the inscription concerning Lot’s wife was shown to us, which place is read of in the Scriptures. But believe me, reverend ladies, the pillar itself cannot be seen, only the place is shown, the pillar is said to have been covered by the Dead Sea. Certainly when we saw the place we saw no pillar, I cannot therefore deceive you in this.*

Not to be confused with the Roman water spirit of the same name and also known as Etheria or Aetheria, Egeria was a Christian woman, one of the earliest recorded pilgrims, who made a four-year pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the fourth century.

She wrote of her experiences (381–384) in a long personal letter, known as Peregrinatio or Itinerarium Egeriae, to a group of convent sisters at home in Europe, (in either Spain or France), who for various reasons, were unable to accompany Egeria on her adventures. She never referred to them by actual name, but rather a series of nicknames. Historians have inferred that because she referred to her correspondents as ‘sisters’ that she and they were nuns with a convent order, but the truth is that we cannot be completely certain. She may have simply been a deeply devout middle class Christian woman who embarked on an extraordinary journey.

It wasn’t until the 1800s that part of an eleventh-century manuscript, a tantalizing copy of that letter, was discovered in the library of Italy’s Brotherhood of St Mary in Arezzo, today just an hour by train from Florence. That account is regarded as of huge importance to the study of Christian liturgy with regard to what she witnessed in the churches in Jerusalem.

Her origins are vague, with suggestions from Spain including Galicia, Aquitaine as well as the Rhone region of Gaul. She spent three years travelling through Syria, Israel and Egypt; the surviving manuscript details the part of her trip that began from Mount Sinai. She travelled to Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, the Jordan River, Jericho, following a decidedly Christian path in keeping with biblical history and a travel path that was seemingly well trodden by pilgrims.

A little bit like Chaucer’s Tales, her travelogue details her discussions with the monks, nuns and religious devotees she met along the way.

When three full years had passed since I came to Jerusalem, and having seen all the holy places which I had visited for the sake of prayer, my mind was to return to my country. I wished, however, at God’s bidding, to go to Mesopotamia in Syria, to visit the holy monks who were there in great number, and who were said to be of such holy life as could hardly be described, and also for the sake of prayer at the memorial of S. Thomas the Apostle, where his body is laid entire. This is at Edessa.*

Her three years away from home demonstrate:

either affluence or the existence of contacts within local financial circles, or possibly both. She surely did not travel like a pauper, and never referred to problems of accommodation, which must have been considerable as the activities of the church, the imperial government, and even of private individuals demonstrate. Moreover, Egeria moved with ease and leisure from place to place, never pressed to leave before or to stay beyond the time she had decreed for herself. She made frequent departures from her original plan, again without apparent regard for economic or time factors. When she finally reached Constantinople after more than three years on the road, she was in no hurry to return home. This singular freedom of movement, if nothing else, would probably exclude affiliation with an institution or establishment that would have required return within a fixed period.**

The early fourth century was marked by the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine, to Christianity, the first emperor to do so.

It is an important theological document and travel guide; and her level of literacy, and knowledge of Latin and Greek, suggests she had a monastic or convent education. She visited monks in the Egyptian desert, travelled to Mesopotamia, Odessa (the site of Abrahams home) and then returned home to Europe via Constantinople.

Egeria serves as an example of the intensity of urban Christianity as well as of the spread of aristocratic fashions to other classes of society in late antiquity. Her case demonstrates how pilgrimage created a channel that enabled pious believers of different social classes to enjoy a singular freedom of movement while uniting them in a common enterprise.**

Sources

https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/301-600/egerias-pilgrimage-blessed-the-ages-11629681.html

http://earlyworldhistory.blogspot.com/2012/03/egeria-pilgrim-and-writer.html

https://www.enotes.com/topics/egeria

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1509585?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

* http://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm

** Who Was Egeria? Piety and Pilgrimage in the Age of Gratian, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 59–72, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School.

Chapter 6

Emma Rowena Gatewood

aka Grandma Gatewood

(25 October 1887–4 June 1973)

I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.

She was born Emma Rowena Caldwell, in Raccoon Creek in Gallia County Ohio, one of fifteen children, who slept four to a bed. Her father was a disabled Civil War veteran, a farmer who had lost a leg during battle and her mother was Evelyn Trowbridge Caldwell.

Emma was the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, in one season. That’s 2,050 miles through fourteen states. She did it in 1955, when she was a 67-year old great-grandmother who had raised eleven children and survived thirty years of sexual and physical abuse from her husband, Perry Clayton Gatewood, a teacher and farmer who she married at the age of nineteen.

The assaults started just three months into the marriage. One particularly vicious beating left her with broken teeth and a cracked rib. He would rape her repeatedly. Yet she was the one who was arrested and spent a night in a jail cell, until the mayor saw what had happened to her and intervened. She was able to get a divorce and was left as a single mother to their three remaining children.

She first learned about the Appalachian trail after reading an article in National Geographic magazine. According to a quote from Emma’s daughter Rowena, she insisted that ‘If those men can do it, I can do it.’ She walked ten miles a day to strengthen her leg muscles. For her first attempt in 1954, she set off on the trail from Mount Katahdin, Maine, but didn’t complete it. She broke her glasses and gave up after getting lost. Local rangers sent her home.

She tried again the next year, in 1955. She got up, told her family she was going for a walk and left.

She didn’t use a tent; she just carried a bag with a shower curtain, nuts, dried fruits and meat, cheese and foraged for food. Her diary says she took ‘an old army blanket, sneakers, an extra dress and undergarments, hose, house slippers, bullion cubes, dried fruits, raisins and nuts, a water bottle and an emergency kit.’

I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t. There were terrible blow downs, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors … This is no trail. This is a nightmare. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and I wouldn’t quit.

The route is 2,050 miles and it took her 146 days and six pairs of shoes. No sleeping bag. No tent. No map. No high-tech trainers. Less than $200 and completing an average 14 miles every day. She slept where she could find shelter and as much as possible relied on the kindness of strangers. Local newspaper reporters would join the trail to interview her.

After completing the trail in 1955, she did it again in 1957, for the pure enjoyment of it, hiking all the way through in twelve months. The third time was in 1964, when she did it in sections. She became the first person to trek the trail three times – doing the Triple.

In 1959 she walked 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon, completing it in ninety-five days and overtaking a wagon train that had left two weeks before her.

Her advice to fellow hikers:

Make a rain cape, and an over the shoulder sling bag and buy a sturdy pair of Keds tennis shoes. Stop at local groceries and pick up Vienna sausages … most everything else to eat you can find beside the trail … and by the way those wild onions are not called ‘Ramps’ … they are ‘Rampians’ … a ramp is an inclined plane.

She established the Buckeye Trail in Ohio, which grew from twenty miles in 1959 to over 1,444 miles.

She brought a huge amount of public interest to the trail, ensuring that parts of it were repaired and in all likelihood saving it from disappearing altogether, as well as inspiring a new generation of hikers.

When she died aged eighty-five in 1973, she had eleven children, twenty-four grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren. She was inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame in 2012 and referred to as ‘American’s most celebrated pedestrian.’

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/obituaries/grandma-gatewood-appalachian-trail.html

https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=122892

https://grandmagatewood.wordpress.com/page/2/

http://www.grandmagatewood.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2015/01/05/grandma-gatewood-survived-domestic-violence-to-walk-the-appalachian-trail-alone-at-67/?utm_term=.1406ae541ed0

https://grandmagatewood.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/what-emmas-life-and-home-looked-like/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/obituaries/grandma-emma-gatewoodoverlooked.html

https://grandmagatewood.wordpress.com/about/

Image: https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=122892

Chapter 7

Fanny Bullock Workman

(8 January 1859–22 January 1925)

Fanny Workman on the Silver Throne Plateau holding up a newspaper that reads “Votes for Women”.

Workman was an American geographer, record-breaking adventurer, cartographer, explorer, travel writer and mountaineer, notably in the Himalayas. She was one of the first female professional mountaineers; she not only explored but also wrote about her adventures in eight travel books, setting several altitude records for women.

She was incredibly determined and competitive:

… her determination to prove herself the equal of any man at lofty elevations culminated with a withering attack on an American woman who tried to surpass her. Annie S. Peck was as adept as Fanny at climbing and self-promotion, but had to rely on lectures and newspaper articles to finance her expeditions; her audiences valued drama and daring over science and accuracy. After success in her fifth attempt upon Mount Huascaran, in Peru, Peck claimed that its 24,000-foot summit gave her the world record for elevation. Had she not reported this to the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Fanny might never have noticed, but her outrage at Peck’s unsubstantiated boast spurred her to send eminent surveyors to check it; they found Huascaran a thousand feet lower than Pinnacle Peak. If Fanny Workman ever receives the recognition she deserves for her feminist determination to excel at this then-male sport, she will surely be remembered as much for her insistence upon accurate record-keeping as for the elevations she achieved.

(Thomas H. Pauly, for harvardmagazine.com)

Fanny was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, where her father Alexander Hamilton Bullock had been its governor. Fanny was educated at finishing schools and within high society in New York, Paris and Dresden. Returning home in 1879, she married surgeon William Workman in 1881; together they determined to use their wealth to fund their adventures. She joined William in his climbing to New Hampshire’s White Mountains; New England took a more progressive attitude towards women climbers and climbing club members.

With the death of both their fathers leaving them considerable wealth, and William taking early retirement, they were able to move to Germany and take up cycling, with trips to Italy, France, Scandinavia, Algeria, India and Spain.

From the lead seat in a bicycle built for two, Fanny carried a revolver and whip to clear a path and ward off troublesome natives who might want money. But she did notice how women were treated in the places they visited, and she included those observations in the travel books she and William published. The books were illustrated with photographs she took with her Kodak camera. The Workmans’ books won a following among readers who overlooked their literary deficiency, confused topography and cultural insensitivity. Through the travel books, Fanny Bullock Workman presented her athletic and organizational capabilities and showed how women were abused.

(http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/fanny-bullock-workman/)

In 1898, when Fanny was 38 and William was 50 years old, they set off on an epic two-and-a-half-year, 14,000-mile cycling trip through Indochina.

They only carried the bare minimum of supplies but stayed close to main thoroughfares in order to replenish any provisions. It was an incredibly challenging trip where they often ran out of food and water. They were continually plagued by mosquitoes, slept in places infested by rats and were constantly subjected to punctures, sometimes as many as 40 a day.

(https://www.wiredforadventure.com/fanny-bullock-workman-explorer/)

They moved northwards into the Himalayan mountain range, where their wealth enabled them to hire porters and mountain guides. They surveyed, mapped and photographed the mountains and glaciers, writing about them afterwards and presenting their findings in talks.

Weeks were often spent at high altitude living in camps, as they explored glaciers and scaled mountains in order to carry out their research. Living and journeying in the remote Himalayan Mountains during such pioneering times meant they always needed to be aware of inherent dangers. Some of the mountains they scaled had never been climbed before and had not yet been named. Although these Himalayan ascents were extremely challenging, Fanny developed a reputation for being a determined, strong and methodical climber.

(https://www.wiredforadventure.com/fanny-bullock-workman-explorer/)

The culmination of her mountaineering career came in 1906 when Fanny summited the Himalayan Pinnacle Peak at 22,735 feet. Immune to altitude sickness, she was wearing long skirts, hobnailed boots, had no radio and no pitons. It was first ascent of the mountain and Fanny’s own personal best altitude record – it was an outstanding accomplishment.

She had two children, Siegfried, who died in 1893 from respiratory illness (Fanny and William would name a mountain summit Siegfriedhorn in his memory) and Rachel, who was sent to boarding school and raised by governesses; Fanny would miss her own daughter’s wedding in 1912 because she was climbing a mountain in India.

In 1912, on what would be her last trip to the Himalayas, she was photographed at the top of the unexplored Siachen Glacier; no one had been there before. She was 21,000 feet up, wearing a skirt and defiantly holding aloft a newspaper whose headline read ‘Votes for Women’.

She would be the first woman to speak at the Sorbonne and only the second to address the Royal Geographical Society. Following her seventh climb of the Himalayas, the RGS extended her an invitation to join; she was one of the first to be afforded the privilege.

When she died at the age of 66 on 22 January 1925, she left endowments to four women’s colleges: $125,000 each to Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith and Bryn Mawr. William survived her, dying in 1937 at the age of 90.

Sources

https://www.wiredforadventure.com/fanny-bullock-workman-explorer/

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/fanny-bullock-workman/

https://rsgs.org/international-womens-day-fanny-bullock-workman/

http://www.themacroberttrust.org.uk/about-the-trust/history/

https://trowelblazers.com/rachel-workman-macrobert/

https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/vita-fanny-bullock-workman

Chapter 8

Freya Stark

(31 January 1893–9 May 1993)

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman, is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

Dame Freya Madeline Stark DBE, was an Anglo-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels across the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works.

Variously described as a trailblazer and maverick, she explored Kuwait, Yemen, Syria, Iran and Iraq at a time when it was rare for any Westerner to do so, and even more so for a women. The Times of London called her ‘the last of the Romantic travellers’.

She was born in Paris, where parents and first cousins Robert (a British sculptor) and Flora Stark (a Polish/German painter and pianist) were studying art. After living in both Britain and Italy with her family, Freya remained in the latter after the end of her parents’ unhappy marriage. She never went to school but mastered several languages, including Latin.

Flora took her daughters Freya and Vera to Dronero, Italy, to look after her new business venture – she had bought into a rug factory business with Italian Count Mario di Roasci, a move that left Robert furious.

Freya wrote of her mother: ‘My mother was so improbable. If I don’t explain it, it looks very louche, and if I do it is rather brutal.’

It was here that Freya suffered a horrific injury before she turned 13; her long hair got caught in a steel shaft from a local carpet factory machine – as it lifted her from the ground, it ripped out part of her scalp and one of her ears was crushed. She nearly died. The injuries left her disfigured and required much recovery time at a hospital in Turin, with a doctor experimenting with a skin graft, without anaesthetic, but ultimately saving her life.

During her long recovery, she indulged her love of reading, with the 1001 Arabian Nights, gifted to her on her ninth birthday, being a favourite, as well as the novels of nineteenth-century French writer Alexandre Dumas.

A gifted linguist, she spent two years reading Arabic and Persian at Bedford College, using money left to her by her father, who had emigrated to Canada. She also studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies. During this time, and after first asking, and being refused by Freya, the Count married her sister Vera; the union was likely born of gratitude for all he had done for them.

With the advent of war, Freya worked as a nurse on the Italian front in Bologna and got engaged to bacteriologist Guido Ruata, two decades older than her. However, when Freya became ill with typhoid, he abandoned her to marry someone else. Freya returned home to Asolo for the duration of the war. She bought a small farm and started harvesting flowers to keep her and her mother; she also learnt Arabic with a Capuchin monk who had spent three decades in Lebanon.

In 1927, aged 35, she embarked on her solo travels in order to further her language studies, boarding a cargo ship first to Beirut, Lebanon, and then onto Syria and Iraq; she did so without an escort. She arrived in Baghdad two years after the death of Gertrude Bell, to whom she would often be compared. Bell was a founder member of the Women’s Anti-Suffragist League in London and Stark attended meetings there. Perversely, for two women who made their names by their independence and daring, both were opposed to women having the vote.

Stark’s godson remarks that:

both women were unabashed elitists who felt that their positions as privileged females would be undermined if their less educated sisters were given the vote. Both also held traditional views about the role of women and would greatly have preferred – or so they thought – conventional careers as wives and mothers if the right men had appeared at the right time.

Independent and determined to genuinely experience and interact with the communities she visited, her behaviour ruffled the feathers of the more traditional amongst her acquaintance. Eschewing traditional British colonial accepted modes of transport, she would instead opt for using local guides and Bedouins.

She returned to Lebanon in 1929 and in 1931, embarking on three solo adventures, two in Luristan and the third in Mazanderan, a northern Iranian province on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

Her passionate ambition was to find and map the legendary Valley of the Assassins, believed to be the headquarters of an eleventh-century Islamic sect of Nizari warriors. Doing so, she would suffer from dengue fever, dysentery and malaria, travelled by donkey and slept in a camp cot.

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

Crossing the Persian (today’s Iranian) border illegally, she was the first European woman to travel to Luristan, Iran. Her biographer Jane Fletcher wrote:

Enduring hunger, gale winds, nights on rocky terrain, and a guide who appropriated her Burberry coat and fell to praying when dinner had to be got, Freya encountered dervishes, idol worshipers, and armed tribesmen; attended both weddings and dyings; and attempted to scamper with ibex on the side of a nine-thousand-foot-high mountain.

On her return, the Royal Geographic Society invited her to receive an award for her adventures:

We have profited greatly by your literary talent and the attention you have paid to getting accurate transcript of the names along your routes, contributing to the correctness of our maps …

The BBC wanted her to give lectures and publishers were scrambling to sign her; she decided on John Murray, the publisher behind Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. With the publication of The Valley of the Assassins in 1934, Freya’s economic situation did an about turn; such was its success that from then on, the Royal Geographic Society would pay for her explorations and John Murray would happily publish the resulting accounts.

Alongside Gertrude Bell, Jane Digby el Mesrab, Hester Stanhope and Anne Blunt, Freya became the fifth European woman to ever embark on a journey into the Arabic interior (1934–1935).

War would again disrupt her ambitions as well as test her family loyalties; with her sister Vera and her nieces and nephews in Italy during the onset of Fascism, she had to choose between the two halves of her heritage: Italy and England.

In 1939 she chose the latter, and her knowledge of the Middle East was of huge value to the Allies. She worked with the British government’s propaganda arm, the Ministry of Information in Aden (Yemen).

In Yemen, her fluent Arabic and ability to genuinely connect served to her distinct advantage; she managed to persuade the foreign minister’s wife to show films about Great Britain to the women in the harem; it wasn’t too long until the men were also watching the propaganda films, which championed the UK and everything it stood for.

Freya would repeat her success in Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, persuading the Arab populace to support the Allies instead of the Nazis, via an anti-Fascist secret society that she founded, called The Brotherhood of Freedom.

In 1943 she was sent to the US by the British government to try and oppose those American politicians who supported the creation of Israel; however, with news about the appalling treatment of the Jewish people across Eastern Europe gaining traction, her efforts were in vain. In attempting to persuade the US to vote against the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, Freya may not have been overtly anti-Semitic but she was most definitely an anti-Zionist and firmly on the side of the Arabs.

In September 1947, when she was 54, she married English diplomat Stewart Perowne; he was gay and saw the marriage as a convenient union between friends; Freya believed otherwise. Unsurprisingly, the union lasted just four years and the marriage was dissolved in 1952.

Stark gave lectures for the BBC and the Royal Central Asian Society and met Gandhi and Nehru. She travelled to Persia and Turkey, and aged 77, made three mounted treks into the Himalayas, as well as travelling to Cambodia, China and Afghanistan (the latter expedition made by Land Rover).

She travelled simply, eating local food, without fuss, fanfare or much money, slept alongside the women and children in the harems of Arabia and became seriously ill three times; twice she was helped by the locals and the third she was rescued by the RAF.

She despised any comparisons with Gertrude Bell, who had reached Arabia before her and turned down the request by a publisher to write Bell’s biography; Freya said she was ‘not very fascinated by her as a woman’.

In Stark’s obituary for The Independent, Malise Ruthven and Stark’s godson summed up the differences between the two women thus:

Her explorations were less significant and her excursions into archaeology less professional than those of Gertrude Bell, her distinguished female predecessor in Arabia and Iraq. But as an ethnographer she was brilliant. She was able to experience and communicate the real life of the people – the poverty, the disease, the chronic insecurity engendered by feuding clans – in a way that escaped the somewhat arrogant, upper-class Bell, who ate alone in her tent. Her disdain for scientific accuracy was more than compensated for by her imaginative strengths, particularly in her capacity for empathizing with peoples of different cultural and social backgrounds.

She wrote 24 travel books and autobiographical volumes of writing; and eight volumes of letters from the 1930s to the 1980s:

The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936)

Seen in the Hadhramaut (1938)

Letters from Syria (1942)

East is West (1945)

Traveller’s Prelude (1950

Beyond Euphrates (1951)

The Coast of Incense (1953)

Riding to the Tigris (1959)

Dust in the Lion’s Paw (1961)

The Journey’s Echo (1963)

The Zodiac Arch (1968)

The Minaret of Djam (1970)

A Peak in Darien (1976)

Rivers of Time (1982)

She lived to be 100 years old, dying in Asolo, north-east Italy on 9 May 1993, after being made a dame in 1972 and awarded a Cross of the British Empire in 1953. She was also awarded the Triennial Burton Memorial Medal, Royal Asiatic Society (1934); the Mungo Park Medal, Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1936); the Founders’ Medal, Royal Geographical Society (1942) and the Percy Sykes Memorial Medal, Royal Central Asiatic Society (1951).

Sources

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dame-freya-stark-2322233.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-stark-realities-go-unnoticed-freya-stark-a-biography-molly-izzard-hodder-pounds-25-1481957.html

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/maverick-explorer-freya-stark-followed-middle-east-s-transformation-1.353429

http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/freya-stark/

https://trowelblazers.com/dame-freya-stark/

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/maverick-explorer-freya-stark-followed-middle-east-s-transformation-1.353429

http://www.saradistribution.com/freja-stark.htm

https://www.civilservant.org.uk/women-freya_stark.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dame-freya-stark-2322233.html

https://laterbloomer.com/freya-stark/

https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/stark-freya-1893-1993

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n11/malise-ruthven/making-history

Chapter 9

Gertrude Bell

(14 July 1868–12 July 1926)

Until quite recently I’ve been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil. Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women – if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.

(Baghdad, 14 March 1920)

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on 14 July 1868 at Washington Hall, Co. Durham. Just two years old when her mother Mary Shield Bell died in childbirth, she was raised by her Victorian industrialist father, Sir Hugh Bell, and stepmother, Florence Bell (née Olliffe), who he married when Gertrude was eight. Wealthy and well connected, her grandfather was also an industrialist, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell.

Bell, described as the ‘uncrowned Queen of Iraq’ was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator and archaeologist, an advisor on the Middle East to both British and Arab politicians. She bucked the debutante tradition of women of her era to pursue a life of travel, adventure and her passion for languages and archaeology.

Much comparison has been made between Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark. Stark’s godson, Malise Ruthven, observes that:

Both women travelled in remote and dangerous regions. Both wrote about their experiences in highly praised books. As well as being talented linguists and accomplished photographers, both women showed unusual physical courage, having received their early training in the tough and demanding school of Alpine mountaineering. Both women acquired formidable reputations for mental toughness, and for getting their own way. Both were frustrated in love, through indifference, betrayal or bereavement, but enjoyed close and enduring friendships with men. Both were Imperialists who served Britain with distinction in wartime, placing the special knowledge acquired in their travels at the disposal of military intelligence. In the carefully ordered realm of public service, both women showed scant regard for the rules of masculine hierarchy, corresponding with chiefs above the heads of their superiors, inviting accusations of meddling and intrigue. Both of them at times appeared jealous of other women, not least because each was conscious of her reputation as an exceptional woman in a man’s world.

(https://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n11/malise-ruthven/making-history)

In 1886, Bell went to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford (one of the few colleges that accepted women) and became the first woman to be awarded a first class degree in modern history.

She was fluent in eight languages, including Persian, and encouraged by her father, travelled to Iran in 1892, where her uncle Sir Frank Lascelles was British Ambassador. Of learning Arabic, she said ‘there are at least three sounds almost impossible to the European throat.’

Her father forbade her to pursue a relationship with the first man she fell in love with, Henry Cadogan, a foreign service official she met in Iran in 1892, because of his gambling debts. She later fell passionately in love with two married men, Dick Doughty-Wylie, and later on Ken Cornwallis, asking both of them to divorce their wives for her. The former’s death at Gallipoli in 1915 was a devastating blow.

In 1914 she became the first European woman since Lady Anne Blunt in 1878 to travel to Hail in Nejd (modern-day Saudi Arabia).

Her travels, explorations and adventures in the Middle East served as a way of escaping from a more humdrum existence at home. Conversely and intriguingly, she was a noted anti-suffragist – perhaps it was easy for her to be with all the freedoms her money and position gave her.

It is the wives – confound them. They take no sort of interest in what is going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I now begin to understand why British government has come to grief in India.

(https://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n11/malise-ruthven/making-history)

Liora Lukitz writes that:

dissatisfied with the conventional role of domesticity and philanthropy assigned to well-to-do, unmarried women, she turned to independent travel, first in the Alps, then in the Middle East, with the intellectual dimensions of archaeological discovery and political observation. The latter enabled her to assume a public role as the First World War and the end of Ottoman rule in Arab lands created an official outlet for her expertise. At her death she was commemorated as a brilliant public servant, who helped to shape the post-war settlement in the Middle East and in particular the creation of the kingdom of Iraq.

(http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30686

Bell travelled widely across Syria, Turkey and Iran and is described by James Buchan as ‘the greatest woman mountaineer of her age’.

She began climbing during a family holiday in La Grave, France in 1897. She went on to climb the Meije and Les Ecrins in the French Alps two years later, followed by ascents in the Swiss Alps, becoming one of the leading female mountaineers of her time. The ‘Gertrudspitze’ in the Bernese Oberland is named in her honour.

Aged 43, she made ten mountaineering first climbs in the Bernese Alps, nearly dying on one of the attempts in 1902, which left her swinging from her climbing ropes for 53 hours on the north-east face of the Finsteraarhorn when she got stuck in a blizzard. The incident left her with serious frostbite. She conquered the Matterhorn in August 1904, later describing the experience as ‘beautiful climbing, never seriously difficult, but never easy, and most of the time on a great steep face which was splendid to go upon.’

Amidst what US President Woodrow Wilson referred to as ‘the whole disgusting scramble’ for the Middle East after the First World War, and alongside T.E. Lawrence, Bell helped support the Hashemite dynasties in what is today Jordan as well as in Iraq, where she helped to establish and map out the boundaries of modern-day nation following the First World War from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, trying to balance out the Sunni and Shia factions.

In a letter to her father on 4 December 1921, she wrote: ‘I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq.’

She backed the Emir Faisal, a son of King Hussein of Mecca, to be king of Mesopotamia (later Iraq) in 1921. She was the only woman at that year’s Cairo conference, a meeting of around forty Middle Eastern experts (which was held to finalize the decisions made at the 1919 Paris peace conference, which she had also attended, invited on the strength of her paper ‘Self-Determination in Mesopotamia’) alongside Winston Churchill (who was colonial secretary at the time) and T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), which cemented British policy in the region.

She played a major role in establishing and helping administer the modern state of Iraq, utilizing her unique perspective from her travels and relations with tribal leaders throughout the Middle East. The Iraqi people referred to her respectfully as ‘khutan’, which means ‘queen’ in Persian and ‘respected lady’ in Arabic.

In a similar parallel to Freya Stark, who assisted the Allied war effort, Bell worked for the British government in Cairo during the First World War.

Such an arrival! Sir Percy made me most welcome and said a house had been allotted to me … a tiny, stifling box of a place in a dirty little bazaar. Fortunately, I had not parted from my bed and bath. These I set up and further unpacked one of my boxes which had been dropped into the Tigris and hung out all the things to dry on the railing of the court.

(Baghdad, 20 April 1917)

During her lifetime she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials and exerted an immense amount of power. She has been described as ‘one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.’

She travelled to Jerusalem in 1900, invited by the German consul Friedrich Rosen. She would travel on horseback to Petra, Palmyra and Baalbek.

A gifted linguist and academic, her 1897 published translation of the work of Persian poet Hafez is still regarded as the go-to work for scholars.

