Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century

A description of the bedchamber, which, for most purposes, was Lady Hester's principal apartment, we shall now subjoin. It bore no resemblance to an English or a French chamber, and, independent of its furniture, was scarcely better than a common peasant's. The floor was of cement. Across the room was hung a dirty red cotton curtain, to keep off the wind when the door opened. There were three windows; one was nailed up by its shutter on the outside, and one closed up by a bit of felt on the inside; only the third, which looked on the garden, was reserved for the admission of light and air. In two deep niches in the wall (which was about three feet thick) were heaped on a shelf, equidistant from the top and bottom, a few books, some bundles tied up in handkerchiefs, writing paper, with sundry other articles of daily use – such as a white plate, loaded with several pairs of scissors and two or three pairs of spectacles, and another white plate with pins, sealing-wax, and wafers; also, a common white inkstand, and the old parchment cover of some merchant's daybook, with blotting paper inside, on which, spread on her lap, as she sat up in bed, she generally wrote her letters.

She had neither watch, clock, nor timepiece; and when her physician asked her why she had never purchased one, as a thing so essential to good order in a household, she replied, "Because I cannot bear anything that is unnatural; the sun is for the day, and the moon and stars for the night, and by them I like to measure time."

A wooden stool by her bedside served for a table, and upon it stood a variety of things to satisfy any sudden want or fancy; such as a little strawberry preserve in a saucer, lemonade, chamomile tea, ipecacuanha lozenges, a bottle of cold water. Of these she would take one or other in succession, almost constantly. In a day or two fresh remedies or concoctions would take their place. There would be a bottle of wine or of violet syrup; anise seeds to masticate instead of cloves; quince preserve; orgeat; a cup of cold tea; a pill-box.

Her bed was without curtains or mosquito net. An earthenware ybrick, or jug, with a spout, stood in one of the windows, with a small copper basin, and this constituted her washing appliances. There was no toilet table; and when she washed herself, the copper basin was held before her as she sat up in bed. Near the foot of the bed stood an upright, ill-made walnut wood box, with a piece of green calico depending before it. The windows were curtainless, and the felt with which one of them was covered was held in its place by a faggot-stick, stuck tightly in, from corner to corner diagonally. "Such was the chamber of Lord Chatham's grand-daughter! Diogenes himself could not have found fault with its appointments!" But the thoughtful observer will regret the indulged self-will and the exaggerated egotism which placed in such a position a woman whose powerful intellect might have been applied to the benefit of the community. It is impossible not to see and feel that hers was a wasted life.

It was this self-will, this colossal egotism that led her to spend so much of her time in conversation – if those could be called conversations in which one of the talkers insisted upon a monopoly of attention. It would be more accurate to describe them as monologues, with occasional interpolations of assent on the part of the listener. We have no wish to underrate their charm, though, from the reports transmitted to posterity, they would hardly seem to have deserved the very warm eulogy pronounced by the physician, who says,25 "Her conversations lasted eight and ten hours at a time, without moving from her seat: so that, although highly entertained, instructed, or astonished at her versatile powers, as the listeners might be, it was impossible not to feel the weariness of so long a sitting. Everybody," he adds, "who visited Lady Hester Stanhope in her retirement will bear witness to her unexampled colloquial powers; to her profound knowledge of character; to her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes; to her talents for mimicry; to her modes of narration, as various as the subjects she talked about; to the lofty inspiration and sublimity of her language, when the subject required it; and to her pathos and feeling, whenever she wished to excite the emotions of her hearers. There was no secret of the human heart, however studiously concealed, that she could not discover; no workings in the listener's mind that she would not penetrate; no intrigue, from the low cunning of vulgar intrigue to the vast combinations of politics, that she would not unravel; no labyrinth, however tortuous, that she would not thread. It was this comprehensive and searching faculty, this intuitive penetration, which made her so formidable; for under imaginary names, when she wished to show a person that his character and course of life were unmasked to her view, she would, in his very presence, paint him such a picture of himself, in drawing the portrait of another, that you might see the individual writhing on his chair, unable to conceal the effect the words had on his conscience. Everybody who heard her for an hour or two retired humbled from her presence, for her language was always directed to bring mankind to their level, to pull down pride and conceit, to strip off the garb of affectation, and to shame vice, immorality, irreligion, and hypocrisy."

