This article aims to critically investigate the contributions to geography made by prolific photojournalist ‘lady traveller’ Isabella Bird, situated within the zenith of the Age of Exploration (The Times, 1904; Middleton, 1973; Porter and Low, 1999). As one of the world’s principal states, Britain was an expanding colonial power during the eighteenth-twentieth centuries and actively encouraged its citizens to travel across its growing territories (Morin, 1998; Porter and Low, 1999). Bird was encouraged to travel for her health and so began writing her first book in America, composed simply of an epistolary account of her experiences (The Times, 1904). She later went on to travel to Australasia, the Orient and the Pacific, notably presenting “one of the earliest photojournalistic accounts of China at the end of the nineteenth-century” (Bird and Ireland, 2015). She was an admirable character amassing accolades such as “the most notable woman traveller of her time, setting standards which any traveller, man or woman would be proud to attain” and a glowing obituary in The Times (The Times, 1904; Matthew and Harrison, 2004: 871). As such, one of her main contributions to the field will be the empowerment of women, “during a time of strict gender roles in British society” (RGS, n.d.). What she accomplished in her lifetime was impressive even for a man of her time and she took on her missions with alacrity, despite her ill health as will be discussed in this essay.
Placing Isabella Bird (1831-1904)
Born in 1831 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family, Bird spent most of her childhood in Boroughbridge Hall, Yorkshire, where her father was a curate until he died in 1858 (Matthew and Harrison, 2004). Consequently, the Bird family relocated to Edinburgh, which would later become her final resting place (Matthew and Harrison, 2004). Bird was a sickly child and was recommended to pursue an “open-air life as a cure for her spinal complaint... so she rode as much as her back would allow, visited the United States and Canada in 1854 and 1857” (Matthew and Harrison, 2004: 870). Bird’s constitution became a large reason for her journeys, especially concerning her 1873 four-week solo horseback trip to the Rocky Mountains, where it was recommended for invalids (Matthew and Harrison, 2004). Particularly here, can we see her rejecting feminine ideals of the time, grappling with Cartesian dualisms by preferring to ride astride as a man would rather than the accustomed side-saddle for women. In one particular adventure in the snow-covered slopes of the Rockies, she journaled that a group of cowboys had called her a “good cattleman” and had forgotten that she was a lady - a comment she took so much pride in that she recorded it in a diary (Matthew and Harrison, 2004: 870).
Many of her books later relied on accounts written to her sister Henrietta, whom she was very close to, and continuously composed vivid letters describing her travels (Bird and Ireland, 2015). It was marketed to appeal to the ‘armchair explorer’, opening up a world of travel and geography to anyone who wanted a taste of the British Empire and beyond (Bird and Ireland, 2015). Her letters were elaborated and improved upon with research from Henrietta, who often “compared notes with naturalists and other books on the same subjects” and a little artistic license, when she discovered that hardship sells (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 14). As reviewed by The Spectator, her work was “a most encouraging record of feminine confidence and masculine chivalrousness” (1879). As Matthew and Harrison note, the death of her sister in 1880 affected her so profoundly that she accepted the long-standing proposal by the surgeon John Bishop, and was married a year later (2004). This would remain a sad period of her life, following the death of her husband only a few years later; subsequently, this spurred her not to travel for her own constitution or frivolity, but for medical missions abroad and built two hospitals in Henrietta and John’s memory (Matthew and Harrison, 2004; Bird and Ireland, 2015).
As an unmarried woman in Victorian Britain without a father, brother or husband, she had to defend her own honour when a reviewer in The Times wrote that she “donned masculine habiliments for greater convenience” (1879). In Fig 2, it is unclear whether she is riding side-saddle or astride, with the right amount of detail for conservative British readers. This was published aside the caption in Fig 2, to placate readers in reproach of The Times’ polemical article, and is an example of her self-confidence and grace in handling public matters.* This attack seems amusing considering accounts given by later Times articles, which describe her as a “veteran traveller who, undeterred by difficulties, dangers, and hardships, has explored many of the wilder parts of the earth and described her adventures with unfailing vivacity and spirit” yet had discouraged women from exactly that (The Times, 1894). During these travels, she rejected and accepted her femininity, sewing, nursing the ill, whilst concomitantly killing rats and bearing arms (Bird, 1880; Woolf, 2015).
