by Olga Kenyon
– 12th – In the beautiful fir wood where I have been several times to paint, I heard a pleasant voice singing hymns. Yesterday the singer appeared, a young negro girl very slight and small, but she says she is eight years of age. She and her little sister of four or five sang to me negro songs and hymns. A boy came and joined them; and after much conversation I found he was given to running away and was often whipped for it. The girl said she would never do anything so wicked. I was amused with these children and they were amused with me. ‘Never was anybody like you.’ They were not sure whether I was Indian or not. They peeled off the inner bark of the fir, and chewed it like tobacco; but the girl said ‘If master seed us do that He’d whip us, because it spoils the teeth.’
March 13
Polly my servant is black, a real black woman. I said to her, ‘Polly, how many times have you been sold?’ ‘Twice.’ ‘Have you any children?’ ‘I had three; God only knows where two of them are – my master sold them. We lived in Kentucky; one, my darling, he sold South. She is in one of those fields perhaps, picking with one of those poor creatures you saw. Oh, dear! Mum, we poor creatures have need to believe in God; for if God Almighty will not be good to us some day, why were we born? When I hear of His delivering His people from bondage, I know it means the poor African.’ Her voice was so husky I could hardly understand her; but it seems her master promised to keep one child, and then sold it without telling her. When she asked in agony ‘Where is my child?’ the master said it was ‘hired out’. But it never came back. I found she was a member of the church I had visited in Louisville. She said to me on parting ‘Never forget me; never forget what we suffer. Do all you can to alter it.’
ENGLISH WOMAN’S JOURNAL 8, DECEMBER 1861
EGYPT IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
Lucy Duff Gordon went to Upper Egypt for seven years, a longer stay than any other European. Her sympathy for the Arabs contrasts with many English attitudes of the time; she proved the only contemporary witness to the disastrous governments of Ismail praised as Viceroy by English male politicians. Her Letters from Egypt (1865), reprinted three times in their first year, remain a valuable historical document and a lively account of one remarkable individual’s view of another culture. Here she tells her husband of Egyptian food and drink.
Thebes 11 Feb 1863
Dearest Alick
We got quite intimate over our leather cup of sherbet (brown sugar and water), and the handsome jet-black men, with features as beautiful as those of the young Bacchus, described the distant lands in a way which would have charmed Herodotus. They proposed to me to join them, ‘they had food enough,’ and Omar and I were equally inclined to go. It is of no use to talk of the ruins; everybody has said, I suppose, all that can be said, but Philae surpassed my expectations. No wonder the Arab legends of Ans el Wogood are so romantic, and Abou Simbel and many more. The scribbling of names is quite infamous, beautiful paintings are defaced by Tomkins and Hobson, but worst of all Prince Pückler Muskau has engraved his and his Ordenskreuz in huge letters on the naked breast of the august and pathetic giant who sits at Abou Simbel. I wish someone would kick him for his profanity.
I have eaten many odd things with odd people in queer places, dined in a respectable Nubian family (the castor-oil was trying), been to a Nubian wedding – such a dance I saw. Made friends with a man much looked up to in his place (Kalabshee – notorious for cutting throats), inasmuch as he had killed several intrusive tax-gatherers and recruiting officers. He was very gentlemanly and kind and carried me up a place so steep I could not have reached it. Just below the cataract – by-the-by going up is nothing but noise and shouting, but coming down is fine fun – Fantasia khateer as my excellent little Nubian pilot said. My sailors all prayed away manfully and were horribly frightened. I confess my pulse quickened, but I don’t think it was fear. Well, below the cataract I stopped for a religious fête, and went to a holy tomb with the darweesh, so extraordinarily handsome and graceful – the true feingemacht noble Bedaween type. He took care of me through the crowd, who never had seen a Frank woman before and crowded fearfully, and pushed the true believers unmercifully to make way for me. He was particularly pleased at my not being afraid of Arabs; I laughed, and asked if he was afraid of us. ‘Oh no! he would like to come to England; when there he would work to eat and drink, and then sit and sleep in the church.’ I was positively ashamed to tell my religious friend that with us the ‘house of God’ is not the house of the poor stranger. I asked him to eat with me but he was holding a preliminary Ramadan (it begins next week), and could not; but he brought his handsome sister, who was richly dressed, and begged me to visit him and eat of his bread, cheese and milk. Such is the treatment one finds if one leaves the highroad and the backsheeshhunting parasites. There are plenty of ‘gentlemen’ barefooted and clad in a shirt and cloak ready to pay attentions which you may return with a civil look and greeting, and if you offer a cup of coffee and a seat on the floor you give great pleasure, still more if you eat the dourah and dates, or bread and sour milk with an appetite.
