Robert Baden-Powell: Boy’s Own Adventurer

“We are having a very enjoyable game” – RSS Baden-Powell

Cool as a cucumber: Col B-P

ROBERT STEPHENSON SMYTH BADEN-POWELL was small and wiry and had receding red hair– an unlikely looking military hero. But inside he was as tough as teak. And at the bloody Siege of Mafeking the little chap proved himself a giant.

Mafeking was a remote outpost of the Empire in southern Africa, a small, defenceless, tin-roofed town that found itself on the front line of the Boer War in 1899. Within days of the conflict breaking out it was surrounded by the enemy. They’d come expecting a walkover.

The Boers were led by General Cronje, a veteran hard case known as the “old fox”. He had seven thousand troops in his command and an impressive battery of heavy artillery. Colonel Baden-Powell was in charge at Mafeking. He had just two thousand men, most untrained part-timers, plus an ancient cannon that had previously been used as a gatepost. On the face of it, Mafeking didn’t have a hope.

A more rational man might have run up the white flag. But Baden-Powell had orders to hold the town, so that’s precisely what he intended to do. And while he was at it, he planned to have himself a ripping adventure worthy of the pages of the “Boy’s Own Paper”.

Baden-Powell – “BP” to his mates – was a product of the Victorian public school system. Years of cold baths, sound thrashings and sport had made him the man’s man he was. He had no time for chaps he considered “wasters” or fellows inflicted with “girlitis”. Life, for him, was like a football match. Success was about pulling together.

Despite the long odds, BP was convinced that Mafeking had a (slim) chance if it kept its collective chin up and stood united. Team spirit was what it was all about - and fate had cast him in the role of team captain. In the famous words of the Victorian poet Sir Henry Newbolt, it was time to “Play up! play up! and play the game!”.

The Boers began their bombardment at 9am on 16 October, 1899, and the people of Mafeking braced themselves for total destruction. Dozens of missiles came whistling over a defensive ring of barbed wire and hastily dug trenches. Shells ploughed into the market square, sailed clean through flimsy mud buildings, smashed trees and destroyed telegraph poles. The pounding continued for hours.

But Baden-Powell was ahead of the game. Already the town had been honeycombed with underground bomb shelters where people were safe from shrapnel. A dummy fort with dummy soldiers and fake guns had been built to draw fire away from real targets. Hundreds of fake mines – boxes filled with sand – had been laid with great ceremony to discourage an all-out Boer charge. And the result of that first onslaught? Nobody was killed; no one was even injured.

When the dust settled, an enemy messenger came forward and asked Baden-Powell for Mafeking’s surrender - “to avoid further bloodshed”. The colonel gave him a hard look. “Certainly,” he told the man, “but when will the bloodshed begin?” British casualties thus far, he added, were one chicken dead and a donkey wounded. It was one-nil to Baden-Powell.

General Cronje response was predictable: more bombs and bullets. But Mafeking held steady and Baden-Powell refused to be shaken or cowed. After one particularly heavy bombardment, the colonel sent a runner through enemy lines with a note to reassure the outside world that Mafeking was okay. The message was telegraphed throughout the British Empire. “October 21st. All well,” it read, “Four hours’ bombardment. One dog killed.”

As the Boers continued to blaze away, the colonel’s courage and calmness under fire became legendary. “To see BP go whistling down the street… bright and confident is better than a pint of dry champagne,” wrote a newspaper man in Mafeking. Good humour and optimism came off him like heat. Major Alick Godley, thought it “splendid” to see his boss sitting in a chair surrounded by officers “dictating messages as cool as a cucumber” as shells burst around him.

During the day, BP would stand atop a wooden lookout platform above his headquarters, surveying the town’s defences like Admiral Nelson. At night, he’d crawl into no-man’s land on his belly to spy on enemy positions, amazing his men when he came wriggling back towards Mafeking’s trenches at dawn. He never seemed to sleep and he never stopped humming and whistling. He acted like he was invincible.

It was all an act of course. There were times when Baden-Powell’s heart must have been in his boots. He knew better than anyone that if the Boers were bold enough to try an all-out attack they’d crush Mafeking. And the alternative was equally dire: a grim, drawn-out siege. How long could his isolated garrison hold out under the baking African sun before disease, shells and starvation overwhelmed them?

