Evelyn Cheesman, born and brought up in rural Kent, nurtured her passion for nature, and in particular, insects, during her childhood. Denied the opportunity to study as a vet because of her sex, she became, in 1917, the first female Keeper of Insects at the Zoological Society of London (London Zoo). In 1920 she was promoted to Curator of Insects and joined a scientific expedition to the south Pacific which would begin a lifetime of collecting and entomological research. She visited Gorgona, the Galapagos, the Society Islands and the Marquesas. She left the expedition on Tahiti, the farthest point from home, and continued her researches alone, in a leaky hut by the side of a lagoon.
Evelyn Cheesman spent most of the 1920s and 1930s travelling and collecting in the south Pacific. She left London Zoo and began working as an unpaid volunteer at the Natural History Museum. On Malekula, New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Papua New Guinea, she began refining her theories on the movement of insects, which contributed to our understanding of the movement of continents in the ancient past. She began making radio programmes and on one, in 1956, she met a young Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, who remembered being rather in awe of her. During the Second World War she worked for naval intelligence, drawing maps of islands in the Pacific.
Why is it that in myth, and reality, women’s presence in wild nature has been controlled, limited and, in some cultures, forbidden by men? Since the very first story ever written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed on tablets thousands of years ago, stories imagine the wild as a site of men’s heroic myth making whereas women are kept behind the city’s thick walls. Only monstrous, transgressive or supernatural women are found in the wild, to be feared, or consulted, or punished. In reality, practices such as Purdah, and foot-binding, chaperoning and religious banishment of women from sacred places, as well as practical constraints such as restrictive clothing, have all conspired to limit women’s presence in the wild and keep them bound to the hearth and home. Nineteenth-century western science only reinforced ideas of women’s helplessness and intellectual inadequacy. When women, like Mary Kingsley, did travel and explore, their narratives were very different from the masculine ideal of man-versus-nature, the hero that must conquer often feminine landscapes in order to reach his true self. The five women subjects of this book represent five different phases of our modern encounters with the wild, from exploration, to scientific research, to sport and leisure, and latterly, to conservation and rewilding, as we begin to understand the damage we have done to this fragile planet.
Mina Hubbard successfully completed her expedition from North West River to Ungava Bay in the early autumn of 1905. On her return, she wrote a book of her travels, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, and embarked on a book tour to London. She still faced criticism and questioning, particularly in New York. Her map of northern Labrador tells the story of both her and her husband’s journeys into the wilderness. It also shows evidence of First Nation American portage routes and settlements. After her book was published in 1908, she remarried and became Mrs Harold Ellis.
When Mina Hubbard’s husband Leonidas died while attempting to map the route of the Naskaupi River in northern Labrador in 1903, his widow, Mina, decided to try to finish his work. In the summer of 1905 she set off, with four Native American and mixed-race guides, in two canoes, starting at the North West River trading post. As a woman her presence in the Labrador ‘wild’ was highly contested and the New York ‘outdoors’ magazines criticised her and questioned her motives. Her private diary of her journey reveals the peaceful delight she found in the wilderness, removed from the expectations and restrictions of so-called ‘civilised’ society.
Dorothy Pilley and Evelyn Cheesman were exploring and climbing well into old age. Mina Hubbard instead chose to live a life in exile in England and rarely went back into the ‘wild’. Her map is her lasting legacy, although parts of the route she took are now submerged beneath a massive reservoir. Evelyn Cheesman carried on collecting in the late 1950s, when she was in her 70s. Her discoveries contributed to the science of biogeography. Dorothy Pilley broke her hip in a car accident in 1958 but her love for the mountains persisted. She saw in her last New Year on the Isle of Skye. Her ashes are scattered on Tryfan, Snowdonia. Her memoir, Climbing Days has just gone into its fourth edition and is viewed as a classic.
Wangari Maathai grew up in rural Kenya, in the foothills of the Aberdare Mountains. As a schoolgirl in the 1950s she lived through the Mau Mau emergency. Clever and hardworking, in 1960 she joined other young Kenyans in the ‘Kennedy Air Lifts’, and went to study for her degree at Mount Saint Scholastica, in Atchison, Kansas. On her return to an independent Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta, she experienced sexism at the University of Nairobi, where she worked as a lecturer. She became the first woman from East Africa to gain a PhD. After hearing concerns of women from rural Kenya during preparations for the United Nations Women’s Conference (1975), she began a tree-planting movement.
The 1980s–2000s were difficult decades for Wangari Maathai. While her Green Belt Movement was planting millions of trees, Wangari was beaten and imprisoned for standing up to President Daniel arap Moi’s corruption. She took him on over a proposed development in Uhuru Park, Nairobi, and then again over the selling off of Karura Forest on the edge of the city, in 1999. Leaders such as Kofi Annan, Secretary of the United Nations, and Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, interceded on her behalf. She attended the first UN climate summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Humans came from the wild. But as soon as societies began to build permanent settlements, women’s presence amidst both the dangers, and beauties, of wild nature was controlled. For men the wild is a place for heroic questing, myth making and exploration. For women, both in storytelling and in reality, they are warned to stay indoors, within the city walls, imprisoned by patriarchy. Women, however, have always challenged for their place in the wild realm beyond human statute, and this book tells the stories of five of them, their lives spanning more than 100 years. Mina Hubbard took on her dead husband’s unfinished task, to find the source of the Naskaupi River in northern Labrador, witness the great caribou migration and make contact with First Nation Americans in their homeland. Evelyn Cheesman, the first woman Keeper of Insects at London Zoo, travelled across the Pacific searching for exhibits, and in doing so helped unlock the ancient secrets of the earth. Dorothy Pilley, the mountaineer, sought spiritual union with nature, as well as freedom from society’s strictures, on the high peaks of the Alps, Snowdonia and the Rockies. Ethel Haythornthwaite’s quiet and insistent campaigning helped make the Peak District the UK’s first National Park in the face of fierce resistance from the grouse-shooting aristocracy. The Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement helped plant 30 million trees in Kenya, to reverse the environmental destruction caused by both colonial settlers and the corrupt and extractive government of Daniel arap Moi.
Climate change transformed London and laid the foundations of the Strand. The people near the Strand scavenged the course of the river, hunted, fowled and fished in the boggy wetland scrummage of Alder Carr below Trafalgar Square and the Fleet estuary, collected hazelnuts below the canopy of the temperate woodlands, and forded the river and camped on its braided islands to the south. The Strand district lay outside the boundaries of the city, to the west of Ludgate. Great change was no doubt visible to travellers approaching the city from this direction across more than 300 years of Roman occupation. Grave sites along the Strand would have been melancholy places, potentially the haunts of ghostly revenants, and one can imagine the sense of relief felt by a lonesome traveller hurrying down this dusky avenue of the departed when at last the welcome lights of London were glimpsed.