At Koom Ombo we met a Rifaee darweesh with his basket of tame snakes. After a little talk he proposed to initiate me, and so we sat down and held hands like people marrying. Omar sat behind me and repeated the words as my ‘Wakeel,’ then the Rifaee twisted a cobra round our joined hands and requested me to spit on it, he did the same and I was pronounced safe and enveloped in snakes. My sailors groaned and Omar shuddered as the snakes put out their tongues – the darweesh and I smiled at each other like Roman augurs. I need not say the creatures were toothless.
L. DUFF GORDON, LETTERS FROM EGYPT (1865)
A HOME IN BRAZIL
Isabel Burton accompanied her adventurer husband to Brazil in 1865. These extracts come from letters to her mother.
1865
It was fortunate that I had the foresight to take iron bedsteads along, as already at Lisbon three-inch cockroaches seethed about the floor of our room. I jumped onto a chair and Burton growled ‘I suppose you think you look very pretty standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures’. My reaction was to stop screaming and reflect that he was right; if I had to live in a country full of such creatures, and worse, I had better pull myself together. I got down among them, and started lashing out with a slipper. In two hours I had a bag full of ninety-seven, and had conquered my queasiness.
Santos:
Here in Brazil there are spiders as big as crabs. In the matter of tropical diseases it ranks with darkest Africa; there are slaves, too, often maintained in conditions of utmost savagery. . . . I am becoming painfully acclimatised. There is cholera, and the less dramatic but agonising local boils so close you could not put a pin between them. I battle through these boils on frequent draughts of stout! However I have now unpacked my fifty-nine trunks, set my house in order, and given my first dinner-party – successfully. I believe that the Emperor considers Burton a great addition to the country, because his wonderful conversation holds his audience spell-bound. . . .
Some of these chic Brazilians look askance at me, wading barefoot in the streams, bottling snakes, painting, furbishing up a ruined chapel, or accompanying my husband on expeditions to the virgin interior. The ladies are namby-pamby: They have taken exception, as improper, to four puny English railway clerks rowing at the Regatta, in jerseys. I often think a parvenue, or half-bred woman would burst if she had to do as I do, keeping up appearances, lancing boils, coping with insects, with Richard, with everything. I do hate Santos. The climate is beastly, the people fluffy. The stinks, the vermin, the food, the niggers are all of a piece. There are no walks, if you go one way you sink knee-deep in mangrove swamps; another, you are covered with sandflies. Fortunately Richard has even taught me to fence. And with him I do gymnastics, have cold baths, go to Mass and market. Above all I help Richard with Literature. I copy out all the pages of his reports to the Foreign Office. Thirty-two pages on Cotton Report, one hundred and twenty-five on Geographic Report – & chee
rfully!
L. BLANCH, THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE (1954)
A TRAVELLER’S LIFE
Isabella Bird, born in 1831, rejected conventional life in order to travel to some of the remotest regions of the world. Yet she had been a frail child and suffered from severe back-pain all her life. On foot, horseback, yak, even elephant, she visited Japan, Korea, Kurdestan, Persia, and the Rocky Mountains. She wrote nine books about her dangerous journeys, which became bestsellers in her time. She gave most of the profits to charities, declaring her travels ‘vindicated the right of a woman to do anything which she can do well’. She rode through the Rocky Mountains in 1873.
