The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

With painful humility the young Huceburg, amanuensis for the first Englishman to travel to Jerusalem, sat down to write what is the earliest English travel book still available to us.

She had been sent from England to the monastery of Heidenheim, in Germany, where her cousin was Abbess. While there, another member of her family, the monk Willibald, now an old man, returned from his travels to dictate his book to the wide-eyed young girl. The guidebook. The Hodaeporicon, written about 780, is full of stories that must have amazed her – how the party saw a lion, how they were arrested by the Saracens on suspicion of spying, how Willibald, later Saint Willibald, smuggled balsam through the customs. First he filled a calabash with the balsam, then he took a hollow cane, filled that with petroleum and concealed it in the calabash so that when the officials came to examine the calabash they were distracted by the smell of petroleum and the balsam went undetected.

Huceburg was the product of her religious education, trained to view herself as a woman and therefore less than nothing, but there was nothing humble about Margery Kempe, the mayor’s daughter from Bishop’s Lynn who, in 1413, set sail for Jerusalem with a party of pilgrims whose collective and determined aim was to lose her as quickly as they could.

By the fifteenth century, women, despite the prohibitive antics of the church, had established themselves as regular and seasoned travellers on the pilgrim run. Their enthusiasm and ebullient response to religious ceremonies could, at times, be somewhat of an embarrassment but their presence was vital to a church which thrived on ignorance and superstition. It is the women, after all, who keep the candles burning and who see, through the hypnotic haze, the strange shadows of moving statues.

Margery Kempe, voluble, energetic, given to hearing voices and seeing visions, was born in 1373 and at the age of forty set out on a five-month journey to Jerusalem. Margery was obsessed with holiness – her own and everyone else’s – and constantly harangued her companions to pray when they would rather have been carousing. Although the threat of piracy had lessened since the Venetian Senate had required all galleys to carry bows, arrows and lances for their own protection, it was still a nerve-wracking journey and most of Margery’s companions preferred to take their minds off their fears by drinking and playing cards.

When the pilgrim band reached Jaffa, Margery was so excited at the prospect of seeing Jerusalem that she fell off her donkey and two kind Germans had to help her back on, one of them even going so far as to feed her with spices to ward off travel sickness. It was in Jerusalem that the pilgrimage proper began, with a seemingly endless round of visits to churches, to the River Jordan, and to Bethlehem. Here, Margery’s sanctity took hold of her in earnest and ‘she fell down because she could not stand or kneel and rolled and wrested with her body, spreading her arms and crying with a loud voice as though her heart burst asunder’. Understandably, the rest of the group thought it best to disassociate itself from this excessive and unseemly display of fervour. On the journey home, they frequently managed to give her the slip and she often found herself trudging alone along unknown roads through foreign countries fearing for her good name. Occasionally, she managed to attach herself to another party or, when the worst came to the worst, to hitch a lift on a passing haycart.

Margery Kempe holds an important position in the history of women travellers. Like many before and after her, she took to the whole paraphernalia of travel with the noisy delight of a drake getting her first sight of water. Although a matron of comfortable means, she stoically endured hardship, danger and illness during the two years she was away from home. Despite the unchristian behaviour of her companions, who cut up her clothes, stole her bed sheets and walked too fast for her, she displayed a dogged determination to complete what she had set out to do. Like many women travellers, however, she enjoyed a privileged position in her own society and it was this which enabled her confidently to deal with officials and critics alike.

In one major aspect, however, she differed from most of the women travellers who were to follow her. She was both ill-educated and ill-prepared to benefit intellectually from her experiences. She died in 1438, untouched by the ripples of humanism and radical religious thinking that were beginning to disturb, yet again, the relatively calm pond of English society. She left behind, however, a record of her travels and the final irony in her tale is that this unique book – the earliest autobiographical travel account still in existence to be written in the vernacular – had to be dictated, for this most exuberant and talkative of women travellers could neither read nor write.

