A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Still seeking rest in the surroundings of the past, she returned again to Tobermory, but in vain. The passing years had not improved her reserves of patient equanimity or her capacity to minister for very long to the meek and lowly – much as she had prayed for these gifts. Now the islanders could do nothing right in her eyes. ‘Tobermory is certainly four years worse,’ she told a friend. ‘Drink is ravaging it. Several young men are at this time dying of it and many of the older men have come to wreck with it since I was last here …’ And further, ‘The place does not improve. The people are so intellectually lazy and so spiritually dead and so contented merely to vegetate…. It is hard for me to love the Tobermory people, and without love one is useless.’ It was a period grey with lovelessness, and without the bright compensations of absorbing interest or stimulating work. ‘I have felt profoundly depressed during my last winter here,’ she told the widowed Ella Blackie in December 1899, ‘and the indifference of friends to my last book, my youngest child, child of my old age, has grieved me much.’ The book, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond had appeared the previous month and, as Isabella said, had received less than the usual critical accolade at first, mainly because everyone was preoccupied with the South African situation. It was dedicated to Lord Salisbury, whose brand of humanitarian, prudent, moral and somewhat aloof conservatism she had long admired. He wrote twice to express his appreciation of the work, but that was slender comfort and her prevailing mood remained an old woman’s pet of self-pity, disillusion and melancholy. Early in 1900 she left the cottage ‘shrine’ at Tobermory for the last time, bearing the ‘dear treasures of the beloved’ away with her to bleak Hartford Hurst.

  But by May her indomitable, enterprising spirit came bouncing back. ‘I have begun French conversation lessons,’ she told a friend, ‘lessons in photography (developing, platinotyping, and lantern slide making by reduction) and am preparing to take a few cooking lessons. I am also ordering a tricycle in the hope of getting more exercise.’ But the exercise she was preparing for was more strenuous than trips awheel around the lanes of Huntingdonshire – it was another journey, no less, since she ‘felt quite able for modified travelling’, such as a jaunt up the West River in China and then to ‘To-chien-lu and up to Somo and Sieng-pon-ling and thence to Peking’. But this time, alas, the flesh was too weak and the doctors’ reports on her health were so unremittingly grave, that she compromised by going only as far as Morocco, where she planned ‘a rest for embroidery, photography and water-colours’.

  New Year’s Day of her seventieth year found her in Tangier, the details of the thousand-mile six-month-long Moroccan adventure that followed are sparse, and confined mainly to her published articles on the political and social chaos of the country. The few other glimpses of it, however, that emerge from private correspondence, tiptoe on the very verge of fantasy – a fantasy so glorious and grand because this mettlesome old woman actually made it fact. ‘I left Tangier;’ she begins, ‘and had a severe two days’ voyage to Mazagan, where the landing was so terrible and the sea so wild that the captain insisted on my being lowered into the boat by the ship’s crane, in a coal basket. The officers and passengers cheered my pluck as the boat mounted a huge breaking surge on her landward adventure. No cargo could be landed…. Before leaving the steamer I had a return of fever; and when the only camping-ground turned out to be a soaked ploughed field with water standing in the furrows, and the tent was pitched in a storm of wind and rain, and many of the tent-pegs would not hold, and when the head of my bed went down into the slush when I lay down, I thought I should die there – but I had no more illness or fever!’ Incredibly, travel had yet again proved an elixir and she thoroughly enjoyed the 126-mile journey to Marrakesh.

  At Marrakesh, Isabella had ‘a Moorish house to myself with a courtyard choked with orange-trees in blossom and fruit. I also have what is a terror to me, a powerful black charger, a huge fellow far too much for me, equipped with crimson trappings and a peaked crimson saddle, eighteen inches above his back. I have to carry a light ladder for getting on and off! I have been waiting for three days to get away and make an expedition into the Atlas range, whose glittering snows form a semi-circle round half the plain.’