But surrender was out of the question, and there was nothing to be gained from moping around. So BP kept smiling and whistling and looking on the bright side. If this was to be the final curtain, he was determined that he and his Mafeking team would face it with a bow.

Civilians as well as soldiers were holed up in the besieged town – about 7,500 blacks, 1,700 whites, a few Indians and some Chinese. And since it had been agreed with the Boers that there would be no fighting on Sundays, Baden-Powell turned the day of rest into a day of fun. He organised cricket and football matches. There were gymnastic displays. People promenaded around town in their Sunday best as though they were in London’s Hyde Park. Music hall shows and dances went on into the night.

The entertainment sometimes got bizarre. There were competitions to find the “best siege baby”, the best bull, the finest cow. A parade of old carriages was held. And whenever the colonel put on his “world-wide show of singing and dancing and playing the fool” all sorts of wannabes queued up to strut and grin their hour upon the stage.

One bloke turned out to be a decent conjurer. Others sang comic songs or recited poems. But the star of the show was always none other than Baden-Powell himself. The colonel would bring the house down by prancing around in a wig and ladies’ clothing or impersonating a cockney barrow boy. Then he’d wrap up his act by playing “Home, Sweet Home” on the mouth organ and exit to thunderous applause.

It was a far cry from what was happening on weekdays. At the start of the standoff, the Boers had made several attempts to overrun Mafeking’s defensive trenches. But after facing unexpectedly fierce resistance they switched tactics. Commandant Snyman took over from General Cronje. A massive siege gun arrived from Pretoria pulled by sixteen oxen. The Boers dug in and focused on trying to bomb and starve the little town into submission.

No one in Mafeking was safe as hundreds of shells and thousands of bullets rained down. A small boy was mortally wounded when a bomb dropped on him from the sky while he was playing marbles. A woman took a stray bullet in the neck and died instantly while pouring her husband a cup of coffee. The town’s makeshift hospital and cemetery quickly began to fill.

Frontline clashes claimed many more lives. One of the bloodiest incidents came ten weeks into the siege - at dawn on 26 December, 1899. BP ordered a surprise attack on a Boer position known as Game Tree Fort to try to knock out a gun. The assault was a disaster: twenty-six men were killed, twenty-three wounded, and a handful captured. The Boers lost just three soldiers. The day became known in Mafeking as Black Boxing Day.

As the New Year approached and the nineteenth century drew to a close, the future could not have looked grimmer for Baden-Powell and his team of part-time warriors. They remained outgunned and outnumbered. Rumours that British reinforcements were on their way had come to nothing. The enemy kept lobbing shells. And fever, diphtheria and dysentery had started to take a deadly grip on the town.

To make matters worse, Mafeking’s food was running out. By February 1900, the first three deaths from starvation were reported among the poorest black Africans.

Yet Baden-Powell remained chipper. He issued special postage stamps for “the independent republic of Mafeking” with his face on them in place of the queen – everyone thought that a splendid joke. He kept a special list of miraculous escapes that people marvelled at (a guy who got shot in the head was at number one: the bullet passed through his skull, just behind the forehead, and exited without causing any serious damage). And he threw his weight behind the “Mafeking Mail” newspaper (slogan: “Issued Daily, Shells Permitting”).

The Boers had long ago cut Mafeking’s rail and telegraph links. But thanks to brave African runners who risked their necks to slip past the encircling enemy with notes, some communication with the outside world was maintained. On 12 April a telegram arrived for BP from a surprising fan back in Britain – the queen. The message was short and sweet: “I continue watching with confidence and admiration the patient and resolute defence which is so gallantly maintained under your ever resourceful command. Victoria R.I.”

As the siege dragged into its seventh month, the colonel’s unflagging boyishness even seemed to rub off on the Boers. One day an enemy commander sent over a jokey note asking if his men could join in one of the garrison’s Sunday cricket matches. “Sir, I should like nothing better,” was Baden-Powell’s neatly typed reply, “after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days, not out, against the bowling of Cronje, Snyman, Botha… we are having a very enjoyable game.”

