JOIN USOur forgotten female explorers
Think of an ‘adventurer’ and images of brawny, bearded men in hiking boots spring to mind. Rarely would one picture a slender, blonde-haired former teacher and mum of one.
Jacki Hill-Murphy is about as far removed from the stereotypical rugged Viking explorer as is humanly possible. But not only has she travelled to the worlds’ most inhospitable places, in doing so, she’s retraced the steps of some little-known — but no less extraordinary – women, who were blazing a trail 300 years ago.
If female explorers are uncommon now, they were virtually freaks in the era Jacki seeks to emulate. Most of the women she’s followed had to overcome extreme hardships with little or no support, and in an age that took no interest in female accomplishment. Her travels have seen her retrace the steps of the first woman to navigate the length of the Amazon, and venture up Mount Cameroon in traditional Victorian attire. While doing the latter, she says, she got off lightly — Mary Kingsley, the explorer whose journey she was recreating, lived during the 19th century when the conventions of the time followed her wherever she went.
“She was constantly in wet clothes,’ explains Jacki, 60. “She was travelling with a group and there were always eyes on her. She could never be alone to change, so she just stayed soaking wet the entire time.” It was in this mulish determination that saw Mary succeed in her mission. Her crew, a motley bunch ill-equipped for the challenge, refused to continue so she climbed to the summit alone. Presumably at least she could finally change her clothes.
“Women have proven there’s no such thing as the weaker sex,” says Jacki. “They have overcome every challenge to reach longed-for distant shores, particularly as in the past the female cheers of success were drowned out by grunts of male disapproval.” Jacki says she was always drawn to adventure and travel. But with a family to raise, her globetrotting was limited to moving to Istanbul with her son for a two-year work placement.
Then, when her son went to university, she was inspired to quit her job as an English and drama teacher in Bristol, in search of a change. “I’ve always had a thirst for adventure,” says Jacki, now a full-time explorer and writer. “As a kid I read all the Gerald Durrell books and in 1988 I crossed Africa in a Land Rover with my ex-husband. It was magic. I never wanted to be just a tourist, a voyeur. I always wanted to take something with me too. In Africa we went to places where they had genuinely never seen a white person before. It gave me a fascination with different ways of life and such gratitude for what I already have — things we take for granted, like fresh water.”
In 2007, Jacki felt free to pursue her love of adventure and try her hand at professional filmmaking at the same time. The story of Isabel Godin, which she’d first come across at university, stuck in her mind. Isabel completed an epic journey up the Amazon in the late 18th century in search of the husband she hadn’t seen in 20 years, after they were separated by colonial politics. Her 42-person, 3,000-mile expedition through the Amazon Basin saw her crew abandoned without canoes, deserted by their guides, drowned and struck down by infected insect bites.
They died one-by-one, until Isabel was the only survivor — and even she almost succumbed after wandering the jungle alone for nine days, before being rescued by an Indian camp. She was reunited with her husband in 1770 and they returned to France together. “I’d always wanted to retrace the first stage of her journey,” says Jacki, who followed in Isabel’s footsteps along a 300-mile route between Ecuador and Peru, mostly in a dug-out canoe. The hardest thing — and this goes for any trip — is just doing it. You can talk about something but at some point you have to just decide to go and buy that ticket.”
Often, adventures with such historical significance are eligible for funding. But Jacki says: “I get turned down for everything and it’s so difficult. I just put in an application and didn’t even get shortlisted. I can’t help but notice that all the previous winners seem to have been young men. And if I go to TV companies, I get told time and time again ‘it’s a no to women explorers’.”
Instead, channelling the intrepid explorers she so admires, Jacki has gone ahead and done it herself, making her own films and writing a book Adventuresses:
Rediscovering Daring Voyages into the Unknown. She’s now writing the story of Kate Marsden, a British missionary and explorer who became a heroine after securing the support of Queen Victoria and the Empress of Russia to ride across the wilds of Siberia, bringing aid to lepers. Kate’s 2,000-mile journey and work with the wounded did not endear her to everybody, and she suffered, Jacki says, “assassination by media. She was very enigmatic and the press hated her. So did the rest of the world, and she died in poverty in the wilds.”
After retracing her journey, Jacki has become so well-known in Siberia that she was invited to speak in front of senior politicians on human rights. She fre-quently talks at events, seminars and conferences on her own adventures and the women who have inspired them, and she also visits schools in character as some of the adventuresses she has followed. “What I do seems to capture people’s imaginations, in a very different way,” she says. “Our lives are very busy and I think the idea of stepping off the beaten track is appealing. After all, you never know what new adventure is just around the corner.”