Ranch, Plum Creek October 24.
You must understand that in Colorado travel, unless on the main road and in the larger settlements, there are neither hotels nor taverns, and that it is the custom for the settlers to receive travellers, charging them at the usual hotel rate for accommodation. It is a very satisfactory arrangement. However, at Ranch, my first halting-place, the host was unwilling to receive people in this way, I afterwards found, or I certainly should not have presented my credentials at the door of a large frame house, with large barns and a generally prosperous look. The host, who opened the door, looked repellant, but his wife, a very agreeable, lady-like-looking woman, said they could give me a bed on a sofa. The house was the most pretentious I have yet seen, being papered and carpeted, and there were two ‘hired girls.’ There was a lady there from Laramie, who kindly offered to receive me into her room, a very tall, elegant person, remarkable as being the first woman who had settled in the Rocky Mountains. She had been trying the ‘camp cure’ for three months, and was then on her way home. She had a waggon with beds, tent, tent-floor, cooking stove, and every camp luxury, a light buggy, a man to manage everything, and a most superior ‘hired girl.’ She was consumptive and frail in strength, but a very attractive person, and her stories of the perils and limitations of her early life at Fort Laramie were very interesting. Still I ‘wearied,’ as I had arrived early in the afternoon, and could not out of politeness retire and write to you. At meals the three ‘hired men’ and two ‘hired girls’ eat with the family. I soon found that there was a screw loose in the house, and was glad to leave early the next morning, although it was obvious that a storm was coming on. I saw the toy car of the Rio Grande Railroad whirl past, all cushioned and warmed, and rather wished I were in it, and not out among the snow on the bleak hill-side. I only got on four miles when the storm came on so badly that I got into a kitchen where eleven wretched travellers were taking shelter, with the snow melting on them and dripping on the floor. I had learned the art of ‘being agreeable’ so well at the Chalmers’s, and practised it so successfully during the two hours I was there, by paring potatoes and making scones, that when I left, though the hosts kept ‘an accommodation house for travellers,’ they would take nothing for my entertainment.
I. BIRD, A LADY’S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS (1982)
Her last journey was to the Atlas Mountains, from where she wrote this letter in 1901, aged seventy, to relatives at home.
I left Tangier and had a severe two days’ voyage to Mazagan, where the landing was so terrible and the sea so wild that the captain insisted on my being lowered into the boat by the ship’s crane, in a coal basket. The officers and passengers cheered my pluck as the boat mounted a huge breaking surge – no cargo could be landed. Before leaving the steamer I had a return of fever; and when the camping-ground turned out to be a soaked field with water standing in the furrows, and the tent was pitched in a storm of wind and rain, and many of the tent-pegs would not hold, and when the head of my bed went down into the slush, I thought I should die there – but had no more illness or fever. After an awful night when the heavy wet end of my tent, having broken loose, flapped constantly against my head, things mended. The rain ceased, and we left with camel, mule, donkey and horse and travelled here, 126 miles in six days.
Marrakesh is awful; an African city of 80,000 people, the most crowded, noisiest, filthiest, busiest city I have seen in the world. It terrifies me. It is the great Mohammedan feast, lasting a week, and several thousand tribesmen, sheiks and retainers, are here, all armed, mounted on their superb barbs, splendidly caparisoned, men as wild as the mountains and deserts from which they come to do homage to the Sultan.
I have seen several grand sights: the Sultan in the midst of his brilliant army, receiving the homage of the sheiks and on another day, similarly surrounded, killing a sheep, in memory of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and as an atonement for the sins of the year. I was at the last in Moorish disguise, pure white and veiled.
I have a Moorish house to myself with a courtyard choked with orange-trees in blossom and fruit. I also have what is a terror to me, a magnificent barb, the property of the Sultan; a most powerful black charger, a huge fellow far too much for me, equipped with crimson trappings and a peaked crimson saddle, 18 inches above his back. I have to carry a light ladder for getting on and off!
