By Jonathan Wright

Published: Monday, 28 November 2022 at 12:00 am

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It was in the year 1873 and aboard the paddle steamer Nevada that Isabella Bird’s life changed decisively, at the moment that it so easily could have been ended. Two days into a voyage from New Zealand to the US state of California, a hurricane hit the ship, which was aged, leaky, infested with rats, and in no condition to withstand a battering. For a while, it looked as if the Nevada might break apart and be lost entirely.

For the passengers and crew, it was a terrifying experience. Yet rather than give in to fear, Bird, a Yorkshire-born spinster in her early forties hitherto facing middle age in a fug of unhappiness that visiting Australia and New Zealand had done little to lift, revelled in what was happening. “It is so like living in a new world, so free, so fresh, so vital, so careless, so unfettered, so full of interest that one grudges being asleep,” she later wrote, after the hurricane passed with the Nevada still seaworthy, in one of her letters to her sister, Henrietta, whom she affectionately called ‘Hennie’.

Bird spent much of the journey across the Pacific helping one Mrs Dexter care for her son, who was grievously ill after rupturing a blood vessel in his lungs. Mrs Dexter planned to alight at the Sandwich Islands, the archipelago now known as Hawaii, for her son to receive medical treatment, and she asked her new friend to accompany them. Bird readily agreed; her sense of adventure and, as a minister’s daughter with a strong morality, her sense of duty in alignment.

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During her six months there, the feeling of “unfettered” freedom she found during the hurricane bloomed. Bird had visited a number of places around the world before – and had written of her experiences, most notably in her popular travel memoir The Englishwoman in America (1856) – but it was in Hawaii that she shook off the shackles of convention in earnest.

The woman celebrated today as an explorer, globetrotter, mountaineer, photographer, cowpoke and expert horsewoman, friend to Wild West outlaws and the nomadic Berbers of Morocco, a founder of hospitals, a reported inspiration to suffragettes, and one of the first female fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, truly began to invent herself.

Bird’s accomplishments were all the more remarkable given that she was born, in 1831, during the reign of Queen Victoria’s predecessor, William IV, hardly an era when women were encouraged to be independent.

A love of outdoors

She had to contend from an early age with a disruptive upbringing as her father, Reverend Edward Bird, moved the family around the country. Often, his transfers were the result of his principled and staunch resistance to Sunday labour or trading, which led to him falling out with many of his parishioners.

Adapting to each new place, Bird grew up bright, curious and outspoken, but she was also a sickly child, suffering from severe back pains, as well as nervous headaches and insomnia. In 1850, she needed an operation to remove a “fibrous tumour” from the spinal area. More happily, much of the medical advice she received encouraged her to be outside as much as possible taking in the fresh air, so she spent many hours riding horses or rowing, and learning to love the outdoors. Alongside her home schooling in an eclectic range of subjects, her father, a knowledgeable botanist, taught her extensively about plants too.

In short: Bird’s early life was unusual, and so perhaps the best possible preparation for her time in the Hawaiian archipelago. After helping Mrs Dexter and her son to settle amidst the expats at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, she was keen to head off the beaten track, to escape a polite society whose mores she rarely challenged directly, but nevertheless treated with suspicion.

She made her way to Hilo, little more than a large village at this point and home to Luther Severance, son of a US congressman serving as the local postmaster. Staying with him and his family, Bird began to explore the area on horseback, but it soon looked like she would have to give it up as riding sidesaddle, in what was then seen as a ladylike fashion, caused her debilitating backache. Severance intervened, asking why she did not use a Mexican saddle, designed for the rigours of life outdoors and on which she could sit astride a horse. Anxious to ride as far as the relatively inaccessible Kīlauea volcano, Bird decided to give it a go. It was an instant improvement. She could gallop into the wilds (although for the rest of her life she would nod to convention by riding side-saddle in towns and cities) and became such an adept horsewoman that locals on the island of Kauai called her paniola, or ‘cowboy’.

Considering her most famous book today is A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), based on letters written to Hennie from the US frontier, this nickname turned out to be prescient. Hawaii prepared Bird for life in the Rockies in another way: mountaineering. She ascended Mauna Loa, which rises to more than 4,100 metres, in the company of William Green, the acting British consul and a keen volcanologist. This involved traversing lava fields and a night spent in a tent near the crater.

