Mary Kingsley
1862–1900
You are coming home from a long and dangerous beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair and then nipped you smartly. You have been also considerably stung and bitten by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your feet go low along the ground … you then deposit promptly in some prickly ground crop, or against a tree stump, and then, if there is human blood in you, you say d—n!
Mary Henrietta Kingsley preferred not to write out the full swear word damn, despite having frequent reason to use it. She was a proper Victorian lady—at least on the outside. But in her heart she was an explorer and a scientist. She had traveled a long way to find those giant beetles, at a time when English ladies were expected to sit sewing quietly beside the fire.
And she didn’t stop at beetles. In West Africa, Mary discovered a new species of fish, ate hippopotamus, waded through swamps, interviewed witch doctors, climbed a volcanic mountain, and was an overnight guest in a cannibal village. Whatever her daily perils, Mary wrote long, colorful letters to friends and recorded every detail in her battered bush diary. She then went home and published two books about her adventures, introducing the suspicious English audience to her beloved West Africa and stirring up controversy whenever she opened her mouth.
Mary had little schooling as a child, but she liked to read books from her father’s enormous library, particularly the ones about long sea voyages, “Most Notorious Pyrates,” and far-away places. She did not imagine that some day she would see them for herself.
Her young years were spent in service to her disabled mother, named Mary Bailey, who did not like to be nursed by anyone other than her daughter. The assumption was still common in England, during Mary’s life in the late 1800s, that this kind of devotion was what daughters were for. Mary’s younger brother, Charley, was sent away to a fancy boarding school, but Mary, being a girl, remained within reach of her mother’s bedside. She apparently taught herself to read, and her spelling was always unreliable.
Mary’s Uncle Henry was a novelist. Another uncle, Charles Kingsley, wrote a famous children’s book called The Water Babies. But it was her father, George, who most influenced the direction her life would take. He was a doctor who traveled for most of the year all over the world, attending wealthy gentlemen instead of his own family. From as far away as Egypt, North Africa, the South Pacific Ocean, and the Wild West of America, he wrote letters home, full of thrilling incidents and exotic sights.
When George Kingsley paused briefly in his travels to visit the family, usually as a surprise, his demands for silence and obedience were difficult to satisfy. Mary remembered hiding her pet rooster, Ki Ki, at the bottom of the garden so that her father would not be disturbed by its crowing and could stop hurling books out the window! She did, however, help her father with his research, and she was bitten with the same curiosity about maps and the people who inhabited distant lands. Apart from Mr. Kingsley, there were others writing in this genre: part adventurous travelogue and part serious study of geography, biology, or anthropology. But to Mary’s knowledge, the writers were all men, and the only connection they had to her own life of confinement was that they provided a much-needed escape for her imagination.
When it came time for Charley to go to university, the whole family moved to the city of Cambridge, home of one of the finest universities in England. Although women were not then permitted to attend classes there, Mary had friends for the first time in her life and was occasionally in the company of brilliant scholars. But her cranky, ailing, and uneducated mother eventually caused the family to be outcasts in the community. As Mrs. Kingsley got sicker, she lost touch with the world around her. At her death, in 1892 (when her daughter was thirty years old), she likely did not realize that her husband had already died, suddenly in his sleep, just a few weeks before her.
Six years earlier, Queen Victoria had become a widow, and her loss had an enormous impact on the English attitude toward mourning. Three years after her coronation, Victoria had been wed—for love rather than politics—to her cousin, Prince Albert. Albert was clever and handsome and dedicated to many causes for the benefit of the public, such as education, the fight against slavery worldwide, and support for the arts. Just before Christmas in 1861, Prince Albert died from typhoid fever, at the young age of forty-two. Queen Victoria was devastated. She crawled into a lengthy period of mourning and for several years was rarely seen in public. She dressed only in black and grieved for the rest of her life.
This dramatic display of sorrow launched an era of severe mourning regulations and fashions. Anyone with a death in the family, including children and servants, was expected to wear certain attire for months or even years, on a strict timetable. Any glossy material, like satin or fur, was forbidden. Only dull black fabrics were allowed, and jewelry made of a dark stone called jet; black hair ornaments, umbrellas, footwear, and handbags were all required.
Mary Kingsley took these guidelines seriously. Despite her open mind on many other topics, according to a biographer, “she wore mourning all her life,” from neckline to hemline, and “she wrote every single letter—and she was a huge letter writer—on black-rimmed notepaper, to mark the death of her parents.”