She met Lady Anne Blunt in 1906, was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1913 and was the third woman to be elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London, although according to Jeremy Johns from the society, Gertrude:

… returned to England twice before her death, in the summer of 1923 and again the in the summer of 1925. On both occasions she passed through London and had ample opportunity to visit the Society, but there is no record in her papers that she did so. Indeed, I regret to say, that I have found no reference to her election, news of which much have reached her when she was distracted by the 1921 Cairo Conference.

Passionate about archaeology since a family trip to Melos, Greece, in 1899, she enjoyed several archaeology trips, including a 1909 trek along the course of the Euphrates River. She was one of the first archaeologists – as well as the first woman – to survey the Byzantine remains of Anatolian Turkey.

In 1914 she travelled to Hail in northern Arabia and later wrote of:

a profound doubt as to whether the adventure is, after all, worth the candle. Not because of the danger – I don’t mind that; but I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all … There are two ways of profitable travel in Arabia. One is the Arabia Deserta way, to live with the people, and to live like them for months and years … It’s clear I can’t take that way; the fact of my being a woman bars me from it. And the other is to ride swiftly through the country with your compass in hand, for the map’s sake and for nothing else, I might be able to do that over a limited space of time, but I am not sure. Anyway, it’s not what I’m doing now … I almost wish that something would happen – something exciting, a raid, or a battle! Yet that’s not my job either. What do ineffective archaeologists want with battles! They would only serve to pass the time, and leave as little profit as before … it’s a bore being a woman when you’re in Arabia.

She witnessed the Armenian Genocide, of which she wrote:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours … some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred Kurds … These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women … One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself … the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses … No man can ever think of a woman’s body except as a matter of horror, instead of attraction, after Ras al-Ain.

In 1922 Faisal appointed her director of antiquities and she had a hand in drafting the 1922 Law of Excavation.

In the months before her death, she was busy cataloguing archaeological pieces found in the ancient Sumerish cities of Ur and Kish.

Two days before her 58th birthday, frail from bouts of malaria, bronchitis and pleurisy, with rumours that following her final visit home to England in 1926, that she, a heavy smoker, had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and perhaps cognizant that she was far from the vibrant, active go-getter she had been, and perhaps fearing for her perceived limited future prospects (the family’s fortunes had taken quite a hit), she committed suicide in Baghdad on 12 July 1926 with an overdose of Dial (diallylbarbituric acid or allobarbital) pills, which she had been prescribed as a sedative and for pain relief.

Her last words were via letter, written five days before she died.

To her father, Hugh: ‘Darling, I must stop now; summer does not conduce to the writing of very long letters. Your loving daughter Gertrude.’

To her stepmother: ‘There is the lunch bell and I’m dreadfully in need of some iced soda water. Your very affectionate daughter Gertrude.’

She left £50,000 in her will to the Baghdad Archaeological Museum she founded. Today it is the Iraq National Museum, which was looted on 10 April 2003 following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and before the US soldiers could protect it; over 15,000 items were stolen. To date, only half have been recovered. Whilst the museum re-opened in 2015, the advent of ISIS led to the destruction of countless priceless artefacts, with many more being sold on the black market to fund their terrorist activities.

Ironically, back in England, modern-day activists have fought to have Red Barns, her Grade II listed family home in Redcar, preserved as a monument in her honour.

At the back of my mind I have a feeling that we people of the war can never return to complete sanity.

Often referred to as the female ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Bell received a state funeral in Baghdad.

Sources

https://eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-archaeology-blog/2017/3/17/the-death-of-gertrude-bell

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30686

https://www.dkfindout.com/uk/history/explorers/gertrude-bell/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v08/n11/malise-ruthven/making-historyhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/12/iraq.jamesbuchan

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/12/iraq.jamesbuchan

https://www.biography.com/news/gertrude-bell-biography-facts

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-archaeology-museum-antiquities-looting-a8996676.html

Chapter 10

Harriet Chalmers Adams

(22 October 1875–July 17 1937)

We slept on the dirt floor of huts, or in the open. We ate just what the natives ate, and traveled just as they do, and in all things accommodated ourselves to the country customs.

(HCA 1908)

I’ve wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of exploration. Why did women never go to the Arctic, try for one pole or the other, or invade Africa, Thibet, or unknown wildernesses? I’ve never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man, could not surmount; never felt a fear of danger; never lacked courage to protect myself. I’ve been in tight places and have seen harrowing things.

(‘Woman Explorer’s Hazardous Trip In South America’, The New York Times, 18 August 2012)

Harriet Chalmers Adams is America’s greatest woman explorer. As a lecturer no one, man or woman, has a more magnetic hold over an audience than she.

(The New York Times)

Described as America’s greatest woman explorer, Harriet Chalmer Adams (born in Stockton, California), was an American adventurer, writer and photographer. Early adventures with her beloved father captured her imagination and determination ‘to go to the ends of the earth and to see and study the people of all lands.’ She didn’t have a traditional education, yet travelled to nearly every single Latin American country that had ever been under the auspices or Portugal or Spain.

Travelling extensively in South America, Asia and the South Pacific in the early twentieth century, she published accounts of her journeys in a total of 21 articles for National Geographic magazine.

She was actually one of the first American women to be elected (in 1913) to join the ranks of the National Geographic Society of London and a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. She also lectured all over the US, engaging enthralled crowds with tales of her exploits, supported by illustrated slides and movies.

The ruling boys club of the day was the ‘Explorers Club’, which only admitted women to its hallowed ranks in 1981 when Faanya Rose was made a member. (She would also be the first woman and the first British citizen elected its president).

In 1925 Adams was part of the effort to launch the Society of Woman Geographers; fellow explorer Marguerite Harrison wrote to Adams that members would be ‘only women who have really done things.’ Harrison and Adams, together with fellow adventurers Gertrude Emerson, Blair Niles and Gertrude Shelby, were indignant that women were excluded from the ‘men’s club’ mentality of global exploration and denied respect, acknowledgement or recognition.

Adams served as the first president of the Society of Woman Geographers, serving until 1933. Their first dinner was in February 1932 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In attendance would be Amelia Earhart (known then as Mrs George Palmer Putnam). Fellow explorer Elizabeth Dickey did a show and tell with a South American Indian mummified head. The new club extended an invitation to Explorers Club President Roy Chapman Andrews. He never showed up, although he did send a letter, which read:

I have in mind many cases where women have done splendid work in the field and I have great admiration for the accomplishments (but) I think, however, that you will agree with me that one or two women would not fit to the advantage in a large [expedition] of men.

Probably just as well that he didn’t turn up, considering that in a recent lecture, to the women of Barnard College no less, he’d announced that ‘Women are not adapted to exploration.’

The Society of Woman Geographers would go on to add more extraordinary women to its ranks, including Jane Goodall, Margaret Mead and Rachel Carson. On its 50th birthday, Gertrude Emerson Sen, the last surviving founder of the club, wrote a letter to all its members, saying:

I am deeply impressed by the articles and books and published lectures noted after your names, and feel humbly proud of being associated with you. There is no place in the heavens, on earth, in the oceans or under them, that some one of you had not penetrated … I sometimes wonder, however, if your travels today to the Arctic or the Antarctic or any other remote area, when you can fly there in a few hours, can be quite as fascinating as ours were in the olden days, when we travelled by slow freighters or camel, or on horseback or on foot.

Over her lifetime, Adams probably travelled over one hundred thousand miles. Her first major expedition (with her husband Franklin Pierce Adams whom she married in 1899), was to South America between 1904 and 1906.

Travelling by steamboat from San Francisco, upon reaching South America, following Columbus’s route, they spent the next three years traversing 40,000 miles, using horseback, boat and train. Her articles are colourful, vivid and bring the reader up close and personal for all the details, disasters, adventures, sleepless nights, eight-hour horseback rides and river crossings as well as meetings with native Peruvians and Indians. She was critical of the devastating effects of colonization and Christianity upon the local populations of South America.

In 1910 she travelled to Haiti, Cuba (horseback) and Santo Domingo and in 1912 she started her life-long research project of detailed information on every former Spanish colony in the world, travelling to places including Mongolia, Sumatra, Japan and Hong Kong.

She wrote for Harper’s magazine, was the only woman permitted in the trenches during the First World War and the first person in the USA to use colour photography as part of a slide presentation in an educational lecture. The New York Times said she ‘reached twenty frontiers previously unknown to white women.’

Sources

http://scholarworks.csun.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.2/2790/CAgeographer2009_p51-70.pdf?sequence=1

https://www.revolvy.com/page/Harriet-Chalmers-Adams

https://writingroughshod.com/2016/10/12/a-unique-lens-on-wwi-the-photography-of-harriet-chalmers-adams/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/society-of-woman-geographers

THE EXPLORERS CLUB

Chapter 11

Helen Schreider

(3 May 1926–)

Frank Schreider

(8 January 1924–January 21, 1994)

We build on others – we grow on others’ shoulders; I think that’s a very accurate statement about women in general and women in particular that live this kind of a life.

Our world has gone crazy with all the hate. It’s such a beautiful world. Everything we saw is still worth going back to.

(Helen Schreider)

Co-adventurers Helen and Frank Schreider married in 1947, three months after meeting at the University of California (UCLA), where Helen studied Fine Art and Frank, a submariner in World War II, studied engineering.

Their belated honeymoon in 1951 was spent driving in a jeep from California to Costa Rica. It took them four months – and they returned, realising that in order to cross Costa Rica’s mountains and Panama’s jungles, they’d need an alternative form of transportation.

In 1954, together with their dog, Dinah, they spent nearly two years travelling along the unfinished Pan American highway from Circle City, Alaska (the most northern town in North America) to South America’s Tierra del Fuego (the world’s southern-most town) in a World War II amphibious truck, named Tortuga, a useful touch when crossing waters where the road hadn’t yet been built and combating severe storms:

We couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black in the middle of the day. Frank put his hand on my knee and said, ‘Honey, I’m sorry. I really didn’t think it would be like this.’

Frank recorded the experiences of their first independent journey; they were firstly serialised in the Saturday Evening Post, as ‘We Made the Impossible Trip’, published in 1957 as 20,000 Miles South, beautifully illustrated by Helen, and then made into a film.

On 1 January 1955, in the southern end of Mexico, the road turned into 200 miles of oxcart tracks through thick jungle.

Navigating this tangle of trees, vines, boulders and mud, with the help of local people and their machetes, they finally reached the wall of mountains in Costa Rica that had blocked them four years earlier; this time they turned to the coastline to go by sea but there was no calm bay to enter the ocean. They had to launch from the beach into twenty-foot waves, nearly ending their journey before it truly began.

On 11 May they passed through the Panama Canal, but this was an adventure in itself, with La Tortuga looking like a minnow beside the huge ships.

The officer in charge of the Panama Canal Zone, Admiral Miles, tried in vain to dissuade them from entering the Caribbean. In parting, the admiral said that if they made it through the Caribbean to South America and Tierra del Fuego, he would recommend Frank to the Explorers Club.

After completing the trip by crossing the Strait of Magellan, they found themselves the first people to travel the full length of the Americas off their own back.

On their return, recognising only his achievement, Frank was inducted into the Explorers Club in 1956; Helen wasn’t allowed to attend, relegated instead to a table outside the dining hall.

Lesley Ewing, a former Northern California chapter chair for the Explorers Club, said this wasn’t an isolated incident for women at the time: ‘They were a team with their husbands, but they were never acknowledged as explorers themselves.’

On the back of their achievement, Helen and Frank became staff writers for National Geographic, completing six expedition, traversing around 50 countries over 15 years, from 1956–1970, with adventures including facing pirates in Panama and dreadful storms, detailed in their two other books, Drums of Tonkin, which recorded their Indonesia expedition in 1960, and Exploring the Amazon.

Adventures included a nearly 4,000-mile journey during seven months following the source of the Amazon, exploring by canoe, raft, foot and horseback.

Helen and Frank never had children: ‘I think you have to make choices. And I don’t think we always made the right choice.’

The Explorers Club refused women admission until 1981. In January 1994, midway through a three-year trip through the Aegean and Crete Seas and with Helen preparing to travel out to join him, Frank died of a heart attack in his boat off Crete. It wasn’t until 2015, when she was 89, that Helen, whose friends and family had applied on her behalf, was finally Inducted as a Member and National Fellow.

Interviewed about the long overdue honour, she joked, saying ‘Now I know why I’ve lived so long’.

At the presentation of her membership certificate, Faanya Rose raised a glass in toast to Helen, describing her as ‘the trailblazer of the women explorers’.

Chapter 12

Faanya Rose

(9 July 1938–)

Founded in New York in 1904, members have included President Theodore Roosevelt, North Pole explorer Robert Peary and Sir Edmund Hillary.

Faanya Rose (9 July 1938 –) became a member of the Explorers Club in 1994, (women were not admitted until 1981), was elected director in 1998 and in 2000, became its first woman president.

I was not elected President because I was a woman, I was elected because I was the best man for the job at the time.

Born on 9 July 1938 in Johannesburg in South Africa, Faanya Lydia (Arch) Rose is a British-American explorer, conservationist and philanthropist. She is the oldest child of Cecilia ‘Cissie’ Elizabeth Arch (née Wainer) (1909–1978) and Simon Arch (1910–1977), a diamond merchant and financier.

She observed Operation Noah (1958–1964) the world’s largest wildlife rescue from the flooding of the Kariba Gorge by the completion of the Kariba Dam.

Between 1998 and 2011, Faanya participated in seven Explorers Club Flag Expeditions including the 1999 Everest Extreme Expedition led by Scott Hamilton and in 2011, an expedition led by British Explorer David Hempleman-Adams.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in the UK and a Fellow of the Canadian Royal Geographical Society.

Sources

https://misadventuresmag.com/exploring-women-explorers-club/

https://www.ctnwconference.com/2018-Committee/Faanya-Rose/

https://peoplepill.com/people/faanya-rose/

Chapter 13

Jeanne Baret (Baré or Barret)

(27 July 1740–5 August 1807)

Jeanne, or Jean, was a botanist and the first woman to, albeit unwittingly, circumnavigate the globe. And she did so whilst disguised as a man.

Born on 27 July 1740 into a poor peasant family in the Loire Valley, at a young age she was known as a ‘herb woman’, due to her exceptional knowledge and grasp of herbal medicine and remedies and support for both doctors and vets with her own selection of herbal treatments.

Whilst still a young teenager, she became housekeeper to Philibert Commerson, a well-educated botanist and student of medicine and natural history. The two bonded intellectually over their shared passion for all things botanical, with Baret acting as a ‘teacher, assistant and all-around aide’, to Commerson. The relationship completely elevated Baret from her humble beginnings and changed the course of her life:

when the baby girl born to Jean Baret and Jeanne Pochard was twenty-six, she would be living in a fashionable Paris apartment, organizing papers and preparing natural specimens for the eminent but often unsystematic botanist Philibert Commerson. When Jeanne Baret was twenty-six, she would see Rio de Janeiro, sail through the Strait of Magellan, and stare at the waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching to the farthest blue horizon.

After Commerson’s wife died in childbirth in 1762, Jean and Philibert became lovers. She became pregnant at the age of 24, giving birth to a son (omitting the name of any father on the birth certificate) and gave him up for adoption to Philibert’s brother-in-law, who was a priest. They had another child in 1764, named Jean-Pierre Baret, who they abandoned at a Parisian hospital when the infant was just one month old. Eventually fostered, the boy died a few months later; meanwhile, Commerson developed pleurisy, leaving Jeanne to look after him and his plants.

In 1765 Commerson was invited via royal commission to be the official naturalist on an expedition led by naval commander Louis Antoine de Bougainville. The aim of the two-year trip: to collect new species of flora and fauna and help put France back on the global map of international exploration with a proposed and ambitious first trip around the globe.

Women were not allowed on board ships – so in order for Jeanne to accompany him as an assistant, she bound her breasts, disguised herself as a teenage boy and joined the 100+ male crew of the supply ship, Etoile, in Rochefort Harbour in December 1766. She bound her breasts so tightly that she often had trouble breathing.

Did the ship’s captain suspect? Claiming to recognise how much botanical equipment the two had, he offered them use of his 30 feet by 15 feet cabin and the ship set sail on 1 February 1767.

The Etoile was accompanying the main ship, La Boudeuse. Jeanne was the only woman amongst around three hundred men. It didn’t take long for rumours to start about her sexuality, especially as ‘Jean’ was never seen relieving ‘his’ bladder outside like the other men and remained fully clothed during a hazing ritual for new crew members as the ship crossed the equator on 22 March 1767.

Jeanne wasn’t the only gender fluid passenger who was also mistaken for a woman:

… there was also a prince onboard this ship who insisted on wearing high-heeled shoes, green velvet and a wig – one of those piled-high, courtly wigs, filled with blond ringlets – even while tramping around the pebbled beaches of Tierra del Fuego.

It would be this gentleman, the Prince of Nassau-Siegen, who wrote of Jeanne in his memoirs:

I want to give her all the credit for her bravery, a far cry from the gentle pastimes afforded her sex. She dared confront the stress, the dangers, and everything that happened that one could realistically expect on such a voyage. Her adventure, should, I think, be included in a history of famous women.

When finally challenged, Jeanne claimed to be a eunuch from a sultan’s harem. She moved to the servants’ quarters (the ship’s captain realized that if a woman in disguise was discovered aboard his vessel, his career would be over). From that moment on she kept pistols by her side and was forced to threaten some crew members when they became a little too friendly one evening. ‘Jean’ swiftly moved back to sharing a cabin with Commerson.

To complete the myth that she was a man, when the ship docked in port, it was she who did all the heavy lifting of the botany equipment, plant press, specimens, jars, usually in incredible heat. She was also caring for Commerson who had gangrene.

She carried the food, boxes for samples, equipment for collecting, a spade, glass vials for seeds, a magnifying glass, butterfly net, telescope, and compass. In what he probably intended to be a term of endearment, Philibert called her his ‘beast of burden’.

It was also probably ‘Jean’ who discovered the vine that they named after the captain: the beautiful bougainvillea. She collected thousands of specimens.

The first stop was Rio de Janeiro, followed by the Magellan Straits, then Tahiti, where according to de Bougainville, it was then that the jig was up when the inhabitants immediately realized that she was female.

De Bougainville wrote of her:

… she well knew when we embarked that we were going round the world, and that such a voyage had raised her curiosity. She will be the first woman that ever made it, and I must do her the justice to affirm that she has always behaved on board with the most scrupulous modesty. She is neither ugly nor pretty, and is not yet twenty-five.

It’s likely that de Bougainville had known her real identity all along. What followed next, on the island of New Ireland, is not clear and only described in vague terms in officers’ journals at the time. But it seems that the starving sailors, having been unable to land anywhere else until New Ireland, near New Guinea, came upon Baret alone on a beach. The journals describe her later being carried back to the ship, where she remained in seclusion for many weeks until the expedition reached Mauritius, where Baret and Commerson left the ship behind because she was pregnant.

Journals of crew members reviewed by writer and biographer Glynis Ridley suggest that Baret was, in fact, gang-raped by her fellow crew members. She remained in Mauritius until the baby, a son, was born and handed over for adoption or fostering with a local plantation owner.

During their time in Mauritius, the two travelled to Madagascar to further explore the native flora and fauna for their research. She remained Commerson’s housekeeper and nurse until his own death from dysentery-related illness in 1773. On her arrival back in France, Commerson’s family paid her for her contracted services whilst the French Navy gifted ‘this extraordinary woman’ a generous annuity of 200 livres for her botanical work.

She married a French soldier and died at the age of 67, ‘leaving a legacy of plants, seeds, shells, and insects that she and Philibert had classified behind her,’ none of which were named after her, whilst in comparison, over 70 plants and insects are named ‘commersonii’ after Philibert Commerson.

Sources

https://exploration.marinersmuseum.org/subject/jeanne-baret/

https://www.travelbelles.com/2012/04/jeanne-baret-first-woman-to-travel-around-the-world/

https://forgottennewsmakers.com/2011/02/07/jeanne-baret-1740-–-1807-first-woman-to-circumnavigate-the-globe/

http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/07/27/jeanne-baret/

https://www.npr.org/2010/12/26/132265308/a-female-explorer-discovered-on-the-high-seas

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/01/23/145664873/the-first-woman-to-go-round-the-world-did-it-as-a-man

http://yearofwomenshistory.blogspot.com/2016/04/jeanne-baret-botanist-andexplorer.html

http://yearofwomenshistory.blogspot.com/2016/04/jeanne-baret-botanist-andexplorer.html

Chapter 14

Jessie Ackermann

(4 July 1857–31 March 1951)

I have been working in the temperance cause ever since I left school, and I have been travelling round for nine years. On the first trip I was away for five years, and I have been away about four years this time. However, I do not expect to get home for a very great while. It will be, perhaps, six or seven years yet. This is a very large world, you know, when one starts to go round it.

More of a bold traveller than an intrepid explorer, nonetheless, this international missionary visited and lectured in more than fifty countries and probably circumnavigated the globe eight times between 1889 and the late 1920s, all in the name of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In doing so, she made a tremendous impact on the suffrage movement in Australia.

A passionate social reformer, she endeavoured to champion progressive women’s policies – and via WCTU, its stern views of gospel temperance, against the consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs.

Born in Frankfort, Illinois, she was the daughter of Charles and Amanda Ackermann. She grew up in Chicago and in 1880 studied at Berkeley, the University of California, although she did not graduate.

Her work began in 1881 when she started organizing for the Independent Order of Good Templars in California, moving in 1888 to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, embarking on a mission to British Columbia and Alaska.

A year later she was given the role of global missionary for WCTU (the second woman to be appointed to the position) and headed for South Australia via New Zealand. She arrived in Adelaide in 1889 and continued the work of her predecessor in the role, Mary Leavitt.

It was then onto China, before returning to Australia, where in 1891 she became inaugural president of the federated Australasian WCTU, Australia’s largest women’s reform group.

I have just completed a second tour of the world. It covered a period of eight years, and during this time I travelled the great distance of two hundred thousand miles. I was a guest in nearly two thousand homes, all kinds of homes, rich and poor, high and low – from the palace, government house and castle to the thatched cot of the sturdy farmer, the canvas or tin tent of the miner, and the bark hut in the lumber camp. I have seen life in all its varied forms, and under every condition, and I have found few really contented women, so few that they could be counted on my fingers.

(The World Through A Woman’s Eyes, Jessie A. Ackermann)

She travelled across the country to outback towns to give her lectures, using lantern slides, telling women about their property, legal and political rights. She also campaigned for people in the towns to have the right to veto alcohol licenses, in an attempt to reduce drunken assaults on women.

The true dignity of labor is being taught to girls and the world is beginning to look with discredit upon women who hang helplessly on men, instead of doing their own work, and, if necessary, earning their own living.

By 1892 she was in South East Asia, criss-crossing back to Australia, South Africa, London and New Zealand. She camped in Yosemite Valley in 1898, went down a coal mine and rode on horseback through the Australian Outback to reach and explore the underground Jenolan Caves.

She also visited India, where she toured the Taj Mahal and Burma, where she travelled on a tea boat, Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass and Peshawar, Iceland (where she founded a WCTU), slow rail in Java, Kashmir, Siam and the Sandwich Islands.

She likely spent around five years in Australia, where she estimated she wrote 420 newspaper articles, 5,949 letters, distributed 60,000 leaflets and gave over 2,500 speeches. Indeed, she was described as a ‘speaker of no mean order’.*

She spent her time there campaigning for the liberal government of Frank Wilson and encouraging women to use their hard-won vote to make a difference. When Labour leader John Scaddan won the October 1911 election instead of Wilson, Ackermann knew it was time to leave. She resigned and left Australia for what would be the last time in December of the same year.

There is no other woman living, and never has been, who, during eight years of constant travel, has twice circumnavigated the globe, which included 200,000 miles of travel, getting over the ground by the use of every method of locomotion, from the ocean liner and the Chinese junk to the elephant and the wheelbarrow. Best of all, Miss Ackermann did not travel as a mere sightseer, but she went to introduce ideas that she believed would make better and happier every person she met and every community in which she tarried.

(Source: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/25702580)

She eventually moved to Johnson City, Tennessee. She never married but was engaged to a Russian count who perished in a fierce snow storm. She was world’s superintendent of the WCTU’s anti-opium department in 1893–1895 and was made one of the only female fellows of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

She published several books, including The World through a Woman’s Eyes (1896); What Women Have Done with the Vote (1913); and Australia from a Woman’s Point of View (1913).

Jessie believed that ‘the freest girls in the world’ were to be found in Australia:

girls who could make a mark upon the age in which they lived. The world’s greatest reforms must be brought about by girls, and Australia is the natural starting point … where they enjoy the advantages of citizenship.

Following her death on 31 March 1951 at Sierra Lodge Sanatorium, Pomona, California, she was cremated.

Sources

https://writingroughshod.com/2016/11/24/seeking-equality-one-journey-at-a-time/

http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0598b.htm

‘Miss Jessie Ackermann: An Interview’, The Western Mail, Interview transcript, Saturday 30 July 1892, p. 23, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33070685.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/33070685

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ackermann-jessie-a-12764/text23023

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ill-have-what-shes-having-how-australia-inspired-the-world-on-votes-for-women-20181022-h16y5z.html

* Willard, Frances; Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1893). A Woman of the Century; Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in all Walks of Life. Buffalo NY: Moulton. pp. 4–5.

Chapter 15

Mary Moffat Livingstone

(12 April 1821–27 April 1862)

Sir David Livingstone

(19 March 1813–1 May 1873)

Born in the Scottish mill town Blantyre, near Glasgow, to parents Neil and Agnes Livingstone, David Livingstone was a Scottish Christian missionary, medic, Victorian explorer and abolitionist (anti-slavery campaigner). He spent tremendous amounts of time in Africa: 1841–1856, 1858–1863 and 1866–1873.

He married Mary, the daughter of fellow missionary Robert Moffat. Livingstone described his wife thus: ‘a matter-of-fact lady, a little thick black-haired girl, sturdy, and all I want’. A journalist for The Telegraph, Julie Davidson, describes her as ‘a whisper in the thunderclap of her husband’s reputation’. She’s also described as ‘the neglected wife of one of the world’s most famous travellers.’

She was born in 1821 at Kuruman, 800 miles from Cape Town, the place of her father’s mission station. She married David when she was 24. Married for eighteen years, eight of which were spent apart, they had six children. She herself would journey across the Kalahari Desert (the first white woman to do so), not once, but twice and pregnant on both occasions. She was also the first white woman to reach the Chobe river, which forms part of the water system of the Zambezi valley.

An alcoholic, who suffered a stroke, she was dreadfully neglected by her husband and lived completely in his shadow, eventually dying from malaria within three months of joining him on the Zambezi River in 1862. One of their children had died on their previous trip.

The inscription on her gravestone, in a Catholic mission cemetery, give reference to the name she was more commonly known as, ‘Mary Moffat’:

Here repose the mortal remains of Mary Moffat, the beloved wife of Doctor Livingstone, in humble hope of a joyful resurrection by our Saviour Jesus Christ. She died in Shupanga House, 27th April 1862, aged 41 years.

Her husband, in comparison, was interred at Westminster Abbey in April 1874.

The first European to see Victoria Falls (which he named after the Queen), he traversed the African continent, 4,300 miles, by a combination of cart, horse and walking. He returned home in 1856 and wrote about his experiences; two years later he returned on a mission to open the Zambezi River to expansion.

The expedition was an abject failure and a dejected and devastated Livingstone returned to Britain, only to leave again in 1866, supported by The Royal Geographical Society, to discover the source of the Nile. They set off from Zanzibar – Livingstone accompanied by a group of thirty-five men. Hiking chin-deep through muddy swamps, cutting their way through forests, assaulted by leeches, eating rats to survive, many of his group abandoned him, despairing of his poor leadership and lack of empathy for the suffering of other members of the group.