*A note on clothing in Fig 1. The judgement of Bird as a solo female traveller was not limited to her activities, evident in the aforementioned comment made in The Times and certainly not proffered to male travellers of the same era. Bird gradually stopped dressing as a westerner abroad, when she saw “how unintentional discourteous actions by Europeans caused great offence to the later population” during times of political tension (See figure 1) (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 35). In China, she wore local clothing to blend in since Victorian “tight-fitting clothes were deemed unseemly and offensive, even for men” (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 27). She became perceptive to the local populations’ preferences to the extent where she wished for others following in her footsteps to be more courteous of Chinese etiquette and social customs (Bird and Ireland, 2015). Even after being stoned by locals in Kuan Hsein in 1891, she was empathetic to their plight, for they were protesting the influence and expansion of nineteenth-century Europe into Chinese affairs, causing war and distress to the population (Bird and Ireland, 2015).
Bird and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS)
Bird often gave addresses on her return to England, with one at the Royal Scottish Geographical Society regarding her adventures in the Upper Karun region being so influential, that the “London Society realised the time had come to lower the bar” (Kearns, 2004). Although objections to female fellowship challenged "the competence of the Council to elect, rather than disagreed with the election of women as such, it is quite clear where the real objection lay” (Middleton, 1973: 67). In 1891, Bird was bestowed the honour of becoming the first female fellow of RGS following her fellowship to the RSGS, in recognition of her services to geography (The Times, 1891; Bell and McEwan, 1996). Despite the irony of barring female fellowship up until the twentieth-century (with the exception of 22 women), the RGS has ranked her one of the most “accomplished travellers of her time” in accordance with their ethos of heroic exploration and promotion of geographical science (Bell and McEwan, 1996; Bird and Ireland, 2015: 7). Records of such addresses use language employed to emphasise the danger of her travels, mirroring language similar to early geographers such as Tyndall, who used the imagined geographies of danger to excite audiences (Hevly, 1996). Her unique position as a female traveller was recognised by RGS council member, George Curzon, who wrote in response to "the ongoing debate about women fellows... 'We contest in toto the general capability of women to contribute to scientific geographical knowledge. Their sex and training render them equally unfitted for exploration: and the general professional female globe-trotters'”, despite praising Bird for “her additions to geographical knowledge which have been valuable and serious”, whilst he later withdrew this notion “twenty years later regarding women’s contributions to geography” (Curzon, 1893; Bird and Ireland, 2015: 15). As a valued explorer, she met with dignitaries such as Prime Minister William Gladstone and Queen Victoria, who was a patron of the RGS as reigning monarch (Middleton, 1973). The irony of this did not go unnoticed, as women were still barred from fellowship using biology to guarantee the hierarchy between genders “in the male Victorian psyche” whilst supporting missions financially (Kearns, 1997: 452).
The importance of heroism to professional middle-class nineteenth-century travellers was of utmost importance to actively construct “an assertive masculinity to uphold their imagined sense of imperial power” which applied to both men and women (Kearns, 1997: 450). When examining other gendered imperial relationships such as Mackinder and Kingsley, it's clear that their “motives and pleasures were certainly determined by gender” (Kearns, 1997: 451). Sexism is and was then “a form of delegitimisation (disqualifying the right to speak and be heard)” and so Bird, like Kingsley, tried to prove herself in characteristically ‘manly’ ways (Kearns, 1997: 455). This raises the question of whether she was only valued by the RGS because of her ‘masculine’ and ‘heroic’ travels, as opposed to other women geographers of the time such as Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe whose contributions to the botany and landscape of the Orient, specifically modern-day Myanmar, were largely overlooked as being feminine (Hevly, 1996; Johnson, 2017).
