A Curious Life for a Lady Read online

  A Curious Life for a Lady

  THE STORY OF ISABELLA BIRD

  PAT BARR

  To Margot,

  who broadened many early horizons

  Why has no poet offered a dithyramb in favour of Curiosity as a receipt for happiness, a stimulus to life?

  To discover how and why a thing was done, to learn the real motive or meaning of some action, to put facts to facts and make them tell a story – this is the detective itch that keeps men young.

  A. J. A. Symons in ‘The Tennants of Glenconner’,

  Essays and Biographies

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Part One A Lady’s Life on Horseback

  CHAPTER I The Sandwich Isles

  CHAPTER II The Rocky Mountains

  CHAPTER III Japan

  CHAPTER IV Malaya

  Part Two A Lady’s Life

  CHAPTER V The Clergyman’s Daughter

  CHAPTER VI The Doctor’s Wife

  Part Three A Lady’s Life on the Back of Yak, Pony, Mule, Stallion; In Junk, Wupan, Steamer, Sampan; In Stable, Tent, Hut, Caravanserai, Across the Deserts, Over the Plains and Up the Mountains

  CHAPTER VII Kashmir and Tibet

  CHAPTER VIII Persia and Kurdistan

  CHAPTER IX Korea

  CHAPTER X China

  CHAPTER XI Bondage

  Sources

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  1. Isabella Lucy Bird

  2. Henrietta Amelia Bird

  3. Wyton Rectory

  4. The crater of Kilauea

  5. Estes Park

  6. Mount Fuji

  7. Japanese rain-cloak

  8. An Ainu patriarch

  9. Tokyo street scene

  10. Isabella’s first ride on an elephant

  11. Leh

  12. A lama

  13. Usman Shah

  14. A gopher

  15. George Curzon

  16. A dervish

  17. A Persian woman

  18. Isabella in the Bakhtiari country

  19. A travelling party

  20. The King of Korea

  21. The Reverend Heywood Horsburgh

  22. Three missionaries

  MAPS

  1. The Sandwich Isles, The Colorado Rockies

  2. Japan

  3. Malaya

  4. Kashmir and Tibet

  5. Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey

  6. Korea and China

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgement is due to the following: to John Murray for 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21 (reproduced from books by or about Isabella Bird), and for 22 which is from an original photograph taken by Isabella Bird; to the Rev. G. E. Wood, rector of Houghton and Wyton, Huntingdonshire, for 3, the original of which hangs in Wyton Church; to the Radio Times Hulton Picture Library for 15; and to Mr Tsuneo Tamba for 9, reproduced from an original in the Tamba collection of the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum, Japan.

  Acknowledgements

  FIRST of all my grateful thanks are due to Mr John Murray, who kindly allowed me access to Isabella Bird’s original letters and photographs, and to my editor at Macmillan, Caroline Hobhouse, for her unfailingly generous help and encouragement.

  I have corresponded with several people in an endeavour to learn more about Isabella’s personality, and I would particularly like to thank Mrs Dorothy Middleton, whose admirably perceptive essay on Isabella in her book Victorian Lady Travellers was my original starting-point. Additional valuable guidance on the American section of the book was kindly given by Professor Alfons L. Korn, formerly of the English Department of the University of Hawaii; by Mrs Alys Freeze of the Western History Department of the Public Library in Denver, Colorado; by Mrs G. Vloyantes of Fort Collins, Colorado, and by Mr Marshall Sprague, whose book A Gallery of Dudes contains an entertaining account of Isabella’s meeting with Jim Nugent. Leads on the Malayan section were given me by Professor J. Kennedy and Mr James Pope-Hennessy, whose excellent work Verandah contains much fascinating material on the early career of Hugh Low.

  It proved very difficult to find much in the way of unpublished material on Isabella’s immediate family or any surviving impressions of the life of the Bird sisters in Scotland. I am, however, indebted to Mr Godfrey Bird of Headley, Hants, Mrs M. Abercrombie of Edinburgh and Mr Duncan McQuarrie of Salen, Isle of Mull, for help in these directions.