David was missing for six years, until 10 November 1871, after an eight-month search, he was found in western Tanzania, in the lakeside village of Ujiji, by Welsh explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley:

I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob, – would have embraced him, only, he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing, – walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Stanley had been sent on behalf of the New York Herald newspaper, accompanied by over 100 porters. Missing for so long, Livingstone was presumed dead. Stanley’s own adventure in reaching Livingstone was extreme – suffering from dysentery, small pox and cerebral malaria. Ultimately, Livingstone refused to return home. He accepted fresh supplies and left his rescuers in March 1872 and continued to Lake Bangweulu in today’s Zambia.

Livingstone was 60 when he died in Chief Chitambo’s village in North Rhodesia (now Zambia). He had dystentery and malaria. His heart in buried in Africa whilst his remains were interred at Westminster Abbey.

Sources

https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-man-who-found-drlivingstone/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/02/david-livingstone-last-letters-deciphered

http://www.livingstoneonline.org

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/15-march/features/features/heres-to-you-mrs-livingstone

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activity-and-adventure/Mary-Livingstonein-the-footsteps-of-the-other-explorer/

https://www.scotsman.com/news/on-this-day-dr-david-livingstone-found-in-africa-1-4284019

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33639154

Chapter 16

Lady Virginia Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes

(9 July 1947–20 February 2004)

Sir Ranulph Fiennes

(7 March 1944–)

I do have an ability to suffer cold and hunger and not get nasty. But a high pain threshold? Definitely not.

(Sir Ranulph ‘Ran’ Fiennes)

Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet OBE is an extreme adventurer with superhuman endurance and a will of absolute iron. He’s often described as the world’s greatest explorer (made official by the Guinness Book of Records).

His passport lists his occupation as travel writer, a trade he entered in 1970 with a book about scaling a glacier in Norway. He dislikes being called an explorer, he says, because it is invariably a misnomer. ‘On the one expedition when we explored and mapped new territory where no human had ever been before [the epic Transglobe Expedition of 1979] that was exploration and at that point we were explorers,’ he says in his patrician drawl. ‘But if you don’t explore you can’t be called an explorer.’ Being described as an adventurer is even worse. Fiennes finds the word frivolous. ‘It makes me think of Dick Whittington,’ he grumbles.

(https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/sir-ranulph-fiennes-on-rivalry-pain-and-the-storage-of-amputated-fingers-20190218-h1be6y.html)

A polar explorer, writer, lecturer and record-breaker, Fiennes is the first person (with Charles Burton) to trek both the North and South Poles; and the first person (with Dr Mike Stroud) to trek the Arctic on foot, unsupported. He is also the oldest person in Britain to conquer Mount Everest.

No one will pay you for planning an expedition at first: you have to work in pubs at weekends so you can pay the gas bills. I joined the Territorial Army, which paid me when I turned up to drill nights, and so did my wife.

Ranulph was born in Windsor, 7 March 1944, just a few months after his father, serving with the Royal Scots Greys regiment, was blown up after stepping on a land mine in Italy.

An Eton-drop out (he failed his ‘A’ levels), he spent eight years in the British army. He worked for the Sultan of Oman, ensuring the kingdom wasn’t overrun by insurgents. He left in 1971, a year after marrying his childhood sweetheart and partner in crime, Virginia Frances Pepper, ‘Ginny’, who he has described as ‘designed and invented in heaven’.

They met when she was 9 and he was 12. After school, Ginny began deep-sea diving, before working for the Scottish National Trust. She also did much of the background research work for Ranulph (Ran’s) travel books on Africa, Arabia and the Rocky Mountains.

From the start, she knew what kind of a life it would be. I thought I could make a living from expeditions and she supported the plan. She never, ever, begged me to stay behind.

Ginny was Fiennes’ equal in spirit and adventure, and has been described as the mastermind behind all her husband’s adventures. It was her idea to use a hovercraft to navigate the Nile in 1968, and it was her concept, planning and resourcefulness that created the Transglobe Expedition that won him the coveted title of Britain’s greatest living explorer; it saw him be the first to reach both North and South Poles, and cross Antarctica, and the Arctic Ocean through the North-West Passage. The journey of 35,000 miles took three years. On the eve of his departure, he told the New York Times:

The British aren’t so weary as they’re sometimes said to be. The Transglobe Expedition, seven years in the planning, is scheduled to leave Greenwich, England, tomorrow on a journey of such daring that it makes one wonder how the sun ever set on the empire.

Her role at base camp was essential: keeping in radio contact with suppliers, rescue services as well as expedition sponsors; for these accomplishments and her research work for the British Antarctic Survey and Sheffield University into VLF (very low frequency) radio propagation, in 1987 she became the first woman to be awarded the Polar Medal and was the first woman member of the Antarctic Society (1985).

Her expertise in radio operations meant she was able to establish and maintain 80 feet radio masts in the extreme temperatures (as low as –50°C) of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Sir Ranulph ‘Ran’ Fiennes, led many expeditions, in hot deserts and cold regions, through the last three decades of the 20th century. But it was his wife, whom he idolised, who originated and inspired the planning, had the final say in choosing the teams, organised the routes and schedules, was base leader in Africa, Arabia and the polar regions for many years, and specialised in communications. She was not impressed by bureaucracy, never took ‘No’ for an answer and, though slightly built, could make big men quake in their boots with a flash of her bright blue eyes.

(https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/feb/24/guardianobituaries.gender)

Fiennes wrote a biography of Captain Scott and after four attempts with Ginny, in the 1990s finally discovered the lost Arabian frankincense trading city of Ubar, also referred to as the Atlantis of the Sands and the Muslim version of Sodom. Ginny had fallen in love with Oman after a magazine commissioned her to spend two months with a sheikh in a Jebel Akhdar village as his third ‘wife’, although no physical marital activity would take place; such was the respect and affection that grew between them that she deigned to publish any of her experiences for the article.

In 2000 Fiennes completed the Arctic Solo expedition. In 2003, he ran seven marathons, across seven continents, in seven consecutive days. And all this just four months after a heart attack, three days in a coma and double-bypass surgery. On the day after his return, Ginny was diagnosed with cancer.

Ginny died in 2004 at just 56. A passionate fundraiser, since then, Fiennes has raised millions for research into the disease. He went on to marry Louise Millington a year later. When ‘Ran’ lost several fingers to frostbite (and removed them himself with a saw), Ginny’s response was typical of her personality: ‘Oh damn, now we’ll be shorthanded on the farm.’

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ranulph-Fiennes

http://www.thecoldestjourney.org/the-expedition/biographies/sir-ranulphfiennes/

https://www.sidetracked.com/sir-ranulph-fiennes/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/16/sir-ranulphfiennes-cut-fingers-wife-said-became-irritable-frostbite/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1455539/Sir-Ranulph-begins-the-loneliest-journey-life-without-his-Ginny.html

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/sir-ranulph-fiennes-on-rivalry-pain-and-the-storage-of-amputated-fingers-20190218-h1be6y.html

Chapter 17

Louise Arner Boyd

(16 September 1887–1972)

I like the pleasant things most women enjoy, even if I do wear breeches and boots on an expedition, even sleep in them at times … but I powder my nose before going on deck, no matter how rough the sea is.

The ‘Ice Queen’ was an American Arctic explorer. In 1955, at the age of 68, she became the first woman to fly over the North Pole, which she did in a private charter plane, flying non-stop for sixteen hours.

Born in San Rafael, California on 16 September 1887, she came from a wealthy family; her father made his fortune from the mining industry during California’s Gold Rush and her mother, Louise Cook Arner, was a New York socialite. They had a 2,000-acre summer home.

Her two brothers died from heart disease, and she lost her parents when she was in her twenties. She was ridiculously rich, very much alone and president of the Boyd Investment Company. She initially continued in the well-worn path of a socialite, giving philanthropically. A member of the San Francisco Symphony Association, she would travel to see performances at the Royal Albert Hall in London, La Scala in Milan and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She was presented at the British court to King George V and Queen Mary. She could have joined the ranks of grant heiresses but instead chose to invest her money in Arctic exploration.

In 1924 she saw the polar ice park for the first time whilst on board a Norwegian cruise liner. It was a world away from the sunshine of California. Her interest was thoroughly piqued, and two years later she came back, this time on a privately chartered ship with friends to hunt seal and polar bears.

In 1928 she was involved in the search for Norwegian Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen. He had gone missing on 18 June whilst searching for missing Italian explorer Umberto Nobile. Boyd had already chartered the MS Hobby once again, and put the ship, its crew and provisions at the full disposal of the Norwegian authorities, travelling 10,000 miles along the coast line (the Barents and Greenland seas, the coasts of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land) as part of a massive international rescue mission involving fifteen ships from across Europe. (The Italian explorer was found, Amundsen was not). The newspapers had a field day, with headlines including: ‘Woman Joins Arctic Search – Miss Boyd to Assist Rescue’ and ‘Miss Boyd Confident of Rescue Outlook. Californian Going in Search of Amundsen is Huntress and Business Woman.’

She was awarded the Chevalier Cross of the Order of Saint Olav by Norway’s King Haakon VII of Norway for her heroic efforts – the first non-Norwegian woman to receive it.

Between 1926 and 1941 she led, personally financed and photographically documented seven scientific explorations on the east coast of Greenland. (The American Geographical Society sponsored expeditions in 1933, 1937 and 1938.) Her team would explore and map the coast of Greenland and use sonic equipment to measure the depth of the Arctic oceans and ice. An undersea mountain range was named in her honour: the Louse A. Boyd Bank. Part of Greenland, which sits at an elevation of 6,535 feet, is named after her: ‘Louise Boyd Land’. She discovered entirely new Arctic botanical species. Her work across geology, glaciology, botany, geomorphology and oceanography is cited by conservationists and environmental scientists to this day. She traversed Russia’s Franz Josef Land, East and West Greenland and Norway’s Jan Mayen Land.

She was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal in 1938 and elected to the Council of the American Geographical Society in 1960 – the first woman to receive the honour. She would eventually resign seven years later only to be made a Councillor Emeritus. She would also be made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour of France, and receive the Medal of King Christian X of Denmark and the Andree Plaque of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography. Mills College, the University of Alaska and the University of California all awarded her honorary degrees. The Louise A. Boyd Junior Museum of Science in San Rafael was named in her honour.

In 1941 she began exploring for the US government, specifically studying the effect of polar magnetic fields on radio communications. During the Second World War, she acted as a special consultant to the Military Intelligence division. The US Army awarded her a Certificate of Appreciation in 1949, after she did some work for them on military strategy in the Arctic.

She gave lectures to universities and geographical societies and wrote books. Intriguingly, her log books and diaries from each of her seven expeditions remain unaccounted for.

She died on 14 September 1972 in San Francisco, two days before her 85th birthday, having spent most of her family Gold Rush fortune on extensive Arctic exploration. (The original home in San Rafael was sold as a result). As per her request, her ashes were scattered into the Arctic Ocean. She never married nor had children and her family name died with her.

Sources

https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/us-history-biographies/louise-arner-boyd

https://collections.dartmouth.edu/arctica-beta/html/EA15-13.html

https://joannakafarowski.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/labgeographicalreviewobit.pdf

https://americacomesalive.com/2011/03/26/louise-a-boyd-1887-1972/

https://www.kqed.org/pop/102094/rebel-girls-from-bay-area-history-louise-arner-boyd-arctic-explorer

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/01/inquiring-minds-tracking-the-polar-adventures-of-a-rich-american-dame/

Chapter 18

Nellie Bly

(5 May 1864–27 January 1922)

On Thursday, November 14, 1889, at 9.40.30 o’clock, I started on my tour around the world.

Trailblazer in every sense of the word, Nellie Bly was a courageous investigative reporter even before the term formally existed.

America’s first female war reporter was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania on 5 May 1864. Her family had to move after the death of her father when she was six and they lost their house and their mill. Her mother did re-marry, but that ended in divorce due to his abuse of her.

Nellie, nickname ‘Pink’, started taking classes at Indiana Teacher’s College, but because her family was in financial dire straits, she had to leave education. Instead, she supported her mother running a boarding house.

In 1885, she wrote a furious, anonymous repost to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, raging at a sexist article they had printed. The editor in chief was impressed, called her in, and offered her a job as a columnist, mainly focusing on ‘fluff’ pieces for women, covering fashion and furniture. After nearly a year, the newly named Nellie Bly (the moniker taken from a Stephen Foster song) went freelance, headed to Mexico and proceeded to deliver over thirty pieces as a foreign correspondent.

She started writing for the Pittsburgh newspaper when she was 21, writing about the lives of women factory workers; by 1887 she had left for New York City to work for the New York World. Arguably, her most famous assignment was going undercover, faking insanity, in the Women’s Lunatic Asylum, on Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) to expose the horrific conditions and abuses ‘patients’ endured. She was given no advice how to get in, let alone get out again. She started off by checking into a working class boarding house for destitute women, claimed her name was Nellie Brown, from Cuba, and that she was looking for ‘missing trunks’. The ruse worked. Her fellow boarders, completely spooked, called the police. Her roommate, so utterly convinced by her ‘insanity’ act, refused to share a room with her ‘for all the money of the Vanderbilts’.

After a hearing at a New York City court, the judge, declaring her ‘positively demented’, sent her to Blackwell’s, which housed 1,600 other women.

She was forced to take an ice bath in filthy water:

My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head – ice cold water, too – into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.

Many of the women were immigrants who, because they didn’t speak English, were committed to the asylum. Others had been sent there purely because they were poor. Inmates were drugged, served appalling food, beaten, choked, kicked, nearly drowned and given inadequate clothing.

Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours … give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.

After ten days, lawyers from her newspaper bailed her out. The first of a two-part series hit the front pages two days later, on 9 October 1887. It caused nothing short of a scandal and cemented her position as a newspaper reporter celebrity. It also paved the way for the investigative reporter as well as more women in journalism. The reporting was published as a book, Ten Days in a Mad House. She continued to write stories championing social justice, including exposés of baby-selling businesses and factory working conditions.

After reading Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, she decided to take it on as a personal challenge, and better the time achieved by fictional character Phileas Fogg actually attempting it in seventy-two days.

Joseph Pulitzer, the editor at her paper, New York World, told her that only a man could embark on such an adventure. ‘It is impossible for you to do it,’ he said.

In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this.

She responded, ‘Very well, start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.’

Her editor eventually let her do it, giving her two days’ notice.

The New York World was behind a new type of journalism in the late 1800s America; Karen Roggenkamp, writing in her journal article, ‘Dignified Sensationalism: “Cosmopolitan,” Elizabeth Island, and Trips around the World’, wrote:

Pioneered by Pulitzer in the 1880s, new journalism was marked by such journalistic novelties as ample illustration, enormous stacked headlines, celebrity writers, and above all, an emphasis on drama – all for the low price of two cents a copy.

What she didn’t know was that, at the same time, a reporter from a rival publication, Elizabeth Bisland of Cosmopolitan magazine, had been challenged not only to do the same undertaking, but to beat her estimated time of 75 days (which she beat, accomplishing the adventure in 72). Elizabeth was far more of a socialite than Nellie and although she wrote of her experiences for Cosmopolitan (later published as a book called In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World), she wasn’t interested at all in any fanfare when she eventually returned after 76.5 days. Allegedly, she never spoke of her experiences again.

Bly was completely unaware of Elizabeth’s presence or purpose until she reached Hong Kong on 24 December, where a shipping official told her he was certain she’d be beaten, as her rival had passed through the port three days ago.

That a woman would consider embarking on such a venture was unthinkable. Women didn’t travel without escorts. She embarked on the Augusta Victoria ocean liner on 14 November 1889, carrying just two small bags.

One never knows the capacity of an ordinary hand-satchel until dire necessity compels the exercise of all one’s ingenuity to reduce everything to the smallest possible compass. In mine I was able to pack two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter. Packing that bag was the most difficult undertaking of my life; there was so much to go into such little space.

Her newspaper gave her £200 in English gold and Bank of England notes. The gold she put in her pocket, the notes in a chamois bag she wore around her neck; she also took some US gold and paper money to see if American money would be recognized outside her home country. She refused advice to take a revolver, buoyed by a strong inner belief that she could handle anything that came her way. The newspaper made a tidy sum from her adventures, launching a competition with the prize of a trip to Europe for the person who could correctly guess her finishing time – it received nearly one million entries and sold a huge amount of copies as a result.

Her planned route: New York to London, then Calais, Brindisi, Port Said, Ismailia, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco then back to New York.

And as for her luggage, she says her:

jar of cold cream was the bane of my existence. It seemed to take up more room than everything else in the bag and was always getting into just the place that would keep me from closing the satchel. Over my arm I carried a silk waterproof, the only provision I made against rainy weather. After-experience showed me that I had taken too much rather than too little baggage. At every port where I stopped at I could have bought anything from a ready-made dress down, except possibly at Aden, and as I did not visit the shops there I cannot speak from knowledge.

Starting on 25 January 1890, she set off from a New Jersey train station. In her own words, she said she bolstered herself with the thought that it was ‘only a matter of 28,000 miles, and seventy-five days and four hours, until I shall be back again.’

The 24-year-old embarked on the steamship Augusta Victoria from Hoboken (New Jersey) to London, a journey that took seven days and during which she had horrific sea sickness. From there, she took a train to Paris, then a brief detour to Amiens,

We traveled from Boulogne to Amiens in a compartment with an English couple and a Frenchman. There was one foot-warmer and the day was cold. We all tried to put our feet on the one foot-warmer and the result was embarrassing. The Frenchman sat facing me and as I was conscious of having tramped on someone’s toes, and as he looked at me angrily all the time above the edge of his newspaper, I had a guilty feeling of knowing whose toes had been tramped on.

Once arrived, she was met by her idol Jules Verne and his wife on the platform.

Jules Verne’s bright eyes beamed on me with interest and kindliness, and Mme. Verne greeted me with the cordiality of a cherished friend. There were no stiff formalities to freeze the kindness in all our hearts, but a cordiality expressed with such charming grace that before I had been many minutes in their company, they had won my everlasting respect and devotion.

The author wished her luck, declaring: ‘If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands. Good luck, Nellie Bly.’

She travelled by horse, donkey, rickshaw, train and steamship, filing her dispatches to the newspaper from all over the world.

On my tour I traversed the following waters: North River, New York Bay, Atlantic Ocean, English Channel, Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal, Gulf of Suez, Red Sea, Straits of Bab el Mandeb, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Straits of Malacca, China Sea, Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay.

I visited or passed through the following countries: England, France, Italy, Egypt, Japan, the United States, and the following British possessions: Aden, Arabia; Colombo, Isle of Ceylon; Penang, Prince of Wales Island; Singapore, Malay Peninsula; and the Island of Hong Kong.

She writes rather disparagingly of the state of French train from Calais, stating that she would have been able to see more of France if the windows had been cleaner.

She then progressed, still by train, through Italy, along the Adriatic Coast, arriving in Brindisi two hours later than scheduled, before wasting no time before driving to her boat for Alexandria.

She bought a pet monkey in Singapore, and was faced with potential delays by an unexpected snowstorm:

I spent 56 days 12 hours and 41 minutes in actual travel and lost by delay 15 days 17 hours and 30 minutes.

The men who spoke to me were interested in my sun-burnt nose, the delays I had experienced, the number of miles I had traveled. The women wanted to examine my one dress in which I had traveled around, the cloak and cap I had worn, were anxious to know what was in the bag, and all about the monkey.

I ONLY remember my trip across the continent as one maze of happy greetings, happy wishes, congratulating telegrams, fruit, flowers, loud cheers, wild hurrahs, rapid hand-shaking and a beautiful car filled with fragrant flowers attached to a swift engine that was tearing like mad through flower-dotted valley and over snow-tipped mountain, on-on-on! It was glorious! A ride worthy a queen. They say no man or woman in America ever received ovations like those given me during my flying trip across the continent. The Americans turned out to do honor to an American girl who had been the first to make a record of a flying trip around the world, and I rejoiced with them that it was an American girl who had done it. It seemed as if my greatest success was the personal interest of every one who greeted me. They were all so kind and as anxious that I should finish the trip in time as if their personal reputations were at stake.

On her return, she was greeted by a ten-gun celebratory salute from New York’s Battery Park and another from Fort Greene Park.

After her adventures, she eventually married an older industrialist when she was 31 and retired from journalism to run his steel company. At her husband’s death, she inherited his considerable business interests, returned to journalism during the First World War to report from the front lines in Austria and organized for American orphans to be adopted.

She died from pneumonia at the age of 57. Around the World in Seventy-two Days and Other Writings, by Nellie Bly, was published in April 2014, nearly a century after her death. Pneumonia also claimed the life of her Cosmopolitan rival, Elizabeth Bisland, who died on 6 January 1929. In a bizarre twist of fate, the two women were buried in the same cemetery.

Sources

https://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly

http://www.nellieblyonline.com/bio

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nellie-blys-record-breaking-trip-around-world-was-to-her-surprise-race-180957910/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nellie-blys-record-breaking-trip-around-world-was-to-her-surprise-race-180957910/

http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.html

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nellie-blys-lessons-in-writing-what-you-want-to

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/28/she-went-undercover-expose-an-insane-asylums-horrors-now-nellie-bly-is-getting-herdue/?fbclid=IwAR3M-VcbuFZCgH6WkhKIICX7GwwOAOJEs4mNiRhZEJl1-8FHDyUvJrVoY7c&utm_term=.551936b92a04

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nellie-blys-lessons-in-writing-what-you-want-to

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20770967?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Chapter 19

Rosita Forbes

(16 January 1890–30 June 1967)

The perfect journey is never finished. The goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.

Rosita Forbes was an English travel writer who explored Egypt and Libya at a time when foreigners were forbidden. She was born Joan Rosita Torr at Riseholme Hall, near Lincoln in England, in 1890. Her parents were Herbert James Torr, a Member of Parliament, and Rosita Graham Torr. She was the eldest of four children;

I always collected maps, and I preferred the kind decorated with stiff little ships, sails bellying in a breeze which looked like a comet, with unicorns or savages to decorate the wilderness … The curly red lines across African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces would leave just one small desert for me.

Between 1920 and 1921, and alongside Egyptian explorer (Turkish born) and civil servant Ahmed Hassanein, she was the first European woman to visit the Kufra Oasis in Libya, at a time when it was closed to Westerners.

Aged 21, she married Colonel Robert Foster Forbes on 5 October 1911 and accompanied him on journeys to India, China and Australia. She promptly scandalized everyone by divorcing him six years later, pawning her wedding ring and using the money to attempt to ride across South Africa on horseback. (The authorities wouldn’t allow her to do it.)

She married again in 1921, wedding Arthur Thomas McGrath. He died in 1962.

She drove an ambulance in France for two years during the First World War and was awarded two medals for her service. Back in England, she took up driving again, this time for the British government, but it bored her.

She spent just over a year with her friend Armorel Meinertzhagen, who also experienced an unhappy, short-lived military marriage, travelling through more than thirty countries. After the experience, Rosita wrote Unconducted Wanderers (1919).

With another girl, equally undismayed by official restrictions, I had wandered round the world, mostly off the map, borrowing what we needed in the way of horses, the floor of a native hut as a bed, the pirogue of the Indo-Chinese customs or the New Guinea government yacht …

During their travels, they were captured by the Southern Army in China, escaping only because they decided to brave the rapids of the Sian River. They also spent time travelling through North Africa ‘with little money but much ingenuity.’

Francis Rodd, an intelligence officer, had heard of her exploits and asked his college friend and diplomat Egyptian Ahmed Mohammed Bey Hassanein if Rosita could join them on their trip to the elusive Kufara Oasis in the Libyan Desert. It was the centre of the Islamic Senussi Brotherhood. Perhaps the thinking was that she could serve her country well as someone who could help shape national policy in the region.

Her goal was to:

cross some six hundred miles of desert ruled by the fanatical Senussi and jealously guarded by the Italians established on the Tripolitanian Coast, in order to reach a group of oases whose exact position was unknown.

(https://www.slideshare.net/eleuthera/rosita-forbes-biography)

Rodd would drop out of the expedition, but Forbes and Hassanein would continue. She studied the Koran and learnt Arabic in preparation, as well as making herself familiar with navigation charts; she did the due diligence and ensured their 1,000-kilometre trip would be smoothed by securing letters of introduction to Mohammad Idris, the emir of the Senussi. She dressed herself as an Arab woman. The journey was fraught with danger, the least of which were sandstorms. It appears that despite Hassanein’s connections and Rosita’s letter of introductions, Senussi still didn’t trust them and tried to have them killed several times during their journey. Rosita writes in The Geographical Journal that their lives were saved much in part to the ‘eloquence’ of Hassanein.

They left the coast of Libya in November accompanied by a desert guide, camels and their handlers, taking a dangerous Benghazi–Ouaddai route, patrolled by Libyan tribes. Midday temperatures in the sand dunes reached as high as 50 degrees dropping dramatically at night to produce frost.

She and Hassanein had an earnest discussion of how many aches and pains the human body could experience. They endured sand rash, utter exhaustion, with Rosita writing that her tiredness was so extreme that she would walk with her eyes closed, and Hassanein would suffer a broken collarbone. Her writing is beautifully evocative and demonstrates a keen understanding of the importance of opening up new trade routes in the area as well as her depictions of the lives and landscapes around her:

There has been no rainfall in Kufara for eight years, and there are no springs, but water is to be found nearly everywhere in the wadi at a depth of 9 feet, and an excellent system of irrigation has been arranged in the oasis … Barley, wheat, millet, roses, verbena, lemons, olives, figs, peaches, and grapes are cultivated, as well as such vegetables as pumpkins, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, marrow molokhia, which makes a form of spinach. There is practically no grazing in the wadi, except the reeds by the lake banks. The few camels are date-fed … When there is no grass in the north, large caravans come and buy all the Kufara dates, so that one has to pay a mejidie (3s.6d) for a pound or two of dates in the wadi. When we were there one could buy a camel’s load for a mejidie, and tons were rotting on the ground. Sheep and goats are worth five and four mejidies respectively. There is no weaving in the wadi. The rich silk and embroidered clothes worn by the Ekhwan, and the Zouiyas’ jerds, come from Egypt … Slaves are sold by private treaty. Men fetch about £20, and women up to £34, according to their age … We saw no animals or birds in the wadi but were told that in the harvest time (in March) many different varieties appear. Cleopatra’s asp exists, together with several other varieties of snakes large and small … We noticed mimosa, figs, tamarisks, acacias and thorns … Except for the negroid slaves working in the gardens of the oasis, I never saw a woman in Kufara. They are most rigidly secluded, and never leave their houses. If obliged to travel, they do so at night.

Her navigation skills were found wanting on several occasions, and they narrowly survived being killed by Zwaya tribesmen. When they eventually reached Taj, the centre of the Senussi brotherhood, Forbes took photographs with a concealed camera. But it seems the only interests she was concerned with were her own: following the expedition, in which she dressed as an Arab woman, and called herself ‘Sitt Khadija’, she wrote The Secret of the Sahara: Kufaraher. It gave her fame and fortune.

True, she was the first European woman (and only the second European) to visit it, describing her experiences, such as her engagement with the Bedouin, in a way that makes the reader feel as if they were there themselves, as well as demonstrates her grit, determination and sense of humour:

At this point I should like to explain how difficult it is to get any definite information as to the distance or direction from the Bedawin. The favourite answers to all such questions in Libya are, ‘There are no hours in the desert’; or, ‘As far as a man may go on one girba’ … we had been walking ten to eleven hours a day, but after leaving the well we marched twelve and thirteen hours. ‘If you lose the way you will either go to Siwa or to hell,’ said another sheikh, in a tone which left no doubt as to which he thought our probably destination.

