The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

Dedication

For Freya, Deirdre and Russell

In memory of their father,

Ian Rodger

Epigraph

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

Mary Kingsley

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 ‘A Most Excellent Reason’

2 Pilgrims to Freedom

3 Flights of Fancy

4 At Sea

5 Reaching the Summit

6 Queens of the Desert

7 To Follow or to Lead?

8 A Question of Duty

9 Escape or Compromise?

10 Risks and Dangers

11 Survival Strategies

12 ‘Merely Feminine Curiosity’

Epilogue ‘The Will of a Woman’

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Some works by women travellers

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 ‘A Most Excellent Reason’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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