  Pat Barr

  Preface

  THE buoyant name of Isabella Bird is an apt identification of that reckless lady with ‘the up-to-anything and free-legged air’, as she herself described it, who went breezing about the remote parts of the Asian and American continents for thirty years and became one of the most popular, respected and celebrated travellers of the later nineteenth century. It was equally fitting that she should marry a man with the name of Bishop, with its overtones of an earnest and pious respectability, its settled-down and no-nonsense air. For the lesser-known, home-grown Isabella was the devout elder daughter of a clergyman, philanthropic gentlewoman of Edinburgh, wife and soon widow of a worthy physician in that city. The ‘Bird’ and the ‘Bishop’ journeyed in uneasy tandem for most of Isabella’s days; the former was often irritable, impatient and bored with the latter, the latter often anxious, disapproving and a little guilty about the former.

  It is Isabella Bird as traveller, writer and adventurer extraordinary who commands the limelight and is the inspiration of this tale; yet this Isabella did not really take off until she was forty years old – a classic case, if ever there was one, of life beginning at that climactic juncture. And so I make no apology for beginning there; I merely give two assurances. First, that had I chosen to start the story in 1831 when Isabella was born, and then plod step by step through her early years – as ailing young lady lying on the sofa of a country parsonage, as student of hymnology and religion, as diligent worker in various charitable causes – it would have been a rather wearisome and spiritless introduction to such a resolute and zestful person. Secondly, that as it is, nevertheless, quite unwarranted to dismiss the first half of anybody’s life simply because it makes for a less spirited read than the second, I have in Part Two outlined the essential patterns of Isabella’s early years. And those years, though they lacked the thrill of adventure, were nonetheless fruitful and valiant in their quieter fashion.

  But I intend to start when Isabella found her vocation: ‘Miss Bird is the ideal traveller’, announced the Spectator’s critic of her second major book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. ‘She can see and she can use the words that place what she sees before the reader…. There never was anybody who had adventures so well as Miss Bird.’ And re-reading the eight ponderous-looking volumes that she wrote, I am convinced that the reviewer spoke no more than the truth. For, in each one, the lands and the people she saw and her experiences of them still live, vividly, freshly, with the bloom still on – and now with the added patina of interest and nostalgia for times past.

  In my attempt to recreate the worlds she visited, I have drawn most extensively, of course, on Isabella’s own books and letters, and all the quotations not otherwise attributed are hers. I have supplemented and I hope enriched these with other contemporary writings about the same scene which provide a change of pace, a different viewpoint, and with additional chat, information, forewords, postscripts about the people and places that came her way. I have also presented the material, mostly from the unpublished letters, which gives some indication of her complex and deeply riv
en personality, and I have hazarded a few interpretative suggestions on this theme, which can only be regarded as informed guesses.

  Many of Isabella’s moral, social and political attitudes were staunchy typical of the Victorian age in which she lived, and she retained throughout her life a confident and, by modern standards, rather dismaying admiration for the conventional and respectable. She did not attempt to provide herself with any broad-based philosophical justification for the way in which she quietly and serenely side-stepped the conventions of her time and yet, as a Victorian gentlewoman, the extent of her departure from those conventions was quite astonishing.

  It was, of course, an energetic age, and many English ladies travelled immense distances. Frequently they went as reluctant ‘dependants’ of their husbands to the farflung outposts of Empire, and sometimes, in pleasurable pursuit of health, spectacular scenery, exotic trophies, they travelled the fairly well-beaten globetrotters’ routes which, by the 1870s, covered a great deal of the world. Miss Bird, however, sedulously avoided these beaten tracks and fled in horror from tourist meccas such as Yokohama, Singapore or Shanghai; she tended to avoid the Empire altogether, in fact, and it is significant that the only large eastern country she neither explored nor wrote about was India.