Charley Kingsley expected that his sister would continue to live with and take care of him. Conveniently, he soon departed on a trip to the Far East, and Mary snatched the only chance that she might ever have to follow her own dreams. For as long as she could remember, her life had been focused on caring for other people. “I have always been the doer of odd jobs—and lived in the joys, sorrows, and worries of other people,” she wrote in a letter to a friend.
Now she was suddenly in the position of asking herself a question she’d never considered: What do I want to do? The answer was to take a sea voyage to the Canary Islands!
Mary made her arrangements quickly. She wanted to pack as little as possible. She took her black mourning clothes and a “long waterproof sack neatly closed at the top with a bar and handle” stuffed with blankets, boots, and books. Although most of Mary’s friends were horrified at her ambitious plans, one of them sent along a book of Phrases in common use in Dahomey, one of the West African countries she intended to visit. As Mary describes it:
The opening sentence … was, “Help, I am drowning” … and then another cry, “The boat is upset.” “Get up, you lazy scamps,” is the next exclamation, followed almost immediately by the question, ‘Why has not this man been buried?” “It is fetish that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed with nothing on him until only the bones remain,” is the cheerful answer.
Fetish was one of the two things that Mary was particularly curious to study in Africa. Fetish is the word for an object that is believed to hold magical powers or to be inhabited by a spirit.
Mary’s other main interest was fish. Before departing, she met with Dr. Albert Gunther, the resident ichthyologist (fish specialist) at the British Museum. He was delighted by her offer to collect samples of species that were unknown in England.
Mary’s friends were either scandalized or frightened by what she planned to do. Women did not travel by themselves, especially to dangerous places full of savages! It was well known that foreigners in Africa faced many perils. They often died of tropical diseases, were murdered—even eaten—or were simply never heard from again. The doctors she consulted confirmed that illness and infection were rampant in Africa. “ ‘Deadliest spot on earth,’ they said cheerfully, and showed me maps of the geographical distribution of disease.”
For the many things that people warned her about, Mary created her own set of categories:
The dangers of West Africa.
The disagreeables of West Africa.
The diseases of West Africa.
The things you must take to West Africa.
The things you find most handy in West Africa.
The worst possible things you can do in West Africa.
A white woman traveling alone was likely to be particularly vulnerable. Mary carried a small revolver as protection, and swore that her sharp little knife would be used upon herself if she were ever in an unbearable situation. Luckily, she was never tested to that extreme. However, Mary realized that her chances of surviving her journey were slim. “I went down to West Africa to die,” she later said. “I fully expected to get killed by the local nobility and gentry.”
Quite hurriedly, but what felt like finally, Mary set sail in the sweltering month of August on a steamship bound for the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco. As the boat approached the first port of call, Mary wrote this about the famous Peak of Tenerife: “Whenever and however it may be seen, soft and dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of man may see.” Her isolated life had now officially opened up to the wide world.
Mary spent several weeks in the Canary Islands and along what she called “the Coast” of West Africa. She soon saw her preconceptions erased and exchanged for eye-opening new lessons. She listened gratefully to the boat captain and the traders who shared their vast knowledge and experience of the country that so compelled her.
She quickly recognized the wisdom of traveling with items of value to the natives. Trading provided a natural overture to people who might otherwise be suspicious. On her future trips, she followed this instinct, bringing knives, fish hooks, mirrors, hair combs, “lucifer matches,” perfume, and other desirable items. She learned that exchanging goods and knowledge was a great equalizer among strangers.
When Mary returned to England, she discovered that her brother, Charley, had sold the house she’d always lived in. It fell to Mary to do most of the sorting and packing up of her parents’ lives. The Victorian daughter in Mary resigned herself to this sad chore, but when Charley assumed that she would now be a dutiful sister and housekeeper for him, her obedience lasted for only a few months. Mary was busy making plans. In December 1894, she was on the move again, retracing her footsteps via the Canaries back to West Africa. This second voyage, and the next one, in 1895, provided enough adventure for her two long books.
When the steamer stopped at the first African port of call—market day at Freetown in Sierra Leone—Mary’s excitement nearly vibrated on the page as she wrote about the streets, paved “in a way more suitable for naked feet, by green Bahama grass,” the natives carrying huge burdens on their heads, the noise, the confusion, “and half a hundred other indescribabilia.” Eager humor accompanied her observations of bare-breasted women, exotic vegetables and fruits, bolts of bright textiles, whole herds of stray sheep and goats, turkey vultures, “cinnamon-coloured cattle,” a dog-faced monkey, an ostrich, “small, lean, lank yellow dogs with very erect ears,” and pigs with rings through their noses.