  So it was away from the plains and back to the snow-peaked mountains, where, perched atop her magnificent black charger, she was received ‘well’, if with some astonishment, by the Berber sheikhs in their castle strongholds. From one of these she wrote, ‘This journey differs considerably from any other and it is as rough as the roughest. I never expected to do such travelling again. You would fail to recognise your infirm friend astride on a superb horse in full blue trousers and a short full skirt, with great brass spurs belonging to the generalissimo of the Moorish army, and riding down places awful even to think of, where a rolling stone or a slip would mean destruction…. It is evidently air and riding which do me good. I never realised this so vividly as now’. (She should surely have realised it by then – it had been the story of her life for thirty years. And if only she had, for once, turned her camera upon herself in that fantastic rig-out.)

  Back at Marrakesh after the ‘splendid journey’, she told her friend, ‘I had an interview with the Sultan. It was very interestng, but had to be secretly managed, for fear of the fanatical hatred to Christians. I wish it could have been photographed – the young Sultan on his throne on a high dais, in pure white; the minister of war, also in white, standing at the right below the steps of the throne …; I standing in front below the steps of the throne, bare-headed and in black silk, the only European woman who has ever seen an Emperor of Morocco! as I am the first who has ever entered the Atlas mountains and ever visited the fierce Berber tribes. When I wished the Sultan long life and happiness at parting, he said that he hoped when his hair was as white as mine, he might have as much energy as I have! So I am not quite shelved yet!’ She was not; she rode another five hundred miles after that from Marrakesh to Tangier via Mogador, Saffii and Fez, and was chased almost to the outskirts of Tangier by a gang of armed Arab bandits. ‘On the whole Mrs Bishop benefited by her long rides in Morocco,’ commented the imperturbable Anna Stoddart. ‘Tent life always suited her, and in spite of alarms she enjoyed the absolute novelty of her experiences. Without alarms and difficulties she would have probably accounted her venture a failure.’ Indeed yes, and to what extraordinary lengths she went, at the age of seventy, for one last draught of unalloyed joy. ‘I know this delightful return of vigour is temporary,’ she explained, ‘but it is marvellous while it lasts.’

  She returned to England in the early autumn, reinvigorated and ‘unshelved’, and immediately undertook another punishingly arduous round of ‘missionary addresses’ – guilty recompense, fervent penitence, pious restitution for those days of pagan delight abroad. The sense of moral guilt and spiritual unworthiness rankled almost to the end, legacy of her environment and the nobler dead who had gone before. It was a guilt that kept her modest all her days, that brought her much anguish, spurred her charitable endeavours, eroded much of the satisfaction she could legitimately have taken in her considerable achievements. In the final two years of her life it was, perhaps, stilled at last and she was as near as she ever was to peace, accepting that she had truly done her best in accordance with the talents she had been given.

  By this time, sales of the book on China had picked up, following the 1900 disturbances in that frequently disturbed country, and so even the ‘child of her old age’ was eventually a success. When Isabella’s books are compared with those of her travel-writer contemporaries this success is quite explicable, for she retained to the last that rare ability to transport the reader to whatever outlandish spot she happened to be in, conjuring its characteristic denizens sights, sounds and smells through her individually apprehended experience of them. And in a pre-radio, pre-television age, such a gift was both valuable and popular – for how else could the stay-at-homes have their horizons broadened? Nevertheless, it is easy to fault Isabella’s work: she had littl
e artistic appreciation and her descriptions of native arts are usually trite, sometimes downright philistine; in her conscientious desire (shared by most of her contemporaries) to instruct rather than merely entertain, she crammed wedges of text-book plain facts into her later books that impede and dull their narrative flow; and her judgements on the political, moral and religious aspects of national life in the countries she knew, though often shrewd and sometimes tolerant, are seldom very far-sighted or progressive. Many of her attitudes – towards women’s rights for instance, or Christian evangelism – were representative of the responsible, high-minded, essentially conservative Victorian middle classes from which she sprang; but at least she was never smug, squeamish or sanctimonious about them.

