In praise of the unsung queens of adventure

It’s time to celebrate the achievements of our great pioneering female explorers, says Mariella Frostrup

I’d never describe myself as intrepid. I’ve dived to 200ft in remotest Papua New Guinea hunting for bull sharks, narrowly escaped renegade Janjaweed militia men on horseback in a Chad internal displacement camp, p, sailed up the Magellan Straits ts through Patagonia, and pounded ed the paths of the Incas in Peru, but ut my adventures have always ys seemed to me relatively tame.

Then again, aside from rom devotees of the travel writing genre, enre, who might possibly widen iden their scope to include the likes of Freya Stark and d Gertrude Bell, women n don’t really tend to number among our planet-conquering icons. ons. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, aside from a few eccentrics ntrics like Cleopatra and Boadicea, ea, and a scattering of Victorian n aristocrats, women barely left their ir kitchens for millennia, unless to accompany ccompany their husbands, teach the word of God or be shipped off to a penal colony. As a dedicated d traveller, this curious conspiracy cy of silence around women explorers rers was what inspired me to write Wild Women, an anthology of first-hand accounts from 50 female ale adventurers, fuelled by wanderlust and all but forgotten by history.

The seed was sown when I saw an article about one Adela Breton, a 19th-century Aztec expert, in a local Somerset newspaper. Reading about her pioneering but demure side-saddle journeys through Mexico in the 1800s when she recorded the disappearing carvings and temples of the Aztecs (in the company of her trusty guide, Pablo), got me wondering how many more similarly intrepid and fearless women there were about whom we know far too little. The wealth of gripping travelogues I discovered, written by those who dared to roam while so many of their gender were forced to stay by hearth and home, are testament to their courage, curiosity and pioneering spirits.

Having g cave-dived in some of the remoter parts of the Yucatán province, I know from my own experience how cut off you can feel in this century, let alone what it must have been like in the 1890s.

Like Adela, I trotted down tangled jungle pathways on my mule, although in my case seeking the entrance to an underwater cave system rather than an Aztec ruin. With scuba tanks rather than watercolours tied to my saddle and accompanied by cave diving expert Mike Madden (who died in that same location a year later), it proved one of the most memorable trips of my life. We swam through gigantic caverns the size of palace ballrooms, with rock formations that resembled chandeliers worth worthy of Versailles, conscious that we were among the first of our species to see these amazing sights.

My realisation th that it is not just the male totems – Burt Burton, Speke, Hillary, Heyerdahl, Shackl Shackleton and Scott – who have been e engaged in mapping our planet’s remot remotest corners was more of a slow dawning daw than an epiphany. My pass passion for travel and travel writing start started when I discovered the (no (now sadly defunct) Travel Bookshop, w which was immortalised by R Richard Curtis in Notting Hill. While newspapers were describing me as a “party girl”, most Saturdays I was located far from any b bar, ensconced among th the bookshop’s wide-roa wide-roaming wooden shelves, h helpfully divided by continents (to w which my book pays homage), dec deciding where I would journey ne next.

The writers I enjoyed had two things in comm common: their thirst for