Every single person, place, or thing that Mary saw was utterly different from what she had known in England, and yet she had a strong feeling of kinship with her new surroundings. While traveling she kept extensive notes; her writing style was exuberant, colorful, ungrammatical, and dense with detail. Some of her original journal entries were lifted directly into her books, Travels in West Africa and later West African Studies. Much more had to be trimmed and edited before it could be published.
Mary’s extraordinary intelligence and relentless curiosity meant that she observed, analyzed, and recorded everything she encountered—and went looking for anything that might be hidden from the usual view of a visitor. Through study, and conversation with nearly everyone she met abroad, she became an expert on a mind-boggling range of topics. Unusual for an English person, Mary quickly realized the error of the simplistic assumption that the label African could adequately describe the many tribes that she encountered: “African culture, I may remark, varies just the same as European in this, that there is as much difference in the manners of life between, say, an Igalwa and a Bubi of Fernando Po, as there is between a Londoner and a Laplander.”
Nothing escaped Mary’s analytic notice and sharp-eyed—though sometimes rambling—descriptions: the varieties of architecture and town-planning; the fashions, jewelry, trades, and crafts; marriage and ceremonial customs; geographical information about mangrove swamps, tide patterns, malarial mud; witchcraft and fetish; music; missionaries; initiation; the abject fate of widows; illness and healing. “Next in danger to the diseases come the remedies for them,” she wrote. A common topic of conversation seems to have been the high fatality rate of white visitors to Africa. On visiting one cemetery, her guide told her, “ ‘Oh! we always keep two graves ready dug for Europeans. We have to bury very quickly here, you know …’ ”
She paid attention to the preparation of local delicacies and often included a form of recipe. After explaining the Igalwa tribe’s process of making a kind of “cheese” from the kernels of a mango-like fruit, she wrote: “This dish is really excellent, even when made with python, hippo, or crocodile. It makes the former most palatable; but of course it does not remove the musky taste from crocodile; nothing I know of will.”
More culinary advice comes later:
The first day in the forest we came across a snake—a beauty with a new red-brown and yellow-patterned velvety skin, about three feet six inches long and as thick as a man’s thigh.… We had the snake for supper, that is to say the Fan and I; the others would not touch it, although a good snake, properly cooked, is one of the best meats one gets out here, far and away better than the African fowl.
Mary had several unexpected meetings with large African wildlife, usually reported with irony, while minimizing the menace.
A crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake—a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along … you may not be able to write home about him, and you get frightened on your own behalf; for crocodiles can, and often do, in such places, grab at people in small canoes.
As far as elephants were concerned:
I saw … wading and rolling in the mud, a herd of five elephants. I remembered, hastily, that your one chance when charged by several elephants is to dodge them round trees, working down wind all the time, until they lose smell and sight of you, then to lie quiet for a time, and go home.
On the subject of gorillas, she was of two opinions. She felt “horrible disgust” for them, but she also said: “I have seen many wild animals in their native wilds, but never have I seen anything to equal gorillas going through bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly perfect handtrapeze performance.”
She didn’t care that a leopard’s whiskers were considered powerful ju ju (an amulet against spirits). She had no intention of backing down when she met one face to face: “The leopard crouched, I think to spring on me. I can see its great, beautiful, lambent eyes still, and I seized an earthen water-cooler and flung it straight at them. It was a noble shot; it burst on the leopard’s head like a shell and the leopard went for bush.”
While traveling upstream as the only passenger on a boat called the Eclaireur, Mary reported a dramatic episode concerning the retrieval of the floating corpse of a dead hippopotamus. Afterwards, although the task of cutting up their catch was extremely unpleasant, “for remember that hippo had been dead and in the warm river-water for more than a week,” Mary bravely tried yet another new taste sensation: “Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black man or white; I have enjoyed it far more than the stringy beef or vapid goat’s flesh one gets down here.”
As well as menacing wild animals, Mary and her guides faced endless other discomforts and dangers. After a wet and dangerous passage through an underground river, she wrote that “our souls, unliberated by funeral rites from this world, would have to hover for ever over the Ogowé near the scene of our catastrophe. I own this idea was an unpleasant one—fancy having to pass the day in those caves with the bats, and then come out and wander all night in the cold mists!”
