Bird’s first journey abroad, in 1854, was not the most adventurous trip of her life: she travelled around the Eastern US and Canada, mostly staying with relatives for the several months she was in North America. However, the trip sparked off the two key interests that would come to define much of her adult life, travelling and writing. She composed daily journal entries throughout the duration of her journey which – along with letters written to her younger sister Henrietta – formed the basis for her first book, The Englishwoman in America.
Following her return to England and her father’s death in 1858, Bird moved to Edinburgh with her mother and sister. As well as several shorter trips to the Americas, Bird made several journeys to the Outer Hebrides during this period, writing articles on the plight of the crofters there. She used some of the royalties from these articles to help crofters emigrate to the US.
1868 saw the death of Bird’s mother, and her sister’s settling on the Isle of Mull. Loathing the quiet domestic lifestyle there, and finding it brought back her childhood illnesses, Bird planned a longer series of voyages. She set out first for Australia, and then in 1872 to Hawaii. There she climbed an active volcano and penned her next book. The money from that funded her travels on to Colorado, the most recent state to have joined the US. Her time in Colorado prompted another book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, perhaps her best known work. Her adventures there were rather awesome, reading like the treatment for a movie. She befriended a charismatic one-eyed outlaw, Jim Nugent, a fan of poetry and casual violence. With his help she climbed Long’s Peak and explored the Rockies. Bird caused some controversy by dressing in a sensible manner for her travels here, and riding astride instead of side-saddle, which ultimately lead to her threatening to sue the Times for accusing her of dressing ‘like a man’.
Her return to England after the trip followed the same pattern as before. Horrified by the idea of a quiet home life, and with an offer of marriage from Edinburgh-based doctor John Bishop, she once again arranged for a journey abroad. This time she voyaged around East Asia, writing about her experiences in Japan and Malaysia amongst others. Her trip was cut short by the loss of her sister to typhoid in 1880, leaving Bird devastated. She agreed to marry Bishop but found the experience miserable, and began travelling again when he died in 1886.
This time around, Bird decided she needed to do some good on her travels, and chose to travel to India as a missionary. Aged almost 60, she studied medicine, and arrived on the sub-continent in 1889. She roamed the area, visiting Tibet, Persia and Baghdad, taking with her a medicine chest and a revolver. (After all, you never know when it might be necessary to heal someone or shoot them.) She also established not one but two hospitals; the Henrietta Bird Hospital in Amritsar and the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinigar. This is two more hospitals than most people ever get round to founding, and a pretty brilliant achievement.
Chilling out on a horse in Tibet, as you do.
Her journeys and writing had earned Bird a deal of fame in England, and in 1892 she became the first woman to be granted a fellowship with the prestigious Royal Geographic Society (presided over at the time by the fantastically named Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff). She met with Prime Minister William Gladstone and addressed a parliamentary committee to discuss the atrocities being committed against Armenian people in the Middle East at the time. Of course, this wasn’t enough to sate her desire for travel and shortly afterwards she once again set off around the world.
She travelled to East Asia again, seeing the Yokohama region of Japan and much of Korea, leaving only when forced to by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. Rather than return home, she moved on to China. There, in addition to travelling up the Yangtze River and writing more, she was attacked by a mob and trapped in the top floor of a building that was then set on fire. Later she was stoned and left unconscious in the street. That’s the sort of thing that might put a lot of people off travelling, but when she died in 1904 Bird had been in the middle of planning another trip to China, due to set off just after her 73rd birthday in October. Because no one as awesome as Bird lets a little mob violence deter them from going where they want to go.
By the time of her death, Bird had circumnavigated the globe three times over, written over a dozen books and countless articles, and established herself as one of the most daring and best known travellers of the era. Many of her works can be found on Project Gutenberg here, all of them excellent reads. Pat Barr provides a detailed biography of her in A Curious Life for a Lady.
“Her work was both intimate and informative, combining personal insight and scientific knowledge of her destinations to provide the reader with an engaging, educational account of her travels. Among other themes, [Bird] wrote to challenge Western stereotypes of Eastern cultures, to critique the treatment of women in lower classes.”
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
In 1901, aged 24, Eberhardt was attacked by a sabre-wielding assassin whilst praying at an Algerian mosque. She survived, but her left arm was almost severed. A reasonable response to this might be to get quite upset, feel somewhat hostile towards the man who just attempted to murder you, and ask for him to be punished to the full extent of the law. Eberhardt however had reached a stage in her life where she was quite simply too badass to be upset by little things like assassination attempts. Instead she chose to forgive her assailant and later represented him in court, successfully arguing for his life to be spared.
How did the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, born in Geneva, end up facing assassination attempts in Algeria? It started with her anarchist tutor father, who taught her Arabic and other languages, horse-riding, theology, and literature. The interest in literature in turn led her to the work of Julien Viaud, a French lieutenant serving in North Africa and writing under the pen name Pierre Loti. Loti’s writing sparked a fascination with North Africa, which coupled with a weariness of Geneva’s formal society and hostility from her older step-siblings, who disliked her father, convinced Eberhardt that she needed to do some travelling of her own.
Travelling to Algiers with her mother in 1897, both of them quickly converted to Islam. They began to travel North Africa but Eberhardt’s mother passed away, as did her father back in Europe shortly afterwards. With her family ties severed, Eberhardt was free to fully devote herself to her travels. To this end she adopted the identity of a young man, taking the name Si Mahmoud Essadi. Having apparently developed a knack for the art of disguise, and being fluent in Arabic, she had little trouble blending in and taking advantage of the greater freedoms her new identity allowed her.
