Three other women, all representatives of Great Britain, likewise deserve notice for their extensive travels and the interesting and instructive accounts which they published of them. These are Constance Gordon Cumming, Isabella Bird Bishop and Amelia B. Edwards.
More notable in many respects than these three distinguished women were Miss Mary H. Kingsley and Madame Octavie Coudreau. For their contributions to science and for their daring adventures in savage lands, they have won for themselves an unique position among women explorers.
Miss Kingsley—the niece of the well-known writer and naturalist, Charles Kingsley—exhibited much of her uncle's literary ability and love of nature. So complete was her intellectual grasp of the most difficult problems, and so rare was her overflowing sympathy for all of God's creatures, that she was well described as possessing "the brain of a man and the heart of a woman."
In order to get at first-hand information that was necessary to complete a work which her father, George Kingsley, had, owing to his premature death, left unfinished, she determined to visit that part of West Africa "where all authorities agreed that the Africans were at their wildest and worst." Accompanied only by the natives, she travelled among cannibals, pushed her way through mangrove swamps and pestilential morasses. She spent months in a canoe exploring the territory watered by the Calabar and Ogowé rivers, often in imminent peril of death from wild animals or wilder men.
When not studying the manners and customs of the native tribes, she was hunting fishes and reptiles in streams and quagmires and collecting insects in the weird, grim twilight of the equatorial forest with its inextricable tangle of creepers, its great hanging tapestries of vines and flowers, its myriads of bush-ropes, suspended from the summits of tall buttressed trees, "some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round and intertwined among each other until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents that had been arrested at its height by some mighty spell."
The results of Miss Kingsley's wanderings in this dark and uncanny wilderness and among the savage tribes visited by her were her two instructive volumes entitled Travels in West Africa and West African Studies. In addition to these two works from her pen there are deposited in the British Museum an interesting collection of insects, fishes and reptiles—many of them new species and some of them named in her honor—which testifies to her activity as a collector and her enthusiasm as a naturalist.
Her brilliant and useful career was cut short in Cape Colony, whither she had gone as an army nurse during the Boer war. In view of her achievements one is not surprised to learn that her countrymen regarded her premature taking-off as a national misfortune. The noblest monument to her memory is "The Mary Kingsley Society of West Africa," whose object is to carry on, as far as may be, the beneficent work she began on the West African coast and to accomplish for English rule in this part of the world what the "Royal Asiatic Society" has achieved for British administration in India.
Madame Coudreau is designated in Qui Etes-Vous—the French Who's Who—as an exploratrice. This well characterizes her; for, if not the first woman explorer by profession, she is certainly the most energetic and successful.
Her first work was in French Guiana, under instructions from the colonial minister of France. This was in 1894. The following year she began the scientific exploration of the province of Pará in northern Brazil, in collaboration with her husband, Henri Coudreau, who had previously distinguished himself by his achievements as a writer and as an explorer in French Guiana. The fruit of their joint work from 1895 to 1899 was six quarto volumes profusely illustrated by photographs which they had taken and by carefully executed charts of the various rivers which they had explored.
While engaged in the exploration of the Trombetas, a tributary of the Amazon, Henri Coudreau was taken seriously ill, and, after a few days' struggle against the disease with which he was stricken, he expired in the depths of the forest primeval, where he was buried by his desolate and disconsolate widow. After such a calamity any other woman would have left the tropics at once and returned to her home and friends. Not so Mme. Coudreau. With matchless courage and determination she buried her grief in the work in which her husband had been so interested, and, after completing the unfinished survey, published the results of this expedition under the title Voyage au Trombetas.