They crossed several swamps: “We were two hours and a quarter passing that swamp.… One and all, we got horribly infested with leeches, having a frill of them round our necks like astrakhan collars, and our hands covered with them, when we came out.” And endured sweltering heat: “My face and particularly my lips are a misery to me, having been blistered all over by yesterday’s sun …”
All this plus torrential rain, countless dunks in rivers, and several tumbles down rocks—Mary met the physical obstacles and hardships with astonishing grace and good spirits. “I just take a flying slide of twenty feet or so and shoot, flump, under the tree on my back, and then deliberate whether it is worth while getting up again to go on with such a world; but vanity forbids my dying like a dog in a ditch, and I scramble up …”
In one region, Mary and her fellow passengers encountered the worst insects so far. “Conversation and atmosphere are full of mosquitoes,” she noted. “I retired into my cabin, so as to get under the mosquito curtains to write.”
Not even rumors of cannibal tribes put Mary off pursuing her passion for both fish and fetish. Her journey through uncharted territory, up the Ogowé River, would teach her plenty about both, but even more about cannibals.
In her writings, Mary referred to the Fan people, though their name was actually Fang. She was protecting their reputation; by leaving off the final letter, her favorite tribe would not appear so fearful to her readers. Right from the start, Mary’s time among the Fang was eventful. She was walking ahead of her guides, knowing that they would soon catch up to her slower pace.
… the next news was I was in a heap, on a lot of spikes, some fifteen feet or so below ground level, at the bottom of a bag-shaped game pit. It is at these times you realize the blessing of a good thick skirt. Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England … and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for. Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.
After some initial suspicion, the villagers welcomed Mary and her company, with the chief even moving out of his own little house to allow Mary to sleep there. “I shook hands with and thanked the chief,” wrote Mary. “And directed that all the loads should be placed inside the huts. I must admit my good friend was a villainous-looking savage, but he behaved most hospitably and kindly.”
During the night, however, Mary was disturbed by an unpleasant smell that she tracked to one of the small bags suspended from the ceiling. She carefully noted the manner in which the bag was tied, so that she could refasten it afterwards. “I then shook its contents out in my hat, for fear of losing anything of value. They were a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame. The hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled.”
Apparently, Mary discovered, “although the Fans will eat their fellow friendly tribesfolk, yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento.” As grim as this discovery was, she did not feel threatened by the habits of her hosts:
The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from getting eaten. The Fan is not a cannibal from sacrificial motives like the negro. He does it in his common sense way. Man’s flesh, he says, is good to eat, very good, and he wishes you would try it.
If cannibals weren’t treacherous enough, there were certainly other dangers awaiting Mary and her band of guides, especially as they considered what would be their greatest challenge: the ascent of Mount Cameroon. There were frequent occasions for resourcefulness while bush trekking; when they ran out of palm oil for treating their boots, for instance, Mary used animal fat instead. During the climb of Mount Cameroon, the company did not bring enough water with them—possibly a trick of the guides to force Mary to abandon the effort. Mary wrote, “The rain now began to fall, thank goodness, and I drew the thick ears of grass through my parched lips.” Later, “we limp in, our feet sore with rugged rocks, and everything we have on, or in the loads, wringing wet, save the matches, which providentially I had put into my soap-box.”
Mount Cameroon is locally called Mungo or Mongo ma Ndemi, “Mountain of Greatness.” It is an active volcano and the highest peak in West Africa, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean, when not shrouded in fog. Some of the heaviest rainfall in the world occurs in this region. Mary was possibly the first woman, and certainly the first white woman, to climb it. But it was far from easy, especially in an ankle-length skirt!
Mary was on this part of the trek with an odd collection of young men, to whom, writing in her journal, she gave descriptive nicknames like “Blue Jacket” and “Windbag.” Although they were meant to be leading her, she seems to have had an almost motherly relationship with them: “I believe if I had collapsed too—the cold tempted me to do so as nothing else can—they would have lain down and died in the cold sleety rain.”
Mary does not tell us much about her writing habits, but partway up the mountain, she mentioned this: “I write by the light of an insect-haunted lantern, sitting on the bed, which is tucked in among the trees some twenty yards away from the boys’ fire. There is a bird whistling in a deep rich note that I have never heard before.”
Mary records one bumbling incident after another: crashing rainstorms, missing supplies, drenched campsites and beds, and lost or frightened guides. The “boys” were reluctant to attempt the final push for the summit, but of course Mary had not come that far to turn back without trying. As she neared the top alone, she was greeted by:
… a burst of bitter wind, and a sheet of blinding, stinging rain. I make my way up through it towards a peak which I soon see through a tear in the mist is not the highest, so I angle off and go up the one to the left, and after a desperate fight reach the cairn—only, alas! to find a hurricane raging and a fog in full possession, and not a ten yards’ view to be had in any direction.… Verily I am no mountaineer, for there is in me no exultation, but only a deep disgust because the weather has robbed me of my main object in coming here, namely to get a good view.… I took my chance and it failed, so there’s nothing to complain about.
