Leading lady
The story of the Edinburgh explorer, who travelled to the Arctic, making friends along the way
As women in Scotland were enjoying the wider freedoms of the Roaring Twenties, their horizons were expanding. They had grown up as steam ships, airplanes, telephones, and movies were starting to shrink the world.
For the most part, global exploration was a male domain, but a small number of women set off on their own ambitious journeys. One of the most intrepid Scottish female travellers was Isobel Wylie Hutchison.
Born in 1889 near Edinburgh, Isobel spent the 1920s and 1930s exploring the Arctic, discovering people, places, and plants… all the while documenting her journeys. And Isobel’s words, paintings, photographs, and films were able, in part, to fund her grand but crumbling family home, Carlowrie Castle, where she lived until her death in 1982.
To us, the list of places she explored – Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska – may not seem that ambitious, but when you hear that she travelled alone, and mostly by sea and over land to cold, remote places few Westerners had visited, and frequently altered her plans as circumstances changed, you start to grasp what a leap of faith she took in setting off from her sheltered Edinburgh life.
Isobel was in her thirties, had travelled abroad – mainly in Europe – and was a relatively experienced walker when she left on her first northern adventure in 1925.
Having “done” the sights of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, she decided to hike cross-country to catch a boat scheduled to call 260 miles away, 14 days later. Often unannounced, Isobel was welcomed in the remotest of places and the spontaneity and resourcefulness she found in herself on this trip were to be valuable in the future.
In Greenland – over two visits – she had to navigate the officialdom of the Danish colony, as well as its harsh
climate. To gain permission to visit, she had applied as a botanist, and plant collecting became the framework for her travels.
Her first visit in 1927 took her close to the Arctic Circle where she sketched, collected plants, and obtained a specially made pair of thigh-high sealskin boots. She was tasting raw Greenlandic life.
Further south she also found herself on the dance floor for a Schottische. Scottish whalers had introduced Highland dancing in the previous century. It was a life as far removed from the Edinburgh countryside as you can imagine.
This five-month adventure gave Isobel the taste for more and she quickly returned to spend a full year in Greenland. Her travels gave her plenty of material and she wrote articles, gave more than 60 talks on the country, and published a travel book, On Greenland’s Closed Shore.
“She was the most remarkable woman,” reflects Jo Woolf, writer in residence for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS), who has studied Isobel. “I was just enchanted by her story and what she did and the way she expressed herself, it’s just beautiful.”
But Greenland was a mere stepping-stone for Isobel – her biggest adventures were in Alaska. In 1933, it took her five
At Martin Point in Alaska, Isobel tried to do some watercolour painting outdoors, but her paints froze
weeks to sail to Vancouver, from where she set off for the Arctic coast.
The picture painted of Isobel in Edinburgh might have been of a quiet artistic lady of means, but on her travels, she seemed to cast off any shyness and even did things we, today, would say were reckless.
The most telling example is that journey around the coast of Alaska. She sailed the 500 miles from Nome to Point Barrow in a cramped boat with a Russian trader Ira Rank, who she had just met. On the way they encountered and explored a famous ‘ghost’ ship trapped for years in the floating ice.
Then, when she could go no further with Ira because of the ice, she travelled with another stranger, Gus Masik, even staying alone with him for seven weeks in his small hut before reaching Aklavik in Canada by dog sled.
News of her exploits preceded her and she returned home something of a celebrity. The importance of her Arctic research was marked with the RSGS Mungo Park Medal in 1934 – the first time it was awarded to a woman.
Isobel went once more to Alaska in 1936 and this time she explored the Aleutian Islands, the 1,000-mile chain in the northern Pacific Ocean. Her travel arrangements were again at times unconventional – hitching a three-week ride with a US Coast Guard cutter – but fruitful.
She also returned to Nome to see friends she had made on her previous visit and then met her sister in Vancouver before they toured Japan and took the Trans-Siberian railway on their way home across Europe.
What is notable about Isobel’s journeys is that along with the countless miles she covered and the wealth of botanical samples she collected for prestigious institutions, she spent time with the people who inhabited these remote places, learning – with the help of her ear for languages – about their lives.
Jo Woolf notes: “She looked at the people that she was visiting in a different way from the explorers of her generation. She didn’t see them as curiosities, she treated them as equals, and she was interested in them.”
Across the northern lands, Isobel left in her wake a host of admirers – not just her scientific and exploration contemporaries, but also the native inuits, traders and officials she spent time with.
Today, Isobel has quietly been gaining more recognition as her remarkable story is told and she takes her well-earned place in exploration history.
Isobel loved Scottish dancing. The Greenlanders often asked her to demonstrate the sword dance and then tried to copy her – with mixed results!