  Within a year of her return from Morocco her health finally broke down, doctors diagnosed a fibrous tumour, thrombosis, worsening heart disease. Hartford Hurst, the last domestic failure, hardly ever lived in, was given up and she went to Edinburgh to die. ‘I learn that I am threatened with a serious and fatal malady,’ she told an old friend. ‘I am not distressed, though there are some things that I should like to see out.’ She wrote that in May 1902, but her tough, thick, oft-besieged body was stubborn, her mind was clear and calm and it took her more than two years to see things out. Even then she kept moving, from one Edinburgh nursing-home to another, from one lodging to another, with most of her possessions in storage – and the trunks in London, packed ready for that last, unrealisable journey to China.

  Devoted old friends surrounded her, sent books, pot plants, game pies, flowers to cheer her, and preserved their recollections of her, knowing the days were numbered. Her cousin, for instance, wrote to Anna Stoddart: ‘She was so wonderfully cheerful and uncomplaining. When I said to her how trying it was for her to be lying there unable to move, she said: “I have never once thought it hard!” One day I remarked how patient she was, and she answered: “I am not patient, I would much rather be going about” … She said to me one day: “I never thought very much of myself.” Then another day, “I should very much like to do something more for people but I can do nothing”.’ In fact, her continuing lively interest in people and events during these bedridden years did quite a lot to help those around her and inspired several younger admirers, Scottish girls who had seldom ventured to set foot south of the border, but listened wide-eyed to her stories and yearned hopelessly to go where she had been.

  Where she had been – her death-bed must have been rich with memories of that. Perhaps she remembered floating in a blue Hawaiian grotto with Mr and Mrs Luther Severance thirty years before and looking up at the golden balls of guava fruit swinging overhead, apricots swinging in the orchards of the Nubra valley and women pounding oil from their kernels, golden curls of Jim Nugent swinging under his smashed wide-awake and his one good eye glowing at her; eyes of tiger congealed and stiff in the mud of a jungle clearing while Chinese ripped out its liver and dried its blood in slabs in the sun; Chinamen jogging over the endless paddies with loads of salt, coal and vegetables or chanting as they heaved the creaking junks up the rapid; tattered sail of sampan creaking at anchorage in the sunset on the Han River, with fleas rustling in the pheasant-grass roof, and sunset sight of flush-pink Japanese children riding their fathers’ shoulders down the village street; and she riding, feeling the springy curl of the yak’s back, the ridgy backbone of the baggage pony, the sweaty side of the mule, the nuzzling nose of Boy begging for grapes, the jaunty prance of iron-legged Birdie. Birdie, the first beloved of many beloved horses, and she astride her with that up-to-anything, free-legged air, the two of them galloping away towards the empty mountain spaces.

  She was bound now, she could not even reach the foothills, her weak hands unable to write down what she was remembering. She died on 7 October 1904. The obituaries said that she embarked ‘on her last great journey’ with fortitude, acceptance and a kind of joy. It was fitting that she should, for, as she always said, she was a ‘born traveller’ – she told her tales well, she seldom retraced her steps, she never outstayed her welcome.

  Sources

  (Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated)

  General

  Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop): An Englishwoman in America by ‘I.Β.’ (1856), Six Months in the Sandwich Islands (1875), A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), Korea and Her Neighbours (1898), The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) also Among the Tibetans (1894). Articles in The Leisure Hour, St James’ Gazette, The Monthly Review, The Family Treasury, Good Words

  Anna M. Stoddart: The Life of Isabella Bird (1906)

  Dorothy Middleton: “Isabella Bird’ in Victorian Lady Travellers (1965)

  Original letters and other documents in the possession of John Murray

  Chapter I The Sandwich Isles

  Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii (1866) gives a lively picture of the Islands at a slightly earlier period. Professor A. L. Korn wrote about several early English visitors to the Islands, including Isabella, in Victorian Visitors (Honolulu, 1958). For a good scholarly historical account of the period when Isabella was there, Ralph S. Kuykendall’s The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. ii Twenty Critical Years 1854–74 (Honolulu, 1953) is invaluable.