Around this time Baden-Powell also sent an amazingly chirpy telegram to his commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts. “After two hundred days’ siege… the patience of everybody in Mafeking in making the best of things… is a revelation to me,” it reads. “The men… have adapted themselves to their duties with the greatest zeal, readiness, and pluck, and the devotion of the women is remarkable. With such a spirit our organization runs like clockwork, and I have every hope that it will pull us successfully through.”

The men and women who were “making the best of things” and “having a very enjoyable game” were by this stage close to starvation. Horse meat and a rough porridge made from oat husks was the only food. Malnourished horses, BP notes in his diary, were “dying as fast as they can be made into sausages”.

Mafeking’s native Africans raided Boer cattle at night to bring in more meat. A soup kitchen was set up for the poorest and weakest. But a staggering seven hundred blacks still died of hunger and disease during the siege, many of them children. That’s hundreds more than the total killed by shells or in battle, black and white.

By the start of May the situation was dire. About a quarter of Mafeking’s fighting men were now dead or wounded in action. The last scraps of food would be gone within a few weeks. It looked like the game was almost up and Baden-Powell was forced to start thinking about how he might evacuate the town.

But then, finally, some good news. Word reached Mafeking that a British relief force was on its way – two thousand fresh men, artillery and machine guns. The Boers got wind of this too and made a last desperate attempt to storm the stubborn, bullet-riddled town. But again BP’s half-starved men held firm. The British reinforcements fought their way steadily closer, driving the enemy before them.

On 16 May an advance patrol of eight riders reached Mafeking to be greeted by a nonchalant passer-by. “Oh yes, I heard you were knocking about,” was his only comment. But by the time the main relief force marched in the following morning, such battle-hardened stoicism had evaporated. Gaunt faces stared at the rescuers “as though they were angels”, wrote a journalist who arrived that day. “One man tried to speak; then he swore; then he buried his face in his arms and sobbed.”

The siege was over. The game was won. The people of Mafeking had gone two hundred and seventeen days not out against the enemy’s fast bowlers. And the victory was largely down to one remarkable man – their gutsy, unflappable and always cheery team captain, Colonel RSS Baden-Powell.

When the news reached Britain of the relief of Mafeking, the country went nuts. Thousands poured onto the streets of London to celebrate. Baden-Powell became a national hero. The little colonel was quickly promoted to a bigwig major-general.

And of course Baden-Powell’s story doesn’t end there. Within a few years he’d gone on to create the world’s greatest youth movement, the Boy Scouts. The movement’s original ten-point Scout Law has Mafeking written all over it. “A Scout goes about with a smile on and whistling,” reads law number eight. “It cheers him and cheers other people, especially in time of danger.”

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

SOURCES
Jeal, Tim, Baden-Powell (London, 1989)
Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2003)
Aitken, W Francis, Baden-Powell, The Hero of Mafeking (London, 1900)

Mary Kingsley: Friend of Cannibals

“Being human, she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were” – Rudyard Kipling

Mary Kingsley in jungle dress

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a more unlikely looking explorer than Mary Henrietta Kingsley. Forget pith helmets and safari jackets, the redoubtable Miss Kingsley trooped across Africa dressed like she was off to a Victorian tea party.

Appearances were important, even in the sweltering jungle. It was her firm opinion that a lady had “no right to go about in Africa in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home”. So she dressed in the tropics as she did in London – impeccably.

Her tall, slim frame was always covered from neck to toe by a prim cotton blouse, black shawl and long, black woollen skirt. She wore a corset. And her fair hair was always pinned back and covered by a neat black bonnet tied under her chin with a bow. Feminists suggested Mary try wearing men’s trousers, a more practical alternative in the African rainforest. “I would rather,” she said, “[have] perished on a public scaffold.”

Mary Kingsley was born in 1862 in Islington, north London, just four days after the shotgun wedding of her parents. Her dad was a doctor, her mum a cockney servant. Within a month of the marriage, Dr Kingsley had left the country for the first of many long journeys overseas. Mary would see little of him growing up.

Hers was a lonely, imprisoned upbringing. While Dr Kingsley roamed the world, Mrs Kingsley sank into chronic ill-health and depression. Mary was expected to play the role of dutiful daughter, nursing her mum round the clock, rarely going outside. While still very young, she took charge of running the household. “I knew nothing of play and such things,” she later wrote.

