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‘Nothing could hold her back, whether it was the labour of travelling the whole world … the perils of sea and rivers … the dread crags and fearsome mountains …’

Valerius on Egeria.

Travellers, like the rest of us, need to communicate with someone even if, by writing a journal, it is at one remove. In 1884 a remarkable book was discovered which tells of a journey made by a woman who travelled to Jerusalem around the year AD 383.

Its author, Egeria, was a devout Roman citizen of noble birth, who journeyed from Gaul to the Holy Land and recorded everything she saw, thus leaving us with both a fascinating traveller’s tale and the only complete account we still have of the fourth century liturgy. So timeless are some of these liturgical ceremonies that her description, written sixteen hundred years ago, captures that odd mixture of gloom and glitter, superstition and ritual that haunts the dark interiors of present-day Jerusalem: ‘All you can see is gold and jewels and silk; the hangings are entirely silk with gold stripes, the curtains the same and everything they use for services at the festival is made of gold and jewels. You simply cannot imagine the number and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and the lamps …’

Travelling through fourth-century Palestine was not without its dangers. Wild animals roamed the purple hills and the inhospitable locals, weary of seeing endless bands of well-to-do foreigners pass through their lands, were liable to attack without warning. It was a formidable undertaking for anyone, let alone a woman on her own, but as long as travellers stuck to the straight and narrow Roman roads, they were relatively safe.

By the time Egeria set out on her journey, the pilgrim way was well established. Monasteries dotted the route and quite a few hospices had been set up for the use of Christian travellers, many of whom, of course, were women. In fact, the hospices themselves were often run by women, among them Paula, a Roman matron whose business acumen and managerial skills led her to establish a chain of hospices. Her contemporary, the scholar Jerome, was amazed that a mere woman should be so successful: ‘With a zeal and courage unbelievable in a woman she forgot her sex and physical weakness and settled in the heat of Bethlehem for good in the company of many virgins and her daughter’ – whom we must charitably assume was one too.

These journeys were far from being temporary religious fads, indulged in by rich women with time on their hands. Egeria and Paula were followed by wave after wave of women who put down lasting roots in Jerusalem and refused to return home. A guide book written nearly four hundred years after Egeria’s arrival comments on the presence, just outside the East Gate of the Holy City, of a hundred women living in an enclosed convent, receiving gifts of food which were pushed through a hole in the wall.

By the eighth century, the pilgrim route had become something of a tourist trek with many of the delays, frustrations and unexpected expenses that one might encounter today. Sea-captains refused to allow their passengers to leave ship until they had paid the airport tax of the day, known euphemistically as a ‘disembarcation fee’. Travellers passing through non-Christian areas were subjected to poll taxes which varied according to their apparent wealth, and one traveller commenting on the bureaucracy of the day, no less autocratic then than now, noted in disgust that ‘anyone who is found by night or day without a paper or a stamp issued by one of the kings or princes of that country is sent to prison … until he can prove he is not a spy’.

None of these inconveniences, however, deterred women from the journey, and indeed so numerous were they on the road to Rome that they presented a special problem to the church authorities whose attempts to restrain this restless tide were at first paternalistic and benign but were soon revealed in their true, repressive colours. ‘It would be well and favourable,’ wrote Boniface to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘… if your synod would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys back and forth to Rome.’ To have wives and mothers straying so far from home was an obvious threat to the institution of marriage. Not only that: despite their respectable status, such matrons, it seems, were in danger of falling by the wayside as so many of their sisters had done previously. ‘For,’ the anxious cleric continued, ‘there are few towns [along the way] in which there is not a courtesan or a harlot of English stock.’ He might have taken a more charitable view of his fallen sisters, as one of his predecessors did. St Marcianus, in the fifth century, persuaded a number of prostitutes to reform and to demonstrate their new way of life by making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem – a journey which he thoughtfully financed himself.

Banditry, piracy, prostitution and smuggling – it was all a long way from the vision of a young, wistful, Anglo-Saxon girl, exiled in a German monastery, who had to content herself with being a second-hand traveller.

I, unworthy child of the Saxon race, the last of those who have come hither from their land who am, in comparison with these my countrymen, not only in years but in virtue also, only a poor little creature … Yet I am a woman, tainted with the frailty of my sex, with no pretensions to wisdom or cleverness to support me, but prompted solely by the violence of my own will like a little ignorant child plucking a few flowers here and there from numerous branches rich in foliage and in fruit.

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.

It was her humanitarian work in saving the lives of twins that evinced uncharacteristic praise from Mary Kingsley and the two formed an immediate if unlikely partnership, for they were both intent on promoting better understanding of tribal customs. Local animists believed that each person was born with a guardian spirit – an invisible companion. When a woman gave birth to twins, however, the Efiks – among whom Mary Slessor was living – believed that the spirit companion had been displaced and its place taken instead by the human child. There could be only one explanation, the Efiks believed. The woman must have secretly mated with the devil. The punishment was horrific. Both children must be killed – for who could be sure which was the devil-child and which the good one? The mother too must be banished, driven out of her home and away from the tribe. The whole thing, as Mary Kingsley noted, was seen ‘as a sort of severe adultery’. Mary Slessor devoted herself to saving the lives of both the babies and their mothers, doing so with such tact and understanding that she was soon able to set up a refuge for the unhappy victims.