Photography and the geographical imagination of Isabella Bird
Both Keltie and Mackinder, key reformers of geography, thought the movement away from sensationalist exploration and towards an ocular-centric discipline was key in placing geography as a useful imperial subject (Mackinder, 1887; Kearns, 2004). Therefore, “from late November 1885 until late January 1886, the RGS put on an exhibition of the globes, maps, models and textbooks that Keltie had garnered from continental Europe” as he believed in greater geographical education as a matter of imperial importance (Kearns, 2004: 338). Bird was friends with Keltie, secretary of the RGS at the time, who introduced her to photography (Bird and Ireland, 2015). This would become a fruitful and genuine friendship, with Keltie seconding Bird’s proposal for RGS Fellowship (Bird and Ireland, 2015). Photography was a relatively new medium in geography, having been invented by Daguerre in France in the 1830’s (Gu, 2013). Bird took photography up relatively late in her career, “partly because photographs could be used as a visual record... But overwhelmingly there was the very practical reason for an increasing need for illustrative material for both lectures and books” (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 15). The places she travelled were incredibly remote and lacked extant written and photographic material, thus photography provided a “visual reality” that would be paramount to promoting an alien likeness and construct discourses of racial and cultural differences in her lectures (Gu, 2013; Bird and Ireland, 2015). These in-built dualisms created a European superiority complex, on which the colonisation of others was justified (Sharp, 2009). Humans are inherently going to label people and objects as different and thus identity is “a learned behaviour rather than pre-existent condition” (Said, 1978; Sharp, 2009: 16). Therefore, photographs “need to be 'read' just like other texts. The acknowledgement of the capacity of photographs to 'operate as complex discursive objects of colonial power and culture' and as powerful agents in the 'construction of imaginative geographies' has necessitated a rethink about what photographs mean, or what they may have meant, in colonial contexts like New Zealand” (Dench, 2011: 69). Other nineteenth-century photographers such as William Temple used iconographic representation in a similar manner to Bird that distorted and legitimised the histories of his subject matter, imperial New Zealand (Dench, 2011). The same level of scrutiny needs to be applied, therefore, to dissect the imperial discourses at play, despite being “seldom analysed in terms of their discursive power to shape perception as well as to legitimate and reinforce particular constructions and representations of knowledge” (Dench, 2011: 68). In this sense, Bird and other male explorers such as Tyndall were similar as they used images to represent masculinity, bravery and Empire (Hevly, 1996). The RGS “had begun to promote the importance of photography to its fellowship” during her tenure, where photography became an important part in naturalising imaginative geographies of imperialism during colonial rule (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 7). Bird was noted for her sensitivity, aesthetics and thoughtfulness in her approach to photography, to the point where even the way she took pictures was gendered (Bird and Ireland, 2015). There was a notable shift in perspective when Bird started using lantern slides in complement to her epistolary writings, as the photos seemingly make her more empathetic to indigenous people, even though these served to reinforce cultural east/west binaries (Bird and Ireland, 2015). Even within photography, her style changed over time as she became more familiar with the medium, in the beginning photographing landscapes, architecture and staged group pictures of autochthonous peoples (Bird and Ireland, 2015). Later on these images included less of the Sublime, and more shocking, unfiltered (both literally and metaphorically) images of Qing dynasty China - she recorded graphic subjects such as an opium user, leper and so called ‘baby-towers’ where poor parents could place their babies so that they would be taken away and given a proper burial with dignity (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 75 and 94). The recording of these harrowing events was from a bystander’s perspective, and so lacked the moralised tone that other travel writers used. Kearns expands this, noting how the “objective scientist stands apart from the imperialist scene and, in a disinterested manner, learns things about the topography, flora, fauna and ethnography of the land. This detachment often treats knowledge as visual and conceives of the world as an exhibition” rather than reality and relates to how Keltie wanted to create exhibitions of the Empire at the RGS (Kearns, 1997: 453). It is also interesting that she even chose to include these, perhaps employing them for shock value, knowing they would attract large audiences and press compared to the many landscapes she photographed, as she was also subverting norms by photographing less feminine subjects.
In her books, there is a distinct focus in her texts on intra-indigenous relationships. In Japan and China, she witnessed and recorded how men subjugated women in highly traditional gender roles (Crone, 1962; Bird and Ireland, 2015). This can be interpreted as an introspection into her own society in Victorian Britain, where she wished to further understand global male-female relationships in relation to what she already knew. Furthermore, a way women could “validate their voice” in the field was to observe matters men didn’t care about or didn’t have the opportunity to, such as the customs of women in these cultures, where even the topics they studied were tainted by Victorian notions of gender (Monicat, 1994; Kearns, 1997). Bird’s earlier texts particularly reinforce imperial discourses of savagery with the occasional distinction such as during her visit to the Sandwich Islands (henceforth known today as Hawaii**), as the native people were clothed and “the king, who is an educated gentleman, wears European dress. The official designation of the group is “Hawaiian Islands,” and they form an independent kingdom. The natives are not savages, most decidedly not. They are on the whole a quiet, courteous, orderly, harmless, Christian community” (Bird, 1880: 3) . Her choice of words is intriguing, employing moral judgment over both their clothing and religion. This follows the corollary colonisation and Europeanisation of the Hawaiian Islands, unlike Japan and Manchuria which at the time had scarcely seen people outside of their race and therefore were undisturbed by Europe’s influence. Because they had similar moral values to her, she approved of them unlike those seen in Japan who were decidedly alien. This is further reflected in the Japanese Shinto ceremony where Bird recorded, “a savage is taking a cup of sake by the fire in the centre of the floor ... and makes six libations to the god” (Bird, 1885; Crone, 1962: 63). Furthermore, the italicisation of sake by Bird as a literary device highlights difference. In her book outlining her travels in Hawaii, she asks rhetorical questions to the reader such as “does the King wear clothes? Who do they belong to? Does anyone live on them but the savages?... are the people very savage?” (Bird, 1880: 3). She openly signals approval of the political structure, with its “constitutional and hereditary king, a parliament with an upper and lower house, a cabinet, a standing army, a police force, a Supreme Court of Judicature, a most efficient postal system” as it bears resemblance to her own (Bird, 1880: 3). (Clement, 1980)
**Taking a closer look at the nomenclature of Hawaii, it is compelling how she uses the both the indigenous and colonial names interchangeably in her title of her 1880 account. This was not necessarily unusual, but it does reflect a type of colonial authority over indigenous populations, despite the fact that the usage of Hawaii over the Sandwich Islands had been adopted prior to Bird’s visit (Clement, 1980). This is interesting as the usage declined after “the official change appeared in the 1840 constitution, with a period of transition from about 1840 to 1865” (Clement, 1980: 55). This may have been in response to the politicisation of imperial British nomenclature, where American and native influence pushed for the local name (Clement, 1980).