Descending from the mountain was every bit as dramatic as going up, with several perilous moments while dismally lost or soaking wet or teetering over chasms. “ ‘Don’t fall,’ I yelled which was the only good advice I could think of to give them just then.”
But always the Englishwoman shone through: “Head man and I get out the hidden demijohn of rum, and the beef and rice, and I serve out a tot of rum each to the boys, who are shivering dreadfully, waiting for Cook to get the fire. He soon does this, and then I have my hot tea and the men their hot food …” Mary’s gratitude conquers all discomfort whenever she mentions “having her tea.”
Mary felt huge affection and respect for the many Africans that she met and traveled with and lived with in their homeland. She paid attention to what they related about their customs, and faithfully reported in her books what her experience and studies had taught her.
Before her first book was published, even before she had set foot back in her own country, tales of Mary Kingsley’s exploits had reached England. She became quite a celebrity, and much in demand as a speaker. Her strong opinions, such as objecting to the common notion that the African brain was somehow not fully formed, were scrutinized and discussed by the public. She argued that a “black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare.” She suggested that the Africans should be left alone to their own religious life and not forcibly converted to Christianity. She resented the European notion that the African way of life could be replaced with what she called “their own rubbishy white culture.”
Even more controversial was her distress about the harmful impact that King Leopold II of Belgium was having in the Belgian Congo. Nearly twenty years earlier, in 1878, Leopold had hired the celebrated explorer Henry Morton Stanley to make an expedition along the Congo River. Knowing that England and other countries would object to his real motives, Leopold pretended that Stanley was merely furthering his previous ventures in the region. However, on Leopold’s behalf and using trinkets and bolts of cloth as currency, Stanley negotiated treaties with 450 tribal chiefs, following his king’s orders that the agreements should be as “brief as possible and in a couple of articles must grant us everything.” Leopold now had the right to take control of the prosperous trading of rubber and ivory in the region. He enslaved, mistreated, and killed between 5 and 8 million of the native inhabitants.
Belgium was certainly not the only country to exploit the African people. Portugal and Spain, among others, had been doing it for centuries, with the United States being a more recent transgressor. But it was the atrocities resulting from Leopold’s presence in the Congo that Mary Kingsley witnessed—among the few events so terrible that she could not bring herself to discuss at length what she’d seen. But she provided the sort of eyewitness testimony that activists could use in their battle against the horror and injustice being perpetrated by King Leopold’s colonization.
In a rare understatement, Mary’s simple opinion was that “the African at large … has been mismanaged of late years by the white races.”
As outspoken as she was on behalf of African rights, Mary was opposed to the struggle in England for women’s suffrage. Ironically, she spoke firmly against women being members of academic societies and sneered at the idea that they should have the right to vote.
One personal result of Mary’s travels was that she kept her fire burning at such a rate that her English house maintained tropical temperatures at all times. Her visitors found it stifling, but to her it felt like home.
Mary Kingsley traveled to Africa one last time, in 1900, seven years after her parents’ death. She was thirty-eight years old. This time she went as a nurse, to care for soldiers during the Boer War in South Africa. She herself caught typhoid fever. Knowing that she was dying, Mary asked that she be buried at sea, recalling a paragraph she’d written in the introduction to Travels in West Africa years earlier:
You hear, nearer to you than the voices of the people round, nearer than the roar of the city traffic, the sound of the surf that is breaking on the shore down there, and the sound of the wind talking on the hard palm leaves and the thump of the natives’ tom-toms; or the cry of the parrots passing over the mangrove swamps in the evening time; or the sweet, long, mellow whistle of the plantain warblers calling up the dawn; and everything that is round you grows poor and thin in the face of the vision, and you want to go back to the Coast that is calling you, saying, as the African says to the departing soul of his dying friend, “Come back, come back, this is your home.”
Although Mary’s wish was carried out, it was reported that “the coffin, wrongly weighted, bobbed indomitably on the surface. A party of men had to row out, and complete the funeral. It was a touch of cussedness she might have enjoyed.”
Mary Kingsley was an adventurer and a writer, displaying the same qualities in both professions: a unique, enthusiastic approach, great wit, and a willingness to do what had not been tried before.
“One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and found them either worthless or wanting.”
Mary Kingsley fell passionately in love with West Africa, but perhaps even more so with the notion of travel as a way to uncover new ideas.
Nellie Bly, more than most other women in history, was an example of someone determined to expose the truth—and she traveled around the world as part of that plan …