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As a writer with a reporter’s eye, Bird rarely indulged in mysticism or flights of fancy, but she made an exception after getting up early to sit alone atop the unquiet volcano. She wrote of the awesome sight: “How far it was from all the world, uplifted above love, hate and storms of passion and war and wreck of thrones, and dissonant clash of human thought, serene in the eternal solitudes.”

Rocky trails

Her time in Hawaii eventually resulted in a new book, Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (1875), but soon it was time for Bird to be on her way. On 7 August 1873, she boarded the mail steamer Costa Rica and sailed for San Francisco. From a city that had grown rapidly during California’s gold rush, she took a train east, as far as Greeley, Colorado, to pioneer country. The territory, which would not achieve statehood until 1876, was attractive to farmers due to its vast plains, but Bird did not come for agriculture. She wanted to see and explore the Rockies.

In particular, she longed to reach the unspoilt valley of Estes Park, which she had heard about from local mountain men. It took several attempts to get there. The first was with the Chalmers family, settlers from Illinois, but ended when it became apparent that the head of the household had little idea of where he was going and few of the skills of an outdoorsman. Bird herself had to take charge and guide everyone back.

She then went to stay with a family called the Hutchinsons. While with them, she threw herself into physical work, so much so that an ox-team driver mistook her for “the new hired girl”, a comment that delighted her, since it emphasised how fit and full of life she had become. That was despite the man adding of Bird, who stood at 4ft 11in: “Bless me, you’re awful small!”

She was fit enough, it turned out, to make it to Estes Park finally, this time in the company of two sullen men who knew the trails. Here was true wilderness where only a few hardy settlers lived, dividing their time between ranching and acting as guides to visiting hunters. One of these was Griffith Evans, a Welshman in whose log cabin Bird stayed.

Mountain man

The man who, by far, had the biggest presence in her life, however, was Jim Nugent, or ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’. While he could be charming and spin tall tales, he was a hard drinker with a reputation for being vindictive and violent. Aged around 45, he was also short an eye following an encounter with a grizzly bear. “The loss made one side of the face repulsive,” wrote Bird, “while the other might have been modelled in marble. ‘Desperado’ was written in large letters all over him.”

Jim was dangerous, although around Bird he tried to be on his best behaviour. He acted as guide when she climbed the 4,346-metre-tall Longs Peak, an undertaking so treacherous that she later noted: “Had I known that the ascent was a real mountaineering feat I should not have felt the slightest ambition to perform it.” Roped together, Jim sometimes literally dragged Bird upwards “like a bale of goods by sheer force of muscle”. The final vertiginous ascent was a painstaking climb up a “smooth, cracked face or wall of pink granite”. On the way down, an exhausted Bird fell several times and “once hung by my frock, which caught on a rock”. Jim cut her free, whereupon she landed in “a crevice full of soft snow”.

Jim doted on Bird, but she remained far too practical to imagine they could share a life. She was right to be wary. Bird went on to explore the Rockies as a lone traveller and rode for hundreds of miles in the wilderness, gaining international fame in the process for her writings, while Jim didn’t make it past 1874. He was shot in the head, perhaps by Griffith Evans with whom he had long feuded.

Insatiable wanderlust

Via New York, Bird returned to Britain and headed to Edinburgh, where Hennie lived. But her travelling adventures were far from over: in 1878, she journeyed through Asia, visiting Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaya. While Bird did eventually marry – in 1881 in the wake of Hennie’s death, to surgeon Dr John Bishop – it did not last long. Her husband died in 1886, leaving her with a comfortable income.

She studied medicine and, in her later years, visited Turkey, Persia, Armenia and Morocco. While in India, she worked with medical missionary Fanny Jane Butler to found the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley. Then in 1891, Bird gave a speech on the persecution of Christians in Kurdistan in a committee room of the House of Commons.

She was able to do all this due to her fame. As a woman of letters, Bird had brought the wonders and beauties of the wider world to Victorian Britain, making her arguably the greatest of the seven trailblazers that writer and geographer Dorothy Middleton profiled for her book, Victorian Lady Travellers (1965). And, in part, it all started with that terrifying, exhilarating voyage in 1873 – the year of so many of her greatest adventures – when Isabella Bird learnt to fly free.

WATCH: Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip, a new series in which Ruby Wax, Melanie Brown and Emily Atack follow in the footsteps of explorer Isabella Bird, will air on BBC Two on 28 November at 9pm. 

This article first featured in the Christmas 2022 edition of BBC History Revealed

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