Famed Adventuresses Are Explored in this Book

Author Jacki Hill-Murphy’s new book, Adventuresses. Rediscovering Daring Voyages Unknown tells the story of three incredibly charismatic yet unsung female explorers who traveled to remote regions of the world in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and whose paths she has followed and tried to recreate there.

Jacki Hill-Murphy has traveled extensively ‘off the beaten track’ since leaving school, including traveling Africa in a Land Rover for a year and Istanbul and back with her young son.

She spent many years as an English and Drama teacher before leaving to become an adventure filmmaker, the highlights of which were filming the Atlantic Race, crossing the Empty Quarter twice with Outward Bound and co-organizing an expedition into the heart of the Llanganates in the Andes to search for the lost Inca gold.

Following in the footsteps of the early female explorers has so far taken her to Cameroon, Ecuador, Ladakh, and Siberia and her first book on the subject – Adventuresses, Rediscovering Daring Voyages into the Unknown was published in December 2014.

She is now writing The Ambivalent Adventuress about the Victorian nurse Kate Marsden, Jacki has recently followed her journey across Siberia to aid the lepers in the forests of Yakutia.

Excerpt from the book: Heading into a fabulously remote, unvisited part of the Ladakh Mountain range

“I travel without fear and rack up fabulous experiences that will last me forever. I love pushing myself to the limit, allowing my senses to come alive, letting go of home and mundane worries along with all my cultural moorings; feeling the sense of freedom beyond the duration, and go home (I hope) with a better understanding of the planet and the people who populate it.”

“From the moment when traveler sets foot upon foreign soil and sees the strange surroundings, the quaint dresses, and curious custom of the natives, enhanced by the clear air and brilliant sunshine, so different from the softened atmosphere at home, she experiences all the effect of having entered into a new life.”

“Once again I tried to put myself in Isabela’s embroidered slippers, and imagine her mixture of abject discomfort and apprehensiveness at every unfamiliar sound or movement of the alien forest, from the sudden fall of a tree to the cry of the bellbird and the bark of the howler monkey.

Pinch yourself, Jacki, in the sealed safety of your dry cab; at least you have the assurance of arrival at the end of the ride!

I noticed my teammates had gone a bit quiet and guessed that Mary in particular was pondering the recklessness of the expedition leader in transferring us all to the Bobonaza, in a dugout canoe of all things, in weather like this.

Wet Trousers Hanging

I looked out under the dripping eaves of the corrugated roof, where our wet trousers hung limply, hoping to catch a sunray if it popped its head out from the white misty sky, and there, on the edge of the concrete deck, stood my brave Angela applying full West End makeup.

The yellowy green and brown hummocks spread out around us and we could see a distant incline which, from Mary Kingsley’s description, I could now point out to my team as announcing the start of the main peak. That, of course, now lost in a cloud. It was a mossy, drippy, dank, and miserable world – but I had my plan to brighten it up. The time had come to pull out those long frocks.

One condition of joining the expedition was to bring a late-Victorian outfit, in Mary’s honor. Each of us, therefore, somewhere rolled tight into a plastic bag in a corner of our damp luggage, had an outfit that Mary would not have scorned.”

The Impassable Barrier

“While Adventuresses like Isabella were picking their way across the ‘impassable barrier’ of the Khardung La I was walking back along with a parallel one – the Lasirmou La passing through the tiny isolated hamlets of Wachan, Yogma, Dok, Brok, and Yanok.

Traveling by a vehicle along a motor road back to Leh had never been my plan and I didn’t see much pleasure in walking for a hundred miles along tarmac, instead I was heading into a fabulously remote, unvisited part of the Ladakh Mountain range, a landscape Isabella would have loved.

I wanted to walk, I wanted time to think, I wanted to be with the ponies and the Tibetan cooks and the lovely guide for longer, and I wanted more time to consider the differences in the lives of the Victorian lady and myself on our walks through the Himalayas.

My own party left at 9 am under a clear blue sky and we trekked for three hours through a canyon, past stone mantras with beautiful carved Sanskrit prayers which were framed by the brown gravelly mountains of the Ladakh mountains and far beyond them the snow-capped Zaskar massif.

Bare larch boughs, bent with the weight of streamers of prayer flags, fluttered in the breeze; on dainty log-bridges we crossed full rushing rivers of blue water and followed neglected, half-collapsed stone walls and the first attempts at a cleared track.”

Buy this book on Amazon Adventuresses. Rediscovering Daring Voyages into the Unknown.