The New York Times glowingly referred to her as ‘an Englishwoman … young and fair to look upon, with a story of hardihood, suffering and narrow escape from violent death in the strange places of the world.’

All well and good, but on their eventual return, and arrival in Alexandria in February 1921, whilst Hassanein recovered from his broken collar bone, she completely dropped his from the narrative, insisting he had only accompanied her on the trip for the ‘rest cure’.

‘Hassanein Bey assured me that he came for a rest cure,’ she blithely wrote. ‘I had to superintend the packing lest he ignore the claims of malted milk tablets, towels and woollen underclothing in favour of delicately striped shirts and a lavender and silver dressing-gown!’

His network of friends in Cairo were furious at how she’d dismissed and insulted one of their own. She was criticized vociferously for it, most notably by the indomitable Gertrude Bell, who said of her: ‘in the matter of trumpet-blowing she is unique.’ It wasn’t a compliment.

Writer Arita Baaijens makes the argument that:

… she enjoyed to the hilt the receptions held in her honour in Cairo. While she may have exaggerated her role as the leader of the expedition during those dinners and receptions, should we really fault this female explorer for her self-importance? It is usually the men who try to downplay the role of women in history. Just this once, it was the other way round.

(Desert Songs: A Woman Explorer in Egypt and Sudan by Arita Baaijens (15 July 2008)

Rosita was unfortunately hugely impressed by powerful men. Her judgement proved appalling when she met with both Hitler and Mussolini, waxing lyrical about walking through a flower garden with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, then furiously backtracking when public opinion turned against her, publishing a book of interviews, called These Men I Knew, using it as a vehicle to insist that she was meeting them to report their politics, and not to endorse them. To avoid further embarrassment, ostracization and ignominy, she and her husband soon moved to the Bahamas.

The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.

She was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Arthur died in 1962 and she followed him five years later in 1967, dying in Bermuda at the age of 77.

Sources

https://www.legit.ng/1239712-50-adventure-quotes-inspire-you.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10768645/Rosita-Forbes-the-travel-writer-they-couldnt-tame.html

https://www.revolvy.com/page/Rosita-Forbes

https://www.slideshare.net/eleuthera/rosita-forbes-biography

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=T_QuBYXpVfAC&lpg=PT66&ots=Uxkk4srOt&dq=Rosita+Forbes&pg=PT65&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Rosita%20Forbes&f=false

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1780483?read-now=1&seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://www.revolvy.com/page/Rosita-Forbes

Chapter 20

Van Buren Sisters

Augusta Van Buren (26 March 1884–30 September 1959)

Adeline Van Buren (26 July 1889–1949)

Woman can, if she will.

(Augusta Van Buren)

The date: 4 July 1916. Women did not have the vote. Women rarely drove, let alone get on a $275 motorbike and attempt journeys of thousands of miles.

The Van Buren sisters were pioneers: the first women to travel solo, on two motorcycles, coast to coast across the USA. The quality of the roads they travelled on? Absolutely nothing like today: dirt roads, mud, pot holes. To boot, accurate maps were a rarity. They had no helmets, had several tumbles from their bikes and were arrested several times for wearing trousers (leggings) and breeches – it was illegal in some states.

Descendants of former President Martin Van Buren, Augusta was born on 26 March 1884, and Adeline was born on 26 July 1889. Raised in New York City, they had an active lifestyle and embraced activities from swimming and skating to wrestling and diving with their brother Albert. They were suffragettes and proponents of the Preparedness Movement, which advocated the US being ready for inevitable entry in the First World War.

Travelling on Indian Power Plus motorcycles, worth $275 each, they started their 5,500-mile adventure in 1916, leaving from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, heading for San Francisco via Chicago.

They reached San Francisco on 2 September, then crossed the border into Tijuana. Sixty days later, on 8 September they finally arrived in Los Angeles. They were the first women, ever, to reach the top of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak on a form of motorized transport – the road to get there rose to over 14 thousand feet.

During their ride they received tremendous support from locals, especially when they nearly ran out of water west of Salt Lake City and needed guidance on which direction to take. Luckily, they were saved from disaster by a prospector, who gave them water and set them back on their way. They’d crash, fall off, suffer extreme fatigue and get stuck in mud ruts. The press, unsurprisingly, focused more on the bikes they’d used, rather than the achievement they’d accomplished as women, referring to their achievement as a ‘vacation’.

The aim was to persuade the US military to allow women to serve as army couriers and dispatch riders to support the war effort. Non-participation in the war effort was one of the main reasons for the government refusing to allow women the vote – so their journey had huge political significance. By undertaking such an arduous and hazardous, not to mention incredibly long journey, and proving they were eminently capable of serving as a war dispatch rider, were they not then removing the last bastion of resistance against women having the vote?

Perhaps this hypothesis was too much for the US to consider. Despite their phenomenal achievement, the government turned down Adeline’s application to the military as a dispatch rider. The sisters did however, live to see the vote granted to women of the US.

Gussie went on to become a pilot, flying in the women’s flying group set up by Amelia Earhart, the Ninety-Nines, whilst Addie completed a law degree at New York University. They were inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2002.

Sources

http://mentalfloss.com/article/85722/bold-van-buren-sisters-who-blazed-trail-across-america

https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-sisters-ride-20160721-snap-story.html

http://www.motorcyclemuseum.org/halloffame/detail.aspx?RacerID=285

http://www.vanburensisters.com/contact/

http://theblackdouglas.com/van-buren-sisters-motorcycle-pioneers/

THE MEN

Chapter 21

Benedict Allen

(1 March 1960–)

It is said that I’m someone who’s almost died nine times, but the fact of the matter is I haven’t died, perhaps due to two things: preparation and belief in myself.

If I really did live the action-man life of Mr I. Jones I wouldn’t have survived very long. These remote communities only look after me because I’m harmless. They adopt me, like you might a child.

For me exploration is not about conquering, it’s not about planting flags, and I know people think I’m some sort of neocolonialist. For me it is not about asserting yourself it is about the opposite. It is about being vulnerable … to immerse myself. And that means being on a level with the local people and that means not being able to be whisked away whenever you feel like it, because you’re feeling a bit ill. So I didn’t take a phone. But I’m a professional, I’m an expert in survival. You can’t claim to be an explorer unless you bring back some new insight.

Benedict Allen went missing in Papua New Guinea in November 2017, failing to turn up for his flight home. He’d gone into the forest to try and rediscover the Yaifo tribe who had helped him years before. They are one of the very few tribes left on Earth with virtually zero contact with the outside world.

He received huge criticism for being selfish enough to embark on such a dangerous adventure without any tracking devices, relying instead on a compass and map. That said, he’s always been upfront about his desire and philosophy of exploration on a ‘pure’ level: that doing without a GPS or satellite phone ultimately tests your mettle as an adventurer and immersing yourself with the unfamiliar.

His father was a test pilot and travelled the world. No surprise then, that his heroes are Captain James Cook and Arctic Norse explorer Nansen and he firmly believes that modern travellers must rationalize and explain their endeavours – that the world is not merely their plaything. He’s supremely aware of the detrimental effect of modern civilization upon the untrodden path. Self-belief is essential – to feel deep down that you are unbreakable.

When Livingstone explored Africa, much of it was a place well understood (although un-charted) by the Africans, and well known to the Arabs. What he was doing was bringing an interpretation of it back to Victorian Britain, and wider scientific world. In the same way (maybe to a lesser though still valid extent) we must keep interpreting these remote ‘exotic’ lands for our current age. Hence I try not to take navigation aids and backup from the UK. IF you want more than just an adventure, this type of exploration must be about immersing yourself in these alien environments and trying to bring a picture of them back to your people.

He tells of fishing for piranha, and literally using a yardstick to measure how far he was walking in order to encourage himself to keep going. When eventually rescued, by a helicopter from an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, it’s thought he was recovering from malaria. The ‘fixer’ who arranged his rescue, Hong Kong-based Steven Ballantyne, was not in favour of Allen’s agent using a text he sent to garner worldwide publicity about his alleged plight.

‘Personally I would not have alerted the press, but this was not my call. The media attention has sadly given a very poor and misleading view of Papua New Guinea,’ he remarked.

Allen had tweeted ‘Marching off to Heathrow. I may be some time (don’t try to rescue me, please – where I’m going in PNG you won’t ever find me you know …)’, echoing the last words of Edwardian Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates, one of the five men who died attempting to return home from Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1912. (His exact words had been: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’)

Allen’s agent took the tweet and ran with it, sparking runners that the whole episode was nothing more than a publicity stunt, an allegation Allen rigorously denies, claiming all the attention he received, as well as the eventual rescue, was unwarranted, unwanted and annoying.

Interviewed at the time, ethnomusicologist Denis Crowdy verbally ripped Allen to shreds:

Anthropologists were also deeply cynical, clearly recognising Allen and his genre of exoticist square-jawed Boy’s Own adventurer Royal Geographical Society lecture tour self-indulgence. Why should we care about a lost, unprepared, silly, white privileged male middle-aged fool? All of the stories have been solely focused on his ‘safety’, when PNG faces some real challenges that are genuinely worthy of reporting.

(http://www.benedictallen.com/benedict-in-a-nutshell)

Born in Macclesfield, Allen admits he was determined to be an explorer from the age of 10 years old. He is billed as the ultimate explorer and one of the first to use a camera to record his adventures. He’s met the Warao tribe of the Orinoco Delta; after being attacked by gold miners in the Amazon, he was forced to eat his own dog to survive in the jungle; he has been shot at by Colombian drug lords, jumping from his canoe to make his escape; he’s been abandoned by his guides, who left him on the one side of a river, whilst taking all his supplies with them on the other; he’s been poisoned in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1997 he trekked for over five months and 3,000 kilometres through Mongolia by horse and camel, meeting the nomadic reindeer herding Tsaatan tribe. He’s completed the first documented journey of the (2,000 km) length of the Namib desert and is the only person known to have crossed, using only camels, the full width of the Gobi Desert, doing so in six weeks.

What he packs:

A survival kit

Compass

Bivvi bag for camping

Pork scratchings and mint cake

Tabasco sauce

A miniature copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets

Pig-toothed carved handled knife given to him by a crocodile hunter and Swiss Army knife

Diary

Postcards of the Queen and Piccadilly Circus

Toilet paper

US $100 bill, sewn into a secret pocket of his trousers

Water bottle and sterilizing liquid

Photocopies of passport, phone numbers and air tickets.

He studied Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia, where, in his final year, he completed three separate expeditions to Costa Rica, Brunei and Iceland. His first solo expedition was across the Orinoco River.

Anyone, with very little money, can jump on a plane and disappear into Africa.

He is famous for visiting some of the most remote, inhospitable places on the planet and for his predilection to do so with the bare minimum of assistive technology, such as GPS, and immersing himself in his surrounding environment. By his own admission, he’d rather be a curiosity than an intrusion to the peoples he meets.

Aged just 25, he successfully tracked down the Yaifo tribe in Papua New Guinea; he also took part in a terrifying six-week ‘crocodile’ initiation ceremony to make him as strong as a crocodile. (Whilst undergoing the initiation, he taught the group the nursery rhyme ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm.) He’s also undertaken a 1,000-mile trek with native sledge dogs through Siberia, during the region’s worst winter on record.

The crocodile marks he received enabled him to later be accepted into a community of Aboriginal Western Australians.

A Westerner can never adopt the gods and spirits or even ethic of people whose life is dictated by the forest or desert. Our mindset is shaped by a society of cars. We are sheltered, buffered and separated from what we call nature.

They had a crocodile cult there. The ceremony was all about ‘becoming a man’ – as strong as a crocodile. I was hidden away with people my age – I was 24 at that stage – in the crocodile nest. A big fence was erected around the spirit house and we were kept there for as long as it took to ‘become a man as strong as a crocodile’. It took six weeks and it turned out to be hell. It wasn’t just that we were cut repeatedly with bamboo blades to give us these permanent scars, but we were beaten every day five times a day.

In all my travels I’ve never experienced anything so terrible.

Exploration is not just about the golden era of David Livingstone and others that we think of as archetypal explorers. It’s about now. Because we don’t understand the concept of climate change. Ecosystems are being saved, threatened and destroyed, and it’s our job – not just my job – to highlight. It has been very sad to see the decline of indigenous people.

But the world is also a very exciting place with a lot to fight for. We just have to fight more than ever – and it’s not about me, and it’s not about the past, it’s about now and it’s about everyone and the future, because we all are explorers.

He is a Trustee and Member of the Council of the Royal Geographical Society.

Sources

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/uk-world/814366/i-got-more-lost-in-dundee-claims-explorer-benedict-allen-after-being-airlifted-to-safety-in-remote-jungle-rescue/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/benedict-allen-lost-jungle/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/17/benedict-allen-allies-defend-rescued-explorer-against-backlash

http://www.benedictallen.com/where-is-left

Chapter 22

Christopher Columbus

(between 26 August and 31 October 1451–20 May 1506)

Real name: Cristoforo Colombo

Birthplace: Genoa, born into a family of wool weavers

Columbus is arguably the most famous explorer and navigator from what is known as the Age of Discovery.

He tried for years to get funding for his expedition, initially in 1484 from King John II Portugal, then in 1487 from King Henry VII of England and King Charles VIII of France. His efforts were to no avail until eventually, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille agreed to sponsor his trip to discover a westward route to China, India and Japan.

They were more than happy for him to risk life and limb to expand their trading opportunities, and their religion, into the Indies. On his part, the deal he made with the Spanish royals, called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, meant he could name himself admiral, viceroy and governor of any piece of land he discovered.

He was also entitled to a huge 10 per cent of any ‘merchandise, whether pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices and other objects’ that he came across on those new lands. Nice work if you can get it.

Columbus set sail in August 1492 and to this day, every history class worth its salt teaches about the trio of wooden sailing ships that he took across the Atlantic Ocean: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

The Santa Maria was the main, largest (and slowest) carrack (three masts) ship, with fifty-two men on board and carrying the bulk of the cargo; the Niña and Pinta each had a crew of eighteen. They were caravels and were better for closer exploration of coastlines. Collectively, the top speed for the trio of vessels was 8 knots – equating to an average of 100 miles each day. Anything more than that was an added bonus.

Conditions on any of the three ships would have been, to say the least, basic. Sanitation would likely have been a secondary consideration – and scurvy would have been a problem. The crew would have slept on deck; provisions would have included salted meat (for preservation), fish, hard biscuits, bread and beer. There would have been livestock on board – including pigs and chickens.

After two months at sea, he promised money to the first person to finally spot land. Sailor Rodrigo Bernajo should have been thrilled when he did just that; but Columbus reneged on the promise, feigning forgetfulness and tiredness. It was land, but not the United States of America. It was a small island in the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador.

Columbus didn’t ‘discover’ North America; he was the first European to discover the Bahamian group of islands (12 October) and the island later called Hispaniola – now modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. (The Santa Maria ran aground off the coast and was abandoned.) Columbus thought that these were the Indies. Also a moot point: he didn’t ‘discover’ them – they’d been inhabited for generations.

The people of Hispaniola, the Taino, were happy to trade with Columbus and his crew. He described them as being ‘very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces. They do not carry arms or know them … They should be good servants.’ Slavery and disease soon followed – and the Taino were decimated.

Columbus may have been a legendary explorer but he was a lousy governor. Much like kings who believed they ruled by divine right, Columbus believed he had a divine purpose. But in 1499 word of his appalling and brutal treatment of indigenous peoples reached the ears of Ferdinand and Isabella; he was arrested in disgrace, sent back to Spain in chains and a new governor put in his place.

And nearly 500 years before he was even born, it’s thought an expedition of Vikings actually did discover America. And they did it first. Led by Leif Eriksson, whose father Erik the Red founded Greenland, the group reached north American shores. Ericsson’s exploits are variously described in the famous Icelandic sagas; researchers believe they likely reached parts of Canada, including modern-day Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland.

Whilst he didn’t achieve what he set out to do, that is ‘discover’ the Americas, it was his actual arrival in the Caribbean and his other voyages which set the precedent for future exploration (and highly controversial and brutal colonization) of North and South America. America’s indigenous people would be exploited, enslaved and their cultures eradicated.

Columbus refused to abandon his calculations of the Earth’s size, returning home to insist it was pear-shaped and that he’d failed to find Asia because of the bulging part of the fruit near the stalk. One might imagine the impact on his reputation, not to mention his history and legacy, which are even now being re-examined: in the United States, Columbus Day, on the second Monday of October, has been reclaimed by the native people of the Americas, and re-named Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Native’s Day).

He died on 20 May 1506 in Valladolid, Spain.

Sources

https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-christopher-columbus-2136702

https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-columbus-to-america

https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/christopher-columbus-0

https://www.biography.com/news/christopher-columbus-day-facts

http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/columbus-ships.htm

Chapter 23

Daniel Boone

(2 November 1734–26 September 1820)

I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

Daniel Boone was an American pioneer, explorer, hunter, tracker, woodsman and frontiersman, whose exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States.

Born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Boone was chopping wood by the age of 5, milking the cows by 11, and given a rifle when he was 12, with which he would hunt small game and learn to track them, soon becoming the main hunting ‘breadwinner’ (deer, beaver, fox and wild turkey) for the family. He killed his first bear at the age of 14 – having spotted its tracks near his family’s cow herd. His rifle was nicknamed the ‘Ticklicker’, as legend has it that he was such a good shot, that he could shoot the ‘tick’ or flea off a bear’s nose.

He befriended the local Delaware Indians and soon adopted their dress. He was the sixth of eleven children to his English emigrant father, who had fled his home of Bradninch for Pennsylvania in 1713. Squire Boone, a weaver, blacksmith and Quaker, had fled due to religious persecution. Daniel’s mother was fellow Quaker Sarah Morgan.

Daniel never received any formal education but he did learn how to read, taking books with him on his trail expeditions, and he could sign his name.

Boone was only 17 when the family moved to the Yadkin River valley in North Carolina, where there were frequent fights with the Native Americans who resented the interlopers on their land hunting for the same food that was in short supply.

Such was his hunting prowess, that they were able to secure 1,300 acres of land from the profits of the skins he’d amassed. With the onset of the French-Indian wars (France and Britain fighting over territory in North America, with the Native Americans mostly siding with the French), Boone joined the side of the British army as a blacksmith and supply-wagon driver, narrowly escaping on horseback from the Battle of Turtle Creek.

After meeting Rebecca Bryan at a family wedding (their families knew each other well), they would marry on 14 August 1756 and have ten children. Rebecca, daughter of Welsh Quakers, was just 17. Daniel worked as a trapper and hunter in the Appalachian mountains to support his family, often gone for months, even years, on end. Rebecca herself was a good small-game hunter – she had to be in order to provide for her family in Daniel’s absence. Forget rose-tinted glasses of a romantic frontier life; according to the North Carolina Museum of History, ‘Rebecca also farmed, gardened, chopped wood, tended farm animals, and performed the other chores necessary to keep a farmstead going.’ She was an experienced midwife, made her own linen and was a leather-tanner. She would set up home in different places at least fifteen times, in North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri.

In 1769 Daniel ventured to the wilds of Kentucke (Kentucky), west of the Appalachian mountains, with five other men, exploring and discovering a pass through them which he called the ‘Cumberland Gap’.

During this time of discovery, where they hunted the land and made a base camp at present-day Irvine, Kentucky, Daniel and his brother John were kidnapped by Shawnee Indians (February 1778). The Shawnee had an agreement with the English that any land west of the Appalachians belonged to them. The tribe took everything belonging to the men – their supplies and animal skins. Daniel finally escaped in June and returned home with nothing to show for his efforts.

In 1775, he would begin the task for which he became most famous: establishing the Wilderness Road across the Appalachians. It would pave the route for 200,000 settlers to make their own way to the western frontier, including the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. When Boone’s group reached the Kentucky River, they built a fort, now known as Boonesborough, where Daniel would settle with his family.

Frontier life was tough and an everyday struggle, particularly as the Native Americans wanted their land back and would frequently attack in an attempt to drive the settlers back to where they came from. Daniel’s daughter Jemima and some of her friends were kidnapped by the Shawnee and Cherokee people whilst they were canoeing. Boone wasted no time and rescued them two days later.

Another encounter with the Shawnee would follow, with Daniel himself captured and even adopted by chieftain Blackfish, in place of one of his sons who had died. With them for four months, Boone was named Big Turtle, or Sheltowee.

There would be several ups and downs, with Boone losing his land due to red tape, debt and title deed mistakes. He moved to present-day Missouri with his family but would again lose his land claims after Spain transferred the territory to the French, who promptly sold it off to the US. He was able to continue living on land owned by his family. After Rebecca died at the age of 75 in 1813 (at the home of her daughter Jemima Boone Calloway), he moved in with his children, who were married with families of their own.

Through his progeny, Boone’s legacy extended even farther; in two generations, his descendants spread across the continent. From Kentucky to California, Daniel’s offspring were at the forefront of the westward expansion of the United States. Their lives intersected with the most famous events in the history of the American conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the Great West: the trapping of Rocky Mountain leaver, the trade on the Sante Fe trail, the settlement of Texas, the conflict with the Mormons, the Gold Rush to California, the migration to the Oregon Territory, and, above all, the dispossession of Indian peoples.

(The Legacy of Daniel Boone: Three Generations of Boones and the History of Indian-White Relations, Stephen Aron)

Daniel died on 26 September 1820 at his son Nathan Boone’s home and was buried next to Rebecca. Boone County (originally named Boone’s Lick County after the salt lick run by his sons) Missouri is named in his honour. There is even an annual Salt Festival at Big Bone Lick, which features demonstrations of pioneer traditions and frontier skills as well as traditional songs and dancing by Native American groups.

Sources

https://shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/b/booned/

http://mentalfloss.com/article/548112/facts-about-daniel-boone

https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-might-not-know-about-daniel-boone

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/explorers/daniel_boone.php

https://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/daniel-boone-legacy

https://studylib.net/doc/8052183/rebecca-boone-and-kentucky-frontier-women-bluegrass-heritage

http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2008/11/rebecca-bryan-boone.html

Chapter 24

Edmund Hillary

(20 July 1919–11 January 2008)

I think the most worthwhile things I’ve done have not been on the mountains or in the Antarctic, but doing projects with my friends, the Sherpa people. The twenty-seven schools we’ve now established, the hospitals – those are the things I would like to be remembered for.

When he wasn’t climbing mountains, Edmund kept bees, a rather grounding activity for an adventurer who conquered the world’s highest peak. That quiet, down-to-earth approach explains why he was more conscious of being remembered as a humanitarian than an adventurer. The Sherpa called him ‘Burra Sahib’ or ‘big in heart’.

The ‘roof of the world’, the summit of Mount Everest (also known locally as Chomolungma) is 29,028 feet above sea level – the highest point on Earth; reaching it is no mean feat – doing so is a physical effort of Olympian proportions. That height is about the cruising altitude of commercial airliners – two thirds of the way through the Earth’s atmosphere.

At 11.30am on 29 May 1953, New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Nepal’s Tenzing Norway did it. Mountaineer George Leigh-Mallory had died in his attempt in 1924. They were equipped with insulated clothing and boots, portable radios and open-and-closed oxygen systems. The future Queen Elizabeth II was telegraphed the news on the eve of her coronation; later that year she would bestow knighthoods on both Hillary and Colonel John Hunt, who had led the expedition. Not one to rest on his laurels, he took part in the Commonwealth Trans-Arctic Expedition (1957–1958) and in 1977 a jet-boat journey up the Ganges River.

Edmund Percival Hillary was born on 20 July 1919 in Auckland, New Zealand, to parents Percival (publisher of the North Auckland Times) and Gertrude (a teacher). He had an older sister, June, and a younger brother, Rex. The family moved to South Auckland after Percy, who had served at Gallipoli during the First World War, was given land near Tuakau.

Edmund was 16 when the family moved to Auckland and his father began a magazine for beekeepers, New Zealand Honeybee. Edmund studied at Auckland University College for a while before deciding, alongside Rex, to support their father with his bee-keeping. He climbed his first mountain peak, the 7,500-foot Mount Ollivier, in 1939. With the onset of the Second World War, Edmund was given exemption due to his bee-keeping until he was able to convince his father that he could serve; he did so in 1944 when called up to the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator and was able to do more climbing whilst training in Marlborough, on the country’s south island. He suffered severe burns in a boat accident after being posted to Fiji and the Solomon Islands and was sent to the Southern Alps of the area to recover. It was here that he met his mentor in New Zealand’s most eminent mountaineer and Mount Cook guide of the time, Harry Herbert Ayres.

He made his own ascent of Mount Cook in 1948 and the following year the 4,158-metre Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps (he combined the climb with attending his sister’s wedding). In 1951 he was part of a national expedition to the Garhwal Himalayas, climbing five peaks over 6,000 metres high. The accomplishment secured him a place in Eric Shipton’s British Everest Reconnaissance Expedition.

After two years of preparation with Colonel John Hunt (who had to be persuaded by the other members of the international climbing team not to cut them from the group) in March 1953, Hillary, together with his partner and fellow Kiwi climber George Lowe, was one of the British-led group of twenty superb climbers at Everest, with a 350-strong Nepalese crew and 36 Sherpas carrying 10,000 pounds of food and equipment. The expedition was sponsored by the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club of Great Britain and the Royal Geographic Society.

History has given Hillary precedence over Lowe, whose contribution was considerable – he cut the ice of the glacial wall of Lhotse Face with his axe as well as cutting the steps to the final camp, which lay 1,000 feet below the summit on 28 May 1953. The following day, 29 May 1953, at 11.30am with the rest of their climbing party too exhausted for the final assault, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal reached the summit. When Lowe met them on their descent with food and oxygen, Hillary said: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’

Journalist Jan Morris, who was also part of the expedition, said:

… when it came to the point near the summit, George had to play a subsidiary role. He climbed very high, he climbed to top camp and said goodbye to Hillary, then helped him come down. He played a very important role.

Hillary himself said of Lowe: ‘Calm and competent, he rode through the storm like a great ocean liner. With his strong hand on the rope, I knew I couldn’t fall far.’ Lowe’s wife Mary said, ‘He had a wonderful life. He did a lot of things, but he was a very modest man … He never sought the limelight. Ed Hillary didn’t seek the limelight either – but he had it thrust upon him.’

Lowe went on to direct the Academy Award nominated The Conquest of Everest in 1954, was a founder of the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust and in 2008 told the New Zealand Herald he was very happy not to have had Hillary’s life. ‘Ed was the right one. I would have been a bugger. I wouldn’t have had the diplomacy.’

Following Everest, Hillary was celebrated across the globe for his incredible accomplishment and married viola player Louise Rose on 3 September 1953. They had three children, Peter (born 1954), Sarah (1956) and Belinda (1959).

British explorer Vivian Fuchs invited Hillary to lead the New Zealand contingent of the Trans-Antarctic expedition (from the southern Atlantic Ocean to South Pole) in 1957 and 1958. They set up Scott Base, New Zealand’s permanent Antarctic Research Station on 20 January 1957. In October they drove south on specially modified tractors to establish refuelling stops for the British contingent. Against the explicit instructions of the British Ross Sea Committee, they decided to go, as Hillary said, ‘hell-bent for the Pole – God willing and crevasses permitting.’

His crew reached the South Pole on 4 January 1958 – the first to reach there, by land, in 46 years, since Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated attempt in 1912.

British explorer Eric Shipton had discovered a human-like footprint whilst climbing the Menlung Glacier, west of Mount Everest, on the Nepal–Tibet border. Meanwhile, Hillary and George Lowe had inexplicably found hair on a high mountain pass in 1952 and Hillary found tracks in 1953 in the Barun Khola range whilst climbing Everest. So Hillary led the Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition between 1960 and 1961, building a hut at 19,000 feet to study the effects of high altitudes on the human body; the group tried, and failed to climb the 8,340-metre high Makalu without oxygen. And as part of their research, they set off in search of the Yeti (the Sherpa word for ‘wild man) themselves. ‘We shouldn’t go just Yeti searching, we should study how people live at high altitude.’