Hers was a lonely life, far from family and home, living in the bush surrounded by her African helpers. Her red hair was shorn to a boyish crop and the climate took its toll on her health. At the age of thirty-two, another missionary appeared on the scene and the two formed a friendship that looked as if it might end happily in permanent companionship, but circumstances forced them apart and she devoted the rest of her life to her beloved Africans, to whom she was known simply as Ma. Mary Kingsley, despite her dislike of missionaries, afforded her the highest praise: ‘The sort of man Miss Slessor represents is rare.’

Mary Kingsley herself, of course, was something of a rare bird, and through her studies of local customs and beliefs she too hoped to make the African better understood. She drew attention, for instance, to the damage she observed being done in girls’ schools in Calabar by ill-informed missioners. It was the custom for the girls to wind a long strip of cloth round their waist and to leave a part of this to trail behind them on the ground to be held by their guardian spirit In the safety of their homes, this train could be caught up and tucked into their skirt but outside in a public place, where danger lurked, the cloth had to trail along the ground. The missionaries briskly forbade this practice, seeing it as yet another example of the lazy, slovenly habits of the Africans. The girls were torn between the two: no respectable girl would go about without the protection of her guardian spirit; if she did, she must be bad. It was a war, Miss Kingsley noted, between native and Presbyterian respectability and it is not difficult to imagine which practice she favoured.

While she found the work done by Slessor admirable, Mary Kingsley would have found it difficult to applaud the zeal with which Annie Taylor, another of her contemporaries, pursued her missionary work in China and Tibet, for Annie’s arrogance fed upon her ignorance: ‘I was shocked to see men and women near Ta’ri’si,’ she wrote, ‘prostrating themselves the whole length of the road … Poor things, they know no better; no one has ever told them about Jesus.’ How different was Alexandra David-Neel’s objective and careful observation of the same scene some fifty years later, written with the intention of understanding, not dismissing, the custom:

Many of the pilgrims [she wrote] went round the mountain, prostrating themselves at each step, that is to say, stretching their arms as they lay on the ground, and marking with their fingers the length they had covered with their bodies. They would get up and stand at the exact place which their fingers had touched, after which they would again prostrate themselves and measure their length once more, and so on, all the way round.

Annie’s was the fixed and limited view of the missioner whose commitment prevented her from appreciating the culture and beliefs of those she wanted to save. But it was that very commitment that led her to journey across China and into Tibet, hopeful of finally entering Lhasa. After Africa, China had become the next focus for nineteenth-century missionary activity. British traders made important economic links there, and in 1878 the first woman missionary was sent into the interior. The fact that the economic links had been forged on the sale of opium – in 1839 British ships were bringing in 2000 tons of opium annually – seems not to have bothered the missionary ladies. Their task was to bring God, not change, to the Chinese millions.

Annie Taylor was accompanied on her journey by her faithful servant, Pontso, and the two of them disguised their true identity by dressing as Tibetans; Annie also cut her hair to look like a Buddhist nun. For the length of their 1300-mile trek they had to ward off bandits and robbers, sleep out in the open and seek sanctuary wherever they could. The rivers they had to cross were often flooded and swollen, posing a considerable obstacle. ‘The river is quite impassable, so they say, barring our way, but we are waiting until tomorrow to see if it will be lower in the morning. The Lord can do this for me. My eyes are unto him who made a passage in the Red Sea for the children of Israel.’

When the river finally abated, they had to force their way through biting waters which froze to icicles on the spot. Pressing on along the tea road from China, Annie’s difficulties continued. One of the three men she had hired to carry her goods and care for the horses turned troublesome and threatened to reveal her identity. This was dangerous, for Tibet feared invasion both from Britain and China and justifiably viewed all foreigners with suspicion. Another of her men died along the way and a third turned back shortly after the journey had begun. Although armed with a pistol, her real trust lay in the Lord.

Undeterred by the icy nights made worse by the altitude, she sold her tent in order to buy another horse. So high up did the route take them that you could plunge your hand unscathed into a saucepan of boiling water and when she put her Christmas pudding on to boil – for certain traditions after all had to be maintained – its centre was still cold after two hours of cooking. Nevertheless, on that Christmas day in 1892, far from the blazing log fire and roast turkey of childhood days in Egremont, she was cheerful and optimistic, doing what she had chosen to do: ‘Quite safe here with Jesus,’ she wrote happily in her diary. Her seven-month long journey to Lhasa proved fruitless in the end; she was apprehended within twelve miles of her goal, tried by the local elder and arbitrarily expelled from Tibet. What a long way this rocklike and forceful woman had travelled from a Victorian childhood plagued by heart trouble.