We have admitted Lady Hester Stanhope's great mental powers, but we can find no trace in the records of her conversation of such extraordinary genius as is here indicated. No doubt, she talked very well; but like all great talkers, she sometimes talked very ill. The great attraction of her conversation was its reflection of one strange personality: she glassed herself in it as in a mirror; and as she had seen much, and known many great men, and gone through a vast variety of experience, she had always something to tell which was interesting. But how largely it was informed by egotism, and how narrowly at times it escaped the reproach of silliness, may be understood, I think, from the following specimen: —

"Doctor," one day she said to her physician, "you have no religion: what I mean by religion is, adoration of the Almighty. Religion, as people profess it, is nothing but a dress. One man puts on one coat, and another another. But the feeling that I have is quite a different thing, and I thank God that He has opened my eyes. You will never learn of me, because you cannot comprehend my ideas, and therefore it is of no use teaching you. Nobody opens a book to an idiot, that would foam and splutter over it; for you never could make him read. Ah! I see my way a little before me, and God vouchsafes to enlighten me perhaps more than other people…

"It was ever an object with me to search out why I came into the world, what I ought to do in it, and where I shall go to. God has given me the extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity; for a clear judgment becomes matter of fact. It has ever been my study to know myself. I may thank God for my sufferings, as they have enabled me to dive deeper into the subject than, I believe, any person living. The theory of the soul, doctor, what an awful thing!

"My religion is to try to do as well as I can in God's eyes. That is the only merit I have. I try to do the best I can. Some of the servants sometimes talk about my religion —dyn es Sytt, as they call it – and I let them talk; for they explain it to people by saying it is to do what is right, and to avoid all uncleanliness.

"My views of the Creator are very different. I believe that all things are calculated, and what is written is written; but I do not suppose that the devil is independent of God: he receives his orders. Not that God goes and gives them to him, any more than the big my lord goes and gives orders to his shoe-black. There is some secondary being that does that – some intendant.

"There are angels of different degrees, from the highest down to the devil. It must be an awful sight to see an angel! There is something so transcendent and beautiful in them, that a person must be half out of his senses to brave the sight. For, when you are looking down, and happen to raise your head, and there is the angel standing before you, you can't say whether it came up through the earth, or down from the sky, or how – there he is, and may go in the same way. But angels don't appear to everybody. You know, doctor, you can't suppose that if you were a dirty little apothecary, keeping a shop in a narrow street, a prime minister would waste his time in going to call on you; or that, if a man is sitting over his glass all the evening, or playing whist, or lounging all the morning, an angel will come to him. But where there is a mortal of high rectitude and integrity, then such a being may be supposed to condescend to seek him out.

"God is my Friend – that is enough; and, if I am to see no happiness in this world, my share of it, I trust, will be greater in the next, if I am firm in the execution of those principles which He has inspired me with."26

In reference to her inveterate love of smoking, her physician says, "Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco… All I can say is, that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long Oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts. In her bed, lying with her pipe in her mouth, she would talk on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Richmond stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.

"Her bedroom, at the end of every twenty-four hours, was strewed with tobacco and ashes, to be swept away and again strewed as before; and it was always strongly impregnated with the fumes.