The Yeti fascination was so intense during this time that the US. State department produced guidelines for American tourists just in case they bumped into one.

1.A royalty of 5,000 Indian rupees was to be paid to the Nepalese government to fund an expedition to search for said yeti.

2.The Yeti may be photographed but not killed, unless in self-defence. All photos or the corpse of the yeti must be surrendered to the Nepalese government immediately.

3.All accounts of the yeti sighting should be considered property of the Nepalese government, and may not be distributed to the press without the government’s consent.

(Later, DNA evidence of alleged Yeti bones, hair and teeth determined that they belonged to Nepalese bears.)

A devoted humanitarian, Hillary was passionate about preserving Nepal’s society and environment, building schools and hospitals, including the school at Khumjung, near Everest. The Himalayan Trust, set up by Lowe, has built over twelve schools, hospitals and medical clinics, repaired bridges, installing water pipes and other essential infrastructure works.

Louise and their youngest daughter, Belinda, died tragically on 31 March 1975 when the light aircraft they had boarded to meet Edmund at Phaphlu, 270 kilometres from Kathmandu in Nepal, crashed on take-off. It was the same year that Tabei Junko of Japan became the first woman to summit Everest.

Hillary later re-married and retired to his bee farm outside of Auckland, not before being made New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India in 1985 and named honorary president of New York’s Explorers Club. He also took a ski-plane jaunt to the North Pole in 1985 with famed US astronaut Neil Armstrong. In 1990 and again in 2003, his son Peter followed in his footsteps by summiting Everest. Edmund returned to visit Antarctica’s Scott Base in 2004 and 2007.

Edmund died of a heart attack in New Zealand at the age of 88 and was given a state funeral on 22 January. His ashes were scattered on the Hauraki Gulf by his family.

Sources

https://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-edmund-hillary/

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hillary-and-tenzing-reach-everest-summit

https://www.notablebiographies.com/He-Ho/Hillary-Edmund.html

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-george-lowe-20130322-story.html

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/caring-huts-antarctica

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/edmund-hillary/early-years

https://www.ripcordrescuetravelinsurance.com/65-years-hillary-sees-yeti-tracks-everest-researchers-say-bears/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/08/yeti-abominable-snowman-bear-daniel-taylor/

https://splinternews.com/what-to-do-if-you-encounter-the-yeti-according-to-a-19-1793852289

Chapter 25

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

(15 February 1874–5 January 1922)

Loneliness is the penalty of leadership.

Shackleton was born on 15 February 1874 in Kilkea, County Kildare, Ireland, the second of ten children. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. Ernest had other ideas and would play a huge part in what became known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.

He joined the Merchant Navy at the age of 16, qualifying as a master mariner in 1898, at the age of 24.

Robert Falcon Scott wanted Ernest as third lieutenant on his British National Antarctic expedition aboard the Discovery in 1901. Together with Edward Wilson, they made their attempt to reach the South Pole in a sledge journey across the Ross Shelf, managing to get closer to it than anyone before them had, although Shackleton became extremely ill in the process and had to turn back. He was sent home on a supply ship in 1903.

Five years later he came back to Antarctica, this time as leader of the British Antarctic (Nimrod) expedition (1907–1909). Ice stopped them from reaching base in Edward VII Peninsula, so they spent the winter on Ross Island.

The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below.

In 1911, he was devastated when Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole. Captain Scott and his group perished on their own return journey in 1912. Shackleton’s dreams shattered, he regrouped and challenged himself to another challenge – to cross the Antarctic via the South Pole: it would entail landing in the Antarctic and traversing nearly 2,000 miles over the entire continent.

A total of 5,000 people applied to be part of the trip. Twenty-seven were eventually selected, together with sixty-nine dogs, with names such as Upton, Hercules, Bummer, Satan and Shakespeare. Their appointed ship was originally called Polaris, but was eventually re-named in honour of Shackleton’s family motto: ‘By Endurance We Conquer’.

On 1 August 1914, with the First World War just declared, Shackleton and his twenty-six-strong crew on board the Endurance, as part of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, set off for his third trip to the South Pole.

Shackleton’s plan was to land a party of men, dogs and supplies on the Weddell Sea side of the continent and travel across uncharted territory to the South Pole. Here he would then follow Captain Scott’s journey before picking up the route he had taken back in 1908 to reach the Ross Sea. While he was making his attempt from a second party would lay depots of food and fuel across the Ross Ice Shelf towards the pole along that route for his crossing party to pick up.

In January 1915, just eighty-five miles from their destination, they got stuck in Antarctic ice and would remain there for two years. The expedition now became a fight for survival, as the group camped on the sea ice. They played football, music and games to keep themselves occupied. They drifted for ten months until the three-masted ship sank in the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica from the sheer pressure of the ice over such a prolonged period of time.

Shackleton wrote in his diary:

27 October 1915.

After long months of ceaseless anxiety and strain, after times when hope beat high and times when the outlook was black indeed, we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted. The end came at last about 5pm – she was doomed, no ship built by human hands could have withstood the strain – I ordered all hands on to the floe and as the floe near us was cracking we started to sledge all the gear.

The crew abandoned ship and could only take essentials to survive. (One exception to the rule was a banjo belonging to meteorologist Leonard Hussey, which Shackleton described as ‘vital mental medicine’.). The four weakest sledge dog puppies as well as the carpenter’s cat were shot.

We are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us. The task is to reach land with all the members of the Expedition. It is hard to write what I feel.

(Ernest Shackleton, 27 October 1915)

Shackleton successfully led his crew to survival on the floating ice; with their supplies nearly gone, and the rest of the dogs eaten, in April 1916 they made a break for it, in three small life boats, reaching Elephant Island (so-named by the early explorers who spotted elephant seals on its shores).

They were laughing uproariously, picking up stones and letting handfuls of pebbles trickle between their fingers like miners gloating over hoarded gold.

(Ernest Shackleton)

Once establishing his crew had a base there (they would survive on penguin and seal meat, as well as their own dogs) he took five members of his team together with a month of supplies, and spent over two weeks crossing 1,300 kilometres of freezing waters, huge waves, ice-cover and in danger of capsizing, in a whale boat to reach South Georgia.

From there, in one burst of thirty-six non-stop hours of travel, they trekked to a whaling station, reaching it on 20 May. From there, they returned and rescued the remaining members of the Endurance team. Not a single member died.

Shackleton served in the First World War as part of the British armed forces and then prepared for a fourth Antarctic trip, to be called the Shackleton–Rowett Antarctic Expedition, with the aim of circumnavigating the Antarctic, but he died from a heart attack on 5 January 1922.

He is buried on the island of South Georgia, near the former whaling station at Grytviken.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Henry-Shackleton

https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/may/21/ernest-shackletons-endurance-expedition

https://www.biography.com/explorer/ernest-shackleton

https://blog.archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/2015/10/01/shackletons-endurance-expedition-centenary/

Chapter 26

George Mallory

(18 June 1886–9 June 1924)

George Leigh Mallory went missing on 4 June 1924, on his third attempt to summit Mount Everest.

An explorer and climber, he was part of the first British team determined to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1921 and 1922. His final attempt in 1924 would claim his life, just 300 metres from his camp.

It took more than 70 years before his body would be discovered, face down, in 1999. The body of his climbing partner, Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine, has never been discovered, although his mountain axe was found in 1933, 800 feet above Mallory’s remains.

They were last seen 800 feet (245 metres) from the summit; it’s thought that they died after a fall on the north-east ridge of Everest, perhaps both tied to each other with climbing rope.

Snow goggles were discovered in Mallory’s pocket. Perhaps he had taken them off as he wouldn’t need them as they made the descent from the summit in the dark, when there was no blinding sun, and there was no need for snow goggles. Further tantalizing evidence, perhaps, that they did reach the summit. Irvine was just 22 years old when he died.

The photographs of Mallory’s body caused a sensation when they were published worldwide, although the mountaineering community largely condemned the images, believing them to be hugely disrespectful and akin to grave robbing.

It is believed that, if found, Irvine’s body will be found in a sitting position, above the rock shelf at around 27,000 feet.

It’s not clear whether the pair ever reached the summit, although experts, based on the placement of Mallory’s body, believe he was actually making his way down the mountain, rather than up it. And a camera that the pair had taken with them to document their attempt has never been found. Mallory had also taken a photograph of his wife to leave at the summit – and no photo was found on his body, further evidence perhaps that the pair made it to the top, only to perish on their way back down. On his body was found a letter from suffragette Stella Cobden-Sanderson who had met Mallory in the US in 1923 – some believe this suggests they had an affair.

They were last seen at 12.50pm by fellow climber Noel Odell, and then cloud cover obscured the view. They were never seen alive again.

The question is tantalizing – if they did reach the summit, then they would have done so nearly thirty years before the historic ascent of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

When asked why he wanted to attempt Everest, his response was: ‘Because it is there.’

Born in Mobberley, Cheshire, to a clergyman father, Herbert, and mother, Annie, herself the daughter of a clergyman, Mallory was a graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge University, and became a teacher. His passion and natural aptitude for climbing began whilst he was a maths scholarship student at Winchester College and his housemaster Graham Irving encouraged him to join a trip to the Alps in 1904.

In 1910 he began teaching at Charterhouse School in Surrey, where he met his future wife, Ruth, with whom he would have three children: daughters Clare and Beridge and son John.

He served in the First World War, in France, and continued his teaching career on his return. A member of the UK’s most important climbing fraternity, the Alpine Club, he was chosen for their first expedition to Everest.

The first attempt in 1921 was purely for research and reconnaissance purposes – to literally find Everest and plot a course around its base, before Mallory and his school friend Guy Bullock, after mapping a route, attempted to climb it. They were ultimately turned back by extraordinary winds at a valley called the North Col.

Mallory also formed part of the second attempt in 1922 where they used extra oxygen during some of the climb – this was an innovative move at the time. Tragically, after initially reaching 27,300 feet (8,230 metres), a second attempt to better that was abruptly cut short when the party of climbers fell prey to an avalanche, which claimed the lives of seven porters; two others were successfully dug out of the snow.

His nickname was Galahad. A fictional account of his life was written by Jeffrey Archer. Mallory’s body was found in 1999, forty-six years later, frozen and preserved, his remains showing he suffered broken bones, likely from a fall. He had attempted the ascent in 1924 – and was never seen again. We will never know whether he and fellow climber Andrew Irvine reached the summit.

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/15/jasonburke.theobserver

https://secretsoftheice.com/news/2017/04/02/everest/

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/mallory-the-everest-enigma-1634977.html

http://malloryexpedition.com/george.htm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/11960859/The-secret-relationship-between-climbing-legend-George-Mallory-and-a-young-teacher.html

Chapter 27

Ibn Battuta

(24 February 1304–1368)

I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So, I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta has been described as both the greatest explorer of all time and the Muslim Marco Polo, traversing nearly the entire Islamic world or Dar al-Islam.

He was born in Tangier, Morocco, on 24 February 1304 into a Berber family of Islamic judges. In 1325, at the age of 21, he left the house to embark on a pilgrimage or haj to Mecca and didn’t return for over twenty years.

After returning to Fez in 1354 (allegedly with 600 female slaves), he spent the following year dictating his story to Ibn Juzayy, a writer commissioned by the city’s ruler. His experiences were recorded in a travelogue called A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling; it’s more commonly known as the Rihla or Travels; the manuscripts weren’t discovered until the 1830s.

It’s estimated he covered 73,000 kilometres across Africa, the Middle East, India and South East Asia – all in all, traversing forty-four modern-day countries, although there is some question as to whether he truly visited every single one that is mentioned in the Rihla.

His background as an Islamic scholar meant that whilst travelling in Muslim lands, he received hospitality and generosity, with gifts given to him including slaves and concubines. A judge, botanist and geographer, he travelled by donkey, caravan, boat and on foot, facing bandits, pirates, fevers, wars and kidnap.

He took on concubines (some were given as gifts and were likely slaves) and married ten times; of whom, as mentioned above, he would wed in one country and then divorce as he prepared to leave it.

It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer … When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The women of these islands never leave their country.

(Dunn, p. 237, https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta/travels-ibn-battuta-side-trips)

In India, he was employed as a judge under Islamic Sultan Muhammad Tughluq and remained there for a number of years, marrying and having children, before being sent as an envoy to the Mongol court of China in 1341.

He described Shina as ‘the safest and best country for the traveller, which he described as ‘the safest and best country for the traveller.’

Sources

https://www.history.com/news/why-arab-scholar-ibn-battuta-is-the-greatest-explorer-of-all-time

https://www.famousscientists.org/ibn-battuta/

http://muslimheritage.com/article/ibn-battuta

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/ibn-battuta-0011325

http://www.10-facts-about.com/Ibn-Battuta/id/1569

Chapter 28

Meriwether Lewis

(18 August 1774–11 October 1809)

William Clark

(1 August 1770–1 September 1838)

and Sacagawea

(c. 1788–c.1812)

The Lewis and Clark Expedition from May 1804 to September 1806, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the first American expedition to cross the western portion of the United States. Their aim was to find a waterway from the US to the Pacific Ocean, to trade with American Indians and collect as much scientific and military information as possible.

In 1803, the US conducted the Louisiana Purchase and bought over 800,000 unexplored square miles of land for $15 million from France. President Jefferson asked Congress to fund an expedition to map out a route from Missouri and the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and back again. He called it the Voyage of Discovery and 29-year-old Captain Meriwether Lewis (the private presidential secretary) and his friend and co-captain, 33-year-old William Clark were selected to lead it.

With a team of forty men, they set out from St Louis on 14 May 1804, taking with them warm clothes, guns, food and beads to trade with the Native Americans.

Travelling on one main barge accompanied by two smaller boats or pirogues, they reached the Pacific in November of the following year, 1805. After a winter spent by the ocean, it took them six months to return home: their total journey was 7,000 miles.

During their travels, they encountered grizzly bears and the prairie dog, both of them completely new to the explorers. The only fatality, however, during the expedition was Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died from, of all things, a burst appendix.

Sacagawea

Accompanying them on the 1805–1806 voyage of discovery was bilingual Shoshone tribe member Sacajawea. She was the only female on the trip. Although ostensibly brought along for her skills as a translator, Sacajawea was also a herbalist, plant expert and guide to the Corps. She helped them trade, barter and traverse the unfamiliar terrain. Without Sacagawea, Louis and Clark would have failed.

It is not known how Sacajawea felt or what she said. No one even knows what she looked like. There are also debates on whether she died when the history books claim she did. What is known is that Sacajawea was born in the Lemhi River Valley (now Idaho), and was part of the Lemhi group of the Native American Shoshone tribe.

Kidnapped in 1800, when she was only 12, during a buffalo hunt by rival tribe Hidatsa she was sold as a slave to fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. She became the second of his wives (like the Native Americans he lived with, he practised polygamy) and soon bore him a son. Just two months after Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau (nicknamed ‘Pomp’) was born, on 11 February 1805, Sacajawea, with her husband and newborn, joined the explorers.

The journals of Clark and Lewis and other members of the Corps reveal a cold lack of empathy for Sacajawea; they never agreed on a common spelling for her name and often just called her squaw, Indian woman or Indian girl. Clark referred to Sacajawea as the group’s ‘token of peace’ and noted that he witnessed Charbonneau striking his wife during a meal.

Hugely useful with her knowledge of the terrain, its edible plants and native languages, it was her visible presence on the expedition, as a mother with a young child, that ensured they were welcomed by other Native American tribes they encountered as peaceful explorers rather than as a possible war party. As a group of men they would have been met with aggression and suspicion.

During one of these encounters, with a group from the Shoshone tribe, Sacajawea was actually joyfully reunited with her brother, now Chief Cameahwait, who provided the Corps with horses to cross the Rockies. Despite the reunion (emotional because once kidnapped, a member of the Shoshone tribe was mourned as ‘dead’), she left him behind and continued with the explorers.

When a boat they were travelling in, steered by her husband, hit a squall and nearly capsized she kept calm and ensured valuable supplies, equipment, documents and journals were not lost. At the end of the expedition, declared a success in terms of exploration and mapping, though it did not find the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific, Charbonneau was given hundreds of acres of land and $500. Sacajawea received nothing.

Together with her husband and son, Sacajawea travelled to St Louis to visit Clark in 1809, when Clark took custody of ‘Pomp’ and assumed responsibility for his education. Three years later Sacajawea had a daughter, Lisette, but died just a few months later. Clark became custodian of both children. Whilst Jean-Baptiste went on to become an explorer himself, little is known of Lisette or whether she even survived infancy.

Sacajawea died, likely of typhoid, on 22 December 1812 at Fort Manuel in what is now South Dakota. She was just 25 years old. An interpretation of what her face might have looked like was minted on a dollar coin in 2000 and there are monuments dedicated to her in Wyoming and Missouri.

Three years after the end of the expedition, Captain Meriwether Lewis died from gunshot wounds – controversy still rages over his death.

Sources

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/explorers/lewis_and_clark.php

Chapter 29

Percival Harrison Fawcett

(18 August 1867–c. 1925)

The Lost City of Z

Born in Torquay, Devon, family responsibilities fell heavily on Percival’s shoulders after his aristocratic father squandered the family fortunes.

Describing the Amazon as ‘the last great blank space in the world’, the British explorer and his son Jack, disappeared in 1925 whilst searching through the Mato Grosso (‘thick bushes’) for the ancient lost city of El Dorado, which was said to be made out of solid gold.

Fawcett served as an officer of the Royal Artillery in 1886, in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka). He fought in the First World War and was recruited by the British Secret Service to act as a spy in Morocco.

Fawcett was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who would use his reports as inspiration for his book The Lost World; he was also probably the inspiration behind legendary archaeologist adventurer Indiana Jones.

Part of the Royal Geographic Society, after taking their course on frontier surveying, in 1906, at the age of 39, he was sent to Brazil to map the border of Bolivia and Brazil. It meant a prolonged absence from his family and uncertain danger, but it was an opportunity to restore his family name and honour. So he took it.

He was asked by Bolivia to map and survey the River Verde, on the frontier of Brazil. The five-week expedition was a disaster – with the majority of his crew dying.

He returned again in 1910 to map Bolivia’s border with Peru; this experience saw him meeting native tribes who shot arrows over their heads. In total, he made four surveying journeys for the Bolivian government.

Fawcett undertook eight surveying expeditions into the Amazon during which he discovered fragments of pottery, evidence he believed that pointed to an ancient civilization. Fawcett thought that the lost city that he referred to as ‘Z’, whether there was gold or not, was somewhere in the midst of the 5.5 million square miles of Amazon rainforest. And he was determined to find it.

His first attempt in 1920 ended badly – with his shooting his injured pack horse and contracting a serious illness. Fawcett’s writings reveal that he thought this lost civilization a kingdom of Atlantis, even referring to it as ‘the cradle of all civilisations’.

Inspired by a fragment of paper dated 1743, possibly written by a Portuguese explorer, referring to a deserted city somewhere in the thick jungle, in 1925, at the age of 58, he tried again, bringing his son 21-year-old son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimell.

He was explicit in his instructions that if they went missing, no one was to attempt a rescue attempt – it was too dangerous. A search expedition led by George Dyott in 1928 discovered that Fawcett, seeing two solitary canoes on the river shore, had simply taken them. The native Kalapo tribe have an oral tradition that remembers a visit by three white men, two of whom were injured.

According to Canadian explorer and historian John Hemming, Fawcett had ‘ugly racist notions about the Native Americans’. He quotes Fawcett as describing indigenous tribes as:

large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with forehead sloping back from pronounced eye ridges – men of a very primitive kind … villainous savages … great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.

Hugh Thomson says of Fawcett: ‘He is not listed in most of the official anthologies of exploration. If anything, he is thought of as the Lord Lucan of the exploring world, whose most dramatic achievement was to get himself lost.’

(https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/lost-city-of-z-hollywood-wanted-indiana-jones-but-percival-fawcett-was-a-rude-racist-a3499816.html)

Hemming would rather that Fawcett was an arrogant bigot, a racist nutcase, whose accomplishments have been vastly overestimated and whose expertise and accomplishments were only limited to surveying. Writer and explorer Hugh Thomson also takes umbrage with history’s remembrance of Fawcett as a noble explorer.

Fawcett probably died at the hands of a hostile tribe deep in the rainforest, after failing to be prepared to reciprocate their hospitality and offers of gifts. It’s argued that he may have been looking for Kuhikugu, an archaeological site discovered after Fawcett’s disappearance.

Hugh Thomson pointedly remarks that there is no mention of Fawcett in any of the anthologies of exploration – purely because he never discovered anything – yet his life remains one hell of an adventure story.

Hugh Thomson says: ‘Fawcett self-mythologized, presenting jungle journeys as if they were Homeric odysseys.’

Sources

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/12/the-hero-of-the-lost-city-of-z-was-no-hero/?utm_term=.1bbb43a6b156

https://uk.reuters.com/article/books-explorer/fate-of-legendary-british-explorer-solved-maybe-idUKSP24989620090225

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/the-lost-city-of-z-what-happened-to-percy-fawcett/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/21/research.brazil

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/the-lost-city-of-z-is-a-very-long-way-from-a-true-story-and-i-should-know/

https://www.inverse.com/article/30137-lost-city-of-z-percy-fawcett-true-story-accuracy-james-gray

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/percy-fawcett-victim-of-a-theosophical-obsession

Chapter 30

Marco Polo

(1254–1324)

I have not told half of what I saw.

Born into a wealthy family of Venetian jewel merchants, Polo was an Italian merchant, explorer and writer. His mother died when he was very young; he was brought up by the wider family.

Although he never intended to be an explorer, his adventures began at the age of 17 – when not only did he meet his merchant father, Niccolo, for the very first time (he’d been away travelling since Marco was born) and his uncle Maffeo, but he also left Venice for the first time.

In 1271, with his father and uncle, he left Venice, joined by two friars, who swiftly turned back as soon as the going got tough. (The Khan had requested at least a hundred priests, in order for them to teach him about Christianity, but none were willing to undertake the incredibly arduous journey).

He travelled to Asia and back during an incredible twenty-four-year, 15,000-mile stint through the Silk Road, reaching China and Mongolia.

His suffered a stint in jail, was a fighter for Venice against the Republic of Genoa, confused rhinoceros with unicorns, and believed that spirits lurked and sang from the sands of the Gobi Desert – a phenomenon we now to be the sounds of seismic waves through the grains of sand.

This desert is reported to be so long that it would take a year to go from end to end; and at the narrowest point it takes a month to cross it. It consists entirely of mountains and sands and valleys. There is nothing at all to eat.

In May 1275, after three and a half years and 5,600 miles, the Polos made their approach to the original capital of Kublai Khan: Shang-tu (this was the summer residence; the winter palace was as his capital, Cambaluc, or Beijing).

Marco recalled his very first meeting with the Great Khan to Rustichello:

They knelt before him and made obeisance with the utmost humility. The Great Khan bade them rise and received them honorably and entertained them with good cheer. He asked many questions about their condition and how they fared after their departure. The brothers assured him that they had indeed fared well, since they found him well and flourishing. Then they presented the privileges and letters which the Pope had sent, with which he was greatly pleased, and handed over the holy oil, which he received with joy and prized very highly. When the Great Khan saw Marco, who was then a young stripling, he asked who he was. ‘Sir’ said Messer Niccolo, ‘he is my son and your liege man.’ ‘He is heartily welcome,’ said the Khan. What need to make a long story of it? Great indeed were the mirth and merry-making with which the Great khan and all his Court welcomed the arrival of these emissaries. And they were well served and attended to in all their needs. They stayed at Court and had a place of honor above the other barons.

In his recollections, Marco Polo talked about gunpowder, paper money, burning coal and salt production. It was the latter that would prove to warring historians that his account of his journey to China was genuine.

He has a sheep named after him: Ovis ammon polii, also known as Marco Polo sheep; named by zoologist Edward Blyth in 1841.

Whilst he is renowned for serving at the court of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in Shangdu, Niccolo and Maffeo actually got there first.

The fact that Marco was not a historian did not stop him offering a long history about the Mongols. He provided a detailed account of the rise of Mongol and Great Khan’s life and empire. He described the ceremonial of a Great Khan’s funeral – anyone unfortunate enough to encounter the funeral cortege was put to death to serve their lord in the next world, Mangu Khan’s corpse scoring over twenty thousand victims. He told of life on the steppes, of the felt-covered yurt drawn by oxen and camels, and of the household customs. What impressed Marco most was the way in which the women got on with the lion’s share of the work: ‘the men do not bother themselves about anything but hunting and warfare and falconry.’ In term [sic] of marriage, Marco described that the Mongols practiced polygamy. A Mongol man could take as many wives as he liked. On the death of the head of the house the eldest son married his father’s wives, but not his own mother. A man could also take on his brother’s wives if they were widowed. Marco rounded off his account of Mongol’s home life by mentioning that alcoholic standby which had impressed Rubrouck before him: ‘They drink mare’s milk subjected to a process that makes it like white wine and very good to drink. It is called koumiss.’

(http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/artl/marcopolo.shtml)

How do we know about Marco Polo? Through his book, Il Milione (The Million), known by sceptics as The Million Lies, or The Travels of Marco Polo. His authorship and the veracity of his tales have often been called into question, least of all because he dictated his story to Rustichello, a prisoner and romance writer he met when both were captured by the Genoese.

Historians have argued back and forth about whether Polo made it to China. That he gathered bits of information from his trips to the Black Sea, talking to other merchants and traders and books. He makes, for example, no mention of the Great Wall of China, tea-drinking, foot binding and chopsticks. Equally, Chinese documents from the time make no mention of Marco Polo. In his defence, German historian Hans Ulrich Vogel (Tübingen University) argues that the Venetian traveller made no mention of the Great Wall because it would be centuries before it was as immense as it is now and that it was a product of the Ming Dynasty; and that the Chinese in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries rarely wrote about Western visitors in their records. Vogel also argues that the unique and detailed depictions Marco Polo made of currency and salt production match archaeological evidence, and his information is far more detailed than other travellers, Arab, Western or Persian, of the time.

According to legend, Marco fell in love with one of the daughters of the Great Khan himself; they were married and he brought her back to Venice where tragedy awaited. Marco’s sisters told the young girl that, following his in capture in battle by the Genoese in 1298, that he was dead. Maddened with grief, she set herself on fire and hurled herself from the windows of their house into the canal beneath. The foundations of the Malibran Theatre, built on the remains of Polo’s old houses was found, upon excavations, to have human remains of a young woman of Asian origin, together with Chinese objects and a royal tiara.

The Venetian traveler is the only one to describe precisely how paper for money was made from the bark of the mulberry tree (morusalba l.) He not only details the shape and size of the paper, he also describes the use of seals and the various denominations of paper money. He reports on the monopolizing of gold, silver, pearls and gems by the state – which enforced a compulsory exchange for paper money – and the punishment for counterfeiters, as well as the 3% exchange fee for worn-out notes and the widespread use of paper money in official and private transactions.

(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120416100439.htm)

Intelligent and able to speak four languages, Marco soon made himself indispensable to the Khan and was awarded accordingly, appointed as an official of the Privy Council in 1277. He spent three years as a tax inspector in Yanzhou, a city on the Grand Canal, northeast of Nanking. He also visited Karakorum and part of Siberia, given secure passage through his travels by an authoritative gold tablet, or paiza, given to him by the Khan, to prove who he was, and demonstrate his importance to the kingdom and guarantee his protection.