Annie Taylor was a simple, solid soul, well suited to the sort of work which the Inland Mission to China required of its members. She plodded her way through some of the most intriguing places in Tibet, totally unaware of their significance, intent only on revealing to the impoverished peasants the golden gates of heaven through which they could walk one day if only they embraced the Bible. The town of Kum Bum is clustered round the famous Buddhist settlement – then the third largest monastery, housing three thousand lamas – and there the stalwart Annie braved the annual Butter Fair, distributing her evangelical leaflets and urging the holiday crowd to forsake their ancient religion and follow the Lord.

What would have happened to Annie had she been forced to stay at home in England? Perhaps she would have found some satisfaction in evangelical work among the wretches who worked the dark satanic mills of the Midlands. Those places, after all, were every bit as godforsaken as Lanchow or Shanghai, or even Kum Bum. Instead, she chose to set out for the most impenetrable of countries, circled as it is by a fortress of snow-covered peaks. Like scores of travellers before and since, she was drawn towards Lhasa as if mesmerized by its inaccessibility. Her motivation was religion, but it was a drive fuelled by the challenges which her chosen life had laid before her – challenges to which her brave and adventurous spirit rose with stoical determination.

Consumed by the same missionary zeal was the aptly named Evangeline French. With her sister Francesca and friend Mildred Cable, the three, known as ‘the trio’, spent fifteen years dining the 1920s and 1930s evangelizing in China; they crossed the Gobi Desert five times during that period. Wearing Chinese dress and learning the local dialects, the three women brightly and happily revealed the treasures of the Bible to the nomad tribes until forced to leave by the vagaries of the Chinese/Japanese war.

Sublimely indifferent to their supposed weaknesses, Victorian women missionaries breached the wall of prejudice and proved themselves to be as vigorous and as tenacious as any man, giving practical expression to their spiritual message by setting up schools and hospitals, drawing attention to the difficulties under which the indigenous women laboured, and making representations to governments and royalty on behalf of the poor, the sick and the forgotten.

Four years younger than Annie Taylor, Kate Marsden was caught up in the same wave of religious fervour that swept through Victorian England. After only eight months’ training as a missionary nurse, she was sent to Bulgaria in 1877, to tend to Russian soldiers injured in the Russian/Turkish war. The sights she saw were terrifying, for she was still only eighteen and until then had been sheltered by a middle-class upbringing. Especially traumatic was her first and unexpected meeting with two men whose bodies had been hideously eaten away by leprosy. It was this meeting, however, that was to give a focus to her religious zeal and a sense of mission to her life.

Back in England, she continued her nursing career, see-sawing between rationality and periods of disabling self-doubt culminating in a mental disorder which eventually engulfed her. When she recovered, she felt ready to begin her life’s work, and started off across Russia to set up a hospital for lepers in the outer reaches of Siberia.

Kate Marsden, above all else, had a sense of humour which got her through many terrible experiences. Her description of her journey across Siberia, undertaken in 1891 before the Trans-Siberian railway had been built, would be unbearable even to imagine were it not for the black humour with which she managed to invest it She and her woman companion travelled by sledge at night, through forests peppered with the gleam of wolves’ eyes. The manic speed at which the sledge was driven was usually due to the intoxicated state of the driver and, on one occasion at least, the company was unceremoniously tipped out into the snow. ‘… we hardly knew whether to laugh or cry,’ wrote Kate, ‘and chose the former alternative and merrily awaited events.’

The journey soon began to resemble a descent into hell. The dark nights of ice and snow gave way to days of suffocating heat. On horseback now, they traversed a region which trembled beneath them, shaken with subterranean fire: ‘Blinding clouds of smoke every now and then swept into our eyes and the hot, stifling air almost choked us. We had to go through the fire: there was no escaping it, unless we chose to turn back. After looking on, aghast, for some time, and trying to prevent our terrified horses from bolting, we moved slowly forward, picking our way as best we could in and out of the flames …’

Her journey took her another 1000 miles and led to hell itself where lepers crawled out from the forests, dragging themselves painfully towards this foreign woman who had come to help them. Dressed as she was in trousers to the knee, bag slung over her shoulder, riding whip in hand and the whole thing topped off by her London deerstalker, no one could possibly have mistaken her origins. To the leper colony, she must have seemed like some god-sent apparition. She unpacked her medical supplies, distributed gifts among the stricken people and naively offered up a prayer for the health of her Imperial Majesty the Empress of Russia, noting – no doubt with approval – that the poor lepers joined in heartily. Like the Light Brigade, hers was not to reason why.

It is hard to believe that in her twenties Kate Marsden had suffered so badly from a lung disease that she had been pensioned off from her job in a hospital. She had proved that she would stop at nothing. Bureaucracy, war, the icy wastes of Siberia – all were mere stumbling blocks to be demolished in her personal campaign to bring help to the lepers whose banishment to Siberia was effectively a way of removing such an unwelcome sight from the public eye.

The Victorian women missionaries formed a travelling brigade that was as unique as it was misguided, but whatever the consequences of their ill-advised activities, we cannot but admire the manner in which these delightful ladies dispensed tea, sugar and the Word of Life.