Famous Women Pioneers

BY

FRANK ELIAS

 A great deal has been said and written about the men who, in times past, opened up vast tracts of the unknown, and, by so doing, prepared new homes for their countrymen from England. Park and Livingstone, Raleigh and Flinders--the names of these and many more are remembered with gratitude wherever the English tongue is spoken.

Less often perhaps do we remember that there have been not only strong-willed and adventurous men but brave and enduring women who have gone where scarcely any white folks went before them, and who, while doing so, bore without complaint hardships no less severe than those endured by male pioneers.

To the shores of Cape Cod there came, on November 11, 1620, a little leaky ship, torn by North Atlantic gales and with sides shattered by North Atlantic rollers. Standing shivering upon her decks stood groups of men and women, plainly not sailor-folk, worn by a long voyage, and waiting to step upon a shore of which they knew no more than that it was inhabited by unmerciful savages and overlaid by dense forests. The first must be conciliated, and the second, to some extent at least, cleared away before there could be any hope of settlement.

What pictures of happy homes in the Old Country, with their green little gardens and honeysuckle creepers, rose up in the memory of those delicate women as they eyed the bleak, unfriendly shore! Yet, though the cold bit them and the unknown yawned before, they did not flinch, but waited for the solemn moment of landing.

The 'Mayflower'

Perhaps a little of what they did that day they knew. Yet could they, we wonder, have realised that in quitting England with their husbands and fathers in order, with them, to worship God according to the manner bidden by their conscience, they were giving themselves a name glorious among women? Or that, because of them and theirs, the name of the little tattered, battered ship they were soon to leave, after weary months of danger from winds and seas, was to live as long as history. Thousands of great ships have gone out from England since the day on which the 'Mayflower' sailed from Plymouth, yet which of them had a name like hers?

Tried as the 'Mayflower' women were, their trials were only beginning. Even while they waited for their husbands to find a place of settlement, one of their number, wife of William Bradford--a man later to be their governor--fell overboard and was drowned. When they did at last land they had to face, not only the terrors of a North American winter, but sickness brought on by the hard work and poor food following the effects of overcrowding on the voyage.

Soon the death-rate in this small village amounted to as much as two to three persons a day. Wolves howled at night, Indians crept out to spy from behind trees, cruel winds shook their frail wooden houses and froze the dwellers in them, but the courage of the women pioneers of New England never faltered, and when, one by one, they died, worn out by hardship, they had done their noble part in building an altar to Him whom, in their own land, they had not been permitted to serve as they would.

For many years the task of helping to found settlements was the only work done by women in the way of opening up new territory. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most of our discoveries were still those of the mariner, who could scarcely take his wife to sea. But in the nineteenth came the rise of foreign missions, as well as the acknowledgment of the need of inland exploration, and in this work the explorer's wife often shared in the risks and adventures of her husband.

When Robert Moffat began his missionary labours in South Africa in 1816, he had not only to preach the gospel to what were often bloodthirsty savages, but he had to plunge into the unknown. Three years later he married Mary Smith, who was henceforth to be his companion in all his journeys, and to face, with a courage not less than his own, the tropical heat, the poisonous insects, the savage beasts, the fierce natives of a territory untrod by the white man, and who had to do all this in a day before medicine had discovered cures for jungle-sickness and poisons, before invention had improved methods of travel, and before knowledge had been able to prepare maps or to write guides.

It was the daughter of Mary Moffat who became the wife of the greatest of all explorers, David Livingstone, and who like her mother, was to set her foot where no white men or women had stood before.

Their first home was at Mabotsa, about two hundred miles from what is now the city of Pretoria. But soon Livingstone began the series of journeys which was to make his name famous. With his wife he travelled in a roomy wagon, drawn by bullocks at a rate of about two miles an hour. But they often suffered intensely from the heat and the scarcity of water. Then the mosquitoes were always troublesome, and frequently even the slow progress they were making would be interrupted by the death of one of the bullocks, killed by the deadly tsetse. At other times they would halt before a dense bunch of trees, and would have to stop until a clearing had been cut through.

Such was the life of Mrs. Livingstone during her first years in Africa. For a time, following this, she lived in England with her children, and had there to endure sufferings greater than any she had shared with her husband, for during most of her time at home Livingstone was cut off from the world in the middle of Africa. When he reached the coast once more she went back to him, unable to endure the separation longer.