She was a bright girl, Mary, but was given no formal education. The only thing her mum seems to have taught her was how to talk cockney. All her life, Mary would drop her hs like an East End flower girl – a habit that always amazed her middle-class peers.

But when she wasn’t helping her mum, Mary educated herself. She spent hours in her absent dad’s library lost in his books. She studied physics, chemistry, biology and maths. She learned Latin and German. She even taught herself how to fix the plumbing in her home by subscribing to a trade magazine.

Then in 1891, the wandering Dr Kingsley returned after picking up rheumatic fever on his travels. Within months, he was dead. His invalid wife, who’d had a stroke, followed him to the grave a few weeks later. Mary’s grey, slavish existence was suddenly over. She was twenty-nine and, for the first time in her life, she was free.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that she should want to cut loose. But what the newly liberated Miss Kingsley did next was so bizarre, so unimaginable for a Victorian lady, so out of keeping with her life up to that point, it’s barely believable - she went to West Africa to study tropical fish and cannibals.

Women simply didn’t go it alone in Africa back then - and certainly not in malaria-ridden West Africa, the White Man’s Grave. A few brave married ladies ventured out, the wives of missionaries and colonial officials. But single female explorers were not only unheard of, they were unthinkable.

Mary made two long African journeys – in 1893 and 1895 - roaming up and down the West Coast and pushing deep into the rainforests of the interior. Unlike so many male explorers of her time, she travelled light with only a handful of hired Africans for company. There was no army of porters, no arsenal of rifles, no tin bath, not even a tent.

She made her way without any fuss by trading tobacco, cloth and gin. She hacked her own way through the bush with a machete and she paddled her own canoe. People downed tools and stared in astonishment as she marched unheralded into their remote villages, pale-faced, straight-backed, formally dressed in black. Children fled in terror. Africa had never seen anything like her.

Before she left Britain, a friend recommended a West African phrase book. This cheery language guide opened with the exclamation, “Help, I’m drowning!”. There was also, “Get up you lazy scamps!”. And it included the memorable question, “Why has this man not been buried?” to which the answer was, “It is fetish [magic] that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed… until only the bones remain.”

Mary didn’t bother with it. Nor did she take a hot water bottle sent to her by another well-meaning but clearly bemused acquaintance. Instead she stuffed her waterproof bag with blankets, boots, a bowie knife, a revolver, anti-malarial medicine and an old book of Latin poetry. She also found room for one little luxury: tea. Then she made out her will, headed to Liverpool and joined a cargo ship bound for Africa.

Ominously, shipping agents refused to sell Mary a return ticket (so few people came back from West Africa in those days it wasn’t considered worth it). The only two other women on board both got off at the Canary Islands. Baffled male passengers thought Mary was a mad missionary with a death wish. But for her, it all made perfect sense. She’d been reading about Africa – its exotic people, its strange animals – for years. Arriving in Angola in August 1893 felt like coming home.

The intrepid Miss Kingsley didn’t do anything too suicidal on that first African journey. This was something of a trial run, the first, she hoped, of many such voyages. But it was still a thousand times more adventurous than anything attempted by other white travellers of her day.

She spent six months moving north through Congo, Cameroon and Nigeria. She lived with local people in their thatched huts, eating the African “chop” of palm oil stew, smashed snails, plantain and yam. She spent hours “puddling about” swamps in dugout canoes, catching rare fish and insects which she pickled in jars and brought back to the British Museum. And she had endless scrapes and narrow escapes – “knockabout farces before King Death” she liked to call them.

One night Mary was woken by a savage growling outside her hut and emerged to see a black leopard attacking a dog a few yards off. The sensible option would have been to retreat back inside, pulling the hut door firmly behind her. Instead Mary went to the rescue with a chair, hurling it at the deadly cat.

The counterattack worked; the dog broke free. But now the leopard turned on her, crouching to spring, its eyes “green balls of fire”. Mary picked up an earthen water jug and chucked it with all her strength at the wild animal. Bull’s-eye! The jug exploded like a shell on the cat’s head. “This discouraged the creature,” she writes to a friend. And the startled beast fled back into the darkness all around.

