Aloha Wanderwell, great Canadian adventurer
The 16-year-old explorer you may have never heard of, but will want to know about
With her blond ringlets, Kewpie-doll lips and statuesque height, Aloha Wanderwell could be a Hollywood invention, leaning against a Ford Model-T, all sass and swagger.
But what her 1920s publicity photo doesn’t reveal — and what has, for the most part, been buried in history — is that at the age of 16, Wanderwell embarked on an adventure that, among her many records, would make her the first woman to drive around the world, covering 380,000 miles and 80 countries before the age of 30.
Back in 1998, Vancouver television producer Randolph Eustace-Wallace, co-author of the book Aloha Wanderwell: The Border-Smashing, Record-Setting Life of the World’s Youngest Explorer, was using the brand-new Google search engine to research his own adventure when he inadvertently stumbled onto her story.
Eustace-Wallace was looking for information on driving around the world for a potential show idea when his cousin called from Ontario need- ing help with travel plans to Hawaii. He entered “Aloha Airlines” into Google, which mixed with his online search for driving, and up popped a story about Wanderwell. Intrigued, he saved the link, but it wasn’t until a couple years later, when he partnered with journalist Christian FinkJensen, his co-author on Aloha Wanderwell, did their decade of detective work begin in earnest.
At this point, the duo didn’t know that Wanderwell was originally named Idris Hall, born in Winnipeg in1906, or that her husband had been jailed as a German spy (and later murdered). None of that is mentioned in her1939 ghostwritten autobiography, Call To Adventure!
“The ghostwriter tarted it up a bit, and added a lot of fiction, made it more melodramatic,” says EustaceWallace. “When we first read it, we thought, ‘It’s too bad she’s such a terrible writer,’ but as it turns out, she was incredible. Very eloquent and well spoken.”
Wanderwell’s story is so incredible it doesn’t require embellishment. In 1922, while the bored teenager was attending French convent school, she answered an ad looking for women with “Brains, Beauty & Breeches” to accompany Captain Ralph Wanderwell — whom she would eventu- ally marry — as a driver and secretary on his international expeditions.
The charismatic captain was also a brilliant marketer, and soon Wanderwell was filling theatres around the world as she lectured vaudevillestyle in front of silent movies of their journeys through exotic locales such as Africa and Asia.
“For 10 years, their escapades were front-page news,” says Eustace-Wallace. And yet, he and Fink-Jensen found plenty of conflicting information during their arduous research process, mainly because Wanderwell had reinvented her own personal history.
“It’s difficult to tell a non-fiction story about someone who tried to keep their life under wraps,” he says.
As it turns out, the key to unlocking Aloha’s mystery was Wanderwell’s children.
In order to gain access to films produced by Wanderwell that had been bequeathed to the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, EustaceWallace and Fink-Jensen needed permission from her two offspring.
Both were initially suspicious, as they had been approached by unscrupulous journalists in the past looking for money in exchange for writing their mother’s story.
But when Valri, who lived in Honolulu at the time, discovered that the two writers were Canadian, she embraced their request. As it turns out, she and her brother Nile, now in their 80s, had been raised on Vancouver Island and still had fond memories of their early years.
The writers and children became close, swapping stories and memories. During one trip to Honolulu, Valri appeared with a dusty tin box she had recently discovered that was labelled with her mother’s initials. Eustace-Wallace picked the lock and discovered the “Rosetta Stone” for her story: Wanderwell’s original passport containing every border crossing (many of which were contrary to other reports), her logbooks and a draft of an unpublished memoir.
They also discovered family photos and her private diary, which she had kept a secret from the captain, who forbade his staff to take notes about their travels.
Finally, Eustace-Wallace and FinkJensen had all the details they needed to shed light on one of Canada’s most incredible adventurers.
As he concludes, “It’s the story of someone who was lost to history, and shouldn’t be.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire.