Women travelers to Africa were true explorer-adventurers, willing to undertake long, dangerous journeys to remote places at considerable risk to themselves. In doing so, they saw themselves as equal participants in the tradition of nineteenth-century male exploration. Kingsley spoke of “the school of travelers of which Du Chaillu, Dr. Barth, Joseph Thomson and Livingston are past masters and of which I am a humble member.” These women’s achievements were considerable, most notably, Sheldon’s exploration of Lake Chala, on the slopes of Mount Kilamanjaro, and Kingsley’s surveys of the Ogowé and the Rembwé Rivers in West Africa.

Sheldon, born in Boston, is the most eccentric lady traveler. She explored the East African desert in an elaborate wicker palanquin (of her own design), wearing gowns (and sometimes a blonde wig), with enough baggage to require a retinue of 100 porters. She was also the author of a best selling novel, Herbert Severance, and the translator of Flaubert’s Salammbo. Her work on the previously unexplored Lake Chala led her (along with Bird and Marsden) to be one of the first women elected into fellowship of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892.

May French Sheldon. Sultan to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and other tribes of East Africa. London: Saxon & Co., 1892. Frontispiece.

Mary Gaunt, novelist and travel writer, is the most famous Australian lady traveler. She swung her way through the Gold Coast of Africa in a hammock, carried by native men. Her particular interest was describing the domestic life and social customs of the African peoples she encountered. Like Mary Kingsley, she was critical of missionary methods and of pre-War British imperialist attitudes.

Florence von Sass was a seventeen-year old, about to be sold into bondage at a slave market in Hungary, when recently widowed English explorer, Sir Samuel Baker, rescued her. She participated in both of his African expeditions to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), one to find the source of the Nile, and the second to thwart the slave trade. Though they traveled as man and wife, they did not marry until their return to England in 1865; this hint of scandal caused Florence to be unjustly ostracized by some members of London society. She was a loyal, brave and resourceful partner. Samuel wrote that she had “a share of sang-froid admirably adapted for African travel. Mrs. Baker is not a screamer.”

Mary Kingsley. West African Studies. London: Macmillan and Co., 1899.

Kingsley, insisting that “you have no right to go about Africa in things you would be ashamed of at home,” waded through West African swamps and rivers in Victorian drawing room dress. She made two trips to Sierra Leone where she became the first westerner to survey the upper reaches of the Ogowé River. She was also a self-educated naturalist who discovered several unknown species and a dedicated spokesman on behalf of tribal Africans.

KIDNAPPINGS ON THE BARBARY COAST

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Barbary pirates (based in Algiers and Tunis) terrorized the seas surrounding northern Africa and the shores of Europe opposite. At the height of their powers, in the mid-seventeenth century, they carried off the entire Irish town of Baltimore; 20,000 slaves were said to be imprisoned in Algiers alone at the time. Although piracy declined somewhat in the eighteenth century, kidnapping by Corsairs remained a risk of sea travel in these regions, especially for women. Marsh was kidnapped in 1756, and in 1776, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, the “French Sultana,” mother of Sultan Mahmoud II, was abducted from a ship sailing from Nantes to Martinique (described by Lesley Blanch in her book, The Wilder Shores of Love). Of those taken captive, the rich were frequently allowed to redeem themselves; the poor were condemned to slavery.

Eliza Bradley. An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley. Boston: James Walden, 1820.

A captivity narrative by a middle-class Englishwoman, Elizabeth Marsh, whose ship was attacked by Corsairs in 1756. She was taken to Morocco where the Imperial Prince asked her to join his seraglio. Like Bradley, she was fortunate enough to be ransomed by the British government some months later.