Throughout his dominions the Polos were supplied with horses and provisions and everything needful … I assure you for a fact that on many occasions they were given two hundred horsemen, sometimes more and sometimes less, according to the number needed to escort them and ensure their safe passage from one district to another.

The Polo family were with the court of Kublai Khan for an incredible seventeen years, making plans to leave with their vast wealth intact when it became clear that the Khan was getting older – and that his death might mean the loss of their fortune and their inability to leave the country with it.

When Master Niccolò, Master Maffeo, and Master Marco had stayed with the Great Khan at his court [for] many years, they said among themselves that one day they wished to go back to their … native country, for it was now high time to do so. Though they found themselves very rich in jewels of great value and in gold, an extreme desire to see their native land again was always fixed in their minds; and even though they were honored and favored, they thought of nothing else but this.

(As written by Marco Polo, and featured in https://erenow.net/biographies/marco-polo-from-venice-to-xanadu/15.php)

In 1292, when Marco was about 38 years old, they secured their exit strategy by convincing the Khan to allow them one final act of service: to escort 17-year-old Mongolian Blue Princess Kokachin to her politically expedient marriage to Persian prince (khan) Arghun, the Ilkhanate of Persia, which was loosely part of the Mongol Empire. Arghun’s wife, Queen Bolgana, had died. The Khan asked the Polo family to promise that after they had spent some time in the ‘land of the Christians and their home’, that they would return to him. They agreed – but had zero intention of doing so.

The Khan gifted them with ‘two tablets of gold sealed with the royal seal with orders written thereon that they should be free and exempt from every burden and secure through all his lands.’ He also:

entrusted them with many things on his own behalf [presumably letters and other personal items] and with an embassy to the pope and to the king of France, and to the king of England, and to the king of Spain and to the other crowned kings of Christendom.

Although they were given a splendid send-off, on fourteen huge ships (according to Marco, four of them held 250 men each), their journey home is widely seen as a disaster; eventually reaching the kingdom of Arghun to deliver the Blue Princess, of the hundreds who accompanied Polo and the princess, he writes that only eighteen survived. The rest of the huge retinue died en route, from scurvy, drowning, disease, pirates and shipwreck. The Polo family and the Blue Princess were amongst the few survivors.

Interestingly, with much of his sojourn in Asia questioned over time by historians, this return journey is the only time that a journey described by Marco is actually confirmed independently by both Chinese and Mongol historical sources. By the time they actually arrived, Arghun was dead – and Kokachin was instead married to his much younger son Ghazan, who was overseen by a regent, Quiacatu. Even then, Marco was not able to directly return home. The Blue Princess and Quiacatu kept them waiting for a further nine months; Kokachin was distraught at the thought of them leaving; she would die in June 1296, likely poisoned by enemies of the Khan. Finally permitted to leave, they had four paizas bestowed on them: ‘… four tablets of gold … two with gerfalcons and one with a lion and the other was plain, each of which was one cubit long and five fingers wide.’

The tablets declared:

that these three messengers should be honored and served through all his land as his own person, and that horses and all expenses and all escort should be given them in full through any dangerous places for themselves and the whole company.

Kublai Khan would die on 18 February 1294, at the age of 80. His burial place has never been revealed nor discovered.

On their eventual return, the Polos’ manner of dress was more Mongol than Venetian and they could barely remember their own language. Their own homes had been taken over by other members of the family, who were convinced with every passing year of their absence, that the Polos had died during their travels.

A Venetian scholar, Giambattista Ramusio, reported that:

They had an indescribable something of the Tartar in their aspect and in their way of speech, having forgotten most of the Venetian tongue. Those garments of theirs were much the worse for wear, and were made of coarse cloth, and cut after the fashion of the Tartars …

Ramusio also reports that in order to prove to their family that they were who they said they were, they appeared at a family dinner dressed in their Mongol clothing and proceeded to:

… bring forth from them enormous quantities of most precious gems such as rubies, sapphires, carbuncles [a deep red garnet], diamonds, and emeralds which had been sewn up in each of the said garments with much cunning and in such fashion that no one would have been able to imagine they were there. For when they took their departure from the Great Khan, they changed all the riches which he had given them into so many rubies, emeralds, and other precious stones, knowing well that had they done otherwise, it would never have been possible for them to carry so much gold with them over such a long, difficult, and far-reaching road.

Now home, Marco discovered that Venice was at war with the Republic of Genoa. Fighting for Venice, he was captured by the Genoese during the Battle of Curzola and thrown into prison. This is where he met romance writer, and professional notary, Rustichello of Pisa, to whom he dictated his life story. During his imprisonment, his father and uncle tried to broker his ransom – to no avail – but he would eventually be released on 28 August 1299, three months after Venice and Genoa agreed to a peace. Marco Polo was now 45 years old. He would shortly after marry Donata Badoer, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and they had three daughters, Fantina, Bellela and Moreta.

Marco brought back with him the concept of paper money, which he had seen for himself at the court of the Khan. He wrote of the musk deer, the chow chow breed of dog, the yak and was so struck by the extraordinariness of the rhinoceros, that he was convinced they were unicorns. Rustichello said Marco Polo:

… noted down only a few things which he still kept in his mind; and they are little compared to the many and almost infinite things which he would have been able to write if he had believed it possible to return to these our parts; but thinking it almost impossible ever to leave the service of the Great Khan, king of the Tartars, he wrote only a few small things in his notebooks.

No original transcript of the manuscript created in that prison exists.

Christopher Columbus carried a copy of Polo’s book with him on his own travels to the New World in 1492.

He ends his book thus:

I believe our return was the pleasure of God, that the things that are in the world might be known. For, according as we have told at the beginning of the book … there was never any man, neither Christian nor Saracen nor Tartar nor pagan, who has ever explored as much of the world as did Master Marco, the son of Master Niccolò Polo, noble and great citizen of Venice.

Sources

http://mentalfloss.com/article/84526/15-surprising-facts-about-marco-polo

https://www.livescience.com/27513-marco-polo.html

https://www.venetoinside.com/hidden-treasures/post/the-ghost-of-the-chinese-wife-of-marco-polo/

https://www.history.com/news/marco-polo-went-to-china-after-all-study-suggests

Marco Polo was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues, (Brill Verlag) Hans Ulrich Vogel, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Tübingen,

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120416100439.htm

http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/artl/marcopolo.shtml

https://erenow.net/biographies/marco-polo-from-venice-to-xanadu/15.php

Chapter 31

Sir John Franklin

(1786–1847)

Franklin led the doomed 1845 Northwest Passage expedition. His first attempt to get there was in 1819–1822. On his return in 1823, he married poet Eleanor Anne Porden; she died just two short years later from tuberculosis, leaving behind their daughter, Eleanor Isabella.

Franklin was an Arctic explorer and British naval officer. He saw action in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 as the signals officer of HMS Bellerophon, which left him slightly deaf but otherwise not wounded.

He got married for the second time in 1828 to Jane Griffin, a friend of his first wife.

His second overland expedition was in 1825–1827.

He tried three times to discover the Northwest Passage, the sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Two expeditions were overland, and the final attempt in 1845 has entered the realm of legend in terms of its horrifying result. It’s been described as the ‘worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration’ (Royal Museums Greenwich, https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/exploration-endeavour/sir-john-franklin#First).

The crew died from scurvy and lead poisoning from the tinned food taken on the voyage, and starvation. There is also evidence pointing towards incidents of cannibalism. In April 2017, Canadian researchers discovered four bodies in permafrost that were part of the expedition of 1845. These bodies were later confirmed to have been women.

Source

https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/exploration-endeavour/sir-john-franklin

Chapter 32

Sir Richard Francis Burton

(19 March 1821–20 October 1890)

England is the only country where I never feel at home.

England certainly delivered some of the greatest Victorian explorers of the era. Burton was certainly that, as well as an anthropologist, linguist, orientalist, diplomat and writer.

Born in Devon to an army officer father, Colonel Joseph Burton, Richard was something of a wild child, accompanying his parents as they travelled across the globe.

In 1842 he was expelled from Oxford’s Trinity College (his father had forced him to join) for attending a steeplechase race (which was strictly against the rules) and joined the army of the East India Company. He would spend nearly a decade doing ‘spy’ work in India before deciding that adventuring was the next step for him.

In 1853 he disguised himself as ‘Sheik Abdullah’ and undertook the ‘Haj’ or pilgrimage to Mecca – an incredibly daring and dangerous task for a Westerner; if he had been discovered, his life would have been forfeit. The Royal Geographic Society agreed to fund the trip – as long as he managed to survive it. Well aware of the risks he was taking, he later wrote: ‘a blunder, a hasty action, a misjudged word, a prayer or bow, not strictly the right shibboleth, and my bones would have whitened the desert sand.’

Such was his dedication to utterly disguising himself in every sense, that he was circumcised.

He carried a small pistol and a copy of the Koran, with three secret compartments, carrying a watch, compass, money and writing materials to record his experiences; twelve of the men in his travelling caravan were killed as he set off. He wrote A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah following his arrival on 11 September 1853 and admittance into the Kaba, the building at the centre of the mosque. He gave his reason for embarking on the adventure as thus: ‘To prove, by trial that what might be perilous to other travelers was safe to me.’

In 1855 he donned his Arabic disguise once again, to explore the African city of Harar, in today’s Ethiopia. The following year he explored Somalia.

During his extraordinary adventures, he would be speared through the face in 1855 and have four teeth knocked out, following an attack by 200 Somalian warriors, and live to tell the tale, proudly displaying the scars towards any camera taking his picture as testament to his life experience.

His linguistic genius, coupled with his innate ability to utterly immerse himself in different cultures made him perfect spy material; he was renowned for staying in character for days, often fooling his own friends and colleagues.

Together with British aristocrat John Hanning Speke, he spent two years in Africa searching for the source of the Nile. It’s incredible that the experience didn’t kill him; as it was, Speke was rendered temporarily blind and they survived encountering tribes including the cannibalistic Wabembe. Burton was the first Westerner to see Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest freshwater lake, but never found the source.

He spent time as consul at the port of Santos in Brazil, and married Isabel Arundell, who learned to fence so that she could defend herself if and when she travelled with her husband. He then took a job at the Foreign Office, and was sent to Trieste.

A singularly accomplished linguist, Burton was fluent in twenty-five languages including French, Italian, Greek and Latin and fifteen dialects including Béarnais, Neapolitan and Punjabi. He wrote forty-three volumes on his travels as well as thirty volumes of translations and introduced the word ‘safari’ to the English language.

His fascination with erotica led to his translation and printing of the The Kama Sutra in 1883; considering that Britain had passed the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, under whose umbrella the Kama Sutra would easily have fallen, Burton and his friend Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot devised a loophole, making its publication possible. They created the Kama Shastra Society, and the book could be privately circulated for its members. Forster and Richard were the only two members – but the illusion allowed Burton to spread the book throughout a fascinated Europe. As well as his undercover reporting of Indian homosexual brothels and interest in female and male circumcision; he also introduced the tales of Aladdin to the Western world through his publishing of the complete edition of the Arabian Nights (1885–1888).

He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886. He died of a heart attack at the age of 69, in 1890, after which his wife, claiming to have been guided by three appearances of his ghost, burned many of his writings and private papers; he and his wife are buried in a tomb shaped like a Bedouin tent.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Burton-British-scholar-and-explorer

https://www.adventure-journal.com/2016/06/historical-badass-explorer-sir-richard-francis-burton/

https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/sex-and-drugs-and-the-source-of-the-nile-sir-richard-francis-burton/

https://www.ranker.com/list/life-of-sir-richard-francis-burton/genevieve-carlton

Chapter 33

Vasco da Gama

(c.1460 ce–23 December 1524)

Da Gama was a Portuguese explorer and navigator who discovered the direct sea route from Europe to Asia. He was also the first European to sail to India by going around Africa, establishing trade routes along the African coast and successfully expanding Portugal’s trading influence.

He was born in Sines, Portugal, sometime between 1460 and 1469. He was the third son to his father, Estêvão da Gama, a fellow explorer as well as a knight. It’s likely that Vasco studied astronomy, navigation and mathematics. He and his wife, Dona Isabel Sodre, had six sons.

Spices were a hot trading commodity – but to get them from India to Europe was expensive and time consuming – they had to travel overland and during the fifteenth century it was the Republic of Venice that held that monopoly. King Manuel I of Portugal wanted to invest in exploration to discover a route by sea – it would make him and his country rich. Da Gama was given a fleet of ships and tasked with finding a route around Africa to India. (His father had been given the commission first, but declined.)

His first endeavour departed Portugal on 8 July 1497: four ships and 170 men, including three interpreters. The São Gabriel and the São Rafael were mid-sized, 120-ton sailing ships; the third was a 50-ton caravel called the Berrio, and the fourth ship, 200-ton São Miguel, was for supplies.

They successfully rounded the Cape of Good Hope (the southern tip of South Africa) on 22 November. They pressed on, stopping at trading ports including Mombasa and Malindi, before finally arriving at the trading post of Calicut, India, in May 1498. He’d done it – in less than ten months.

Calicut was:

one of the greatest ports in the world and a cornerstone of international trade; even goods from the Far East were shipped to Calicut first before the Arabs transported them out to Persia and Europe. Until the Ming emperors elected to isolate themselves from the world, huge Chinese junks used to visit Calicut regularly; between 1405 and 1430 alone, for instance, the famed Admiral Zheng He called here no less than seven times with up to 250 ships manned by 28,000 soldiers.

(https://scroll.in/article/773707/what-really-happened-when-vasco-da-gama-set-foot-in-india)

Initially they received a friendly welcome from the local Hindu residents – but this soured after da Gama offered them cheap greeting gifts: ‘twelve pieces of striped cloth, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case of six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey.’

It’s said that the King of Calicut believed them to be pirates. The situation didn’t improve because the Muslim traders did not look on them favourably.

The hostility of the Arabs did not help either; for they, recognising a threat to their commercial preponderance, initiated a policy of slander, painting him and his men as loathsome, untrustworthy pirates. When complaints about this were made to the Zamorin, they were met with yawning disdain, not least because the Portuguese had precious little to contribute to business or to the royal coffers. The first European trade mission, thus, was a resounding flop as far as the Indians were concerned, and when da Gama’s fleet departed Calicut three months later, they left behind a distinctly unflattering impression on the locals.

Da Gama left for Portugal without signing any treaties, taking several locals with him by force. The route home was horrific. Sailing against the wind, it’s estimated that half of his entire crew perished from scurvy, because the journey took too long – 132 days, arriving in September 1499. His crew was decimated, including his brother Paolo – only 55 of the original 170 survived and two ships remained. That being said, he returned to a hero’s welcome, a knighthood and the feudal rights of his home town of Sines.

Da Gama would embark on two further trips to India; the first in February 1502 as the Admiral of India. Da Gama made good on his reputation for brutality by attacking Arab traders in the region and forced the leader of Calicut into making a peace agreement with Portugal. He also established a Portuguese trading post in what is now Mozambique.

The last trip in 1524, was intended to culminate with him being triumphantly taking over as Viceroy of Portuguese India. Arriving in Goa, he was set with combating Portugal’s corruption in India; however, he died of malaria in December of that year.

Sources

https://exploration.marinersmuseum.org/subject/vasco-da-gama/

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/explorers/vasco_da_gama.php

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vasco-da-Gama

https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/10-interesting-facts-about-vasco-dagama/

https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/vasco-da-gama

https://lisbonlisboaportugal.com/Lisbon-information/Vasco_gama_2.html

Chapter 34

Hernan Cortés

(1485–2 December 1547)

It was a meeting of civilisations which previously had no idea of each other’s existence.

(Michael Wood, historian)

Everything that has happened since the marvellous discovery of the Americas has been so extraordinary that the whole story remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it at first hand. Indeed it seems to overshadow all the deeds of famous people of the past, no matter how heroic, and to silence all talk of other wonders of the world.

(Bartolome de las Casas)

Conquistador is Spanish for ‘he who conquers.’ A more appropriate term might be annihilate, committing unspeakable atrocities whilst doing so.

Hernan Cortés, Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, was the ruthless explorer, inspired by Columbus, who overthrew and conquered the Aztec Empire, and also won Mexico for the Spanish. He was, and remains, a highly controversial figure.

The men who were sent to America to extend the Spanish Empire were, by necessity, largely desperate individuals, men who had little to lose in sailing to an unknown and dangerous territory Many were seduced by the promise, usually illusory, of gold and unimaginable riches for the taking.

(https://www.historytoday.com/archive/death-hernando-cortez)

Born in Medellin, Spain, he was the son of Martín Cortés de Monroy and of Doña Catalina Pizarro Altamarino. Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés’ secretary, says the parents had ‘little wealth, but much honour’ and describes Cortés as ‘ruthless, haughty, mischievous, and quarrelsome, a source of trouble to his parents; much given to women,’ frustrated by provincial life, and excited by stories of the Indies Columbus had just discovered. He set out for the east coast port of Valencia with the idea of serving in the Italian wars, but instead he ‘wandered idly about for nearly a year’ (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hernan-Cortes).

At the age of 14, he was sent to study at Salamanca in Spain with the family hopes of being a lawyer but in 1504, he left in search of his fortune in the New World, reaching the island of Santo Domingo, where he settled down in the new town of Azua, working as a notary and farmer. In 1511, having recovered from syphilis, he joined Diego Velazquez’s expedition to Cuba, where he served as the mayor of Santiago.

In 1518, he was all set to head to Mexico, running his own expedition:

An agreement appointing Cortés captain general of a new expedition was signed in October 1518. Experience of the rough-and-tumble of New World politics advised Cortés to move fast, before Velázquez changed his mind. His sense of the dramatic, his long experience as an administrator, the knowledge gained from so many failed expeditions, above all his ability as a speaker gathered to him six ships and 300 men, all in less than a month. The reaction of Velázquez was predictable; his jealousy aroused, he resolved to place leadership of the expedition in other hands. Cortés, however, put hastily to sea to raise more men and ships in other Cuban ports.

(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hernan-Cortes)

Velazquez, concerned that Cortés had got too big for his conquistador boots, cancelled the expedition.

Cortés wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer and set sail for Yucatán anyway, accompanied by over 500 soldiers, 100 sailors, 16 horses and 11 ships. Landing in Tabasco in March 1519, he wasted no time in establishing alliances and a network of intelligence. He was determined ‘that they would conquer and win the land, or die in the attempt’.

We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.

(Hernan Cortés)

Local tribespeople gave him gifts, including a group of women, one of whom included Malinche, who would become his mistress and indispensable to his efforts. He founded Veracruz, establishing himself as both captain general and chief justice in a bold gesture to Velasquez that he was his own man. His men weren’t in such a rush to explore the interior; but Cortés, in a brutal ‘ride or die’ moment, removed the option for them by destroying many of his own ships so that they’d have no choice but to follow him or perish. They had no other option but to move forward.

Tempted by rumours of the wealth of the rich inland kingdom of Tenochtitlan, and by the gifts bestowed upon them by its Aztec ruler Moctecuhzoma Xocoyotzin – known as Montezuma, Cortés wasn’t just looking to explore. He wanted power and he ruthlessly exploited the rival people of Tlaxcala via their jealousy of the Aztec Emperor, to get it. Initially dubious of Cortez, they saw in him an ally who could take on the dominance of their political rivals.

Whilst making allies with some native groups, Cortés murdered countless others. It’s estimated in the midst of their bloody plunder, he and his men murdered around 100,000 of the indigenous population.

On 8 November 1519, he was received by Montezuma at Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, accompanied by his soldiers and 1,000 Tlaxcaltecs:

Wanting to secure the city peacefully, Cortés negotiated his way into Tenochtitlan as an ambassador of Charles V and was magnificently received by Montezuma, who entertained the Spaniards and their allies lavishly. During their first few days in the city, the conquistadors were shown both the wonders and horrors of this new world. They marvelled at the towering temples, grand palaces, beautiful gardens and great markets, but were revolted by the terrible spectacle of human sacrifice. The conquistador Bernal Díaz, who wrote a famous history of the conquest, described it graphically: ‘The walls of that shrine were so splashed and caked with blood that they and the floor too were black … the stench was worse than that of any slaughterhouse in Spain’.

(https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/hernan-cortesmontezuma-tenochtitlan-aztec-conquest-conquistadors/)

Cortés was a Christian and he passionately felt his duty to convert the Aztecs to worship of the Virgin Mary. He took Montezuma hostage, eventually rushing out of the city on hearing that Spanish troops were on their way to punish him for disobeying orders from Velazquez. He left a garrison behind in Tenochtitlán, under the charge of Spanish captain Pedro de Alvarado, who murdered several Aztec chiefs during his absence. Montezuma was murdered in June 1520 – and the Aztecs took up arms. Under attack, Cortés and his men had to retreat, losing lives and much of their ill-gotten plunder. After several days of retreat, Cortés regrouped and, with the support of his Tlaxcalan allies, seized control of Tenochtitlán on 13 August 1521. Thousands died. The city was sacked. Cortés had taken control of the fallen Aztec Empire.

Cortéz was not master of Mexico. But having won the territory by force he found it difficult to rule. As the years went by Cortéz, the self styled Captain General of New Spain of the Ocean Sea, administered the Colony in an increasingly arrogant and regal manner. The colony was full of men as ambitious and ruthless as himself who formed themselves Into pro and anti-Cortez parties. Rumours were spread that he had murdered his wife, complaints made about this highhanded style, plots hatched against him. Finally, officials were despatched by Spain to help administer the colony, which did not improve Cortéz already volatile and bitter temperament.

(https://www.historytoday.com/archive/death-hernando-cortez)

La Malinche aka Marina/Malintzin/Malinche/Doña Marina/Mallinali (1496–1529)

Her original name was Malinali, and she born in the town of Painala, near to the Coatzacoalcos, where her father was a chieftain. Her mother, from nearby Xaltipan, sold her into slavery to the lord of Pontonchan when she was 5 years old.

La Malinche inherited her aristocratic Aztec father’s wealth when he died and her mother wanted her son from her brand new lord and husband to have it. So she pretended Mallinali had died. The girl was passed around between various owners and given to Cortés as a slave in 1519, when she was soon baptised as Dona Marina.

Central Mexico was composed of several rival Aztec (Mexica) tribes who all hated each other; they especially hated Montezuma, King of the Aztecs, who was rather fond of human sacrifice to appease the gods. It didn’t prove too difficult for the rival tribes to side with Cortés and the Spanish.

She would be extremely useful to him due to her skills in tribal languages, in particular Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and knowledge of local customs and politics. She became his mistress and in 1523 bore him a son, Martin, the first recorded ‘mestizo’ (child of mixed descent) in Mexican history. He would be made legitimate by papal decree, spend his early years at court in Spain and became a soldier like his father.

At around the same time (1524) as she accompanied Cortés on his ill-fated expedition to Honduras, Cortés would eventually convince her to marry Juan Jaramillo, one of his captains, with whom she’d also have a child, and gave her large amounts of land in and around Mexico City as a reward for her ‘service’.

Malinche’s name was vilified after Mexico won independence from Spain; the country hated Cortés and anyone linked to him. Cortés even claimed she was the reason he won New Spain.

One of Cortés’ soldiers, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, described Malinche:

She was a truly great princess, the daughter of Caciques and the mistress of vassals, as was very evident in her appearance. Cortés gave one of them to each of his captains, and Doña Marina, being good-looking, intelligent and self-assured, went to Alonso Hernandez Puertocarrero, who was a very grand gentleman.

(https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-dona-marina-malinche-2136536)

Mexicans today have extremely mixed and varied opinions of Malinche. The majority hate her – viewing her as a sell-out, the reason their culture was decimated. Others argue that as a slave, perhaps she had no choice and was trying to survive and that, as a woman, she enjoyed more independence than most. Some claim that she probably saved lives by negotiating treaties with Cortés rather than promoting constant warfare. It also seems rather unfair to blame her for the decimation of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was actually ravaged by smallpox.

* * *

Cortés’ men were literally robbed by him, receiving only 160 pesos of gold, after the King of Spain, Cortés and his shady contacts received their cut of the empire they had raped, ransacked and ruined. They would always believe that he hid huge amounts from him.

In 1524 Cortés travelled to Honduras in a two-year expedition, to face down a rebellion against him; during this time, news of the appalling behaviour of those he had left in charge reached the ears of the King of Spain. An enquiry into their behaviour was established, and an emissary, Luis Ponce de León, was sent to investigate the claims only to die almost upon arrival. Cortés was accused of poisoning him and forced into a form of self-imposed house arrest. He travelled to Spain in 1528 to clear his name with the King, who made him Marqués del Valle. On returning to New Spain in 1530, he remarried into an aristocratic family (his first wife Catalina, related to the family of his arch enemy Velazquez, died under mysterious circumstances) and built a palace at Cuernavaca, around thirty miles south of Mexico City.

His last expedition was in 1536 to north-western Mexico; in 1540, Cortés retired to Spain, where he died seven years later, worn down by legal woes.

As for the legacy of conquistadors like Cortés, historian Michael Wood puts it succinctly:

The ‘Columbian Exchange’ as modern historians call it, brought the potato, the pineapple, the turkey, dahlias, sunflowers, magnolias, maize, chillies and chocolate across the Atlantic. On the other hand, tens of millions died in the pandemics of the 16th century, victims of smallpox, measles and the other diseases brought by Europeans (and don’t forget that the African slave trade was begun by the Europeans, to replace the work force they had decimated). Then, after the defeat and extermination of the native societies, came the arrival of the European settler class and the appropriation of the native lands and natural resources. From this process has emerged the modern US empire.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/conquistadors_01.shtml)

Sources

https://www.biography.com/explorer/hernan-cortes

https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-spanish-conquistadors-2136511

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-cholula-massacre-2136527

https://www.thoughtco.com/biography-of-malinche-2136516

https://www.ranker.com/list/terrible-facts-about-brutal-conquistador-hernancortes/setareh-janda

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/conquistadors_01.shtml

https://www.thoughtco.com/ten-facts-about-hernan-cortes-2136576

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hernan-Cortes

https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/hernan-cortes-montezumatenochtitlan-aztec-conquest-conquistadors/

Chapter 35

Ferdinand Magellan

(c. 1480–27 April 1521)

At Seville on 24 August 1519 Magellan signed his last will and testament … One-tenth of all he may gain from the voyage to the Moluccas is to be set apart for legacies; one-third to build a new chapel around Santa Maria de la Victoria, where the monks may forever pray for the repose of his soul …

The first European to cross the Pacific Ocean; Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães (more commonly known as Ferdinand Magellan) left Spain on 20 September 1519 with a fleet of five vessels, and a motley crew of sailors from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, north Africa, Sicily and Greece, in an attempt to discover a western sea route to the Moluccas, or Spice Islands in Indonesia and break the Muslim merchants monopoly of the spice trade.

Let’s set the scene in 1519, with the Magellan Project writing that:

… Leonardo da Vinci died, Michelangelo was working in Florence for Pope Leo X, Hernando Cortez entered and conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. The young King Charles was crowned the Holy Roman Emperor. Translated versions of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses were being circulated throughout Europe. The Reformation was underway. The Renaissance and the Age of Exploration were in full bloom.

Magellan was born in Portugal around 1480, either in the city of Porto or Sabrosa. After the death of his parents, he became a page to the Queen of Portugal when he was ten years old; as a youth he studied cartography, astronomy and navigation. In 1505, in his early twenties, he joined a Portuguese fleet of ships that made for East Africa and four years later, was fighting at the Battle of Diu in the Arabian Sea, where the Portuguese destroyed Egyptian ships.

In 1519 he set off from Seville to find this western route to the coast of South America because due to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, a decree from Pope Alexander VI, the world had been split in half between Spain and Portugal; it gave Portugal the eastern route to the Spice Islands – Spain therefore were forced to find an alternative route (without the benefit of a SatNav) by sailing west around South America.

