68th Issue:

Here are four different people who I thought were kind of interesting. I hope you do too. If not though, it will not hurt my feelings.

William Dampier

I was reading a book, now I don’t remember what it was about, but it did have a chapter about William Dampier and he intrigued me so I did some research. William was born in 1651 in a well-off family. He joined the Royal Navy after finishing school, but he got sick and ended up having to quit. He tried several different jobs but none of them stuck. He got married, but left his wife to join a pirate ship to visit Mexico.

He went to Virginia, and then ended up in Mexico and Peru, sailing all around the area. He went to Guam and then the Philippines. He bounced from different ship to ship, under various pirate captains. Depending on who you ask, he was either a pirate himself or he was a naturalist. I think he was both. In 1688 he ended up in Australia, where for two months he took notes on the local flora and fauna as well as the indigenous populations.

William returned to England with a slave named Jeoly, who he then sold because he needed money. He was exhibited as a ‘prince’ and died of smallpox three months later. William then wrote a book called A New Voyage Round the World, published in 1697, and it became a hit. The King and Queen gave him command of a warship and he was told to go explore the east coast of Australia. He began making detailed records of the flora and fauna while his secretary made drawings of them. He also collected specimens as he went. Unfortunately his ship began to fall apart and eventually he was marooned on an island with his crew for over a month before a passing ship picked them up and took them home in 1701. He wrote a book about his journey called A Voyage to New Holland.
 

While they were on that voyage though, William had his lieutenant removed from the ship and sent to jail in Brazil. His lieutenant found his way back to England and complained to the Admiralty. William was found guilty and was officially dismissed from the Royal Navy. That didn’t seem to matter much, because as war broke out, William was given a gunship to fight against the French and Spanish. He didn’t do a very good job, and ended up going back to England without his ship again, which was abandoned on the coast of Peru because it was damaged and destroyed.

He sailed on a couple of more journeys, but ended up dying in 1715 in London. He was over two thousand pounds in debt when he died. Though William, the pirate scientist, made a lot of discoveries, collecting data on currents, winds and tides, along with notes on flora and fauna, he was kind of a shitty person, both to his crew, the slave he bought and sold, and the local indigenous populations of the places he traveled.

Fun facts about William are that he is cited over 80 times in the Oxford English Dictionary, not necessarily for coining words but being the first to use them in writing in English. Some of those words are ‘barbecue’, ‘avocado’, and ‘chopsticks’. He also recorded the first English language recipes for guacamole and mango chutney.

Annie Londonderry

Annie Londonderry was the first woman to bicycle around the world. She was born in Latvia, but her family moved to the United States when she was just about four or five years old. Her parents died when she was still just seventeen, and Annie and her brother Bennett, who was twenty years old, had to take care of the younger siblings who were just ten and nine years old. Both Annie and Bennett got married and brought their spouses to live in their home with them.

Annie married a man named Max who was a peddler, and they had three children. Her brother married a woman named Bertha, and they had two children. Their brother Jacob died as a teenager but it was still a very crowded house. Max, Annie’s husband, was an Orthodox Jew (she was Jewish too but not as intense as he was) and studied the Torah while Annie sold advertising space for newspapers.

Just a quick aside in case you didn’t know, but the invention of the bicycle really coincided with the first wave of feminism, helping usher in women’s clothing to move from full skirts to bloomers that let them move easier and play sports or do other athletic things. Women also could travel on their own with bicycles which was nice.

Anyway someone made a wager that a woman couldn’t cycle around the world or something like that and Annie was chosen. She had never ridden a bicycle before and was a married mom of three young kids, but perhaps it was her background in advertising that made it happen. She needed sponsorship to fund the trip, and attached a placard to the back of her bike advertising Londonderry Lithia Springwater Company. Her name was actually Annie Kopchovsky, but she agreed to go by Londonderry in exchange for $100.

On June 7, 1984, Annie set off. She wore a long skirt and corset and carried a pistol. She averaged about nine or ten miles a day, and arrived in Chicago on September 24. She didn’t really want to keep going at this point, but Sterling Cycle Works offered to sponsor her and gave her a new bike. She also switched from a corset and skirt to bloomers and then later a men’s riding suit. Now she was determined to get back, though she only had about eleven months. She went back to New York City, and took a ship to France.
 

In France, her bike was confiscated, her money was taken, and the local press wrote rude articles about her appearance, but she finally got hold of her bike and went to Marseille. She did it partially by bike and partially by train. Annie then took ships from place to place, doing a day trip bike ride in each location. She stopped at places like Alexandria, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and Kobe. In March of 1895, she sailed from Japan to San Francisco. She went from Los Angeles to Arizona and New Mexico. The Southern Pacific Railway allowed cyclists to stop at shelters for train crews. She rode the train for part of the way and biked for part of the way, and made it all the way to Iowa, where she broke her wrist from crashing into a group of pigs.