"The finest tobacco the country could produce, and the cleanest pipes (for she had a new one almost as often as a fop puts on new gloves), could hardly satisfy her fastidiousness; and I have known her footman get as many scoldings as there were days in the week on that score. From curiosity, I once counted a bundle of pipes, thrown by after a day or two's use, any one of which would have fetched five or ten shillings in London, and there were 102. The woods she most preferred were jessamine, rose, and cork. She never smoked cherry-wood pipes, from their weight, and because she liked cheaper ones, which she could renew oftener. She never arrived at that perfectibility, which is seen in many smokers, of swallowing the fumes, or of making them pass out at her nostrils. The pipe was to her what a fan was, or is, in a lady's hand – a means of having something to do. She forgot it when she had a letter to write, or any serious occupation. It is not so with the studious and literary man, who fancies it helps reflection or promotes inspiration."27

LADY BRASSEY

Most of our readers will be familiar with the exciting story of voyages round the world; with that famous circumnavigation by Magellan, which first found an ocean-way between the West and the East, and carried a furrow across the broad waters of the Pacific; that scarcely less famous circumnavigation of Drake's, which made the English flag known on the southern seas; that great voyage of Cook's, which added so many lands, hitherto unknown, to the map of the inhabited globe, down to later circumnavigations, accomplished for scientific objects by ships equipped with the most perfect appliances. Storm and wreck and calm; intercourse with savages who look with wonder on the white sails that have come up from the under-world; the wash of waters upon coral-reefs; the shadow of green palms upon lonely isles; strange sea-weeds floating on the deep green wave, and flying-fish hunted by voracious foes; long days and nights spent under glowing skies, without a glimpse of land; the breathless eagerness with which some new shore is sighted – with such incidents as these we English are necessarily familiar, possessing as we do a vast and various literature of the sea. And yet our appetite never grows weary of the old, old tale; there is a romance about it which never seems to fade – like the sea itself it seems ever to present some fresh and novel aspect.

And such an aspect it certainly wears when it is told by a woman, as it has been told by Lady Brassey, one of the most adventurous and agreeable of lady-voyagers. Told, too, with a literary skill and a refined taste which have greatly charmed the public, and given a permanent value to her rapid record. There is no affectation of high-wrought adventure or heroic enterprise about it. Lady Brassey describes only what she has seen – and she saw a great deal. She invents nothing and she magnifies nothing; her narrative is as plain and unvarnished as a ship's log-book.

The yacht Sunbeam in which Lady (she was then simply Mrs.) Brassey accomplished her voyage round the world was a screw three-masted schooner, of 530 tons, with engines of thirty-five horse-power, and a speed of 10 to 13 knots an hour. She was 157 feet in length, with an extreme breadth of twenty-seven and a-half feet. Belonging to a wealthy English gentleman, she was richly appointed, and fitted up with a luxurious splendour which would have driven wild with envy and admiration the earlier circumnavigators. Leaving Chatham on the 1st of July, 1876, she ran off Beachy Head on the following evening, dropped anchor off Cowes next morning, and early on the 6th passed through the Needles.

"We were forty-three on board, all told," says Mrs. Brassey, the party then including her husband and herself and their four children, some friends, a sailing master, boatswain, carpenter, able-bodied seamen, engineers, firemen, stewards, cooks, nurse, stewardess, and lady's maid.

