Mary Russell - The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt

By the seventeenth century, the pilgrimage had given way to the Grand Tour and it was not unusual for women to travel between the major cities of Europe, sometimes without their husbands but always with a startling entourage of servants and baggage. Products of a sober, post-revolutionary England which offered an enlightened education to its more privileged daughters, women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Eliza Craven toured Europe, Russia and Turkey, studying the architecture, admiring the paintings, dining with the local nobility and wondering at the strangeness of places like Moscow and Istanbul. They were avid collectors of information and assiduous at recording everything they saw.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the energy and drive that characterized the great days of the British Empire were beginning to show themselves among travellers. Lady missionaries were storming the citadels of China and Africa and the young Victorian miss – middle-class and energetic – was starting to travel on her own, savouring the freedom of climbing in the Alps or walking in Italy while the older, more intrepid maiden lady was pressing onwards to India, Japan, Hawaii and America. By the turn of the century, the New Woman – confident, educated and financially independent – was further liberated by the arrival of the bicycle and the aeroplane. Fanny Workman’s bike took her to North Africa and India and another American, Harriet Quimby, took England by surprise by becoming, in 1912, the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Women such as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark who found satisfaction in combining travel with serious scholarship became professional travellers, bringing with them an aura of respectability that some equally serious travellers have since sought to cast off.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women travellers and explorers were again soaring towards their dreams, breaking new records in the sky, on land and by sea. Jerrie Mock became the first woman to fly solo round the world, and Sheila Scott, having failed her driving test three times, became the first British woman pilot to solo the earth. Ann Davison, as we have seen, became the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic and in the 1950s the first British all-women expedition set out for the Himalayas. The small but steady stream of women travellers and explorers continues, hell-bent on getting up and away into the skies, over mountains, down rivers or across deserts, travelling on foot, by bike, in a canoe or on their wits alone.

Robyn Davidson needed all her wits about her when she went to spend a year in the incomparable town of Alice Springs learning how to handle camels before setting out with a dog and two camels (one of which was pregnant) on an astonishing trek across 1700 miles of Australian scrubland. Her stay in Alice Springs was a baptism by alcoholism and sexism, and at times was nothing less than sheer misery, but the experience provided her with the protective armour she needed in order to make the journey.

A university girl, she had been accused of being a bourgeois individualist – an insult too terrible to contemplate. ‘For one who associated herself for years with the Left, it was the political equivalent of having VD.’ Soon however, the pressing need to organize her trek pushed any such self-centred concerns to the back of her mind. She learned how to scout in the desert, how to saddle a camel and, when one of them became ill, how to inject it with massive doses of antibiotics. More important for her own survival, she learned how to supplement her diet with witchetty grubs. She wasn’t altogether sure what she was doing in the middle of this vast nowhere. Perhaps she was expiating a collective guilt? The misery caused by her mother’s death had affected her whole family and at times she felt that all the stupid, meaningless pain our family had suffered might somehow be symbolically absolved, laid to rest through this gesture of mine’.

Robyn Davidson was twenty-seven when she made her solitary and memorable journey across Australia. She has blond hair and a determined smile and though there is a gentleness in her eyes there is also the self-knowledge she gained during her own remarkable pilgrimage. ‘You are as powerful,’ she wrote when she reached the Indian Ocean and the end of her journey, ‘and as strong as you allow yourself to be.’

Lucy Irvine was strong too, but despite that she nearly succumbed to poisoning on three occasions while spending a year as a castaway on the island of Tuin, which lies between the north coast of Australia and Papua New Guinea. She was a 24-year-old tax clerk when she saw a newspaper notice advertising for a wife to live on a desert island for a year. Gerald Kingsland, who had placed the ad, liked what he saw – her ‘bubbling, bucaneering spirit … her delicate wrists … unwavering eyes – and long, shapely legs’.

On her twenty-fifth birthday they made love. A month later, for his fifty-first birthday, she took him to the Royal Festival Hall and the following month they married. It was a marriage merely of convenience. The Australian immigration authorities would feel happier, they said, about allowing a couple to live together on a deserted island if they were married.

‘I’m not in love with you,’ Lucy told him, ‘but I feel very closely attached to you and who knows what the year will bring?’

How could they have guessed what it would be like? They’d brought only the minimum of food with them – two hundred tea bags, a packet of spaghetti, two kilos of dried beans, a bottle of cooking oil and a few other bits and pieces. It would be enough to keep going until they could grow some things of their own. They drank the milk from the large green coconuts that hung overhead and caught and cooked their own shark. It was an idyll that wasn’t to last. Three times Lucy became violently ill from eating wild berries. They ran dangerously short of water and Gerald’s extra years began to tell on him. He developed a gangrenous ulcer and they both lost weight Their affection for each other degenerated into a strained uneasiness and it wasn’t until their year was ending that they managed to recapture their earlier feelings. At the end of the year, however, she left both the island and Gerald just as she had always planned to do, marriage or not.

‘“I know you’ve got to go,” he said. “Christ, you’re only twenty-six, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” … And with that he pulled me closer and our faces bumped together in a brief kiss.’ The year was over.

There have been other women propelled by the same curious combination of determination and vulnerability – a blind woman sets out to climb Kala Patthar, 500 feet above Everest base camp, a grandmother cycles solo across America and Eve Jackson, a young Englishwoman, plans to fly solo in 1986 from England to Australia in a frail microlight aircraft. The list lengthens each year, but spread across the world as they are, spanning the years from youth to old age, these women appear linked by nothing more than their sex and the common experience of travelling. Surprisingly, the link that initially might appear to be a vital one – that of feminism – is rarely to be found.

It may be thought that because a woman attempts to achieve something in what has hitherto been considered a male area she is doing so with the primary intention of making a statement about women. It is abundantly clear, however, that in the case of most women travellers, this is not so. It is true, certainly, that some of them have consciously and deliberately laid their motivations and success on the altar of their womanhood. Others, in the course of travelling, have taken on the mantle of their sisters, as their physical journey has evolved into one also of the soul. But to describe all women travellers as feminists would be to take away from them that very quality which makes each one unique – their individuality.