In September, Annie made it back to Chicago where she collected her $10,000 prize. She went back home to Boston and arrived fifteen months after she had left. She published an account of her journey in the New York World, and became famous. She was a great storyteller and gave lots of lectures, often exaggerating. She claimed in Europe to be many things, such as an orphan, a wealthy heiress, etc. When she got back home she talked about hunting tigers in India or getting shot and sent to prison in Japan. She sold photos of herself, souvenir pins, and autographs. She moved to New York City and wrote more about her adventures, saying that she was “a journalist and a 'new woman,' if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.”

Annie Londonderry died in 1947, and in 2007, her great-nephew wrote a book about her called Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride. You can also read her obituary in the New York Times, in a series they did on people who were overlooked when they actually died.

Alice Manfield

Alice Manfield, also known as Guide Alice, was a mountain guide who lived in Australia. She was born on her family property near Mount Buffalo in Victoria in 1878, with seven siblings. Her parents were from England, and made their money mining gold. They worked on their farm in the Buckland Valley in Victoria, Australia.

Mount Buffalo was known for its special geology and botany, and some tourists came towards the end of the 19^th century. There was a railway that connected it to Melbourne, so more and more people began to come. Alice’s father built a hotel called the Buffalo Falls Temperance Hotel at the foot of the mountain. The tourists would climb the three hours to the Buffalo plateau to explore or camp.

Alice was twelve when the hotel opened, and followed her family around the mountain, building her knowledge of the natural attractions and landscape of the mountain. She then began leading the tours up the mountain herself, and was known as Guide Alice. There were no signs at first and just a narrow track, so the tourists needed her. She also had a calm presence so that the tourists would not be concerned or scared of the wildlife or of getting lost.

Alice’s family built a second hotel on the plateau itself, calling it Granny’s Place, and Alice ran it, enjoying her solitude there when there were no tourists, and dealing with bushfires, storms, and one snowfall so deep that she had to enter the chalet through the chimney. There wasn’t really hiking gear for women at the time so Alice wore long woolen bloomers and a high necked buttoned jacket. She also wound fabric around her calves and wore a snug hat and walking boots.
 

She soon became a guide who was very in demand, not just for the novelty of being female but because of her skills as a photographer and a naturalist, as well as her enthusiasm. She became part of the draw for Mount Buffalo for tourists as well. In 1898, Mount Buffalo plateau was declared a National Park, and when a road was opened to the plateau, Alice held the ribbon while the Premier of Victoria cut it.

Alice wrote a book called The Lyre-Birds of Mount Buffalo, including her own photography, and married a ranger in the Parks Service, John Manfield, who was a distant cousin. They had one daughter, Genevieve. Alice retired in the 1930s when she was around fifty years old, and died about thirty years later, in 1960.

Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur was a French artist who I learned about through a Google Doodle on March 16^th of this year. Her father was a painter and encouraged his daughter. The family was of Jewish descent, but followed Saint Simonianism which was Christian and socialist, promoting education of women. Her siblings Auguste, Isidore, and Juliette also became painters.

Rosa had trouble learning how to read and write, but she loved to sketch. Her mom taught her the alphabet by having her draw a different animal for each letter. She said that was why she loved drawing animals so much. She was expelled from school and failed an apprenticeship with a seamstress. Her father finally decided to encourage her love of painting and brought live animals to the family art studio for her to study and paint. She studied horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits, and other animals around Paris. She went to the Louvre and began copying the paintings. She went to the National Veterinary Institute and dissected animals.

One of Rosa’s most famous paintings was The Horse Fair, which is eight feet by sixteen feet. She became famous and met Queen Victoria, traveling to England and Scotland. Rosa also exhibited her work in Chicago. She was given the French Legion of Honor in 1865 – the first female artist to ever receive the award.

Rosa was a little eccentric for her time. She opened doors for other female artists that came after, and was known for wearing men’s clothes because they were more practical for her to wear when working with the animals that she painted. She was also a lesbian, living with Nathalie Micas for forty years and after Nathalie’s death she began a relationship with Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. She didn’t really keep her relationships private in a time when lesbians were not that accepted. She wore pants and shirts and ties, and refused to conform to the gender binary. It was against the law at this time to cross-dress, so Rosa had to ask special permission from the police, who granted it. She liked doing stuff that men could do, because it gave her freedom, but she thought men were stupid and women were superior.

Rosa died at the age of 77 in 1899. Anna Klumpke was her heir, and when she died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Nathalie Micas and Rosa Bonheur. Rosa’s family did not like that Anna was named as heir to Rosa’s estate instead of them, and she used the money to open the Rosa Bonheur Memorial Art School to teach female artists. She also converted Rosa’s home into a Museum, and founded the Rosa Bonheur Prize as well. She wrote a biography of Rosa, based on her diary and Rosa’s letters. I think they loved each other a lot.