  Isabella Bird belonged, in short, to that colourful band of travelling individualists of the late nineteenth century who, for all their eccentricities, had one feature in common – an innate, abiding, intensely emotional distaste for the constraints imposed by their own highly civilised society. Like others among them, Isabella tried to explain her most unconventional journeys in conventional terms by stressing the worth of ‘the rich cargoes of knowledge’ she brought back from them. But it cannot, and indeed need not, be claimed that her efforts in this direction were of very lasting significance. Rather, the story of her life is valuable and pleasurable today simply because she used it to journey far and tell her tales well. The life was the work; the work was going to various parts of the globe and having adventures better than anyone else; the first adventure begins here.

  Part One

  A LADY’S LIFE ON HORSEBACK

  CHAPTER I

  The Sandwich Isles

  IN midsummer 1872 a quiet, intelligent-looking dumpy English spinster sailed to Australia in a desperate search for physical and mental health. Up to that time, Isabella Bird’s life had developed in appropriate conformity with her position as the dutiful daughter of a middle-class Victorian clergyman. During her early years, she had studied diligently, learned needlework and music, organised Sunday School classes, and also suffered the onset of a chronic spinal disease, which was to recur throughout her life. As a young woman, she had promoted various charitable schemes to help the poor, studied metaphysical poetry, and written articles on hymnology and moral duty while laid up on a sofa convalescing after the removal of a fibrous tumour from the base of her spine. She had also travelled in Europe and America and these early, fairly conventional journeys had benefited her health temporarily – suggesting that, for her, travelling was indeed an elixir. During her thirties, Isabella, still sickly and plagued with backache, lived with her maiden sister, Henrietta, in a dignified square in the city of Edinburgh and had a circle of high-minded, intelligent friends. But because Isabella was an extraordinary woman, all these fairly ordinary endeavours provided few outlets for the immense reserves of energy, enthusiasm and enterprise she possessed. Now she was forty, and added recently to her woes were debilitating attacks of insomnia and nervous prostration. She felt herself growing old, unused, unfulfilled; she was fretful, depressed, frustrated and near mental collapse. On the day she sailed she wrote in her diary, ‘All his days he eateth in darkness and he hath much sorrow and wrath with his sickness.’

  At first the whole enterprise seemed a ghastly failure, and the letters she wrote home from Australia show a mind numbed with ever more harrowing melancholy, shadowed with an ever more consuming sickness. She was suffering, it seemed, from ‘neuralgia, pain in my bones, pricking like pins and needles in my limbs, excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity’. She took three bromides a day and still ‘felt shaking all over and oppressed with undefined terror … I am such a miserable being,’ she groaned. ‘My back is better but my head remains so bad and I always feel so tired that I never wish to speak … I wish I cared for people and did not feel used up by them, for people one can always have. I like toil with occasional spurts of recreation. This is such an aimless life.’

  Recipient of these distressing and unhappy letters, as of all the bubbling happy ones soon to follow, was Henrietta – Hennie, as she was usually called. Hennie was a gentle, worthy soul whose function in life was that of lodestar to Isabella’s wanderings, fire-keeper for Isabella’s return and inspiration for Isabella’s best writing; it was Isabella’s whole-hearted effort to make her younger sister see what she had seen, share what she was doing, that made her letters so alive. These long, discursive, personal, discerning epistles were written more or less on the spot like war-reports and then sent to Hennie, who shared their contents with a small circle of intimate women friends. On returning home, it was Isabella’s habit to ‘excise a mass of personal detail’ from the letters, edit them, add chunks of historical and political information and then publish them in book form. When Isabella was carefree and enthralled, as she invariably was when travelling, her letters romp; on the few occasions when she was oppressed, they sag, snarl and whine – as did those from Australia, a continent that could do nothing right in Isabella’s eyes.