But, soon after landing, her health gave way. At the end of April her condition was hopeless; she lay upon 'a rude bed formed of boxes, but covered with a soft mattress,' and thus, her husband beside her, she died in the heart of the great continent for which she and those most dear to her had spent themselves.

Lady Baker

An even greater African explorer than Mrs. Livingstone was Lady Baker, wife of Sir Samuel Baker. She was a Hungarian, and married Baker in 1860, when he had already done some colonisation work by settling a number of Englishmen in Ceylon. In the year following their marriage, the Bakers went to Egypt, determined to clear up that greatest of all mysteries to African explorers--the secret of the Nile sources. Arrived at Khartoum, they fitted out an expedition and set off up the river with twenty-nine camels.

One day, as they pushed on slowly in that silent, burning land, they heard that white men were approaching; and sure enough, there soon appeared before them the figures of Speke and Grant, two well-known explorers who had gone out a year before and whom many feared to have been lost. These men had found the source of the Nile in the Victoria Nyanza. But they told the Bakers a wonderful story of how they had heard rumours from time to time of the existence of another lake into which the Nile was said to flow.

The minds of Baker and his wife were fired to emulation. Parting from their newly-met countrymen, they pressed onwards and southwards. They had to go a long distance out of their way to avoid the slave-traders who were determined to wreck their plans if they could.

'We have heard a good deal recently of lady travellers in Africa,' said the _Times_ a long time afterwards, 'but their work has been mere child's play compared with the trials which Lady Baker had to undergo in forcing her way into a region absolutely unknown and bristling with dangers of every kind.'

But after encountering many adventures, the determined traveller and his brave wife at last reached the top of a slope from which, on looking down, they saw a vast inland ocean. No eye of white man had ever beheld this lake before, and to Lady Baker, not less than to her husband, belongs the glory of the discovery of the lake which all the world knows to-day as the Albert Nyanza.

'Thus,' to quote an earlier passage in the same _Times_ article, 'amid many hardships and at the frequent risk of death at the hands of Arab slavers and hostile chiefs, Baker and his wife forged one of the most important links in the course of one of the world's most famous rivers.'

After many further difficulties, the explorers found their way back to the coast, and thence to England. But their fame had gone before them, and everywhere they were welcomed. And though it was Baker who was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society, all must have felt that the honour belonged, not less, to his courageous wife.

Mary Kingsley

It may be said that Lady Baker was not alone in her journeys. On the other hand, Mary Kingsley, another woman African traveller, led her own expeditions. Moreover, her travelling was often done through territory reeking with disease. At the age of twenty-nine she explored the Congo River, and visited Old Calabar, and in 1894 ascended the mountain of Mungo Mah Lobeh. After her return to England she lectured upon her adventures. One more journey, this time not of exploration, was she to make to the great African continent. In 1900 she volunteered as a nurse during the war, and went out to the Cape. Here she was employed to nurse sick Boer prisoners. But her work was done. Enteric fever struck her down and, before long, the traveller had set out upon her last journey.

The names we have mentioned have been those of famous travellers--women whose work is part of the history of discovery. But there are hundreds of courageous women to-day, not perhaps engaged in exploration, but who, nevertheless, are living in remote stations in the heart of Africa, in the midst of the Australian 'never-never,' in the lonely islands of the Pacific--women whose husbands, whose fathers, whose brothers are carrying on the work of Empire, or the greater work of the gospel.

Often one of these women is the only white person of her sex for hundreds of miles. Perhaps she is the first who has ever set foot in the region wherein she lives. Yet her courage does not fail. When, as sometimes she does, she writes a book describing her adventures, it is sure to be full of high spirits and amusing descriptions of the primitive methods of cooking and housekeeping to which she must submit. The other side of the picture, the loneliness, the intense heat or cold, the mosquitoes or other pests, the compulsion, through absence of assistance, to do what at home could be done by a servant--all this is absent.

Women may have changed, but certainly woman in the difficult places of the Empire, whether she be missionary, squatter, or consul's wife, has lost nothing in courage, in perseverance, in cheerful or even smiling submission to hard conditions.