Travelling around North Africa under the guise of Si Mahmoud, Eberhardt became involved with the Qadiriyya, a secretive and radical Sufi brotherhood. The Qadiriyya were strongly opposed to colonial rule of Algeria and struggled against it, whilst also attempting to help the poor. Eberhardt, who by this point had begun writing journals and perhaps attempting to follow the path of Loti, threw herself into the Qadiryya cause, penning articles and works of prose railing against the French rule and celebrating the local culture. This is most likely what led to the assassination attempt against her, described earlier.
One very graceful impression is that of sunset over the port and the terraces of the upper town, and the gay Algerian women; a whole playful world in pink and green on the slightly blue-tinted white of the uneven and disorderly terraces. It’s from the little lattice window of Madame Ben Aben that you discover all this.
– Isabelle Eberhardt, Journals
Later that same year, having survived the near-severing of her arm, Eberhardt married an Algerian soldier, Slimane Ehnni. This didn’t slow her down though, as she continued to travel and write, acting as a war correspondent in the South of Oran for the French press. She also continued to push social boundaries, writing in her journals about adventures with alcohol and other intoxicants. Alongside her devotion to her adopted faith, her anarchist upbringing and free spirit kept her bending and breaking rules to experience every possible moment of her new country.
I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.
– Isabelle Eberhardt, Journals
How does Eberhardt’s tale end? In a manner entirely suited to the general badass themes of Eberhardt’s life as a whole. In 1904, after another extended journey of exploration and writing, Eberhardt reunited with her husband in Aïn Séfra, an area remarkable for its dryness even by Algerian standards. The pair had barely settled in when a flash flood struck the area and their house – made of clay – collapsed on them.
Eberhardt escaped, but swam back in to pull her husband out. She managed to get him to safety but lost her own life in the process. Drowning in a flood in the middle of a desert, giving her own life to save someone she’d spent a long period estranged from, aged only 27. Arguably Eberhardt achieved her wish, fitting in one last act of boldness in a thoroughly unusual incident.
Following her death, Eberhardt’s journals were rescued from the flood. They document the last four years of her life and her adventures around North Africa. Along with a novel and several articles written for French newspapers these have cemented Eberhardt as one of the 20th century’s most bold and fascinating of wanderers.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Bly’s life before this hadn’t exactly been simple, something which may have helped her develop her intense levels of badass. Born the 13th child out of 15, Bly’s father died when she was six, leaving her mother and siblings with nothing due to will issues. Her stepfather was an abusive drunk, whom Bly described in court as being “generally drunk since he married my mother. When drunk he is very cross, and [he is] cross when sober.”
Bly’s initial work for the Dispatch showed glimpses of the journalistic style she would go on to develop. She covered the difficulties faced by working class women and girls, the urgent need for reforming the state’s divorce laws, and the lives of local factory workers. So the editors decided after this to put her in the ‘women’s interest’ pages and have her cover minor fashion events and flower shows. Bly tried to get back to serious reporting by having herself sent to Mexico to write as the Dispatch’s foreign correspondent, but this only lasted for a few months before she was returned once again to the women’s pages.
Did Bly settle for a career writing lighthearted fluff, or give up journalism, accepting Wilson’s claim that a woman doing more serious work would be “a monstrosity”? Of course she didn’t, because she was awesome. She left a suitably withering note for Wilson and moved to New York in order to find work on a paper that would take her seriously.
Now, getting into journalism is not an easy task. It isn’t easy now and it wasn’t easy in 1887, particularly if you happened to be poor and female. Generally after six months of failing to get a job, one might give up and return home to do something easier. The people covered in this series are not the sort of people who give up and go home when things get hard, however, and after six months of knocking on doors Bly managed an interview at the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer (he of the prize). The editor, John Cockerill, – possibly in an attempt to deter her – challenged Bly to write a piece on Blackwell’s Island, then home to a notorious New York asylum.
In order to fully appreciate how blazingly fantastic what Bly did next was, it’s important to realise that investigative journalism wasn’t really a thing that existed at that point. People didn’t go undercover to write reports, or press closely-guarded inside sources for facts. It just wasn’t something that happened. This is what made Nellie Bly a pioneering journalist: she went undercover, and feigning insanity for 10 days, managed to have herself sent as a patient to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island to see for herself what was going on. This was particularly bold, as she had no guarantee she would be able to secure her release when the piece was done, and indeed had some difficulty regaining her freedom. She came back with a story of cruelty, beatings and poor conditions – examples of pretty much everything that was wrong with 19th century mental health care. Not only did Bly’s report get her the job at the New York World, it also drew public and political attention to the institution. This brought money and much needed changes, improving the lives of the people treated there. An impressive achievement for someone only just starting their career.
Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.
– Nellie Bly
Pioneering the field of investigative journalism and spending her career writing important pieces on workers’ rights, the treatment of women, and other socially important issues wasn’t quite enough for Bly, however. She still had a significant quantity of badass in her that she needed to make use of, and there was only one outlet for it that held sufficient coolness: a race around the world. Phileas Fogg’s 80 day trip around the world was all well and good, but it was fictional. Bly was going to be the first person to do it for real, and she was going to do it better.
"ROUND THE WORLD WITH NELLIE BLY": 1890 illustration published by New York World - a boardgame square for every day of Bly's adventure
So, by the age of 26, Bly had pioneered a new form of journalism, written countless important pieces in support of worker’s rights and women’s suffrage, and set the record for the fastest solo trip around the world. Doing either of these things is enough to cement someone’s claim to brilliance, let alone both.
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.
– Nellie Bly
For interesting further reading on Bly, there is the excellently thorough Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist by Brooke Kroeger, and Bly’s own Ten Days in a Mad-House.
- Unsung Heroes: a new series on BadRep spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school…
Guest blogger Rob Mulligan blogs atStuttering Demagogue.Stay tuned for future Heroes.