With mules, horses and soldiers I left the din and devilry of Marrakesh, as the Sultan’s guest. We have been travelling six hours daily since, camping four nights and sleeping two in the castles of these wild tribes till tonight, when we are camped in the fastness of the great Atlas range at the height of 1000 feet, in as wild a region as can be imagined. This journey differs considerably from any other as it is as rough as the roughest. I never expected to do such travelling again. You would fail to recognise your infirm friend astride a superb horse in full blue trousers and a short full skirt with brass spurs belonging to a generalissimo of the Moorish army, and riding down places awful even to think of, where a rolling stone or slip would mean destruction. In these wild mountains we are among tribes which Rome failed to conquer. It is evidently air and riding which do me good. I never realised this so vividly as now.
This is an awful country, the worst I have been in. The oppression and cruelty are hellish – no one is safe. The country is rotten to the core, eaten up by abominable vices, no one is to be trusted. Every day deepens my horror of its deplorable and unspeakable vileness.
The journey of twenty-one days is over. The last day I rode thirty miles and walked two. Is it not wonderful that even at my advanced age this life should affect me thus? We were entertained everywhere as guests of the Sultan. The bridle tracks on the Atlas are awful, mere rock ladders, or smooth faces of shelving rock. We lamed two horses, and one mule went over a precipice, rolling over four times before he touched the bottom. We had guides, soldiers and slaves with us. The weather was dry and bracing. Today I had an interview with the Sultan, the first European woman to see the Emperor of Morocco! It was very interesting, but had to be secretly managed, because of the fanatical hatred to Christians.
ED. C. PALSER HAVELY, THE TRAVELS OF ISABELLA BIRD (1971)
‘MY CANNIBAL FRIENDS NEVER EAT HUMAN HEADS’
Mary Kingsley was born in 1862, to a middle-class family, and lived a respectable Victorian life until her parents died in 1892. For the next eight years she travelled in West Africa, alone, making copious notes of her adventures. Considering herself an anthropologist, she studied African religion and law. As the family money had been spent educating her brother, she paid her way by trading fish-hooks and matches. She preferred traders to missionaries, since they did not try to change African customs. She enjoyed staying with traders, as this gave her freedom to criticize, which she eschewed in her published works, but not in private letters, such as this undated one to the trader John Holt.
I could not be a parson’s guest and then abuse them, so seeing staying with missions tied my hands I settled with traders to their great alarm at times. I don’t mean to say I could ever half pay them, but I spent my money at their stores to the tune of £500 while in West Africa. The three missions I stayed at are the Mission Evangelique. I hold my tongue for the sake of those men and women I respect, but I have never forgiven one of the best of the white women from saying to me when I said I was going down t
hat night to nurse a sick man, white, who was ill with fever, with no other Christian close by, ‘Miss Kingsley, you can not, it’s not respectable’.
She enjoyed teasing, as here to Professor E.B. Taylor in 1898:
‘My cannibal friends never eat human heads unless for religious purposes. By the way, did I tell you of my friend James Irvine, the Elder of the Presbyterian Church, late of Calabar, now Liverpool, who came across a black friend boiling human heads in an oil cauldron – he expressed his opinion and the African let him run on and laughed and finally demonstrated he was not soup-making but only preparing the skulls to keep in a way that would not attract flies.’
VALERIE GROSVENOR MYER, A VICTORIAN LADY IN AFRICA (1989)
A HIMALAYAN JOURNEY
Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) toured the Middle East and North Africa as an opera singer. In 1904 she married a distant cousin, Philippe Néel, but she felt trapped by marriage, and they separated within a matter of days. Nevertheless, they continued to correspond, and he supported her financially, enabling her to study and travel abroad. In 1911, when the Dalai Lama was in exile in Darjeeling, she became the first Western woman to interview him. Her meeting with him inspired her to concentrate on Tibetan Buddhism in her studies. These letters were sent to her husband.