On the 8th they were fairly away from Old England. Next day, in the afternoon, they rounded Ushant, at the distance of a mile and a-half: "the sea was tremendous, the waves breaking in columns of spray against the sharp needle-like rocks that form the point of the island." Two days later, Mrs. Brassey had her first rough experience of the sea. "We were all sitting or standing," she says, "about the stern of the vessel, admiring the magnificent dark blue billows following us, with their curling white crests, mountains high. Each wave, as it approached, appeared as if it must overwhelm us, instead of which it rushed grandly by, rolling and shaking us from stem to stern, and sending fountains of spray on board. Tom (Mr. Brassey) was looking at the stern compass, Allnutt being close to him. Mr. Bingham and Mr. Freer were smoking, half-way between the quarter-deck and the after-companion, where Captain Brown, Dr. Potter, Muriel, and I were standing. Captain Lecky, seated on a large coil of rope, placed on the box of the rudder, was spinning Mabelle a yarn. A new hand was steering, and just at the moment when an unusually big wave overtook us, he unfortunately allowed the vessel to broach to a little. In a second the sea came pouring over the stern, above Allnutt's head. The boy was nearly washed overboard, but he managed to catch hold of the rail, and, with great presence of mind, stuck his knees into the bulwarks. Kindred, our boatswain, seeing his danger, rushed forward to save him, but was knocked down by the return wave, from which he emerged gasping. The coll of rope, on which Captain Lecky and Mabelle were seated, was completely floated by the sea. Providentially, however, he had taken a double turn round his wrist with a reefing point, and throwing his other arm round Mabelle, held on like grim death; otherwise nothing could have saved them. She was perfectly self-possessed, and only said quietly, "Hold on, Captain Lecky, hold on!" to which he replied, "All right." I asked her afterwards if she thought she was going overboard, and she answered, "I did not think at all, mamma, but felt sure we were gone." Captain Lecky, long accustomed to very large ships, had not in the least realized how near we were to the water in our little vessel, and was proportionately taken by surprise. All the rest of the party were drenched, with the exception of Muriel, whom Captain Brown held high above the water in his arms, and who lost no time in remarking, in the midst of the general confusion, "I'm not at all wet, I'm not." Happily, the children don't know what fear is. The maids, however, were very frightened, as some of the sea had got down into the nursery, and the skylights had to be screwed down. Our studding sail boom, too, broke with a loud crack when the ship broached to, and the jaws of the fore-boom gave way.

"Soon after this adventure we all went to bed, full of thankfulness that it had ended as well as it did, but, alas! not, so far as I was concerned, to rest in peace. In about two hours I was awakened by a tremendous weight of water suddenly descending upon me and flooding the bed. I immediately sprang out, only to find myself in another pool on the floor. It was pitch dark, and I could not think what had happened; so I rushed on deck, and found that, the weather having moderated a little, some kind sailor, knowing my love of fresh air, had opened the skylight rather too soon, and one of the angry waves had popped on board, deluging the cabin.

"I got a light and proceeded to mop up as best I could, and then endeavoured to find a dry place to sleep in. This, however, was no easy task, for my own bed was drenched and every other berth occupied; the deck, too, was ankle-deep in water, as I found when I tried to get across to the deck-house sofa. At last I lay down on the floor, wrapped up in my ulster, and wedged between the foot-stanchions of our swing bed and the wardrobe athwart ship; so that, as the yacht rolled heavily, my feet were often higher than my head. Consequently what sleep I snatched turned into a nightmare, of which the fixed idea was a broken head, from the three hundredweight of lead at the bottom of our bed swinging wildly from side to side and up and down, as the vessel rolled and pitched, suggesting all manner of accidents. When morning came at last the weather cleared a good deal, though the breeze continued. All hands were soon busily employed in repairing damages; and very picturesque the deck and rigging of the Sunbeam looked, with the various groups of men occupied upon the ropes, spars, and sails. Towards evening the wind fell light, and we had to get up steam. The night was the first really warm one we had enjoyed, and the stars shone out brightly; the sea, which had been of a lovely blue colour during the day, showed a slight phosphorescence after dark."