Such a state of ignorance would have been unendurable for those women living around the time of the English Civil War whose lives, for a time, depended on their wits, and consisted of a series of hurried and dangerous escapes made under cover, frequently in disguise and usually at dead of night. Their journeys – hazardous and solitary – were ones they would rather not have made.

Anne Harrison was nineteen when she married Sir Richard Fanshawe, in 1644. Brought up to sew and play the virginal, Anne soon found herself thrust into the role of political refugee, both in her own country and abroad, for Sir Richard, who sided with the King in the Civil War, was frequently on the run from the Roundheads. In the course of her happy marriage, she gave birth to six sons and eight daughters and spent much of her time moving her surviving children from country to country, from safe house to safe house, the burden of planning and negotiating the journeys falling on her shoulders alone. When her husband was finally captured in 1651, she had to make a perilous journey through the London streets to see him.

‘During this time of his imprisonment, I failed not constantly to go, when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot from my lodging in Chancery Lane, and then I would go under his window and softly call him … sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’

Like other women travellers who came after her, she became adept at talking her way out of difficult situations – not only her own survival but that of both her husband and her family depended on it When, on Cromwell’s death, Sir Richard left for France, she had to forge a document and disguise herself in order to get past the watchful eye of the Roundhead official. It was a testing time and one to which women responded with courage and vigour. The Restoration period which followed seemed for women so dull, superficial and frustrating in comparison that one of its most famous writers – Margaret Lucas – made a special plea that all women should be ‘free, happy and famous as men’. It was a brave, vociferous demand, made at a time when, in fact, changes both economic and social were slowly beginning to take place which would allow women a far greater freedom to move out of the domestic milieu to which Margaret Lucas felt herself to be so unwillingly chained. During the latter part of the seventeenth century trade and commerce were expanding, the navy was growing and women found themselves running import and export businesses, dealing in insurance and acting as shipping agents. It was against this increasingly prosperous setting that Celia Fiennes was born in 1662, of a well-to-do family of Dissenters.

At the age of twenty, she set out on a series of journeys round England and Scotland which would take her ten years to complete. She was a prim and serious young woman who undertook her journeys, usually riding sidesaddle, with the aim of improving both her health and her intellect: ‘so that my mind,’ she wrote severely, ‘should not appear totally unoccupied’. More disconcerting in one so young – she hoped that the account she planned to bring back would give people more serious things to think about than cards or dice. If people were to concern themselves with ‘observing the pleasant prospects and the different produces and manufactures of each place … they would undoubtedly be cured of the endemic sicknesses of laziness and the vapours’. More to the point, she felt, knowledge of their own country might ‘cure (in others) the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts’.

The English countryside into which she forayed was not altogether hospitable and it took a considerable sense of adventure, allied to a strong puritan desire for self-improvement, to set out on such a venture. Roads were rough and badly signposted. On horseback, she had to negotiate water-filled potholes so big that a man could drown in one. Since the ending of the Civil War soldiers had turned to vagrancy, and it was a sign of their prosperity that footpads had recently taken to horseback in order to make their getaway more efficient. Travellers were especially vulnerable on open heaths and in forests, Epping, Hampstead and Hounslow being the well-known danger spots. A sixteen-year-old heiress was attacked no less than eleven times and women took to travelling with a spare purse of money ready to hand over to robbers. Clearly, even a short journey to market was not to be undertaken lightly.

Without children to leaven her solemn attitudes, Celia Fiennes’ view of life tended to be staid and devoid of humour, but her insatiable curiosity and sturdy determination more than compensated for this. Her description of a meeting with highwaymen is typical of her style not only of writing but of living: ‘… two fellows all of a sudden from the wood fell into the road and they looked all trussed up with great coats and as it were, bundles about them which I believe were pistols.’ They jostled her horse and tried to get between it and those of her servants and when asked the way said they didn’t know the area though later it became obvious that they did. The Fiennes party was saved by the presence of men haymaking nearby. ‘It was the only time I had reason to suspect I was engaged with some highwaymen,’ she remarked, characteristically omitting to say whether or not she had been frightened.

