Miss Mary Henrietta Kingsley had a typical Victorian
upbringing. Conceived out of wedlock, (her parents married four days before her
birth, in 1862), Mary had almost no formal education; whereas the whole family
moved to Cambridge so that her brother, Charley, could read law at Christ’s
College. Her mother, Mary, was a cockney servant (her daughter dropped her
aitches all her life), who was frequently ill. Her father, George, was a doctor
who travelled extensively but he became bedridden with rheumatic fever. Young
Mary was expected to remain at home and nurse her invalid parents. In February
1892 Dr Kingsley died, followed shortly after, in April, by his wife. At
twenty-nine, Mary went into mourning, wearing a crisp white cotton blouse under
a black shawl, a thick black woollen skirt and a black sealskin hat, tied with
black ribbons in a tight bow under her chin. She continued to wear this same
wardrobe for the rest of her life.
Miss M H Kingsley |
Mary moved into her brother’s house – he now controlled the
family finances - but to her relief he decided he would like to travel to
China, leaving her alone in England with an allowance of £500 per year. Mary
decided to use her new freedom to travel to Africa, to collect material in
order to finish a book started by her father. She also offered to collect
tropical fish for the British Museum.
In August 1893 she arrived in Sierra Leone, and returned
home in December 1893. On December 23rd 1894, Mary left Liverpool on the
Batanga, again bound for Sierra Leone, via the Canaries. She arrived on January
7th 1895. Dressed in her black mourning outfit – “… you have no right
to go about in Africa in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home,”
this prim Victorian spinster in her early thirties set off for the interior. At the
time, West Africa was regarded as ‘ the White Man’s Graveyard’. Missionaries
and traders went there, and quite a lot did not return. When she arrived at
Accra, a government official showed her two newly dug graves, adding, “We
always keep two graves ready dug for Europeans.”
In a mangrove swamp, Mary encountered a crocodile, “ … a
mighty Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front
paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance. I
had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, [1] and fetch him a clip
on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled into the very
middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his
friends to repeat the performance. Presumably it was, for no one did it again.
I should think that crocodile was eight feet long; but don't go and say I
measured him, or that this is my outside measurement for crocodiles. I have
measured them when they have been killed by other people, fifteen, eighteen,
and twenty-one feet odd. This was only a pushing young creature who had not
learnt manners. ([1] It is no use saying because I was frightened, for this
miserably understates the case.)”
When struggling with a machete through the jungle, Miss
Kingsley fell into an animal trap, a bag-shaped pit, fifteen feet deep, with a
bed of spikes at the bottom. “It is at these times you realise the blessing of
a good thick skirt,” she wrote, “… had I paid heed to the advice of many people
in England, who ought to have known better, and did not do it themselves, and
adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done
for.”
One night a leopard entered her camp and attacked a dog.
Mary went out into the dark and threw a couple of stools at them. The big cat turned
its attention to her and crouched, ready to spring, so Mary picked up an
earthenware water cooler and hurled at the beast. “It was a noble shot; it
burst on the leopard's head like a shell and the leopard went for bush one
time.”
Modern reprint |
After umpteen other escapades, scrapes and adventures
(including the ascent of the 13,760 ft Mt Cameroon – her native male companions
gave up halfway up), she returned to England and wrote two books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, which became best sellers and launched
her on the lecture tour circuit. Although she advocated trade in Africa, she
was wary of British Imperialism and spoke out against, "… stay at home
statesmen, who think the Africans are awful savages or silly children - people
who can only be dealt with on a reformatory penitentiary line." In her
view the, “… black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an
undeveloped hare," and she went on to upset the Church of England when she
said the African was "… by no means the drunken idiot his so-called
friends, the Protestant missionaries, are anxious, as an excuse for their
failure in dealing with him, to make out."
Some have been keen to present Miss Kingsley as a feminist
icon, but she had firm opinions on female emancipation, and opposed
parliamentary votes for women. The House of Commons was already packed with
uninformed men and the “…"addition of a mass of even less well-informed
women would only make matters worse." "Women,” she said,” are unfit
for parliament and parliament is unfit for them".
At the outbreak of the Second Boer War, she left again for
Africa and worked as a nurse in the Cape, tending to Boer prisoners. In the
evenings, she would call on Rudyard Kipling, who later wrote, "Being
human, she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they
were." In late May 1900, she contracted typhoid fever and died on June 3rd,
aged thirty-seven, and at her own request, alone. She was buried at sea, but
someone forgot to weight her coffin, which bobbed around on the surface until a
sailor rowed out to it and attached a spare anchor to drag it down.
When I was a little boy, this was my favourite book. It is
In the Wilds of Africa, by W H G Kingston, published in 1871.
It is, and always was, battered and filthy. But I loved this
book – I would sit on my Grandfather’s knee and we would read it together. I
could read and write before I went to school, and soaked up stories like this.
In addition to the ripping yarn, it has all sorts of asides on natural history,
and my love of all things zoological were born here. Obviously this is a novel
(it’s subtitled A Tale for Boys), but there are parallels with Mary Kingsley’s
real life adventures. These scans of the illustrations could just have equally
come from her works.
Title Page and Frontispiece |
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