How to Climb Mt. Blanc in a Skirt: A Handbook for the Lady Adventurer

By Mick Conefrey

• Which explorer found the lost site of Jesus' first miracle?

• Who was first to the top of the highest mountain in Peru?

• Who was the first Westerner to visit the Ottoman harem in Constantinople?

• Who held the world record as the only person to fly from Britain to Australia for 44 years?

You'll find the answers to these questions and more in Mick Conefrey's charming new book (a hint: none of them had beards).

In 1870, New York mountaineer Meta Brevoort climbed Mt. Blanc in a hoop skirt. Pausing at the summit only long enough to drink a glass of champagne and dance the quadrille with her alpine guides, she marched back down the mountain and into history as one of the first female mountain explorers.

Here, Mick Conefrey weaves together tips, how-tos, anecdotes, and eccentric lists to tell the amazing stories of history's great female explorers—women who were just as fascinating and inspiring as all the Shackletons, Mallorys, and Livingstones. Most were brave, some were reckless, and all were fascinating. From Fanny Bullock Workman, who was photographed on top of a mountain pass in the Karakoram, holding up a banner calling for "Votes for Women" to Mary Hall, the Victorian world traveler, whose motto was, "take every precaution and abandon all fear," How to Climb Mt. Blanc in a Skirt is uproariously funny and occasionally downright strange.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780230112421

Mick Conefrey

Mick Conefrey is an award-winning author and documentary filmmaker. Mick created the landmark BBC series The Race for Everest to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include Everest 1922; The Adventurer’s Handbook; Everest 1953, the winner of a Leggimontagna Award; and The Ghosts of K2, which won the National Outdoor Book Award. Conefrey lives in England.

Book preview

PREFACE

A few years ago, after making a series of documentaries about mountaineering and Arctic exploration, I wrote The Adventurer’s Handbook, in which I attempted to look at the history of exploration in a slightly unusual way. I wanted to discover the life lessons that could be drawn from the experiences of the great explorers and the archetypal patterns that most expeditions follow.

Most of the characters in that book were men. I have to come clean and admit that I was simply ignorant of the long history of female travelers and explorers. Some of them—for example, Amelia Earhart and Freya Stark—are still well known today, but none of them share the status of Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, or Reinhold Messner.

This book is a small attempt to redress the balance. Within these five chapters you’ll find the stories of dozens of female explorers, sailors, pilots, and horsewomen. A few made careers out of exploration; others only made one great journey. Most were brave, some were reckless, and all were fascinating. So why are they not better known? Often they were just as heroic and just as eccentric as the men. There is no question that Osa Johnson, Jackie Cochran, and Wanda Rutkiewicz lived hugely exciting lives, but when it comes to exploration, women have rarely been accorded the same respect as men.

Until very recently, exploration was seen as an almost exclusively male realm; anyone who had the temerity to challenge that view was heading for trouble. Women found it harder to raise money, to get permissions to travel to remote areas, and to be taken seriously. In spite of this, hundreds of women did take to the air, the sea, and the dusty road to follow their dreams or simply go in search of adventure. But did they approach exploration differently from men? Were their concerns and obsessions the same? And do their stories have anything to say about the wider difference between the sexes?

This is a dangerous territory to get into. There is nothing harder than making generalizations about men and women, and no easier way to make a fool of yourself than by claiming to understand the difference between the genders. No sooner do you find a pattern than someone invariably comes along to contradict it.

Exploration, though, is all about risk, and to avoid this rather fascinating question would be to take the easy way out. So with a nod to Mary Hall, the Victorian world traveler, I have decided to follow her motto—Take every precaution and abandon all fear—and plunge deep into the dark continent of gender relations. My aim is to try to discover if there is a distinctly female approach to travel, and if so, what lessons can be learned from it.

First, though, a few words of gratitude to the people who have helped and supported me with this book. I would like to thank Christina Dodwell, Dominique Jean, Hugh Thompson, Amanda Faber, Carmel Conefrey, David Presswell, the staff of the Bodleian Library, the staff and trustees of the London Library, Anthony Sheil, Sally Riley and Leah Middleton at Aitken Alexander Ltd., Bettina Feldweg at Piper, Alessandra Bastagli at Palgrave Macmillan, and Mike Harpley at OneWorld. I would like to give special thanks to Adam T. Burton, who so beautifully illustrated this book. As ever, I owe a huge debt to my children, Frank and Phyllis, who put up with my absences, and most of all to my darling wife, Stella, without whose kindness and consideration this book could never have been written.

HOW TO CLIMB MT. BLANC IN A SKIRT

MICK CONEFREY

Chapter One

WHO, WHY, AND HOW?

Few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel.

—GERTRUDE BELL, TWENTIETH-CENTURY DESERT EXPLORER

Take every precaution and abandon all fear.

—MARY HALL, NINETEENTH-CENTURY

SELF-STYLED WORLD TOURIST

WHO?

Ask someone to describe a typical explorer and they will usually have a pretty good idea. Explorers have lined faces, scraggy beards, skin that has been punished by the wind and sun. Sometimes they wear furs; sometimes they wear khaki. They either smile at the camera in triumph or they stare with gritty resolution.