While Celia was exploring her native England, a contemporary of hers had been making a name for herself first as a spy and later as a writer. Aphra Behn was born in 1640 and brought up in Kent. Details of her childhood are uncertain but in her early twenties she sailed with some of her family to live as part of the household of the Governor of Surinam. Life in the tropics seemed strange to the young girl, but she had a generous, open mind, receptive to the wonder of it all and when, with her brother, she encountered some slaves recently uprooted from their African homes she was ready to approach them with friendliness and compassion. In a long, full dress and with a bonnet covering her unconventionally short hair, her appearance must have seemed as strange to them as theirs did to her. ‘They touched us, laying their hands on all the features of our faces, feeling our breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat then wondering to see another; admiring our shoes and stockings but more our garters which we gave them and they tied about their legs, being laced with silver lace at the ends.’ The arrival, however, of the chieftains of war was another thing altogether, for they seemed a ferocious bunch with their marks and self-mutilations: ‘… so frightful a vision it was to see them … some wanted their noses, some their lips … others cut through each cheek’. They wore ‘girdles of cotton with their knives naked stuck in it … a quiver of arrows on their thighs and feathers on their heads’. Nevertheless, she found them both humane and noble.

Returning to England in 1663, Aphra married a merchant called Behn who died within three years, and she was then sent to Antwerp as a spy, with little more to live on than forty pounds and money from the sale of her rings. It seems that she never married again, for she regarded that institution as ‘the cheap drug of a church ceremony’. She received little thanks for the political and naval information she sent back from Antwerp, and on her return she devoted herself to earning a living from her writing, becoming the first Englishwoman to do so and drawing copiously on her travels in Surinam which she recounted as the background to her autobiographical novel Oroonoko, published a year before her early death at the age of forty-eight.

It is one of life’s small ironies that women – their own position in society not unlike that of a colonized country – were themselves able to take a ride on the great wave of colonization that burst outwards into the unclaimed world. The more ambitious and adventurous among them were quick to grasp the opportunity to travel far beyond the tamer shores of Europe to the unknown excitements of distant colonies. While Aphra Behn was working in Holland to undermine any plans the Dutch might have to defeat the English navy, another woman – also in Holland – was starting to build up a career that would eventually take her, also, to Surinam.

It was unusual for women to travel to the colonies on their own and those who did were usually making the journey in order to marry a merchant or planter. A contemporary writer, therefore, found it ‘a kind of phenomenon to see a lady actuated by a love of insects so truly heroic as to induce her to traverse the seas for the purpose of painting and describing them’. To go after a husband was understandable but to endure a journey into the tropics merely to paint insects was another thing altogether!

The amazing lady was the entomological artist, Maria Sibylla Merian who, ten years after Aphra Behn’s death, received a grant from the Dutch government which allowed her, at the age of fifty-two, to set out for Surinam. At that time, according to a contemporary report, it was the black spot of the Dutch Empire. If the destination proved unsavoury, the means of getting there was a positive death-trap. Sea travel in the seventeenth century was neither pleasant nor healthy. Scurvy abounded, hygiene was virtually non-existent and the only air that filtered down below deck came through hatches which often had to be battened down to keep out the driving rain. Sailing into the tropics, the air became steamy and foul and this, acting upon the decaying food left lying round the galley, meant that sailors and passengers often fell victim to dysentery. Maria, taking her daughter with her as a companion, survived the journey – no mean feat for a woman who would have hitherto led a very sheltered life. Surinam lies just north of the Equator and the combination of high temperatures and a copious rainfall meant a plentiful vegetation for Maria to sketch. It was the low, unhealthy marshlands, however, that were too much for this middle-aged matron and she had to return to Holland after two years.

The travels of these three women – and of many others that must go unremarked – are a reflection of the new horizons perceived, for the first time, by people interested in the special qualities of the places they visited and especially, in the case of Aphra Behn, in the lives of those they encountered in the course of their journeys. Celia Fiennes noted with obvious disapproval the increasing interest in things foreign and chose instead to confine herself to a thorough study of her own country. The other two travellers accepted the challenge of adventure and, like so many women before them, found it to their taste.