  Chapter II The Rocky Mountains

  Marshall Sprague’s A Gallery of Dudes (Denver, 1967) includes a very entertaining, quite irreverent version of Isabella’s meeting with Jim Nugent. His Newport in the Rockies (Denver 1961) is full of the flavour and atmosphere of the Colorado Springs area, including the period when Isabella was there. George Kingsley’s Notes on Sport and Travel (1900) contains his version of Jim Nugent’s death. South by West by Rose Kingsley (1874) gives her very personal account of the pioneer days in the Colorado Springs area. Harold M. Dunning has written a pamphlet about Jim Nugent for local tourist consumption; it is called ‘Ιn the Evening Shadows of Colorado’s Long’s Peak’. Le Roy Hafen has written extensively on many aspects of Colorado’s pioneer history. There is an intriguing contemporary history of Denver by W. B. Vickers with lots of flavourful photographs, History of Denver (Denver, 1880). I also obtained cuttings from The Rocky Mountain News and The Fort Collins Standard. The Western History Department of Denver Public Library gives much useful information and help to all enquirers about Colorado’s pioneering days.

  Chapter III Japan

  The Rev. John Batchelor gives detailed accounts of Ainu life at the period in The Ainu of Japan (1892) A. H. Landor wrote his petulant, eccentric account of North Japan in Alone Among the Hairy Ainu (1893). The only (lifeless) biography of Sir Harry Parkes is by F. Dickins and S. Poole. Other personal, entertaining accounts of Japan during the 1870s and 1880s are found in William G. Dixon’s The Land of the Morning (Edinburgh 1882), and Dr Henry Faulds’s Nine Years in Nippon (1887). There are many ‘straight’ histories of nineteenth-century Japan including Malcolm D. Kennedy’s A Short History of Japan (1963) and W. G. Beasley’s The Modern History of Japan (1963). Sir George Sansom The Western World and Japan (1950) is always invaluable. In my own books, The Coming of the Barbarians (1967) and The Deer Cry Pavilion (1968) I give an account of westerners in Japan – including, in the latter, Isabella Bird.

  Chapter IV Malaya

  An idiosyncratic ‘woman’s view’ of Perak and Selangor during the 1870s appears in Emily Innes’s The Golden Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885). Sir Frank Swettenham’s British Malaya (1907) gives much fascinating material about events and personalities he knew in the Malay States during the period of Isabella’s visit. There is a sympathetic and very readable account of Sir Hugh Low’s personality in Verandah by James Pope-Hennessy (1964). Extracts from Hugh Low’s journals appear in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malay Branch for 1954. Among many very readable histories of the Native States at the time are John Kennedy’s A History of Malaya (1962); Nineteenth-Century Malaya by Prof. C. D. Cowan (1961) and J. Gullick’s Mal
aya (1964). I also consulted records in the Public Record Office, London for material on Low’s administration and Douglas’s misdemeanours.

  Chapter VII Kashmir and Tibet

  William Carey’s Travel and Adventure in Tibet (1902) is good on contemporary atmosphere, and for the atmosphere of a rather earlier time, the lively, charming, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China by Abbé Huc (Trans: by W. Hazlitt, 1852). Working and Waiting for Tibet by H. G. Schneider (1891) is a pamphlet about the Moravian missionaries there. Tibet the Mysterious, Sir Thomas Holdich (1906) gives the background of western exploration there. There is a comprehensive modern history by Η. Ε. Richardson, Tibet and its History (1962); and for what happened when Curzon focused his attention on Tibet, don’t miss Bayonets to Lhasa by Peter Fleming (1961) which concerns the Younghusband expedition.

  Chapter VIII Persia and Kurdistan

  Persia and the Persian Question by George N. Curzon (1892) tells all, but all, about the country at the time. A colourful contemporary account of the period is Dr C. J. Wills’s In the Land of the Lion and the Sun (1883). Clara C. Rice published a small worthy memoir of Mary Bird, Isabella’s cousin, Mary Bird of Persia (1922). For the political background of Russian-British rivalry, Persia and the Defence of India, Rose Greaves (1959), is invaluable and lucid. There is also the very scholarly Russia and Britain in Persia by F. Kazemzadeh (Yale, 1968).

  Chapter IX Korea