SIBERIAN STAR
The female explorer whose life ended in tragedy
MARYA Antonina Czaplicka is little known nowadays, but in early 20th century Britain, where her name was usually anglicised to Marie Antoinette de Czaplicka, she was a minor celebrity as an explorer of a part of the world about which Britons knew almost nothing.
Her books about her travels in Siberia and central Asia were well received, and she had a distinguished academic career with several papers to her name.
Had she lived some decades more, hers might even have become a household name because even if the wider public had little understanding of her academic field – anthropology – women explorers were unusual.
But on Saturday May 27, 1921 she died at the age of just 36, officially of heart failure. In truth, she took her own life.
Marya Antonina Czaplicka was born in Warsaw in 1884, one of several children of Zofia Czaplicka (née Zawisza) and Feliks Czaplicki, both of whom were from impoverished Polish noble families. Feliks worked as an official but encouraged his daughters’ education.
Poland at this time was part of the Russian empire, and after attending a girls’ school Marya Antonina continued her studies at the Uniwersytet Latajacy, the socalled ‘Flying University,’ an illegal underground institution run by Polish patriots.
She supported herself with teaching and secretarial jobs, and even had a spell as a lady’s companion. She also wrote poetry and published a children’s novel.
Her big break came in 1910 when she was awarded a scholarship, from the fund set up by the doctor and political activist Józef Mianowski (1804-1879) to support Polish scholars.
She travelled to England and studied at the London School of Economics and at Somerville College, Oxford. Czaplicka was, unsurprisingly, a fluent Russian speaker, but could also read and write German, English, Ukrainian and (of course) Polish, and so was encouraged by one of her tutors to use her language skills to study the existing books and papers on the native peoples of Siberia. The resulting book, Aboriginal Siberia, was greeted with great respect and would remain an essential English language reference work long after her death.
When it was published, she had never set foot in Siberia, but it was now suggested that she should travel there, specifically to study the now-threatened lifestyles of the nomadic peoples there.
Every Pole knew Siberia by reputation; it was the place where the Russian Tsarist regime sent its political opponents, sometimes for life. Czaplicka joked that she might well be the first Pole in history to have volunteered to spend a year there.
Scholarship funding from Somerville college enabled her, along with an American academic, Henry Usher Hall, to visit the northern part of the Yenisey river system where she endured illness, inadequate supplies, a freezing winter, mosquitoes and dust in summer and, in between the two seasons, thick, all-consuming mud.
A female companion who accompanied the party for the first part of the expedition wrote that Czaplicka would walk for miles across the tundra “with only a piece of bread … she can accomplish these feats because she has great spirit but afterwards she pays for them dearly”.
She and Hall recorded local tales and legends, interviewed local shamans, collected objects and took hundreds of photographs.
Returning via Petrograd and Poland in the middle of the Great War, she found herself a minor celebrity in Britain, with numerous press articles about the “lady scientist” and “lady explorer”. She was hailed, too, by campaigners for votes for women as a fellow-suffragist. She was, as The Vote wrote in September 1915, “the first woman to be appointed head of a scientific research expedition”.
Writing a few years later, Czaplicka said that the status of women was one of the things that attracted her to Britain and made her want to stay. “There is no prejudice against my sex.” She was also grateful, she said, “for the scientific training I received … and the wonderful power of friendship which English people have revealed to me”.
She published a number of papers about the expedition, as well as a popular and dryly humorous account, My Siberian Year, and was invited to lecture in Britain and America. The lectures were published as The Turks of Central Asia in 1918.
From 1916 to 1919, she had a post as a lecturer at Oxford, but this ended when the previous holder of the post came back from wartime service.
Attempts to find a job in America failed, and so she accepted the position of lecturer in anthropology at Bristol University in 1920. She was by all accounts popular and an active member of the Clifton Ladies’ Debating Society.
Despite a grant from the Royal Geographical Society, she had money problems. Her contract at Bristol University was about to expire and she could not cover debts, which by early 1921 amounted to about £200. That sum may not sound like much, but would be upwards of £30,000 nowadays.
An important travel scholarship she was hoping to get was awarded to the same man who had reclaimed her Oxford job.
On May 27 1921, she poisoned herself with mercuric chloride.
Perhaps she was depressed by her circumstances; perhaps she realised that as a woman and a foreigner she had little chance of obtaining a secure academic job. It has also been speculated that she may have had some sort of relationship with Henry Usher Hall, the American she had travelled with, and that she was upset by news from America that he had recently been married.
There was a requiem mass at the Catholic pro-cathedral in Clifton, and was to have been buried at Holy Souls Cemetery at Arnos Vale - though it seems the arrangements were changed at the last minute and she was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford, in accordance with her own wishes.
Her many friends clubbed together to pay off her debts. These included anthropologist Barbara Aitken who, on her own death in 1967, established the Marya Antonina Czaplicka Fund to help members of Somerville College studying the ancient world, anthropology, or the natural sciences to attend conferences and meetings abroad.
An anonymous appreciation in the Western Daily Press by someone from Bristol University spoke of the shock at the loss of “a highly distinguished member” and of her great knowledge, her fluency in languages and how she “endeared herself to everyone she has met”.