By the eighteenth century, a steady wave of women travellers was regularly leaving England’s shores, some to accompany their husbands on diplomatic missions, and some to participate with them in that great cultural institution – the Grand Tour. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went with her husband to Constantinople in 1716, where she became a keen and amusing observer of life. She was one of the first travellers daring enough to try out a strange, foreign practice: while in Turkey, she studied the habit of vaccination for smallpox, adopted it for her own children, and later introduced the practice to England.

In 1810, Hester Stanhope left England in search of a new and more exciting life than anything she could possibly find at home. There was no way in which an intelligent and independent-minded woman such as she could satisfy her hunger for both knowledge and adventure. She was the daughter of an illustrious family: her grandfather had been Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, and her uncle was William Pitt for whom she had acted as hostess during his years of office as Prime Minister. After his death in 1806 there was a vacuum to be filled, and she began to think about ways of satisfying the unbounded curiosity which had ruled her since childhood. She recalled her governesses admonishing her for this awkward trait: ‘I was tired of all those around me who to all my questions invariably answered, “My dear, that is not proper for you to know – you must not talk about such things until you are older.”’ That she was clever was certain; had not her father, himself hungry for knowledge, said that she was the best logician he knew?

The only man she might have married. Sir John Moore, had been killed at Corunna, and having left behind the suffocating standards of English society, she felt free to take as her lover a man much younger than herself – though she refused to marry him. With a settled home in Syria, she found it possible to live a life of freedom that would have been impossible in England. A commentator of the time noted that she was impervious to public opinion: ‘Her intentions were pure but only God was the judge of that and she cared not a fig what men thought.’

Perhaps that was just as well, for England could be unforgiving of those who strayed from the preordained path – and never more so than in its treatment of Hester who, having given her services to her country by acting as advisor, secretary and hostess to its Prime Minister, found her meagre pension cut off by Palmerston in an attempt to get her to mend her profligate ways. It was an attempt that failed, for in protest she walled herself up in her Arab mansion at Dar Djoun, near Mount Lebanon. There, in a bed covered in pipe burns – she had taken to the hookah with as much enthusiasm as she had adopted male Arab dress – and in a room heavy with smoke and scattered about with phials, calico and papers, she died a pauper at the age of sixty-three, owing £12,000 invested in an archaeological dig that had failed to reveal anything startling.

Misunderstood and unforgiven, she was one of those early women travellers who pursued their goals of excitement and learning, encountering discomfort and danger to a degree that could only be imagined by those who were so quick to criticize them.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, conditions were slightly easier for the woman who wanted more from life than anything home and marriage might offer. Attitudes had softened, travel conditions had eased and it was no longer necessary for women travellers to cut the umbilical cord in such dramatic fashion. Moreover, it was now seen that in one area at least, the missionary field, women could serve a very useful purpose indeed. The Victorian era was marked by the great surge of enthusiasm with which its women took to the new lands of Africa, America and China, defying convention, daring fate and stepping outside their appointed positions with a cheery disregard for the consequences. They enjoy a special place in the affections of anyone interested in the history of travel, for the journeys they made were not merely physical ones – they were the embodiment of the female spirit that would never again be content to flutter helplessly at the bars of its cage.

The position of women in the Christian Church – and in many other religions – has always been an ambivalent one, their ability to give birth robed in superstition and their power to nurture life feared. Yet their very closeness to the miracle of life has in the past invested them with a mysticism which the Christian Church saw as a strength upon which it might capitalize.

In Victorian times, bemused and bewildered, women found themselves plucked from the blood and sweat of childbirth and placed high upon the pedestal of perfection – the Angel of the Drawing-Room presiding over her own prison. Marriage, however, was not the destiny of every woman, nor was every woman prepared to be held within this domestic cage, and no book about women travellers would be complete without reference to the band of women who in those days set out with courage and conviction to present their foreign god to the unsuspecting peoples of Africa and China.