Critical review of the significance of Bird
Even though she achieved a lot, it is important to acknowledge her role in reinforcing colonial messages through her writings, photographs and lectures. Perhaps it is impossible to judge her through modern eyes, but regardless, she was a subject of empire. Furthermore, she was a best- selling author with a large and devoted readership, presumably composed of people who would never ratify her experiences personally, so it can be assumed that they took her word as gospel, ignoring the obvious colonial inflections (Bird and Ireland, 2015). She was in a position of privilege, coming from a reasonably well-off family that could afford to give her riding lessons and send her to America when her condition worsened. Additionally, her race served as a trump card over gender on her travels where, as a white person she always felt safe, often noting how “her sex was really a protection rather than a danger, and it was not until she travelled in China that she carried any arms at all... in Western China she was once very badly stoned” (The Times, 1904).
Female travellers occupied a certain space within colonial contexts, both passively and actively aiding the British Empire as subjects through photography, botanical drawings and private scientific research that was rarely recognised (Johnson, 2017). Bird was unusual in that she traveled not as a reluctant dependant of a spouse or as a missionary, and went off the beaten track to avoid the reaches of the British Empire (Barr, 2015). Travelling awarded them a sense of spatial freedom that was unattainable at home in a “formative psychological splitting en route” (Arshi et al., 1994; Kearns, 1997). Geography was masculinised and travel writing was distinguished as inherently female, as a more informal or perhaps watered-down iteration of the subject (Kearns, 1997). Since the RGS focused on exploration, it left no room for women who did not fulfil these manly requirements, as propounded by Curzon (Kearns, 1997). To be accepted at the RGS, there was also an arbitrary requirement of needing to be an explorer to pacify those who believed the aims of the RGS were more about adventuring than academia, as witnessed by Mackinder who felt the need to climb mountains to achieve his geographic reforms and avoid being called an ‘armchair geographer’ (Kearns, 1997).
Conclusions
To précis, the new geography in the time of Mackinder, Keltie and Bird was couched in imperialistic terms, designed to promote success of the British Empire as well as geography in British universities. Travel writing and photographs were used to promote the Empire both abroad and at home, display the wealth, power and reach of Britain and were employed by subjects like Bird, who brought home and reinforced these discourses through her lectures and visual material. As a Victorian lady, she attempted to escape gender norms within her own society, subverting stereotypes, adopting of masculine ideals to fit in with heroic travel discourses and rejection of femininity through clothing, masculine adventures and activities such as riding horses astride. Her success as a travel writer indubitably ameliorated the acceptance of women into formal sciences such as geography, with her influential talks opening doors for women in societies such as the RGS and RSGS. Although her interest in photography came later in life after the death of her husband, I believe it was one of the most poignant facets of her work, providing a visual reality that audiences in Victorian Britain could feed off and create imaginative geographies of seldom seen oriental regions. Moreover, as much as her reputation precedes her, it would be unfair to suggest that this is simply because of her gender. Her achievements surmount more than her biological constraints in a society that did not value women’s contributions to the fields of academia.
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Figure 1 - “Mrs Bishop in Manchu Dress” (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 35)
Figure 2 - “Isabella’s Hawaiian riding dress: ‘a thoroughly serviceable and feminine costume’” in retort to The Times (Bird and Ireland, 2015: 12)