And they are men.

Or are they?

Which explorer found the lost city of Cana in the Middle East?

Which mountaineer first mapped the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas?

Who was first to the top of Huascarán in Peru?

Which European was first to visit the Ottoman harem in Constantinople?

Who held the world record for the fastest flight from Britain to Australia for 44 years?

You’ll find the answers to all of these questions within these pages, and none of the protagonists will have a scraggy beard. This book is about female explorers and travelers. Who were they? What did they achieve? And what can we learn from them?

The lost history of female exploration includes women who traveled to every corner of the globe: mountaineers like Fanny Bullock Workman and Annie Smith Peck, sailors like Ann Davison and Naomi James, desert explorers such as Rosita Forbes and Freya Stark, polar explorers such as Ann Bancroft and Pam Flowers, and African queens such as May French Sheldon and Mary Kingsley. A handful of them are still well known today, some enjoyed just a few fleeting months in the headlines, and others never saw the limelight at all.

Of course, for most of them, fame was not what spurred them into a life of exploration. They were not traveling for posterity; they were driven by what Martin Luther King called the fierce urgency of now. Ella Maillart didn’t make incredible journeys through central Asia hoping to join Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott in the pantheon of great explorers; she did it because she was desperately excited to encounter other cultures. It would be a tragedy, though, if the exploits of Maillart and the other great women explorers were forgotten. Their stories are just as entertaining and just as inspiring as any of the more familiar exploration tales.

We’ll begin, though, by posing the question that no explorer likes to hear:

WHY?

For most adventurers and travelers, male or female, the answer to why? is a complex mixture of desires and emotions, often combined with a lot of vagueness and happenstance. Because it is there, in order to go beyond the far blue mountains or the far horizon are just some of the many stock answers trotted out by reluctant interviewees who cannot or do not want to explain their wanderlust. This is an important question, though, for anyone trying to look at the differences between male and female travelers, so it is worth a closer look.

Some reasons are common to both sexes. Isabella Bird, for example, was one of several people who first went abroad for health reasons. At home in Victorian Britain, she was a virtual invalid who suffered from insomnia, spinal prostration, boils, severe headaches, hair loss, muscular spasms, and depression. But once on the trail, she was transformed into a fearless adventurer and expert horsewoman who traveled all around the world, from Australia, to Japan, to Hawaii, to the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of Kurdistan.

The British journalist Beatrix Bulstrode was one of many explorers who went in search of an alternative to modern civilization. She made an expedition to the wilds of Mongolia in 1913, hoping to revert to the primitive, only to discover that, after a couple of months, the primitive had become rather predictable.

The American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of the few people who confessed her motivation, though undoubtedly it was shared by many others. As her autobiography proclaimed, she made a series of daring, long-distance plane journeys quite simply for the fun of it.

You’ll find versions of the common whys in the biographies of both male and female explorers, but there are some answers that seem to be more gender specific.

WHY WOMEN EXPLORE

For Womankind?

No man ever climbed a mountain or crossed a river to prove what a man could do, though several might have done it for Mankind, with a capital M. For women, it has been different. To a much greater extent, they were going against expectations and trespassing in a male realm. Some politely ignored this, but others saw their successes and failures very much in terms of gender. Alexandra David-Néel wrote that she made her famous journey to Lhasa in 1924 to show what the will of a woman could do. A decade earlier, the American mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman was photographed on top of a mountain pass in the Karakoram, holding up a banner calling for Votes for Women. It would be a mistake, however, to think that all female explorers were feminists. In fact, some were at pains to point out the opposite. Gertrude Bell, one of the most famous women travelers of the early twentieth century, was a founder member of the British Women’s Anti-Suffrage League. And more recent women, from the mountaineer Julie Tullis to the sailor Clare Francis, have written about their dislike of so-called women’s lib.

To Change Sex

Apart from Jan, née James, Morris, the famous travel writer who had a sex change operation in the early 1970s, few male explorers have had to deal with complex gender identity issues. To put it more simply, not very many of them have had to spend a lot of time dressed up as women. However, several notable women throughout history had to pass themselves off as men, and not just for a day. Stella Court Treatt drove all the way through Africa from the Cape to Cairo in the 1920s dressed as a boy. Isabelle Eberhardt wandered around North Africa disguised as an Arab scholar, and Lady Hester Stanhope spent much of her strange life decked out like a well-to-do Turkish merchant. For most of these women, cross-dressing was a necessary evil that facilitated their travel, but in the behavior of certain women, you sometimes get a whiff of something more transgressive. Dressing as men made their travels smoother, but it also gave them the opportunity to explore their sexuality and gender. When Sarah Hobson trekked around Iran masquerading as a young British man, not only was she propositioned by Iranian women and their fathers who saw her as a good catch for their daughters, but she also found herself flirting with local girls and enjoying the crude jokes of the men she hung out with. Isabelle Eberhardt certainly had a very complex and active sex life, and she clearly enjoyed playing with gender and identity.