The voyage, which opened in this stirring manner, proved not less prosperous than pleasant, and was unmarked by any striking adventures, though not devoid of interesting incidents. By way of the Cape de Verde Islands and Madeira, the Sunbeam kept southward to the Equator, and gradually drew near the coast of South America, until it touched at the Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro. Thence it ran southward to the River Plate, skirted the Patagonian shores, and, threading its way through the defiles of the Magellan Strait, emerged into the Southern Ocean. A northerly course took it to the great sea-port of Chili – Valparaiso, whence it reached across the Pacific to the beautiful group of the Society Islands, visiting Tahiti, the Eden of the southern seas. The Sandwich Islands are almost the same distance north as the Society are south of the Equator. Here Lady Brassey was received with great hospitality, and surveyed the new and rising civilization of Hawaii with much interest. In the track of the trade winds the voyagers crossed the Pacific, which, so far as they were concerned, justified its name, to Japan; thence they proceeded to Hong-Kong, and through the Straits of Malacca to Penang. Ceylon lies on the farther side of the Bay of Bengal. From Ceylon they sailed to Aden, at the mouth of the Red Sea, one of those strong strategical points by which England keeps open the ocean-highways to her commercial fleets. Through the Suez Canal the Sunbeam passed into the Mediterranean, "whose shores are empires," touching at Malta and at "the Rock," which the enterprise of Sir George Rorke gave, and the patient courage of General Eliott preserved, to England. Entering the familiar waters of the Atlantic, it put into Lisbon, and afterwards fell into the track for "home," sighting the first English land, the Start, very early in the morning of the 26th of May. At midnight the voyagers reached Beachy Head, and could see the lights of Hastings in the distance. At half-past six on the 27th they landed there, and were warmly greeted by a multitude of well-wishers.

In our limited space it would be impossible for us to follow up very closely a voyage which covered so large a part of the world's surface; nor is it necessary, since Lady Brassey's charmingly written narrative is now well known to every reader; but we shall permit ourselves the pleasure of seeing, as Lady Brassey saw, a picture here and there of beautiful scenery or foreign manners, that we may judge of the impression it produced on so accomplished an observer. Lady Brassey evidently belongs not to the nil admirari school, but enjoys keenly and heartily everything that is fresh and new – a bright bit of colour or a picturesque detail. It is this which makes her book so enjoyable. There is no affectation in its pages – no airs of conscious superiority; and we feel that we are in the company of a woman with a woman's heart – of a woman with broad sympathies and a happy nature.

Our first visit, with Lady Brassey as our guide, shall be to the market at Rio de Janeiro.28

The greatest bustle and animation prevailed, and there were people and things to see and observe in endless variety. The fish market was full of finny monsters of the deep, all new and strange to us, whose odd Brazilian names would convey to a stranger but little idea of the fish themselves. There was an enormous rock fish, weighing about three hundred pounds, with hideous face and shiny back, and fins; large ray, and skate, and cuttle fish – the octopus, or pieuvre, described with so much exaggeration in Victor Hugo's "Travailleurs de la Mer," to say nothing of the large prawns for which the coast is famous – prawns eight or ten inches long, with antennæ of twelve or fourteen inches in length. Such prawns suit those only who care for quantity rather than for quality; they are of indifferent flavour; whereas the oysters, which are particularly small, are remarkable for their delicious taste. Mackerel are here in abundance, also a good many turtle and porpoises, and a few hammer-headed sharks.

In the fruit market were many familiar bright-coloured fruits. Fat, jet-black negresses, wearing turbans on their heads, strings of coloured beads on their necks and arms, and single long white garments, which appeared to be continually slipping off their shoulders, presided over glittering piles of oranges, bananas, pine-apples, passion-fruit, tomatoes, apples, pears, capsicum and peppers, sugar-canes, cabbage-palms, cherimoyas, and bread-fruit.

In another part of the market all sorts of live birds were for sale, with a few live beasts, such as deer, monkeys, pigs, guinea-pigs in profusion, rats, cats, dogs, marmosets, and a dear little lion-monkey, very small and rather red, with a beautiful head and mane, who roared exactly like a real lion in miniature. There were cages full of small flamingoes, snipe of various kinds, and a great many birds of smaller size, with feathers of all shades of blue, red, and green, and metallic hues of brilliant lustre, besides parrots, macaws, cockatoos innumerable, and torchas on stands. The torcha is a bright-coloured black and yellow bird, about as big as a starling, which puts its little head on one side and takes flies from one's fingers in the prettiest and most enticing manner.

While the Sunbeam was lying in the River Plate, Lady Brassey and her party made an excursion to the Pampas, those broad, league-long undulating plains of verdure, on which civilization as yet has made but a limited advance.