As Magellan was, in fact, Portuguese, his currying favour with King Charles I of Spain (who later became become Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire) and embarking on a Spanish-financed mission, infuriated King Manuel I of Portugal – who considered him a traitor, tried to sabotage him, allegedly put out mafioso-style ‘hit’ on him and sent two Portuguese ships after him to try and capture him to bring him back to face the music.

King Charles gave Magellan a fleet of five ships and a crew of 232. Conditions were tough:

Big water and ferocious storms pounded the expedition. Scurvy and starvation decimated the crews. Mutiny, shipwreck, and a massacre were all a part of the backstory. One ship officer was charged, convicted, and garroted for sodomy within the first few months of the expedition.

The planned route, sailing west across the Atlantic, around South America and across the Pacific, wasn’t a new one – Christopher Columbus and Spanish explorer and conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa (the first European to see the Pacific Ocean) had already paved the way.

They headed first to Brazil and then along the South American coast to Patagonia. The majority Spanish crew weren’t fond of Magellan and, in April 1520, three of the five ships revolted – convinced that Magellan’s determination to find a route was going to get them all killed. Magellan managed to overcome the plots and left two sailors on an island to die as punishment.

Quite incidentally, on 21 October 1520, he discovered what is now known as the Strait of Magellan. He called it ‘Mar Pacifico’ or ‘peaceful sea’ in Portuguese. It took them over a month to sail through it and one of the vessels, the San Antonio ‘abandoned ship’, left the fleet and returned home to Spain, taking most of the food with it. The three remaining ships continued to sail across the Pacific, reaching Guam in March 1521 before reaching Homonhom Island, just before the Philippines, with 150 of the original crew remaining.

Magellan was murdered in April 1521, when a chieftain in the Philippines he was attempting to force to convert to Christianity furiously fought back. Magellan had already convinced Humabon, the local leader of the island of Cebu, to convert. However, his local tribal rival, Lapu Lapu, ruler of the nearby island of Mactan, refused to kowtow to him, and Magellan responded by burning his village to the ground.

When Magellan later returned to the island and again demanded that Lapu Lapu convert, a huge battle ensued – during which the majority of Magellan’s ran for it, and he, identified easily by his armour as the main target, had his helmet struck off twice by rocks, was struck by a spear or scimitar and then stabbed to death, whilst he desperately tried to stand his ground in the knee-deep water. Seven of his sailors died with him, the rest escaping back to Cebu. None of the bodies were ever given back to his crew.

An evangelical cloud of misjudgment preceded the disaster. 1000 warriors in thirty war canoes watched the debacle from offshore at Magellan’s insistence. Rajah Humabon had advised Magellan against the attack but had still provided the 1000 warriors familiar with the defenses of Mactan to join in the battle. Instead, they witnessed the defeat. Magellan’s intent to demonstrate the power of his God fell to earth. The invincibility of all the king’s men came up short. Humabon would soon turn on the survivors of this flawed ally of his with a disguised slaughter.

Magellan’s was the first recorded expedition to circumnavigate the globe, although, technically, he was pipped to the post by Basque mariner Juan Sebastian del Cano, who led the return to Spain in the only surviving vessel, the Victoria, after Magellan was murdered. Only nineteen members of the crew survived, bringing with them 26 tonnes of spices, including cloves and nutmeg. Del Cano would die from scurvy on 6 August 1526 during an ill-fated attempt to re-enact Magellan’s journey to the Spice Islands. Buried at sea, ironically he was one of the sailors who had originally mutinied against Magellan years before at Port St Julian in 1920.

It would be another fifty-eight years before anyone attempted a repeat of the circumnavigation; England’s Sir Francis Drake set sail with a fleet in 1577 and the only surviving vessel would be the famous Golden Hind in 1580.

A twist in the tale is this: in 1511, Portugal captured Malacca (on the Malay peninsula) and thus claimed control of the spice trade between Indonesia and the West. The capture led to the collapse of the Egyptian spice monopoly. Magellan was present during the raid and took a man he later named as Enrique as his personal slave. Enrique, thought to be around 14 years old at the time, was taken back to Europe and accompanied Magellan on his circumnavigation attempt, working as a translator, for which he was paid 1,500 maravedis per month. It was his language skills that would have helped Magellan convince the locals to convert to Christianity.

In his will, Magellan wrote this of Enrique:

And by this my present will and testament, I declare and ordain as free and quit of every obligation of captivity, subjection, and slavery, my captured slave Enrique, mulatto, native of the city of Malacca, of the age of twenty-six years more or less, that from the day of my death thenceforward for ever the said Enrique may be free and manumitted, and quit, exempt, and relieved of every obligation of slavery and subjection, that he may act as he desires and thinks fit; and I desire that of my estate there may be given to the said Enrique the sum of ten thousand maravedis in money for his support; and this manumission I grant because he is a Christian, and that he may pray to God for my soul.

Despite this provision for his freedom, Duarte Barbosa, the new captain general who replaced Magellan, reneged on it, insisting Enrique stay with them as a translator. Enrique had endured quite enough and managed to trick his way off the boat, informing Humabon that the Westerners planned to kidnap him. Humabon duly invited Serrano, Enrique and the crew, a total of twenty-six, to their deaths, in the guide of a banquet on 1 May.

According to Antonio Pigafetta, who was chronicling the expedition, and to whom history owes much of its knowledge of Magellan.

… we heard loud cries and lamentations. We immediately weighed anchor and discharging many mortars into the houses, drew in nearer to the shore. When thus discharging [our pieces], we saw John Seranno in his shirt bound and wounded, crying to us not to fire any more, for the natives would kill him. We asked him whether all the others and the interpreter were dead. He said they were all dead except the interpreter. He begged us earnestly to redeem him with some of the merchandise; but Johan Carvaio, his boon companion, [and others] would not allow the boat to go ashore so that they might remain masters of the ship. But although Johan Serrano weeping asked us not to set sail so quickly, for they would kill him, and said that he prayed God to ask the soul of Johan Carvaio, his comrade, in the day of judgment, we immediately departed. I do not know whether he is dead or alive.

Enrique and the fleet’s priest, Chaplain Valderrama, were the only survivors – meaning there weren’t enough sailors left alive to sail the remaining three ships back home; the Conception was abandoned.

On the presumption that Enrique managed, a decade after his capture, to return home to Malaysia, he likely became the first person in the world to circumnavigate it. Alas, we know nothing more of his story as he disappears from history following the Massacre of Cebu, which took place just four days after Magellan’s death at the Battle of Mactan, which is re-enacted every 27 April with chickens and pigs slaughtered in praise of Magellan’s death. However, there is a statue of him (imagined, as no one knows what he looked like) in the Maritime Museum of Malacca.

Sources

https://www.history.com/news/10-surprising-facts-about-magellanscircumnavigation-of-the-globe

https://www.theawl.com/2012/07/the-slave-who-circumnavigated-the-world/

https://magellanproject.org/tag/enrique/

https://www.biography.com/explorer/ferdinand-magellan

Chapter 36

James Cook

(7 November 1728–14 February 1779)

Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.

Often described as England’s greatest explorer, James Cook was born in Marton, Yorkshire, in 1728, the second of eight children to father James Cook, a Scottish farm worker and his mother, Grace Pace, from Thornaby-on-Tees.

He spent time working on a farm in Yorkshire, moved to Whitby and was apprenticed to a Quaker-owned merchant sailing company at the age of 17, studying trigonometry, astronomy, navigation, geometry and algebra.

Despite what appeared to be a promising future career with the merchant fleet, he joined the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman in 1755 at the start of the Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War, it was a global conflict pitting France, Austria and Russia against Britain and the German kingdom of Prussia). (Historical note: Winston Churchill referred to the Seven Years War as the first world war). Cook served as a master of the HMS Pembroke in North America.

He was soon recognized for his incredible talents as a cartographer and surveyed the St Lawrence River in Canada in 1759 (his charts were so accurate that they ensured the British pulled off a successful surprise attack against French-held Québec) and the islands of Newfoundland, St Pierre and Miquelon between 1760 and 1767. His maps of Newfoundland, created over the course of five seasons, were so accomplished that they were used in the twentieth century.

He married Elizabeth Batts, the daughter of his mentor Samuel Batts (the inn keeper of the Bell Inn in Wapping) in 1762 at St Margaret’s Church in Barking, Essex; they had six children and Elizabeth outlived them all as well as her husband.

On 26 August 1768, James left England’s shores with the command of the HM Bark Endeavour with 100 crew ostensibly to sail to Tahiti and observe the Transit of Venus; in reality and in secrecy, the British government wanted him to try and find the mythical Great Southern Continent.

It was his first round-the-world voyage and he introduced innovative methods to keep his crew safe and well, including instructing them to wash every day, airing their bedding twice a week, eating plenty of fresh fruit to prevent against scurvy (the scourge of all sailors, and caused by a lack of Vitamin C) and consuming vast quantities of sauerkraut (pickled cabbage). His efforts at ensuring their health resulted in him being awarded the Copley Medal (given for outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science) by the Royal Society in 1776 for not losing a single sailor to scurvy.

It was also during this expedition that he mapped the majority of New Zealand’s north and south islands, before heading to the east coast of Australia, where they came across the kangaroo and on 11 June 1770, sailed directly into the Great Barrier Reef, obviously having no idea that it existed. The Endeavour started taking on water and it was twenty hours before they were able to patch the ship up sufficiently to head back to the Australian coast and a further two months before the Endeavour was fit for purpose again. During this time, over thirty members of the crew died from malaria due to mosquito bites. The Endeavour returned home in July 1771, after an absence of nearly three years.

His second global circumnavigation was between 1772 and 1775 aboard the ships Resolution and Adventure. Cook was determined to find the ‘southern continent’ and reached the furthest south that any European explorer had ever reached, and his expedition was possibly the first time anyone had ever crossed the Antarctic Circle.

He also visited Easter Island, which had been named by Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen around fifty years early, in 1722.

No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less refreshments, and conveniences for Shiping than it does. Nature has hardly provided it with any thing fit for man to eat or drink, and as the Natives are but few and may be supposed to plant no more than sufficient for themselves, they cannot have much to spare to new comers. The produce is Potatoes, Yams, Taro or the Edoy root, Plantains and Sugar Cane, all excellent in its kind, the Potatoes are the best of the sort I ever tasted; they have also Gourds and the same sort of Cloth Plant as at the other isles but not much, Cocks and Hens like ours which are small and but few of them and these are the only domestick Animals we saw a mong them, nor did we see any quadrupedes, but ratts which I believe they eat as I saw a man with some in his hand which he seem’d unwilling to part with. Land Birds we saw hardly any and Sea Birds but a few, these were Men of War Birds, Noddies, Egg Birds, &ca. The Sea seems as barren of fish for we could not catch any altho we try’d in several places with hook and line and it was very little we saw a mong the Natives. Such is the produce of Easter Island which is situated in the Latitude of 27o 6’ South and the Longitude of 109o 51’ 40’’ W.

The journals go on to describe the inhabitants of Easter Island thus:

The Inhabitants of this isle from what we have been able to see of them do not exceed six or seven hundred souls and above two thirds of these are Men, they either have but a few Women among them or else many were not suffer’d to make their appearance, the latter seems most Probable. They are certainly of the same race of People as the New Zealanders and the other islanders, the affinity of the Language, Colour and some of their customs all tend to prove it, I think they bearing more affinity to the Inhabitants of Amsterdam and New Zealand, than those of the more northern isles which makes it probable that there lies a chain of isles in about this Parallel or under, some of which have at different times been seen …

They have enormous holes in their Ears, but what their Chief Ear ornaments are I cannot say. I have seen some with a ring fixed in the hole of the ear, but not hanging to it, also some with rings made of some elastick substance roled up like the Spring of a Watch, the design of this must be to extend or increase the whole.

And of the giant statues for which Easter Island is famous:

The Stupendous stone statues erected in different places along the Coast are certainly no representation of any Diety or places of worship; but the most probable Burial Places for certain Tribes or Families. I saw myself a human Skeleton lying in the foundation of one just covered with Stones, what I call the foundation is an oblong square about 20 or 30 feet by 10 or 12 built of and faced with hewn stones of a vast size, errected in so masterly a manner as sufficiently shews the ingenuity of the age in which they were built … Some pieces of carving were found amongest these people which were neither ill designed nor executed. They have no other tools than what are made of Stone, Bone, Shells &ca. They set but little value on Iron and yet they knew the use of it, perhaps they obtained their knowledge of this Metal from the Spaniards who Visited this Isle in 1769 some Vistages of which still remained amongest them, such as pieces of Cloth &ca.

Cook was held in high international esteem, so much so that during the American Revolution, when Americans were fighting for independence from Britain, Benjamin Franklin instructed US naval captains not to engage with Cook; in fact, should they come into contact with him whilst at sea, they should:

not consider her an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England by detaining her or sending her into any other part of Europe or to America; but that you treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness … as common friends to mankind.

On his return home, the Royal Navy elevated him to the rank of captain.

Cook’s final voyage, aboard Resolution and Discovery, took place between 1776 and 1780; the ships completed the voyage, but he met a violent end, stabbed to death, in Hawaii, on 14 February 1779.

He discovered Christmas Island in 1777 and was the first European to set foot on Hawaii, which he named the ‘Sandwich Islands’ after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. His arrival coincided with the island’s festival in honour of Lono, Hawaii’s god of fertility, at Kealakekua Bay. The islanders had likely never seen a white man before – or ships of a similar size to Cook’s. They assumed he was Lono. Cook and his crew were feted and took complete advantage of their genuine hospitality. They observed ‘breadfruit Trees, Plantains, Taroo root, Sweet potatoes, Ginger root and Sugar Canes …’ and incredulously observed the islanders surfing, admitting that they themselves would have been terrified to do so:

As two or three of us were walking along shore to day we saw a number of boys & young Girls playing in the Surf, which broke very high on the Beach as there was a great swell rolling into the Bay. In the first place they provide themselves with a thin board about six or seven foot long & about 2 broad, on these they swim off shore to meet the Surf, as soon as they see one coming they get them-selves in readiness & turn their sides to it, they suffer themselves to be involyed in it & then manage so as to get just before it or rather on the Slant or declivity of the Surf, & thus they lie with their Hands lower than their Heels laying hold of the fore part of the board which receives the force of the water on its under side, & by that means keeps before the wave which drives it along with an incredible Swiftness to the shore. The Motion is so rapid for near the Space of a stones throw that they seem to fly on the water, the flight of a bird being hardly quicker than theirs. On their putting off shore if they meet with the Surf too near in to afford them a tolerable long Space to run before it they dive under it with the greatest Ease & proceed further out to sea. Sometimes they fail in trying to get before the surf, as it requires great dexterity & address, and after struggling awhile in such a tremendous wave that we should have judged it impossible for any human being to live in it, they rise on the other side laughing and shaking their Locks & push on to meet the next Surf when they generally succeed, hardly ever being foiled in more than one attempt. Thus these People find one of their Chief amusements in that which to us presented nothing but Horror & Destruction, and we saw with astonishment young boys & Girls about 9 or ten years of age playing amid such tempestuous Waves that the hardiest of our seamen would have trembled to face, as to be involved in them among the Rocks, on which they broke with a tremendous Noise, they could look upon as no other than certain death. So true it is that many seeming difficulties are easily overcome by dexterity & Perseverance.

The tide turned when one of Cook’s crew died – the islanders were furious to have been tricked – clearly their guests were mortal after all. Some of the islanders stole a small boat (or cutter) from Cook’s fleet, and, in retaliation, James attempted to kidnap and ransom their chief, Kalani’opu’u.

Cook’s death on 14 February 1779 was a violent one. He was stoned, clubbed and stabbed to death, before his hands were preserved in sea salt whilst the rest of his corpse was burnt in a pit and his bones cleaned.

The crew were only able to recover a small part of Cook’s remains:

a Priest whose name was Car’na’care … came onboard and brought with him a large piece of Flesh which we soon saw to be Human and which he gave us to understand was part of the Corpse of our late unfortunate Captain, it was clearly a part of the Thigh about 6 or 8 pounds without any bone at all – the poor fellow told us that all the rest of the Flesh had been burnt at different places with some peculiar kind of ceremony, that this had been deliver’d to him for that purpose, but as we appear’d anxious to recover the Body he had brought us all that he could get of it, he likewise added that the Bones which were all that now remain’d were in the possession of King Terre’oboo.

They buried those remains at sea:

In the Evening I had the remains of Capt Cook committed to the deep with all the attention and honour we could possibly pay it in this part of the World.

Cooks’ last written words were:

I have no where in this Sea seen such a number of people assembled at one place, besides those in the Canoes all the Shore of the bay was covered with people and hundreds were swiming about the Ships like shoals of fish. We should have found it difficult to have kept them in order had not a Chief or Servant of Terrio-boos named Parea now and then [exerted] his authority by turning or rather driving them all out of the Ships. Among our numerous Visiters was a man named Tou-ah-ah, who we soon found belonged to the Church, he intorduced himself with much ceremony, in the Course of which he presented me with a small pig, two Cocoanuts and a piece of red cloth which he wraped round me: in this manner all or most of the chiefs or people of Note interduce them selves, but this man went farther, he brought with him a large hog and a quant[it]y of fruits and roots all of which he included in the present. In the after noon I went a shore to view the place, accompaned by Touahah, Parea, Mr King and others; as soon as we landed Touahah took me by the hand and conducted me to a large Morai, the other gentlemen with Parea and four or five more of the Natives followed.

A monument at Kealakekua Bay commemorates Cook’s landing, and his later death.

Captain Cook is lauded for using both longitude and latitude to navigate, and was one of the first sailors to use a chronometer to measure time whilst at sea.

His accomplishments are honoured by NASA; their third space shuttle was called Discovery, and the command service module of Apollo 15 and a space shuttle were named after the HMS Endeavour. A crater on the moon, the Cook crater, is named in his honour.

His parents’ cottage in North Yorkshire, where he lived for a while, was moved brick by brick to Melbourne, Australia, in 1934, where it still stands.

Sources

http://theconversation.com/how-captain-cook-became-a-contested-national-symbol-96344

https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-captain-james-cook

https://www.captaincooksociety.com/home

https://www.visitwhitby.com/blog/captain-james-cook-facts/

https://www.captaincooksociety.com/home/detail/march-1774-off-easter-island

https://www.factinate.com/people/astonishing-facts-captain-james-cook/

http://tonsoffacts.com/30-fascinating-and-interesting-facts-about-james-cook/

THE RACE TO THE SOUTH POLE

Chapter 37

Captain Robert Falcon Scott

(1868–1912)

Scott joined his first ship when he was 13 years old.

He married sculptor Kathleen Bruce in 1908 and they had one son, who grew up to become painter and ornithologist Sir Peter Scott. Kathleen, for the record, studied with Rodin and at the Slade School of Fine Art. Historical characters including Lloyd George, Yeats and George Bernard Shaw would sit for her. Widowed just four years after her marriage to Scott, she would later marry Edward Hilton Young 1st Baron Kennet and was mother to Wayland Hilton Young, a writer and politician. (In a fascinating side note, she was a descendant of Robert the Bruce and also helped to deliver the illegitimate child of Isadora Duncan).

A British Royal Navy officer, Scott led two expeditions to the Antarctic. The first, 1901–1904, was in the ship Discovery, together with Ernest Shackleton.

His second trip in 1910, on board the Terra Nova, was a race against time to be the first explorer to reach the South Pole. On 17–18 January 1912, he became the first British explorer to reach the South Pole, although he discovered that Norway’s Roald Amundsen had beaten him to be the world’s first. Criticized for not planning properly and not bringing enough food or provisions (he used ponies rather than Amundsen’s dogs), Scott died on the 800-mile return journey to base camp.

The first to die on the return journey was Petty Officer Edgar Evans, at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. The body of Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates was never found. At the age of 31, he committed suicide on 17 March 1912, according to legend, by leaving the relative safety of the tent and walking without his shoes into a deadly blizzard with the words ‘I am just going outside, and may be some time.’

He did so because the thought he was slowing the others down. Born on 17 March in Putney, he disagreed with the competition and oneupmanship between Amundsen and Scott, writing to his mother Caroline:

I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves, all the photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc. etc. is rot, and if we fail will only make us look more foolish.

His feet having got wet, he most likely suffered frostbite, with a black toe and his body turning yellow. Scott himself wrote of Oates: ‘If we were all fit I should have hopes of getting through, but the poor soldier has become a terrible hindrance, thought he does his utmost and suffers much I fear.’

Captain Scott wrote: ‘He went into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.’

The last three, Scott, ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Dr Wilson, died after managing another twenty miles – they were just eleven miles from safety. Their frozen bodies, discovered on 12 November, in their sleeping bags, their tent covered with snow, were buried close by. Their papers and personal effects were rescued. The wider public only found out about the tragedy in February of the following year, 1913. King George V led a memorial service for them at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Sources

https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/captain-robert-falcon-scott

https://io9.gizmodo.com/10-mistakes-that-caused-the-most-punishing-nature-exped-5874145

Chapter 38

Roald Amundsen

(16 July 1872–18 June 1928)

With sufficient planning, you can almost eliminate adventure from an expedition.

Legendary polar explorer Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was born on 16 July 1872, in Borge, near Oslo, Norway, and was the first man to reach the South Pole, the first to make a ship voyage through the North West Passage, and one of the first to traverse the Arctic by transarctic flight.

He grew up with three brothers in Norway; his father died when Roald was 14 years old. Infatuated with polar exploration from an early age (though his mother wanted him to become a doctor), he studied medicine until his mother died, when he was 21. After that, it was all guns blazing for his polar passion.

His first Antarctic trip was in 1899, where he was first mate on the Belgica. It became the first expedition to survive winter in the Arctic as the vessel became trapped in the ice pack and would only get free the following spring. It was from this initial venture that he learned vital survival skills: that the vitamin C in fresh seal meal would protect against scurvy and that animal skins were actually warmer than woollen coats.

1903–1906 marked the first polar expedition he was in command of, on board the Gjoa. In a tremendous achievement, he became the first explorer to travel the North West Passage (the route extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Arctic Archipelago (now Canada).

In August 1910, he left Christiana, Norway, for the South Pole. Amundsen initially had his heart set on reaching the North Pole, but on learning that fellow explorer Robert Peary had got there first, he secretly arranged to head for the South Pole. Only one of his brothers knew of his plan. He didn’t even tell the crew until their ship was well on its way. This time, he’d be in a race with British explorer Robert Scott.

He was in such a rush that he started as soon as he arrived in Antarctica, even though the weather was adverse. He was soon forced back to base, with his dogs dead and his men suffering from frostbite.

Ultimately, a team of five men (Roald Amundsen, Olav Olavson Bjaaland, Hilmer Hanssen, Sverre H. Hassel and Oscar Wisting) set out with a sledge pulled by thirteen dogs, who were fed with blubber and seal meat. Only eleven of the animals would return, having either died or been killed and eaten deliberately by both the men and the other dogs themselves in stages along the way; the surviving dogs were handed over to the expedition of Australian Douglas Mawson in Hobart (Amundsen stopped there on his return).

When he reached the South Pole at 3.00pm on 14 December 1911, a full thirty-three days before Scott, they put up a tent and left a letter inside, before heading back to their winter camp.

US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and King George V of sent telegrams of congratulations.

Scott would find out that Amundsen was on his way to the South Pole. He received a telegram from Amundsen when he was in Australia, declaring that he was ‘proceeding to Antarctica’; and the race was on. He arrived on 17 January 1911 to face the bitter disappointment that he’d been pipped to the post. He and his entire team would perish on the way home.

Continuing his polar explorations, his next trip was the Maud expedition (1918–1925), which saw Amundsen on his new polar ship drifting over the Arctic Ocean in an attempt to reach the North Pole. Accompanying him as they departed, with five tonnes of dried fish and reindeer-skin clothing in July 1918 were a team of nine men, including scientist H.U. Sverdrup, Helmer Hanssen, Oscar Wisting, Knut Sundbeck, Martin Rønne, Paul Knudsen, Peter Tessem and Emmanuel Tønnesen. They would later be joined by 21-year-old telegraphist Gennadij Olonkin.

The expedition completed many scientific and meteorological observations. During the winter of 1918 Amundsen fell through the ice and had to be rescued; he also broke his arm after a fall on the ice by the ship. Amundsen also survived a polar bear attack; one of the dogs ran at it as it went in for the kill (the bear was protecting its cubs from the same dog that protected Amundsen). His thoughts at the time were quite surprising:

I lay there wondering how many hairpins were swept up on the sidewalks of regent street in London on a Monday morning! The significance of this foolish thought at one of the most serious moments of my life I shall have to leave to a psychologist.

During that winter on the ice, he would also suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning from the magnetic observations. After months stuck in the ice, and conducting various scientific experiments, expedition carpenter Peter Tessem had enough; he wasn’t sleeping and was suffering from headaches. He wanted out. Amundsen decided he’d send all the data they’d collated, along with their post, with Tessem and Paul Knudsen back to Norway via Dickson, the last telegraph station at the west end of the North East Passage.

With the ice finally releasing the Maud on 12 September, the two men waved goodbye to the ship from their small cabin on the shore. They left Maudheim by dog sledge on 15 October 1919. The 800-kilometre trip should have taken them a month.

They were never seen again. From the remains found of the two men, it is thought that Knudsen (possibly) died in an accident and that Tessem, attempting to continue to Dickson, had reached a point where he could see the lights of the island on Dickson 3 kilometres away. But he slid on the ice, knocked himself out and froze to death. A skeleton, with a gold watch engraved with Tessem’s name, and a gold ring engraved with the name of his wife, was found and later buried with a memorial stone.

It took Amundsen two years to sail through the Northeast Passage and an additional year, north of the Bering Strait, immersed in ice, before he gave up and attempted to fly across the Arctic Ocean instead. The remaining crew of the Maud (named after the English-born Queen of Norway) would continue in a vain attempt to reach the North Pole.

Amundsen sold the Maud to the Hudson Bay Company in 1920; they used it as a floating warehouse before it eventually partially sank in 1930, becoming a popular local landmark in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in Canada. (It would finally be returned home to Norway in 2017, one hundred years since it was built by Christian Jensen in 1917.)

Amundsen disappeared whilst searching for survivors of an airship in the Arctic. His South Pole win was tainted by accusations of ungentlemanly behaviour – his exploration win didn’t endear him to people in the UK, who thought he’d cheated by not revealing his true intentions from the get-go.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roald-Amundsen

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/explorers/roald_amundsen.php

https://www.seeker.com/polar-bear-attacks-surprisingly-rare-1765355955.html

https://frammuseum.no/polar_history/expeditions/the_maud_expedition__1918-1925_/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/maud-reaches-norway-1.4784867

https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/roald-amundsen-the-first-to-reach-the-south-pole/

SPACE

Civilization and space exploration has come a long way in a short time since Russia launched Sputnik 1 into space on 4 October 1957. The following month, Russian dog Laika became the first animal to orbit the earth, in satellite Sputnik 2.

These two extraordinary feats for humankind sparked off the so-called ‘Space Race’ between Russia and the USA. Both nations wanted to be the first to get a rocket on the moon – and Russia won.

Just two years later, Russia continued to lead the way in space exploration as Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, his ‘ship’ Vostok 1, orbited the Earth and landed two hours after launch. They followed up this achievement with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

Astronauts have incredibly ambitious plans to explore what TV show Star Trek aptly refers to as the ‘final frontier’ to go ‘boldly where no man has gone before’. Space is, as far as we know, infinite. There are no boundaries, no circumnavigating the solar system because human kind simply has no way of knowing how truly vast it is. This is far bigger than a search for an alternative Spice Route, although, at the time, the attempt to discover it would have seemed insurmountable.