More knockabout farces followed on Mary’s second African adventure in 1895. This time she really went for it, pushing deep into the bush, going boldly where no white man – and certainly no white woman – had gone before. She was there a year. She ran into gorillas, scorpions and poisonous snakes, some of which she ate for lunch. She saw a man savaged to death by another leopard. When dozy hippos blocked her path Mary used her umbrella to prod them out of the way.

The hairiest moment came when a crocodile clambered onto the back of her canoe and, in her words, “endeavoured to improve our acquaintance”. Mary shuffled to the front of the unsteady little dugout, took aim, and gave the monster an almighty whack on the snout with her paddle. It did the trick. The reptile retreated. And Mary brushed off the incident: at just eight feet long, she says, the animal was “only a pushing young creature who had not learnt manners”.

But it was Africa’s people, not animals, who really excited her. She was fascinated by local rituals and customs. She was enthralled by African witchcraft and magic, what she called “fetish”. And above all she was drawn to the Fang, a fierce tribe who lived in the forest and were renowned for their cannibal feasts.

Despite the Fang’s spine-chilling reputation for dining on passers-by, Mary had her heart set on meeting them. So she took a steamboat as far as it was possible to go up the Ogooue River, deep into Fang territory in what was then the French Congo. And from there she continued alone on foot and by canoe, pickling interesting fish as she went and getting to know the locals.

They didn’t eat her of course. Far from it. The Fang proved a surprisingly friendly bunch. Instead of putting her in the pot, they showed her the best way to cook snake. She taught them a few English phrases, enjoying hearing them say “Dear me, now” and “Who’d have thought it?”. A dozen white ladies’ blouses were traded for ivory and rubber. And all in all, the prim Victorian spinster found her cannibal hosts a bright lot “full of fire, temper, intelligence and go”.

Mary’s adventures in Fang country continued with a brutal trek across the dangerous, slimy swamplands to the north of the Ogooue River. No European had ever set foot here before. It was what Mary liked to call a “choice spot”. She took four Fang “gentlemen” and six other African guys with her. And pretty soon the lot of them were, in a very literal sense, up to their necks in shit.

The worst stretch of swamp took more than two hours to cross. Plucky old Mary plunged in and waded through without fuss, the filthy, stinking water coming up to her chin. When she finally clambered out at the other side her exposed hands and neck were completely covered in leeches. She nearly fainted from loss of blood.

Another time she was walking through the forest when she stepped on a camouflaged animal trap. Its cover of leaves and branches gave way beneath her. She plunged fifteen foot into a pit. And she landed, in a most unladylike heap, on a bed of spikes. “It is at these times you realised the blessing of a good thick skirt,” she writes. “Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England… and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for.”

Mary was lucky. “Save for a good many bruises,” she continues, “here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out.” Her African companions gathered at the rim of the hole and peered down. “You kill?” asked one. “Not much,” responded Mary. They pulled her out with a bush rope and the party marched resolutely onwards.

Just a few minutes later, however, one of her men – a quiet chap she nicknamed Silence - also disappeared through the forest floor into another spiked animal pit. Silence was less fortunate than his boss. He survived. But since he didn’t have the benefit of a good thick skirt, he emerged, Mary reports, “a good deal frayed at the edges”. His wounds had to be bound up with large jungle leaves.

One night the eleven exhausted travellers arrived at a Fang village called Efoua. Mary was given a hut to sleep in and she crashed out as once, fully dressed and still wearing her wet boots. But a few hours later she was woken by a gruesome smell. It had, she says, “an unmistakable organic origin”. And it was coming from an odd collection of bags hanging from the roof.

She pulled the biggest one down, untied it and carefully poured its contents into her hat. No wonder things were wiffy. Mary found herself staring at a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other bits and bobs that clearly belonged underground. “The hand was fresh,” says Mary, “the others only so so and shrivelled.” Not wishing to pry further, she popped the human parts back in the bag, carefully re-fastened it, and stepped outside for spot of fresh air.

