Cattleman and Devil man

Richard West

Travels in West Africa Mary Kingsley (Virago £5.95) 'T sabella Bird is the ideal traveller' wrote

the Spectator critic in 1879, of the first edition of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. 'There never was anybody who had adventures as well as Miss Bird'. Ex- cept Mary Kingsley, one has to add, after reading the other magnificent book reprinted this month by Virago.

Isabella Bird was a clergyman's daughter, born in 1831, who suffered for most of her early life from back trouble, insomnia, depression and other ailments that tend to afflict unhappy women. When she was 23, she went on a therapeutic voyage to North America, wrote a book about it, and later a series of essays on subjects as various as John Donne's poems, and life in the Outer Hebrides — a _part of the world she much admired. After the death of her father, when she was 40, Miss Bird went on a more ambitious trip to Australia, New Zealand and to the Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii. It was there, in the words of Pat Barr's new introduction, that 'the miracle first happened: almost as soon as she land- ed on those lush, carefree islands her lassitude, low spirits, aches and pains simp- ly vanished'. Hawaii inspired her first suc- cessful book, Six Months in the Sandwich Isles, and gave her confidence to attempt the still more adventurous trip to the Rocky Mountains, in 1873.

The Colorado territory of that time con- firmed the truth of the proverb that there was `no God west of the Missouri'. The trappers, Indian-fighters, ranchers and miners worshipped instead the 'almighty dollar' (the phrase was not yet a cliche); the human quality they admired was 'smart- ness', or cheating; their principal pastimes were whisky and gambling. Isabella Bird describes a Wild West town known to us from the cinema. 'A man accidentally shoves another in a saloon, or says a rough word at meals, and the challenge, "first finger on the trigger" warrants either in shooting the other at any subsequent time without the formality of a duel'. Only lynch law deters the gunmen, Miss Bird wrote: `At Alma and Fairplay vigilance commit- tees have been lately formed, and when men act outrageously and make themselves generally obnoxious they receive a letter with a drawing of a tree, a man hanging from it, and a coffin below, on which is written "forewarned". They "git" in a few hours'.

For months Isabella Bird rode on her own through heat and snowstorm, through prairies and the precipitous crags, en- countering not only desparadoes but rattle- snakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears. There were few hotels in the West in those days and travellers had to put up in one of the homesteads, a custom that pleased Miss Bird as it helped her to share the lives of the settlers. Some were profane and coarse; some bitter against the English; the worst were gloomy 'psalm singers'. But most of the settlers welcomed Miss Bird, especially in what was to her a kind of Garden of Eden, the high and remote Estes Park.

She stayed many weeks there, roaming the mountains, doing her share of the household chores and herding the cattle: `So we've been driving cattle all day, riding about twenty miles, and fording the Big Thompson about as many times. Evans flatters me by saying that I am "as much use as another" . . . He said I was "a good cattleman" and that he had forgotten that a lady was of the party till he saw me "come leaping over the timber, and driving with the others":

She soon made friends with an Estes Park resident known as Rocky Mountain Jim, who was more notorious in his time even than Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickock and Comanche Bill (the latter also befriend- ed her). Rocky Mountain Jim was the son of an Irish Army officer, an educated and

courteous gentleman, who, thanks to a blighted love affair and the demon whisky, had gone to the bad. He had been the most famous Indian fighter and gunman in all the West, but now lived as a trapper and recluse clad only in rags. One half of his face was handsome and noble; the other had been removed by a bear. Rocky Moun- tain Jim and the pious Miss Bird fell in love. 1 was terrified' she wrote to her sister (this Passage was cut from the printed volume of letters) . . . made me shake all over and even cry. He is a man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry'. Jim cried out to her in his anguish: 'Now you see a man who has made a devil of himself! Lost! Lost! Lost!' And indeed Rocky Mountain Jim was gunned down the following year by Evans, his neighbour, and Miss Bird's host in Estes Park.

The doctor who treated his fatal wound was George Henry Kingsley, a brother of Charles the 'muscular Christian' novelist, and the father of Mary, whose book is also under review. As well as being a doctor, George Henry Kingsley was an inveterate traveller, naturalist and anthropologist. On his rare returns to England from places like Colorado, he set his daughter to work on research and had her taught German to help him with foreign studies of cannibalism. This was the sum of her formal teaching. Though one of her brothers had £2,000 spent on his education; though Uncle Charles was always campaigning for schools for girls, the unfortunate Mary taught herself. Her father, a high-minded agnostic, was bullying and bad-tempered. When she was famous, Mary Kingsley jok- ed of how he had yelled at her when her pet game cocks crowed too loud, or when she experimented with gunpowder and blew a keg of liquid manure on the washing in the garden. But her parents were selfish people and played on her feelings of duty to make her attend their trivial complaints; they once called her back by telegram from the first night of her holiday.

When her parents were dead and Mary was 30, she set off for Africa to become, like her father, a naturalist and an an- thropologist, making a special study of river water fish and African religious beliefs. Or so she said, though to a friend She confessed much later: 'Dead tired and 00 one had need of me any more, I went down to West Africa to die'. Against all the odds, she survived. The Coast, or 'White Man's Grave' in the 1890s had still to wait for a protection against malaria and Yellow Fever, or even the knowledge that these were conveyed by the anopheles mosquito.

As Mary Kingsley travels for months, by canoe and on foot, through the Gabon, the wildest part of West Africa, the reader is stunned by the narrative of escape and adventure. She falls into an elephant trap and is saved from the spikes by her thick woollen skirts. She crouches in a tprnado beside a leopard, beans a second with a water cooler, and scares off a third by shouting `Go home, you fool!' She catches Poisonous snakes in the path, in trees and on top of her cupboard. She beats off a crocodile which tried to board her canoe at night in a mangrove swamp, and gets rare close-up looks at elephants and gorillas. One night in a village of cannibal Fans, she smells something human from a bag: 'I 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'.