For the Sake of Their Dead Husbands

There are no male explorers who traveled for the sake of their wives’ reputation, but a small and fascinating group of women took to the trail to settle their dead husbands’ unfinished business. In 1903, for example, Mina Hubbard became the first person to cross Labrador in Canada by canoe. It took considerable guts: her husband, Leonidas, had starved to death on his attempt. Not only did Mina Hubbard have to battle against the environment, but she also had to race against her husband’s old friends who were determined to beat her to the prize. Similarly, Ruth Harkness, a New York socialite and fashion designer, went to China in 1936, aiming to bring the first live panda back to the United States. Her husband, Bill, had died in Shanghai earlier that year, having spent 13 frustrating months trying to capture the mythical creature. Like Mina Hubbard, Ruth Harkness had to contend with one of her husband’s former partners who had set up a rival expedition. After several weeks of difficult going, she and her team managed to capture a baby panda; Harkness then had the equally tough job of nursing furry little Su-Lin all the way back to Chicago.

To Lose Weight!

Several women travelers and mountaineers commented wryly in their memoirs that exploration and adventure are good for weight loss. For example, Caroline Hamilton and the four British women who trekked to the South Pole in 2000 lost a total of 97 pounds, the equivalent weight of the smallest member of their team. However, as Caroline and the others all noted, any fat lost on the ice invariably makes a comeback as soon as you return home.

If there is an underlying theme in women’s whys, it is the idea of escape. Home often meant rigid social conventions, and traveling abroad offered the possibility of reinventing yourself.

WHY MEN EXPLORE

For King and Country

When Caroline Hamilton and an intrepid team of British women reached the South Pole in January 2000, they sang the national anthem, much to the amusement of scientists at a nearby American base. They were the exception that proved the rule. Patriotism has rarely been a motivation for women explorers, although it has frequently been a very important one for men. In the nineteenth century, exploration was often seen as part of the empire-building strategies of the colonial powers, and no explorer’s pack was complete without his national flag, to be raised at the top of the mountain, the end of the river, or the apex of the pole. Looking through their expedition accounts, it is clear that occasionally women travelers did (and still do) play the patriotic card—principally in order to raise money—but, comparing male and female travelers as a whole, nationalistic rivalry seems like much more of a male trait.

To Suffer

A lot of exploration books written by men include passages of what can be best described as painography: long, detailed descriptions of suffering endured by the author. With some, you almost suspect that pain is part of the pleasure. Wilfred Thesiger, the desert explorer, for example, loved to describe the minimal rations and physical privations of his travels, and Roald Amundsen claimed that he was inspired set off for the Arctic after reading about the suffering of previous polar explorers. Few women, if any, match Thesiger’s or Amundsen’s relish for suffering. Many did experience pain and discomfort, but in their accounts they rarely dwell on it. Ida Pfeiffer, the nineteenth-century Viennese globe-trotter, walked through the jungles of Sumatra in bare feet because she could not find suitable shoes! At night, her guides used to lever thorns out of her soles with their machetes, but she never mentioned whether it hurt or not. There is no equivalent in women’s exploration to the archetypal scene when the American polar explorer Robert Peary cuts off his frostbitten toes with a penknife and carves Hannibal’s motto, I shall find a way or make one, on the wall of his miserable wooden hut. Masochism seems to be a very male predilection.

First-ism

First-ism was, and still is, one of the most common motivations for alpha male explorers. They race to the poles, to the source of the Nile, to the top of Everest and the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, aiming to get into the history books ahead of their rivals. Certainly there were, and still are, women who want to be remembered as the first to achieve something but, as with patriotism, this does not seem to have been quite such an important issue. Perhaps the truth is that women weren’t really prone to first-ism because by the time they entered the race, the first prizes had already been taken. Or perhaps, like the great Swiss explorer Ella Maillart, they love travel for its own sake, not because they feel the need to assert themselves over others. Being the first woman to climb Everest or cross the Sahara has never had quite the same cachet as being the first person to do it. First-ism sometimes was a factor when women were trying to raise money, but in general, women explorers don’t seem to have the same obsessive competitiveness as men.

Ultimately, whatever the why there are certain basic hows that have to be attended to before an expedition begins. Money has to be raised, teams have to be assembled, and equipment has to be procured; all of this is common for any adventurer, but, again, there are frequently differences in approach between genders.

FAMOUS SECONDS

SECOND WOMAN TO CLIMB MONT BLANC

In 1838 the French aristocrat Henriette D’Angeville claimed to have been the first lady to climb Mont Blanc. Not true. In her account, she didn’t even mention her predecessor, the peasant girl Maria Paradis (who made the first female ascent in 1809).

SECOND WOMAN TO CLIMB EVEREST

Mrs. Phantog, a native Tibetan, was a member of the Chinese team that scaled Everest from the Tibetan side in the summer of 1975, 11 days after the Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit. Initially, many Western climbers were very suspicious of their ascent. Proof came a few months later when a British team found a Chinese surveying marker that had been left at the top of Everest.

SECOND WOMAN INTO SPACE

The Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Yevgenyevna was the second woman in space, and the first to make a space walk, 19 years after Valentina Tereshova and 7 months before Sally Ride, the first American female