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,