She became an admirer and friend of the white traders, the 'Palm-oil ruffians', whose cause she championed back in England. She also became a rubber trader herself, learning the intricate skills of buy- ing up-river. One of the Europeans who feared that Mary might be cheated was later to say: 'Miss Kingsley, that I should ever live to see this day! You've been swindling those poor blacks!' The blacks themselves both liked and accepted Mary, called her `ma' or more often 'Sir', though some who had traded with her gave her the nickname `Devil man'. The only question she ever resented was: 'Where be your husband, ma?'

Towards the end of her life, Mary fell 1 rather in love with Sir Matthew Nathan, a Jewish army officer who had served in Sierra Leone: she admired Jews, officers and West Africa hands. He did not return this feeling, and something was dead in her. 'I am no more a human being than a gust of wind is' she wrote to a friend, and later 'I know nothing myself of love'. Yet beneath her sadness, so Mary wrote to a Christian friend, was faith in God that had somehow survived her agnostic upbringing. Africa enriched this faith, which fed on natural wonder, 'the sound of that surf that is beating on the shore down there, and the sound of the wind talking in the hard palm- leaves, and the thump of the natives' torn- toms, or the cry of the parrots passing over the mangrove swamps . . . They never give me the dazzles by their goings on, like humans do by theirs repeatedly'.

Although she wrote beautifully of the physical Africa, Mary Kingsley was better still at describing the people. Her astoun- ding and never since equalled knowledge of fetish was due in part to the fact that she took it seriously. It is the one subject on which she is never facetious. Indeed with her pantheism, a view of religion much af- fected by Goethe, she regarded fetish with sympathy, if not belief. A recent biographer, Olwen Campbell, thinks that Mary may have seen an affinity between the way Africans tried to placate their gods and the way Mary had tried to placate her father, who threw not thunderbolts at her head but a Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences. Although she admired some of the missionaries that she met in the Gabon, Mary Kingsley did not approve of Chris- tianity for the Africans; still less would she now approve the isms and ocracies that we force on them.

Mary Kingsley was a kind of Tory who died at the age of 37 while nursing prisoners in the Boer War. In spite of her latest publishers, the ;Virago Press, she was not a feminist, and indeed once declared that the representation of 'palm oil ruffians' was more important than votes for women. Nor did she see any reason to side with African women against their men. 'The more wives, the less work, says the African lady; and I have known men who would rather have had one wife and spent the rest of the money on themselves in a civilised way, driven into polygamy'. She sympathised with African men who beat their shrewish wife or wives: 'He may whack with impuni- ty so long as he does not draw blood; if he does, be it never so little, his wife is off to her relations, the present he has given to her is returned, the marriage is annulled, and she can re-marry as soon as she is able.' African women enjoyed a financial advan- tage now conferred by the Californian divorce laws.

Isabella Bird was scarcely a feminist: 'I have seen a great deal of the roughest class of men... and the more important I think the "mission" of every quiet, refined, self- respecting woman... the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity or fastness'. She asked her publisher to horsewhip one reviewer who dared to suggest she had worn men's clothes. Rocky Mountain travel, she wrote at the end of her book, 'intensifies tenfold one's appreciation of the good at home and, above all, of the quietness and purity of English domestic life'.

In her new introduction, Pat Barr argues that Isabella Bird suffered 'internal con- flicts' and that her life would have been happier as a man. Although Miss Bird afterwards married a childhood sweetheart, Miss Barr implies (on what evidence is not made clear) that her run-in with Rocky Mountain Jim was the nearest she came in life to romantic sexual passion. Well even if it was, how many women are lucky enough in a lifetime to love and be loved by some- one half as glamorous? Indeed Miss Bird says over and over again that life in. the Wild West was privileged for the woman thanks to the gallantry and respect of even the coarsest men. In the modern United States, we are constantly told by feminists, all women are victims of rape, insult, injury and at least sexual harassment.

In her good, if all too short introduction to Travels in West Africa, Elizabeth Claridge is cautious in her assessment of Mary Kingsley's private life. Certainly she was exploited by her family; worse still, she was starved of affection; but that can hap- pen to children of any age including our own. The coldness and selfishness of a George Henry Kingsley could even be found among modern, liberated parents. Divorce, for example, is sometimes more harmful than chucking dictionaries.

Feminism, like any other ideology, is a dubious guide to the hearts and minds of those who are dead. I know nothing of Isabella Bird except for this book on the Rocky Mountains. I have, however, read

almost everything by and about Mary Kingsley. I have come to know her a little and love her a lot. She was indeed sad; but her sadness was surely attributable not to her sex but to the human condition. Her loneliness on the Gabon was nothing to that of the palm oil ruffians: 'No-one knows, who has not been to visit Africa, how terri- ble is the life of a white man in one of those out-of-the-way factories (trading stations)'. Several sad and tormented men were drawn to the same part of Africa, to the Gabon, including Sir Richard Burton, the scholar- explorer, Winwood Reade, who wrote the Martyrdom of Man, Andre Gide in the 1920s, and best known of all, Albert Schweitzer, who revered Mary Kingsley and shared her love for Africa and for Goethe. The French explorer of the Gabon, the no- ble De Brazza, whom Mary revered, died of a broken heart when he saw what colonisa- tion and greed had done to the people he loved. Brazza and Mary Kingsley knew that continent and its people better than any before them; better than, any since. They were mourned by white and black on the Coast. An anthropologist, Captain R.S. Rattray, called Mary Kingsley 'the greatest white woman who ever went to West Africa... In some ways I think she was in- spired. Her face... in an old poke bonnet has always struck me as a beautiful face'.