After leaving the Fang, Mary returned to the coast and rounded off her epic adventure by climbing Mount Cameroon. She was, she says, “the third Englishman” to scale the 13,760-foot peak (the first was Sir Richard Burton). She was also the first white woman to do it (perhaps the first woman full-stop, white or black). And she reached the wind-battered, rain-soaked summit completely alone, her five male companions having abandoned the tough climb halfway up.

News quickly spread of the mountain-climbing, fish-collecting, cannibal-studying spinster. And by the time Mary got back to Liverpool in November 1895 she was already an unlikely celebrity. For the next three years she would travel up and down the country, lecturing to thousands. She wrote two rollicking bestsellers, modestly titled “Travels in West Africa” and “West African Studies”. And she waded into controversy with the same guts and gusto that she had marched through fetid swamps.

She accused Christian missionaries of trying to “murder” African culture. She attacked do-gooders who would ban booze exports to Africa. She defended the African man’s right to have more than one wife. And she took regular pot-shots at ignorant Brits who saw black people as savages in need of salvation.

“I do not believe the African to be brutal or degraded or cruel,” Mary writes in a letter to the Spectator magazine. “I know from wide experience… that he is… by no means the drunken idiot his so-called friends, the Protestant missionaries are anxious… to make him out.” The Spectator called her views “cynical”.*

When Mary wasn’t off lecturing round the country she kept her small London flat heated at tropical temperatures. She filled it with African souvenirs: wooden masks, ivory carvings, musical instruments. She spent all her free time planning her next big trip, her next chance to “skylark and enjoy myself in Africa”. The so-called Dark Continent had put light and joy and hope back into her lonely life; she couldn’t wait to get back there.

But this story ends on an unhappy note. When the Boer War broke out Mary volunteered as a nurse and sailed not to her beloved West Africa but to war-ravaged South Africa. She was posted to an overcrowded prisoner of war hospital on the Cape. And she endured two terrible months there, a time of misery and horror and death.

Mary had more than a hundred Boer prisoners under her care, farm boys mostly; young men brought in with festering bayonet and bullet wounds and appalling blast injuries. Typhoid fever was rife. Bugs and lice were everywhere. Mary would see five or six men die on the wards every shift. “Killing work,” is how she describes it.

In the evenings she would call on her friend Rudyard Kipling who lived nearby. The poet listened to her speak about her work with calm dignity and admired her bravery. “Being human,” he said “she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were.” Then one morning in late May 1900 Mary woke in pain and knew that she too had the fever.

It didn’t take long. On 1 June a doctor confirmed the worst. By the following day it was clear Mary was in a losing battle. And that afternoon, before delirium took hold, this fearless and funny young woman did a curious thing: she asked her colleagues to withdraw from her room and allow her to face death as she had faced life, alone.

Mary Kingsley died in the early hours of 3 June, aged thirty-seven. She was buried at sea, her final wish. Enemy Boers were among those who paid their respects as soldiers carried her casket onto a torpedo boat. The vessel steamed out into the Atlantic. And Mary’s body was lowered overboard a few miles off the coast of her beloved Africa.

And that would have been that were it not for one final twist in the tale of the magnificent Miss Kingsley, a last little joke that would certainly have made her smile: instead of sinking like a stone, her coffin floated. It popped back up to the ocean’s surface and sat bobbing about cheerily on the waves. No one, it seems, had thought to weight it.

Mourners on the deck of the torpedo boat watched in disbelief as Mary’s mortal remains floated gently away on the sea current. “Dear me,” you can imagine her saying, “what a knockabout farce.” Then a lifeboat rushed out to catch the runaway coffin, a sailor hooked a spare anchor to its brass fittings, and the wooden box with Mary inside (still no doubt impeccably dressed) was sent hurtling to the ocean floor.

* Footnote: It wasn’t just Africa that got contrary Mary fired up. She disapproved of bicycles, disliked London’s omnibuses, and was against votes for women because “women are unfit for Parliament and Parliament is unfit for them”.

* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!

SOURCES
Frank, Katherine, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (London, 2005)
Simpson, Helen, A Woman Among Wild Men (London, 1938)
Kingsley, Mary, The Congo and the Cameroons (extracts from Travels in West Africa) (London, 2007)
Russell, Mary, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (London, 1986)
Robinson, Jane, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (Oxford, 1990)
Robinson, Jane, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (Oxford 1994)