Women had always played an important role as missionaries, women whose lives had been illuminated by a vision so compelling that they left family, home and country to pursue it. The great mystic, Teresa of Avila, took to the rough roads of sixteenth-century Spain, preaching reform of the Carmelite Order. In the following century, a Frenchwoman, Marie Guyard, abandoned her child in order to become a missioner. In 1617, at the age of seventeen, she had been forced into marriage much against her will, for she had hoped to become a nun. Within three years, she was widowed and left with a small son. This child she put in the care of a sister before sailing to Canada to set up a convent. Attacked on numerous occasions by the Iroquois Indians whom she had come to convert, she nevertheless survived to the age of seventy-three.

The English tradition of the woman preacher travelling the countryside had been established by the Quakers in the seventeenth century. Later, the wave of energy which surged through England during the Industrial Revolution was reflected in the blossoming of Victorian evangelism, its success due in part to the army of women who carried the message with enthusiasm and vigour to the furthermost points of the empire. It was a time when there was work to be done, coal to be mined, lessons to be learned, money to be made and a Queen to be honoured.

For many women, missionary work provided a most satisfying alternative to marriage or stay-at-home spinsterhood. The empire offered men numerous opportunities to travel abroad: they could serve in the army, take a posting as an army chaplain, or make a career for themselves as administrators. They could even make a name for themselves as explorers. No such options were open to women, who had to content themselves, if they were single, with a position as a governess or lady’s companion – both lowly states of existence. There were few acceptable occupations open to the single woman in a society which regarded marriage as the only proper state and in which spinsters were regarded as second-class citizens.

Their value in the missionary field lay in the fact that as members of the gentler sex, they presented little threat to the local people; furthermore they had easy access to the local women – a great advantage, since it was commonly held among missionaries that to convert a family, you need only convert the mother. Their most attractive quality, however, was the simple fact that they were unmarried. As such, they could be relied upon to pursue their goals with a single-minded disregard for the hardships encountered along the thorny path to heaven. Staunch and sensible, they were admirably suited to unceasing and unquestioning labour in the name of all they – and the empire – considered decent.

The rationale of religion is, of course, an excellent ingredient to throw into the traveller’s brew. It can be used as an elixir, giving fresh and unsuspected strength to a mind and body exhausted by lack of sleep or sustenance. The missionary traveller knows that despite rejection and ridicule, despite the alien climate, the strange customs and only half-understood language, despite the isolation, discomfort and danger, reward will follow, if not by the end of the day, at least at the end of a lifetime. And which of the ungodly among us can be sure of that? In a perverse way, the hardships suffered reinforced both the missionary’s zeal and her determination to carry on, her mental state not unlike that of a patriot waging war. ‘I am,’ said one, ‘a soldier of Christ.’

The British Government was quick to see how useful these women could be with their energy, local knowledge and reputation for being fair. Indeed, in the colonies, the link between Church and state was thinly drawn with no distinction at all existing in the minds of some. Born in 1848 in Aberdeen, little Mary Slessor was a millhand by the time she was eleven – the family of seven children needed her earnings. Her mother was a weaver and her alcoholic father a shoemaker. Determined to free herself from the evils of poverty though not from her family commitments, she educated herself as best she could and in the process learned a lot about the famous Doctor Livingstone, another Scot who had become the inspiration of the empire. She too, she decided, would become a missionary. In 1876, at the age of twenty-eight, she sailed from Liverpool on the SS Ethiopia, bound for the Niger region of West Africa. Her salary, as a missionary, would be £60 a year. In Calabar, her practical approach to her work and her expertise in dealing with local disputes led to her appointment as British government agent. She saw nothing incongruous in this dual role, simply viewing her job of conducting judicial courts as an extension of her religious duties. Nor did she feel it was unchristian to administer an occasional box on the ear to a local chief when he spoke out of turn.