  It was a ‘prosaic, hideous country’ with ‘hideous leafage’ and ‘a golden calf its one deity’, she decided. Its acacias stank like drains; its bluebottles battered her like an Egyptian plague; its gum-trees depressed her, for their colour was ‘that of town-grown willows smothered with dust’; its heat was so torrid that she came out in a rash all over and some of her hair fell out. The people of this unfortunate land did little to raise her spirits. Its ‘colonial born young ladies all seem afflicted with hysteria’, its dressmakers ruined her clothes, its clergymen indulged in petty wrangles and gossip and most of its remaining denizens were ‘lumpish and heavy’. Even its photographers were quite without talent and the ‘portraits’ they produced of her – with sparse hair, clothes that had ‘gone crooked’ and those numerous afflictions – made her look ‘completely insane and suicidal’. Better to go home again herself, she thought, than to send photographs like that!

  But home to what? That was the rub. She loathed the ‘constant murk of Scottish skies’, she told Hennie – but what was the alternative to their Edinburgh home? For: ‘Houses and situations are so perfectly dismal and with this tendency to depression it is dangerous to put oneself in depressing circumstances. We have not money to get a house in a good situation and the w.c.’s of flats are so objectionable.’ Perhaps a small house then? – though they hadn’t the money for anything ‘too elaborate’. But it must be cheerful with a sunny drawing-room. Or perhaps she should relinquish the role of gentlewoman altogether? ‘If my back gets well enough I seriously think that a servant’s place would be the best thing. Manual labour, a rough life and freedom from conventionalities added to novelty would be a good thing.’ And so Isabella travelled hopefully, desperately on, in search of freedom, novelty, some different mode of experience with a rough, real, challenging edge to it. And at the tail-end of the drear year she found herself wilting beneath the ‘white, unwinking, scintillating sun’ that ‘blazed down upon Auckland, New Zealand. Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees and calla lilies drooped with the heat. Dusty thickets sheltered the cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the palpitating atmosphere. In dusty enclosures, supposed to be gardens, shrivelled geraniums, scattered sparsely, alone defied the heat. Flags drooped in the stifling air. Men on the verge of sunstroke plied their tasks mechanically. Dogs, with flabby and protruding tongues, hid themselves away unde
r archway shadows. The stones of the sidewalks and the bricks of the houses radiated a furnace heat. All nature was limp, dusty, groaning, gasping. The day was the climax of a burning fortnight of heat, drought and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and oily, breezeless seas, of glaring days, passing through fiery sunsets into stifling nights.’

  In Auckland harbour, Isabella boarded the Nevada, an ancient, lumbering paddle-steamer with ailing boilers, leaking seams and listing masts. It was bound for California, where, she had been told, the air of the mountains was brittle and zestful, and the tough realities of pioneer life jerked one into health. The voyage proved eventful: a shrieking hurricane nearly wrecked them on the second day out; Mr Dexter, a young male passenger, became critically ill and was nursed by his mother and Isabella in the deck-house; there was constant threat of permanent engine failure as mysterious internal ‘tubes’ gave way ‘at the rate of ten to twenty daily’. The cabins were alive with rats, food squirmed with ants and weevils and was served in a dining-room usually awash with spray from the leaking deck above.

  But this bright-eyed tension of true danger, this drama of tropical sunrise and storm, this irresponsible, rolling rollicking life on the ocean wave was most enlivening. Suddenly Isabella felt much much better, her spirits flowered. ‘At last’, she wrote home, ‘I am in love and the old sea-god has so stolen my heart and penetrated my soul that I seriously feel that hereafter, though I must be elsewhere in body, I shall be with him in spirit! … 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; and instead of carrying cares and worries and thoughts of the morrow to bed with one to keep one awake, one falls asleep at once to wake to another day in which one knows that there can be nothing to annoy one – no door-bells, no “please mems”, no dirt, no bills, no demands of any kind, no vain attempts to overtake all one knows one should do. Above all, no nervousness, and no conventionalities, no dressing. If my clothes drop into rags they can be pinned together … I am often in tempestuous spirits. It seems a sort of brief resurrection of a girl of twenty-one.’