In the seventeenth century an escaped nun did well as a seafaring man under the Spanish colors, ruffled as a gallant in Chili, and led a gang of brigands in the Andes. On her return to Spain as a lady, she was very much petted at the court of Madrid. The last of many female bandits was Miss Pearl Hart, who, in 1890, robbed a stage-coach in Arizona.
Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician and a successful business man, died in New York, and was found to be a woman.
But of women who, without disguise, have excelled in adventurous trades, I have known in Western Canada two who are gold miners and two who are cowboys. Mrs. Langdon, of California, drove a stage-coach for years. Miss Calamity Jane was a noted Montana bull-whacker. Miss Minnie Hill and Miss Collie French are licensed American pilots. Miss Evelyn Smith, of Nova Scotia, was a jailer. Lady Clifford holds Board of Trade certificates as an officer in our mercantile marine. A distinguished French explorer, Madame Dieulafoy, is an officer of the Legion of Honor, entitled to a military salute from all sentries, and has the singular right by law of wearing the dress of a man. Several English ladies have been explorers. Miss Bird explored Japan, conquered Long’s Peak, and was once captured by Mountain Jim, the Colorado robber. Lady Florence Dixie explored Patagonia, Miss Gordon-Cumming explored a hundred of the South Sea Isles, put an end to a civil war in Samoa and was one of the first travelers on the Pamirs. Mrs. Mulhall has traced the sources of the Amazons. Lady Baker, Mrs. Jane Moir, and Miss Kingsley rank among the great pioneers of Africa. Lady Hester Stanhope, traveling in the Levant, the ship being loaded with treasure, her own property, was cast away on a desert island near Rhodes. Escaping thence she traversed the Arabian deserts, and by a gathering of forty thousands of Arabs was proclaimed queen of Palmyra. This beautiful and gifted woman reigned through the first decades of the nineteenth century from her palace on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Two other British princesses in wild lands were Her Highness Florence, Maharanee of Patiala, and the sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.
Among women who have been warriors the greatest, perhaps, were the British Queen Boadicea, and the saintly and heroic Joan of Arc, burned, to our everlasting shame, at Rouen. Frances Scanagatti, a noble Italian girl, fought with distinction as an officer in the Austrian army, once led the storming of a redoubt, and after three years in the field against Napoleon, went home, a young lady again, of sweet and mild disposition.
Doctor James Barry, M. D., inspector-general of hospitals in the British Army, a duelist, a martinet, and a hopelessly insubordinate officer, died in 1865 at the age of seventy-one, and was found to be a woman.
Apart from hosts of adventurous camp followers there have been disguised women serving at different times in nearly every army. Loreta Velasquez, of Cuba, married to an American army officer, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, raised a corps of volunteers, took command, was commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War of 1861–5, and fought as Lieutenant Harry Buford. She did extraordinary work as a spy in the northern army. After the war, her husband having fallen in battle, she turned gold miner in California.
Mrs. Christian Davies, born in 1667 in Dublin, was a happy and respectable married woman with a large family, when her life was wrecked by a sudden calamity, for her husband was seized by a press gang and dragged away to serve in the fleet. Mrs. Davis, crazy with grief, got her children adopted by the neighbors, and set off in search of the man she loved. When she returned two years later as a soldier, she found her children happy, the neighbors kind, and herself utterly unknown. She went away contented. She served under the Duke of Marlborough throughout his campaigns in Europe, first as an infantry soldier, but later as a dragoon, for at the battles of Blenheim and Fontenoy she was a squadron leader of the Scots Grays. The second dragoon guards have many curious traditions of “Mother Ross.” When after twelve years military service, she ultimately found her husband, he was busy flirting with a waitress in a Dutch inn, and she passed by, saying nothing. In her capacity as a soldier she was a flirt herself, making love to every girl she met, a gallant, a duelist, and notably brave. At last, after a severe wound, her sex was discovered and she forgave her husband. She died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one hundred eight, and her monument may be seen in the graveyard.
Hannah Snell left her home because her husband had bolted with another woman, and she wanted to find and kill him. In course of her search, she enlisted, served as a soldier against the Scots rebellion of 1745, and once received a punishment of five hundred lashes. A series of wonderful adventures led her into service as a marine on board H. M. S. Swallow. After a narrow escape from foundering, this vessel joined Admiral Boscawen’s fleet in the East Indies. She showed such extreme gallantry in the attack on Mauritius and in the siege of Areacopong, that she was chosen for special work in a forlorn hope. In this fight she avenged the death of a comrade by killing the author of it with her own hands. At the siege of Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in the legs, and a ball in the body which she extracted herself for fear of revealing the secret of her sex. On her return voyage to England she heard that she need not bother about killing her husband, because he had been decently hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she revealed herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican at the sign of the Women in Masquerade.
Anna Mills, able seaman on board the Maidstone frigate in 1740, made herself famous for desperate valor.
Mary Ann, youngest of Lord Talbot’s sixteen natural children, was the victim of a wicked guardian who took her to the wars as his foot-boy. As a drummer boy she served through the campaigns in Flanders, dressing two severe wounds herself. Her subsequent masquerade as a sailor led to countless adventures. She was a seaman on a French lugger, powder monkey on a British ship of the line, fought in Lord Howe’s great victory and was crippled for life. Later she was a merchant seaman, after that a jeweler in London, pensioned for military service, and was last heard of as a bookseller’s housemaid in 1807.