It was In the year 1873 and aboard the paddle steamer Nevada that Isabella Bird's life changed decisively, at the moment that it so easily could have been ended. Two days into a voyage from New Zealand to the US state of California, a hurricane hit the ship, which was aged, leaky, Infested with rats, and in no condition to withstand a battering. For a while, it looked as if the Nevada might break apart and be lost entirely.
For the passengers and crew, it was a terrifying experience. Yet rather than give in to fear, Bird, a Yorkshire-born spinster in her early forties hitherto facing middle age in a fug of unhappiness that visiting Australia and New Zealand had done little to lift, revelled in what was happening. “It is so like living in a new world, so free, so fresh, so vital, so careless, so unfettered, so full of interest that one grudges being asleep,” she later wrote, after the hurricane passed with the Nevada still seaworthy, in one of her letters to her sister, Henrietta, whom she affectionately called ‘Hennie’.
Bird spent much of the journey across the Pacific helping one Mrs Dexter careDexter planned to alight at the Sandwich Islands, the archipelago now known as Hawaii, for her son to receive medical treatment, and she asked her new friend to accompany them. Bird readily agreed; her sense of adventure and, as a minister's daughter with a strong morality, her sense of duty in alignment.
