Britain’s forgotten female Victorian adventurer

A brand new three-part series Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip will see Ruby Wax, Melanie Brown and Emily Atack re-trace the footsteps of Yorkshire-born Victorian explorer Isabella Bird. Ahead of the first episode the BBC takes a look at the life of the extraordinary, but largely forgotten, pioneer.

With a £100 gift from her vicar father and a doctor’s recommendation that a spot of foreign travel might be a tonic for her malaise, Isabella Bird set off on her first wild adventure in 1854.

It was to be a journey beset by drama. During a sea journey from Newfoundland to Maine a violent storm raged around the steamer.

Fellow explorer and author of a book on Bird’s life, Jacki Hill-Murphy said: “A storm hit and the ship groaned and strained [then] a large wave struck the ship and put out the lamps and then the engine fires.

“Isabella thought she was going to die.”

But, rather than denting her burgeoning wanderlust Bird later wrote, of the first of many brushes with death: “I felt that a new era of my existence had begun”.

The trip lit a fire within and, over the following 50 years, she travelled to the four corners of the earth.

Her experiences were chronicled in letters and correspondence to her sister, Henrietta, and publisher, John Murray, and published in 11 books of derring-do.

Few who have read any of her books would deny her a place in history, but the exploits of this unlikeliest of explorers from Boroughbridge, near Harrogate, in North Yorkshire, have largely been lost to time.

Now, using her book ‘A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains’ – covering her time in America in the early 1870s – Ruby – who describes Bird as a personal “heroine” – Melanie and Emily are seeking to address this.

Bird was born in 1831 to Edward Bird, a man of the cloth renowned for his animated services, and his wife Dora.

She suffered from a young age with mental and physical ill health but still enjoyed learning to ride a horse with her father and dreamed of escaping the “bondage” of Victorian constraints.

After her initial overseas adventure she boarded a ship bound for San Francisco in 1872 but ended up in Hawaii – then known as the Sandwich Islands

While there she rode into the crater of Mauno Loa, which according to the U.S. Geological Survey is now among the world’s most active volcanoes, having erupted 33 times since 1843.

Bird wrote of that adventure: “I screamed and wept, rendered speechless at seeing the most unutterable of wonderful things.”

On another occasion, she narrowly avoided drowning while enjoying a white-knuckle river trek, saved at the last-minute by “a naked, tattooed man who lassoed her horse” says Ms Hill-Murphy.

After leaving Hawaii she travelled to the US where she crossed the lawless Wild West, made an 800-mile journey on horseback across the Rocky Mountains and came face-to-face with grizzly bears.

During her time in Estes Park, Colorado, she met the one-eyed trapper “Rocky Mountain Jim” – with whom she climbed the 14,259ft (4,364m) Longs Peak.

“There is no doubt they had a connection,” says Ms Hill-Murphy.

“But we cannot presume they acted with impropriety. She had to guard her reputation fiercely as her books were selling well.”

After returning to Britain, where she married the Scottish surgeon John Bishop, she went on to travel to countries including Malaysia, Japan, Korea, China and Morocco and was among the first women to be admitted to the Royal Geographical Society.

Describing her in a 2013 episode of Great Lives, novelist Meg Rosoff said she was a “small, rather plump woman less than 5ft tall, who dressed like Queen Victoria in kind of stiff, black rustling silks and yet she travelled to every far-flung corner of the world where almost nobody else had ever been”.

Deborah Ireland, who also produced a book on Bird’s life, said the adventurer thrived in the great outdoors, away from the constraints of Victorian society. “Back in entitled England there were rules and regulations to follow, but she soon realised that as she was on a horse no one cared about her. She found freedom.”

Despite her well documented travels, Ms Hill-Murphy fears Bird, and other female explorers of the time, need their achievements pulling from the mire of history.

She said she is on a quest to “rescue the names of the early women explorers and pioneers from obscurity”.

Speaking to the BBC from eastern Africa, she stressed the importance of acknowledging women from all over the world who, for different reasons, travelled to faraway places “so that they could document the lives of people who were hitherto unknown in environments that could only be dreamed of”.

Ms Hill-Murphy added: “They showed enormous courage and tenacity in their pursuit of knowledge and wrote some of the first travel books and, in doing so, enlightened the world to the plights and pleasures of other societies.”

But it was not Bird’s gender alone that set her and her female peers apart in Victorian Britain, Ms Hill-Murphy said a key difference was that she “did not write to encourage colonialization as many of the early male explorers did.”

Bird died in Edinburgh, aged 72, on 7 October 1904. She had reportedly been planning another trip, to China, at the time of her death.

Reflecting on her experience following in Bird’s footsteps Ms Wax said: “She actually walked and travelled the equivalent of three times around the world throughout her years.

“She rode with only a backpack, sometimes slept in the snow and faced constant danger, either from the wild desperados or wild animals.

“She climbed 15,000ft mountains and wrangled cattle throughout the state.

“She had no fear and yet most people have never heard about her. Hopefully now they will.”

Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip airs on BBC Two and iPlayer on Monday 28 November at 21:00 GMT.