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Off
the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers
extract
WOMEN TRAVELLERS sought to wander freely and for
long periods of time in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Being in the open air was invigorating. In August
1892, Gertrude Bell wrote to her mother from an
expedition in the Middle East, ‘I shall be sorry to leave
this wonderful Freedom and to be back within walls
and gardens.’ Abroad, being outdoors was doubly
exhilarating for the novelty of the wide open spaces
and the rampant foreignness. It was what Vita
Sackville-West, when she first saw the Persian landscape
in 1926, dubbed ‘this question of horizon.’ The
views were, quite simply, ‘enormous’. In Persian
Pictures, her first book on the East, her friend Gertrude Bell had shared the adventurer’s attraction to ‘the
boundless plain stretching before him, the nights
when the dome of the sky was his ceiling, when he
was awakened by the cold kisses of the wind’. Twenty
years earlier, Isabella Bird had experienced the same
feeling of her heart opening up to fill the vast land
stretched out in front of her. On 28 September 1873,
she wrote to her sister in tiny Tobermory in the Scottish
Highlands that the Rocky Mountains meant ‘everything
that is rapturous and delightful – grandeur,
cheerfulness, health, enjoyment, novelty, freedom,
etc, etc. I have just dropped into the very place
I have been seeking, but in everything it exceeds
all my dreams.’
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Gertrude Bell
by Flora Russell, 1887
© Estate of Flora Russell
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Vita Sackville-West
by Gisèle Freund, 1939
©
Gisèle Freund /
The John
Hillelson Agency
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Constance Gordon Cumming
by Herbert Rose Barraud, 1893
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Isabella Bird was a keen camper, and liked nothing
better than to roll out her muslin-lined blanket
sleeping-bag in a fresh spot each night. Always
precise, even in her speech (Marianne North observed
that Isabella talked very slowly and methodically, as if
‘she were reciting from one of her books’), she had a
thoroughly tested routine that she observed on her
travels. In the morning, she would rise and have a cup
of tea accompanied by ‘stir-about’, boiled water thickened
with local flour. She then travelled until midday,
when she halted for two hours for her carriers, who
transported the load of her heavy camera kit and
other equipment, to rest and eat. Isabella lunched on
chocolate and raisins. She aimed to reach her new
camp before six in the evening. Her men would pitch
her folding bed, and she would take another cup of
tea before sitting down to record the day’s events in
her notebook. For supper, she had curry, ‘always
appetising’, made with her own curry powder and
cayenne pepper.
Even small, everyday activities could be transformed
into sensual pleasures. In 1876, Constance Gordon
Cumming wrote from ‘The Teacher’s House at Limiti,
Isle Ngau’, how a bath was no longer a ‘humdrum tub,
filled by a commonplace housemaid’ but was taken in
the open air, in an ‘exquisite stream . . . just deep enough to lie down full
length’, overarched by
great tree ferns and palm
fronds ‘through which you
see peeps of the bluest
skies’. She confessed that,
stumbling across such spots
when alone, she simply
undressed and waded in,
her long blonde ringlets,
usually so formally and oldfashionedly
arranged, becoming damp and unkempt.
After she had bathed, she picked ripe oranges from
the tree, peeled and ate them. Being alone like this in
the Fijian forest was far from frightening. Ten years
later, she was boasting in her book, Wanderings in
China (1886), ‘physical fear is a sensation which
I have never experienced.’
A determined fearlessness when faced with a physical
threat was shared by many women travellers. Violet
Cressy-Marcks had already trekked the Cape to Cairo
route and sleighed across the frozen north to
Murmansk before tackling the rivers and swamps of
South America in 1929. She was sleeping on the
ground in the Amazon when she was woken by a
snake slithering over her. She grabbed it just below the
head, crawled out from under her mosquito net and
walked until she found a rock to smash the snake’s
head against. ‘I was afraid I should cause too much
commotion if I fired,’ she explained in Up the Amazon
and Over the Andes (1932). She had been bitten
below the knee. Not knowing whether the snake was
poisonous or not, but taking no chances, she used her
scalpel and cut across the bite, pushing in two halves
of a tablet of permanganate of potash. She examined
her face in a mirror (‘I hadn’t used one for months’)
to see if she were turning grey or her lips were a
strange colour. Apart from being thinner than when
she had last looked, ‘nothing seemed to be amiss.’
Anyway, she mused, ‘if I was going to die it was a
fine spot for it.’
An edited extract from Off The Beaten Track: Three Centuries of
Women Travellers by Dea Birkett, published in Face to Face (Summer
2004), the National Portrait Gallery's magazine.
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