The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt. Mary Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ they would undoubtedly be cured of the endemic sicknesses of laziness and the vapours’. More to the point, she felt, knowledge of their own country might ‘cure (in others) the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts’.

      The English countryside into which she forayed was not altogether hospitable and it took a considerable sense of adventure, allied to a strong puritan desire for self-improvement, to set out on such a venture. Roads were rough and badly signposted. On horseback, she had to negotiate water-filled potholes so big that a man could drown in one. Since the ending of the Civil War soldiers had turned to vagrancy, and it was a sign of their prosperity that footpads had recently taken to horseback in order to make their getaway more efficient. Travellers were especially vulnerable on open heaths and in forests, Epping, Hampstead and Hounslow being the well-known danger spots. A sixteen-year-old heiress was attacked no less than eleven times and women took to travelling with a spare purse of money ready to hand over to robbers. Clearly, even a short journey to market was not to be undertaken lightly.

      Without children to leaven her solemn attitudes, Celia Fiennes’ view of life tended to be staid and devoid of humour, but her insatiable curiosity and sturdy determination more than compensated for this. Her description of a meeting with highwaymen is typical of her style not only of writing but of living: ‘… two fellows all of a sudden from the wood fell into the road and they looked all trussed up with great coats and as it were, bundles about them which I believe were pistols.’ They jostled her horse and tried to get between it and those of her servants and when asked the way said they didn’t know the area though later it became obvious that they did. The Fiennes party was saved by the presence of men haymaking nearby. ‘It was the only time I had reason to suspect I was engaged with some highwaymen,’ she remarked, characteristically omitting to say whether or not she had been frightened.

      While Celia was exploring her native England, a contemporary of hers had been making a name for herself first as a spy and later as a writer. Aphra Behn was born in 1640 and brought up in Kent. Details of her childhood are uncertain but in her early twenties she sailed with some of her family to live as part of the household of the Governor of Surinam. Life in the tropics seemed strange to the young girl, but she had a generous, open mind, receptive to the wonder of it all and when, with her brother, she encountered some slaves recently uprooted from their African homes she was ready to approach them with friendliness and compassion. In a long, full dress and with a bonnet covering her unconventionally short hair, her appearance must have seemed as strange to them as theirs did to her. ‘They touched us, laying their hands on all the features of our faces, feeling our breasts and arms, taking up one petticoat then wondering to see another; admiring our shoes and stockings but more our garters which we gave them and they tied about their legs, being laced with silver lace at the ends.’ The arrival, however, of the chieftains of war was another thing altogether, for they seemed a ferocious bunch with their marks and self-mutilations: ‘… so frightful a vision it was to see them … some wanted their noses, some their lips … others cut through each cheek’. They wore ‘girdles of cotton with their knives naked stuck in it … a quiver of arrows on their thighs and feathers on their heads’. Nevertheless, she found them both humane and noble.

      Returning to England in 1663, Aphra married a merchant called Behn who died within three years, and she was then sent to Antwerp as a spy, with little more to live on than forty pounds and money from the sale of her rings. It seems that she never married again, for she regarded that institution as ‘the cheap drug of a church ceremony’. She received little thanks for the political and naval information she sent back from Antwerp, and on her return she devoted herself to earning a living from her writing, becoming the first Englishwoman to do so and drawing copiously on her travels in Surinam which she recounted as the background to her autobiographical novel Oroonoko, published a year before her early death at the age of forty-eight.

      It is one of life’s small ironies that women – their own position in society not unlike that of a colonized country – were themselves able to take a ride on the great wave of colonization that burst outwards into the unclaimed world. The more ambitious and adventurous among them were quick to grasp the opportunity to travel far beyond the tamer shores of Europe to the unknown excitements of distant colonies. While Aphra Behn was working in Holland to undermine any plans the Dutch might have to defeat the English navy, another woman – also in Holland – was starting to build up a career that would eventually take her, also, to Surinam.

      It was unusual for women to travel to the colonies on their own and those who did were usually making the journey in order to marry a merchant or planter. A contemporary writer, therefore, found it ‘a kind of phenomenon to see a lady actuated by a love of insects so truly heroic as to induce her to traverse the seas for the purpose of painting and describing them’. To go after a husband was understandable but to endure a journey into the tropics merely to paint insects was another thing altogether!

      The amazing lady was the entomological artist, Maria Sibylla Merian who, ten years after Aphra Behn’s death, received a grant from the Dutch government which allowed her, at the age of fifty-two, to set out for Surinam. At that time, according to a contemporary report, it was the black spot of the Dutch Empire. If the destination proved unsavoury, the means of getting there was a positive death-trap. Sea travel in the seventeenth century was neither pleasant nor healthy. Scurvy abounded, hygiene was virtually non-existent and the only air that filtered down below deck came through hatches which often had to be battened down to keep out the driving rain. Sailing into the tropics, the air became steamy and foul and this, acting upon the decaying food left lying round the galley, meant that sailors and passengers often fell victim to dysentery. Maria, taking her daughter with her as a companion, survived the journey – no mean feat for a woman who would have hitherto led a very sheltered life. Surinam lies just north of the Equator and the combination of high temperatures and a copious rainfall meant a plentiful vegetation for Maria to sketch. It was the low, unhealthy marshlands, however, that were too much for this middle-aged matron and she had to return to Holland after two years.

      The travels of these three women – and of many others that must go unremarked – are a reflection of the new horizons perceived, for the first time, by people interested in the special qualities of the places they visited and especially, in the case of Aphra Behn, in the lives of those they encountered in the course of their journeys. Celia Fiennes noted with obvious disapproval the increasing interest in things foreign and chose instead to confine herself to a thorough study of her own country. The other two travellers accepted the challenge of adventure and, like so many women before them, found it to their taste.

      By the eighteenth century, a steady wave of women travellers was regularly leaving England’s shores, some to accompany their husbands on diplomatic missions, and some to participate with them in that great cultural institution – the Grand Tour. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went with her husband to Constantinople in 1716, where she became a keen and amusing observer of life. She was one of the first travellers daring enough to try out a strange, foreign practice: while in Turkey, she studied the habit of vaccination for smallpox, adopted it for her own children, and later introduced the practice to England.

      In 1810, Hester Stanhope left England in search of a new and more exciting life than anything she could possibly find at home. There was no way in which an intelligent and independent-minded woman such as she could satisfy her hunger for both knowledge and adventure. She was the daughter of an illustrious family: her grandfather had been Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, and her uncle was William Pitt for whom she had acted as hostess during his years of office as Prime Minister. After his death in 1806 there was a vacuum to be filled, and she began to think about ways of satisfying the unbounded curiosity which had ruled her since childhood. She recalled her governesses admonishing her for this awkward trait: ‘I was tired of all those around me who to all my questions invariably answered, “My dear, that is not proper for you to know – you must not talk about such things until you are older.”’ That she was clever was certain; had not her father, himself hungry for knowledge, said that she was the best logician he knew?

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