Space exploration is even opening the way to space tourism – currently only around eight space ‘tourists’ have achieved their wildest dreams – but they were able to afford the millions it cost. The latest space race is to get people, on holiday, in space.

On 28 April 2001, American Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he paid around 20 million dollars for a trip in a Russian spacecraft. Dennis spent a week in orbit, most of the time visiting the International Space Station. He had to train for 900 hours just to be a passenger! Virgin Galactic is an airline set up by entrepreneur Richard Branson, and intends to offer private tourist trips into space.

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on 12 August 2018. Built to cope with 1,377°C heat, by 2025 it will have reached the closest possible approach to the sun – that’s within six million kilometres, seven times closer than any spacecraft before it.

Moon missions are essential to the exploration of more distant worlds. Extended lunar stays build the experience and expertise needed for the long-term space missions required to visit other planets. The moon may also be used as a forward base of operations on which humans learn how to replenish essential supplies, On the 28th April 2001, American Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he paid around 20 million dollars for a trip in a Russian spacecraft.

(National Geographic)

Space exploration serves to illustrate how small Earth is in relation to the cosmos. Scientists are feverishly working to develop ways of investigating black holes, gravitational waves, even the origins of the Big Bang and creation itself.

Space continues to capture our imagination – because only imagination can even attempt to consider what lies beyond our own planet and solar system. In 2036, an attempt will be made to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, Earth’s neighbouring star system; the journey will take two decades, on a 4.37 light year-journey at 15–20 per cent of the speed of light using lasers on Earth. Scientists who are witness at the launch may never live to see the outcome of their efforts. This is literally light years away from Captain Cook’s innovations in using both longitude and latitude; we are currently searching for signs of life on Mars; to send crafts onto asteroids in an attempt to mine them for precious metals; exploring Jupiter and three of its largest moons (Ganymede, Callisto and Europa).

The sheer scope of the time and space involved in exploring the galaxy means that many of our initial future ‘explorers’ will be machines – at present, mankind doesn’t have the capacity to travel for decades at light speed. We are relying on science and engineering to do that for us and to see if there is life on other planets – ‘alien’ or otherwise, creating telescopes to test for radio signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations, hitherto only imagined in film and book.

There is also the sobering thought that with how mankind is destroying Earth, space exploration may one day be our only hope of providing a viable alternative living habitat.

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale states that any person who flies higher than an altitude of 100 kilometres is recognized as an astronaut.

As of 2018, a total of eighteen astronauts and cosmonauts have died during space flight. The Apollo 1 launch pad fire killed the entire crew of three. On 28 January 1986, due to a failure in the fuel system, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven astronauts on board.

Launched in 2004, the Rosetta probe, launched by the European Space Agency, took ten years of space travel to reach Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko where it transmitted vital and thrilling information and scientific data.

The US National Space Policy of 2010 planned to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars by 2030; meanwhile, the commercialization and race for colonization of space has begun apace. In 2000 a permanent crew of astronauts moved into the research-based ISS, or International Space Station.

There are countless historical ‘firsts’ in the exploration of space – and here are just a few.

Chapter 39

Neil Armstrong

(5 August 1930–25 August 2012)

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Neil Armstrong claims he was misquoted – or, at the very least, misheard. His words, as he remembers saying them, were: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11 mission, was the first man to walk on the moon after piloting the lunar module Eagle with Buzz Aldrin. Back on Earth, six hundred million people watched him. During a period of around two and half hours, he and Buzz conducted experiments and collected geological samples. Armstrong walked around 60 metres on the moon.

Arguably the most famous explorer of modern times for his singular achievement, Neil was born on 5 August 1930 in Wapakoneta, Ohio. His passion for flying meant he secured his pilot’s licence when he was just 15. His first degree was on a US Navy scholarship in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University and his masters was from the University of Southern California; it was during college that he joined the Navy as a fighter pilot, serving during the Korean War. He flew seventy-eight combat missions, taking a hit but managing to eject from his aircraft safely.

After his service, and with his passion for flying, it was only fitting that he became a test pilot, flying over 200 varieties of aircraft after joining the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), before joining the NASA astronaut programme in 1962.

Apollo astronauts practiced every second of their mission, even planting the flag many times, indoors, outdoors, in space suits, underwater, in planes, in centrifuges, in pools, in the ocean and anywhere else NASA saw fit. They were prepared for every contingency and trained for water planned landings as well as desert and jungle survival in case their capsule missed the ocean and hit land. They learned geology, how to withstand g-forces, maneuver in low- and zero-gravity conditions, and how to drive electric rovers and land the lunar module.

Training also include the use of a Reduced Gravity Walking Simulator, at the hangar at Langley Research Centre in Virginia. They practiced the activities they would undertake on the moon, from collecting moon dust specimens and other geological material, to climbing in and out of the lunar module so that their bodies could build muscle memory to replicate the activity successfully on the moon itself.

The trip to the moon is estimated to have cost $25 billion – around £20 billion or £323 billion today. The Saturn V Rocket that launched them into space was as tall as a thirty-six floor building and Ground Control was over three miles away from the launch pad. The footprints made by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are still there. The lunar module descended onto the surface of the moon from 50,000 feet above, using thrusters to control the descent, with enough fuel to attempt it just once.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Wearing his A7L space suit made by Playtex, Neil collected a bag of moon dust from the surface for NASA to study; together with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, he was confined to quarantine in a sealed chamber for three whole weeks to protect against possible moon or space contamination. A famous photograph depicts President Nixon addressing them from outside the chamber.

Armstrong retired from NASA in 1971 and became a Professor of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, remaining there for eight years.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

At his death, on 25 August 2012, Buzz Aldrin, one of the three astronauts on board the Apollo 11, said:

I am deeply saddened by the passing of my good friend, and space exploration companion, Neil Armstrong today. I had truly hoped that on July 20th, 2019, Neil, Mike and I would be standing together to commemorate the 50th anniversary of our Moon landing, as we also anticipated the continued expansion of humanity into space, that our small mission helped make possible. Regrettably, this is not to be. Neil will most certainly be there with us in spirit. I know I am joined by millions of others in mourning Neil’s passing – a true American hero and the best pilot I ever knew.

Amongst the many awards Neil received were the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978.

Following his death, his family issued the following statement:

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

Sources

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/explorers/neil_armstrong.php

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1153230/moon-landing-anniversary-neil-armstrong-buzz-aldrin-Apollo-11-nasa-spt

http://mentalfloss.com/article/538908/facts-about-neil-armstrong-apollo-astronaut

https://www.wired.com/2011/07/moon-landing-gallery/

https://www.natgeokids.com/uk/discover/science/space/neil-armstrong-facts/

https://www.biography.com/astronaut/neil-armstrong

Chapter 40

Michael Collins

(31 October 1930–28 April 2021)

Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. Buzz Aldrin was born in 1930, and Mike Collins, 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10% shrewd planning and 90% blind luck. Put Lucky on my tombstone.

I honestly felt really privileged to be on Apollo 11, to have one of those three seats. Did I have the best of the three? No. But was I pleased with the one I had? Yes! And I have no feelings of frustration or rancor or whatever. I’m very, very happy about the whole thing.

Often referred to as the forgotten astronaut of Apollo 11, on the 50th anniversary of man walking on the moon, Michael Collins, admitted his first inclination was ‘to go hide under a rock somewhere.’ Whilst ‘Buzz Aldrin’ and ‘Neil Armstrong’ are household names for humanity, Michael Collins largely disappeared and it seems he was happy for it to be that way. He describes being part of history as ‘an honour’.

Born in Rome on 31 October 1930, like Buzz Aldrin, he graduated from West Point and joined the US Air Force as a fighter pilot. He served at George Air Force Base, learning how to drop a nuclear payload, before joining the astronaut programme in 1962.

One of the three men who formed the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, Collins was the only one not to walk on it. He did so willingly, allowing Armstrong and Aldrin to take the equipment needed to take those first giant steps – as there was only enough room for equipment for two of them. Instead, he remained in orbit in the Command Module Columbia, waiting for them to return to him in their lander craft, Eagle.

Apollo 11 was made up of the Eagle lander and the ‘mothership’ Columbia, that would orbit above the Moon. After it launched on a huge Saturn V rocket on 16 July 1969, for the first three days, the three astronauts were together on Columbia, watching as the Earth grew smaller and smaller. On the fourth day, they split up; Aldrin and Armstrong made their way into the Eagle lander and piloted it down to the surface of the Moon.

All alone, Collins radioed a message to them, saying ‘Keep talking to me, guys.’

Minutes later, Columbia swept behind the Moon and Collins became Earth’s most distant solo traveller, separated from the rest of humanity by 250,000 miles of space and by the bulk of the Moon, which blocked all radio transmissions to and from mission control. He was out of sight and out of contact with his home planet.

‘I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it,’ he wrote in his capsule. Lindbergh’s remarks were certainly accurate.

Without radio contact, Collins may have been one of the few people on Earth to have missed Neil Armstrong’s famous words: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/19/michael-collins-astronaut-apollo11)

Collins was terrified that should the lander fail to ignite and fuel their ascent to meet the Command Module, he would return to Earth alone, with his two fellow astronauts left to slowly die as they ran out of oxygen. Neil Armstrong himself was convinced their chances or returning alive were 50-50. The then US President, Richard Nixon, had prepared a speech in the event of such a calamity:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

Collins admitted to ‘sweating like a nervous bride’ whilst waiting for them, alone in the pitch black of space.

My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter. If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.

The Eagle fired successfully and the three were reunited. Such was his relief, that Collins considered kissing Buzz on the forehead, but he thought better of it: ‘I decided maybe no, no, I think the history books wouldn’t like that.’

After their successful return to Earth, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh wrote to Collins, telling him that the part he had played was one of ‘greater profundity … you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before.’

Michael Collins went on to be director of the National Air and Space Museum until 1978, and then Vice-President of LTV Aerospace in Arlington, Virginia, before launching an aerospace consultancy.

I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.

Like Aldrin, he is passionate about Mars and has joked that he would have preferred to have been the first human crew to visit the Red Planet rather than the Moon.

I always used to joke that they sent me to the wrong place. The moon is far less interesting than Mars.

Of the three astronauts, Collins status as a forgotten hero seems to have suited him. None of them sought the unprecedented levels of fame and adulation that followed their splashdown in the Pacific. Aldrin famously fought depression and Armstrong, becoming a professor at the University of Cincinnati, made himself a virtual recluse. Both of them ended up divorced; Collins remained married to wife Pat until her death in 2014.

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/19/michael-collins-astronaut-apollo11

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a28400600/michael-collins-today-apollo-11-astronaut-moon-landing/

Chapter 41

Buzz Aldrin

(20 January 1930–)

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. I am the first man to piss his pants on the moon.

By the way, while Neil was the first human to step onto the moon, I’m the first alien from another world to enter a spacecraft that was going to Earth.

These are a few of my favorite life lessons that I learned as a result of walking on the Moon and the preparation that took us there – the guiding principles that have helped keep me going since returning to Earth.

•The sky is not the limit … there are footprints on the Moon!

•Keep your mind open to possibilities.

•Show me your friends, and I will show you your future.

•Second comes right after first.

•Write your own epitaph.

•Maintain your spirit of adventure.

•Failure is always an option.

•Practice respect for all people.

•Do what you believe is right even when others choose otherwise.

•Trust your gut … and your instruments.

•Laugh … a lot!

•Keep a young mind-set at every age.

•Help others go beyond where you have gone.

I hope these lessons will be as helpful to you as they have been to me. Take it from a man who has walked on the Moon: Be careful what you dream – it just might come to pass, so be prepared. Apollo is the story of people at their best, working together for a common goal. We started with a dream, and we can do these kinds of things again. With a united effort and a great team, you too can achieve great things. I know, because I am living proof that no dream is too high!

He was born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. on 20 January 1930, in Montclair, New Jersey.

His sister, unable to pronounce ‘brother’, called him ‘Buzzer’. And from 1988, he used ‘Buzz’ as his official name. (Buzz Lightyear, the popular character from the Toy Story films, is named in his honour; an actual 12-inch action figure of Buzz Lightyear was launched into space alongside the Discovery in May 2008 for a fifteen-month space station mission. Buzz Aldrin gave his namesake a stern pre-mission instruction: ‘I said, now look, don’t you forget, I’m the real Buzz.’)

A graduate of the legendary US military academy West Point, he served in the US Air Force during the Korean War, flying sixty-six combat missions as a fighter pilot. He went on to complete a PhD in Astronautics (the science of space travel and exploration) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and in 1963 was chosen to be an astronaut. He was also a pioneer of underwater training techniques, where astronauts could simulate zero gravity in preparation for space conditions.

On 11 November 1966 he spent two hours doing a spacewalk as part of the four-day Gemini 12 mission.

On 16 July 1969, Buzz, together with Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong, launched for the moon aboard the Apollo 11. It took them four days to reach it, with Buzz as the lunar module pilot.

Buzz was the second man on the moon, stepping onto it 19 minutes after Neil Armstrong made history; once on the surface of the moon, the crew took photographs, rock samples and conducted scientific tests. Buzz would famously describe the moon as ‘magnificent desolation’.

As the commander of the flight, Neil was going to be the one who first stepped onto the moon and said something historic, which he did. Then I come down and look around and nothing was prepared. If I had been the first to go down, I would’ve consulted philosophers or historians to help me come up with the right thing to say. But I wasn’t the first. So I just put together words that came to mind to represent the magnificence of the human achievement. Throughout history we’ve dreamed of the moon, and wondered if people would ever go there. The magnificence of our achievement for humanity was that we were there. But when I looked around I saw the most desolate sight imaginable. No oxygen, no life, just the lunar surface that hasn’t changed for thousands of years – and the blackness of the sky. It was the most desolate thing I could ever think of.

In an interview with National Geographic, he said:

Once we were on the surface of the moon we could look back and see the Earth, a little blue dot in the sky. We are a very small part of the solar system and the whole universe. The sky was black as could be, and the horizon was so well defined as it curved many miles away from us into space.

Neil and Buzz then took a lunar module, Eagle, to rendezvous with Michael – before the three successfully splash landed in the Pacific.

On his return, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2011 Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins all received the Congressional Gold Medal.

After decades of being referred to as the ‘second’ man on the moon, Buzz found it frustrating:

As the senior crew member, it was appropriate for him [Armstrong] to be the first. But after years and years of being asked to speak to a group of people and then be introduced as the second man on the moon, it does get a little frustrating. Is it really necessary to point out to the crowd that somebody else was first when we all went through the same training, we all landed at the same time and all contributed? But for the rest of my life I’ll always be identified as the second man to walk on the moon.

He retired from NASA in 1971 and became head of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California, before stepping down from the air force a year later in March 1972. In his book No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon, he admitted fighting bouts of depression after his moon landing.

The ‘Aldrin’ Crater on the Moon near the Apollo 11 landing site and Asteroid ‘6470 Aldrin’ are both named in his honour. He also took the first ‘selfie’ in space. He is passionate about mankind’s next major space step being a journey to the Red Planet: ‘I believe that within two decades America will lead international crews to land on Mars.’

Buzz and Neil left a satchel on the moon containing commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Uri Gagarin and other astronauts who have lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration.

Sources

https://www.dkfindout.com/uk/space/moon-landings/buzz-aldrin/

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33144699/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/real-buzz-welcomes-buzz-lightyear-back/#.XWutpK2ZPVo

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Buzz-Aldrin

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/space/2019/07/buzz-aldrin-hates-being-called-second-man-moon

Chapter 42

Sally Kristen Ride

(26 May 1951–23 July 2012)

When you’re getting ready to launch into space, you’re sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

Sally Kirsten Ride was the first American woman in space; she flew on the shuttle Challenger on 18 June 1983.

Sally attended high school in Los Angeles on a tennis scholarship. After graduating in 1968 she went to Stanford University, securing a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1973. She followed this up with a Master of Science degree in 1975 and a doctorate in physics in 1978.

Her upward trajectory continued as she beat thousands of candidates to win a place at NASA, one of their first six female astronauts. Her training for her eventual spaceflight began in 1978.

She flew into space twice in total. On her first time she was 32 years old and she was a mission specialist on Challenger, leaving Earth on 18 June 1983 and returning on 24 June. During the trip, she was the first woman to work the shuttle’s robotic arm.

When the space shuttle’s engines cut off, and you’re finally in space, in orbit, weightless … I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that’s when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet.

She swiftly moved on to make history again, being the first woman to travel to space twice, as she travelled on a second Challenger mission, lasting nine days, on 5 October 1984. She was due to journey on a third mission but the Challenger disaster of January 1986 made that an impossibility.

After leaving NASA, she joined the Stanford University Centre for International Security and Arms Control, became a professor of Physics at the University of California and served as president of space.com. She also co-founded Sally Ride Science, a scientific outreach programme.

Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.

After a lengthy battle, she died from pancreatic cancer in 2012 at the age of 61. US President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour, in November 2013, saying:

As the first American woman in space, Sally did not just break the stratospheric glass ceiling, she blasted through it. And when she came back to Earth, she devoted her life to helping girls excel in fields like math, science and engineering.

Sources

https://www.space.com/16756-sally-ride-biography.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/why-sally-ride-waited-until-her-death-tell-world-she-f908942

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/sally-ride-quotes

Chapter 43

Kalpana Chawla

(1 July 1961–1 February 2003)

The path from dreams to success does exist. May you have the vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it.

Kalpana Chawla was the first female American astronaut of Indian origin who went to space twice. Born and raised in Karnal, Haryana, India, Kalpana’s story is both inspirational and tragic – an incredible life of achievement cut short far too soon.

The youngest of four children and the first Indian-born woman in space, Kalpana (KC to her friends) died alongside her six team members on the space shuttle Columbia as it exploded on re-entry to earth in 2003. She was only the second Indian person in space.

Passionate about science and space and inspired by India’s first pilot, J.R.D. Tata, she completed a course in aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, before moving to the US in 1982. What follows is an unbelievable list of academic achievements: a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas and a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, topped off with a PhD, all before marrying Jean Pierre Harrison in 1988, the same year she started work at NASA. She became a naturalized citizen in April 1991 and joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in March 1995.

In 1997, on board the space shuttle Columbia, she was responsible for the Spartan Satellite. Her second and final mission was also on board the STS 107 Columbia; the launch was delayed several times before finally taking off in 2003. The crew spent sixteen days in space, conducting scientific research and experiments.

The shuttle was due to land at Kennedy Space Centre on 1 February, but due to a briefcase-sized piece of the wing breaking off at launch it was unable to protect itself from the immense heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA decided against telling the crew of the imminent danger of re-entry. All seven (Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, Mission Specialists David M. Brown and Laurel B. Clark) died as the shuttle de-pressurized and disintegrated over Texas.

Kalpana Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Space Flight Medal and NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Several academic scholarships have been established in her name, including ones at the International Space University, University of Texas and University of Colorado. There are also asteroids, mountains on Mars, streets, hostels and supercomputers named in her honour.

Sources

https://www.rankred.com/most-famous-astronauts/

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/10-future-space-missions-to-look-forward-to/

Chapter 44

John Herschel Glenn Jr

(July 18 1921–December 8 2016)

I guess the question I’m asked the most often is: ‘When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?’ Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts – all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

John Glenn learned to fly whilst at Muskingum College in Ohio. During the Second World War, he flew fifty combat missions, initially serving in the US Marine Corps Reserve. He would rise through the ranks, initially as a second lieutenant, to first lieutenant in 1943 and then to captain in 1945. During the Korean War he served an additional sixty-three missions, (shooting down three enemy planes) before being promoted once more, this time to major, on 28 June 1952. By 1 April 1959, he was a lieutenant colonel.

Glenn made the astronaut selection programme for NASA’s Project Mercury and joined the NASA Space Task Group.

On 20 February 1961, John Glenn was on board the Mercury Atlas 6, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida for NASA’s first manned space flight. He became the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth, completing three orbits, beating the record of Russian Yuri Gagarin, who had made a single orbit the previous year. Each of Glenn’s orbits took 88 minutes and 19 seconds, at altitudes ranging between 100 miles to 162.2 miles. Five hours after launch, his space capsule parachuted successfully into the Atlantic Ocean, just six miles from his recovery ship.

To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible.

Glenn resigned from NASA in 1964, and retired from the military in 1965, after twenty-three years of service. He moved into politics and was elected to the US Senate to represent Ohio in 1974. He served in Congress until 1999.

On 29 October 1998, at the age of 77, Glenn made his return to space, aboard the space shuttle Discovery. NASA conducted experiments studying the similarities between the effects of ageing and the effect of weightlessness on the body. Glenn was the oldest astronaut to fly into space.

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, he is the only US senator to have flown in space. He died on 8 December 2016 at the age of 95.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Glenn

https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/john-herschel-glenn-jr-astronaut/

Chapter 45

Yuri Gagarin

(9 March 1934–27 March 1968)

Set against a backdrop of intense battle for space tech supremacy between Russia and the USA, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin made history on 12 April 1961, when he circled the Earth in one orbit for 108 minutes, reaching heights of 203 miles. He was officially the first man in space.

Gagarin’s craft was stocked with enough food to last ten days in case of emergency engine failure. Gagarin stayed conscious upon re-entry despite forces of eight times the pull of gravity.

To officially be recognized as a genuine space flight, the astronaut had to land back on Earth in his craft; this never happened, but the Russian authorities only admitted it in 1971. Gagarin actually ejected from his craft 7 kilometres above the Earth, parachuting to safety; he did this because his craft, Vostok 1, didn’t have any engines that would slow down re-entry.

He returned to a hero’s welcome in Russia, with cheering crowds greeting him in Red Square. He was sent on a promotional tour around the world (even meeting Queen Elizabeth II of England) and the authorities made him a deputy of Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and he was made commander of the Cosmonauts’ Detachment. He was now too important for public relations to risk sending him back into space, so Gagarin was ‘restricted’ to test flights; ironically, it would be this that would kill him.

Gagarin died on 27 March 1968 whilst test-piloting a powerful jet fighter, the MiG 15, in a routine flight with his flight instructor, Vladimir Serugin.

His death remains shrouded in mystery and conjecture. The official reason his plane crashed was given as a weather balloon; other suggestions include another jet flying dangerously close to him at supersonic speed, causing his plane to go into a deadly black nosedive. The Soviet leader at the time, Leonid Brezhnev, suppressed the results of the enquiry into their deaths, not helping the rumours that it was his regime that was ultimately responsible for his tragic death, because of his attempts to stop the flight of the Soyuz craft that killed his friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in 1967.

In July of the following year, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left a medallion with Gagarin’s likeness on the surface of the moon, in honour of him, and all other astronauts who had lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration.

He is buried in the Kremlin in Moscow.

Sources

https://www.space.com/16159-first-man-in-space.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/how-did-yuri-die-the-mysterious-death-of-a-space-age-hero-302054.html

https://www.seeker.com/the-real-story-behind-yuri-gagarins-death-1767592875.html

Chapter 46

Vladimir Kamarov

(16 March 1927–24 April 1967)

That’s Yura and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.

He’s been referred to as the man who fell from space. He was the first human being to die in a space mission. His death was horrific – and even worse, completely avoidable, if only the Russians hadn’t been hell bent on winning a PR coup in space.

Despite knowing his craft had over two hundred faults, the Russians, led by Premier Leonid Brezhnev were so hell bent on having a PR coup in space that they didn’t care. Kamarov knew there was no going back, and that if he didn’t go, they’d send his friend Gagarin in his place.

He took the mission, knowing it was certain death. It has been contentiously been reported that he died ‘crying in rage’, knowing that it could all have been averted – and with the Russian authorities, engineers and other astronauts knowing it was going to happen. Leonid Brezhnev was insistent that the launch went ahead, even though previous unmanned test pilots had proved disastrous. There were at least 203 known faults in the space craft – in short, it wasn’t anywhere near ready for a safe manned flight. A full report outlining the flaws and danger was produced – but ignored.

Days before the launch, allegedly Kamarov and his wife had dinner with Russian KGB operative and Yuri Gagarin’s friend, Venyamin Russayev. At the end of the meal, Kamarov said to Russayev: ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight.’

He was in an awful position; if he refused to fly, not only would his career be over, but Gagarin would be sent to a certain death in his place. Kamarov put Gagarin’s life before his own by ultimately climbing into the spacecraft.

Once in orbit, as predicted, everything went wrong with catastrophic mechanical failures. After the craft’s parachute failed on re-entry, Soyuz 1 crashed to Earth with the force of a 2.8-ton meteorite. Kamarov’s body turned molten and all that was left was a chipped heel bone, which was displayed for all to see at his open-casket funeral, as Kamarov himself had requested.

His fellow cosmonauts published a tribute to Komarov in Pravda on 25 April:

For the forerunners it is always more difficult. They tread the unknown paths and these paths are not straight, they have sharp turns, surprises and dangers. But anyone who takes the pathway into orbit never wants to leave it. And no matter what difficulties or obstacles there are, they are never strong enough to deflect such a man from his chosen path. While his heart beats in his chest, a cosmonaut will always continue to challenge the universe. Vladimir Komarov was one of the first on this treacherous path.

Komorov was given a state funeral in Moscow, with his remains interred at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis at Red Square. Posthumously, he was awarded the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union. His name is amongst those remembered in a plaque left by Neil Armstrong on the moon to those who have perished in the name of space exploration.

Sources

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/aeeyep/when-soyuz-1-fell-to-earth

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/astronaut-vladimir-komarov-man-fell-space-1967/

Chapter 47

Valentina Tereshkova

(6 March 1937–)

Anyone who has spent any time in space will love it for the rest of their lives. I achieved my childhood dream of the sky. Americans, Asians, everyone who has seen it says the same thing, how unbelievably beautiful the Earth is and how very important it is to look after it. Our planet suffers from human activity, from fires, from war; we have to preserve it. When you are up there, you are homesick for Earth as your cradle. When you get back, you just want to get down and hug it.

The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova volunteered for the Soviet space programme after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, joining four other women to undertake eighteen months of intensive training. Its intensity clearly took its toll – with exhaustive tests to see how they would cope being alone for long periods of time or react to both extreme gravity and zero-gravity conditions.

Despite having no formal pilot training, she was a passionate parachutist, having joined a local club and spending as much time there as she could, achieving over ninety jumps.

I learned to wait as long as possible before pulling the cord, just to feel the air; 40 seconds, 50 seconds … It’s not really falling; you experience enormous pleasure from the sensation of your whole body. It’s marvellous.

It was this experience that set her above the others in the selection process; at the age of just 26, Tereshkova was the only one of the five to go into space, piloting Vostok 6.

She logged over seventy hours in space, making forty-eight orbits of the Earth over the course of three days. The Chicago Tribune called her the ‘Russian blonde in space’, even though she wasn’t blonde.

She discovered that the settings for re-entry were incorrect, to the point where she would have sped into outer space, rather than back to Earth. She was eventually sent new settings, but her space centre bosses made her swear to secrecy about the mistake, to save their own reputation and that of the programme. ‘We insisted that all was OK; we didn’t talk about it. We kept it secret for 30 years, until the person who made the mistake was in his grave.’

She was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, received the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal, and has publicly said she would volunteer for a one-way trip to Mars. Whilst she never again went into space, she was the poster girl for Russian space exploration. It would be another two decades before the USA sent its first woman into space.

People shouldn’t waste money on wars, but come together to discuss how to defend the world from threats like asteroids coming from outer space.

Sources

https://www.space.com/21571-valentina-tereshkova.html

https://daily.jstor.org/cosmonaut-valentina-tereshkova-and-the-american-imagination/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/mar/29/valentina-tereshkova-first-woman-in-space-people-waste-money-on-wars