The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

us, laying their hands on all the features of our faces, feeling our breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat then wondering to see another; admiring our shoes and stockings but more our garters which we gave them and they tied about their legs, being laced with silver lace at the ends.’ The arrival, however, of the chieftains of war was another thing altogether, for they seemed a ferocious bunch with their marks and self-mutilations: ‘… so frightful a vision it was to see them … some wanted their noses, some their lips … others cut through each cheek’. They wore ‘girdles of cotton with their knives naked stuck in it … a quiver of arrows on their thighs and feathers on their heads’. Nevertheless, she found them both humane and noble.

      Returning to England in 1663, Aphra married a merchant called Behn who died within three years, and she was then sent to Antwerp as a spy, with little more to live on than forty pounds and money from the sale of her rings. It seems that she never married again, for she regarded that institution as ‘the cheap drug of a church ceremony’. She received little thanks for the political and naval information she sent back from Antwerp, and on her return she devoted herself to earning a living from her writing, becoming the first Englishwoman to do so and drawing copiously on her travels in Surinam which she recounted as the background to her autobiographical novel Oroonoko, published a year before her early death at the age of forty-eight.

      It is one of life’s small ironies that women – their own position in society not unlike that of a colonized country – were themselves able to take a ride on the great wave of colonization that burst outwards into the unclaimed world. The more ambitious and adventurous among them were quick to grasp the opportunity to travel far beyond the tamer shores of Europe to the unknown excitements of distant colonies. While Aphra Behn was working in Holland to undermine any plans the Dutch might have to defeat the English navy, another woman – also in Holland – was starting to build up a career that would eventually take her, also, to Surinam.

      It was unusual for women to travel to the colonies on their own and those who did were usually making the journey in order to marry a merchant or planter. A contemporary writer, therefore, found it ‘a kind of phenomenon to see a lady actuated by a love of insects so truly heroic as to induce her to traverse the seas for the purpose of painting and describing them’. To go after a husband was understandable but to endure a journey into the tropics merely to paint insects was another thing altogether!

      The amazing lady was the entomological artist, Maria Sibylla Merian who, ten years after Aphra Behn’s death, received a grant from the Dutch government which allowed her, at the age of fifty-two, to set out for Surinam. At that time, according to a contemporary report, it was the black spot of the Dutch Empire. If the destination proved unsavoury, the means of getting there was a positive death-trap. Sea travel in the seventeenth century was neither pleasant nor healthy. Scurvy abounded, hygiene was virtually non-existent and the only air that filtered down below deck came through hatches which often had to be battened down to keep out the driving rain. Sailing into the tropics, the air became steamy and foul and this, acting upon the decaying food left lying round the galley, meant that sailors and passengers often fell victim to dysentery. Maria, taking her daughter with her as a companion, survived the journey – no mean feat for a woman who would have hitherto led a very sheltered life. Surinam lies just north of the Equator and the combination of high temperatures and a copious rainfall meant a plentiful vegetation for Maria to sketch. It was the low, unhealthy marshlands, however, that were too much for this middle-aged matron and she had to return to Holland after two years.

      The travels of these three women – and of many others that must go unremarked – are a reflection of the new horizons perceived, for the first time, by people interested in the special qualities of the places they visited and especially, in the case of Aphra Behn, in the lives of those they encountered in the course of their journeys. Celia Fiennes noted with obvious disapproval the increasing interest in things foreign and chose instead to confine herself to a thorough study of her own country. The other two travellers accepted the challenge of adventure and, like so many women before them, found it to their taste.

      By the eighteenth century, a steady wave of women travellers was regularly leaving England’s shores, some to accompany their husbands on diplomatic missions, and some to participate with them in that great cultural institution – the Grand Tour. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went with her husband to Constantinople in 1716, where she became a keen and amusing observer of life. She was one of the first travellers daring enough to try out a strange, foreign practice: while in Turkey, she studied the habit of vaccination for smallpox, adopted it for her own children, and later introduced the practice to England.

      In 1810, Hester Stanhope left England in search of a new and more exciting life than anything she could possibly find at home. There was no way in which an intelligent and independent-minded woman such as she could satisfy her hunger for both knowledge and adventure. She was the daughter of an illustrious family: her grandfather had been Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, and her uncle was William Pitt for whom she had acted as hostess during his years of office as Prime Minister. After his death in 1806 there was a vacuum to be filled, and she began to think about ways of satisfying the unbounded curiosity which had ruled her since childhood. She recalled her governesses admonishing her for this awkward trait: ‘I was tired of all those around me who to all my questions invariably answered, “My dear, that is not proper for you to know – you must not talk about such things until you are older.”’ That she was clever was certain; had not her father, himself hungry for knowledge, said that she was the best logician he knew?

      The only man she might have married. Sir John Moore, 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