Bebe Bwana. A Woman in Darkest Africa

A curious snippet in The Launceston Examiner (Tasmania) of 7 January 1891 reads as follows

A FEMALE AFRICAN EXPLORER
Mrs. Sheldon, an American lady, contemplates exploring Central Africa with a body guard of soldiers, who will be negresses

The images created by this report sent me scurrying to discover more. Who was Mrs. Sheldon and did she really have “negresses” as a bodyguard while exploring Central Africa?

Another slightly more accurate report in The Advertiser (Adelaide) of the same date states that Mrs. Sheldon, is “the widow of an American congressmen” and her body guard will include both “soldiers and negresses”. Six months later, another brief report in The Advertiser states:

MRS. SHELDON

Ill at Zanzibar.

June 19



Mrs. French-Sheldon, the American lady who recently undertook to explore Darkest Africa, is lying dangerously ill at Zanzibar. She sails for England at the earliest opportunity.

Further trawling of old newspaper reports revealed much more about this intriguing woman, that Mrs. Sheldon not only survived her illness at Zanzibar but went on to have many more adventures in Africa.

She was not yet a widow when she started out on her epic journey in 1891 and, most importantly, Mrs. Mary [or May] French-Sheldon, known to the Africans as "Bebe Bwana", in 1910, became the one of the first women to be appointed a Fellow of the Geographical Society.

She had already travelled around the world by the age of sixteen and later qualified as a medical doctor, ran a publishing company and wrote several books. She was friends with the explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, and was one of the few people not to condemn him over the atrocities with which he was reportedly connected in the Congo.

Mrs. Sheldon’s best-known work is a well-illustrated book about her first foray, called “Sultan to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and other tribes of East Africa 1892”. From her book, it seems her ambition to take women porters wasn’t all that successful, as she says :

Although I had been strongly advised to take women porters to wash and for other duties, I found the few that I had were a perpetual nuisance. They were always inciting disputes among the porters, and resorted to all sorts of measures to win from them portions of food and other things which they coveted.

She goes to describe one tiny woman who ate so much she ended up “like a fatted pig” by the end of the safari and who was always in danger of being washed away when they crossed rivers so that Mrs Sheldon had to detail a male porter to look after her.



Unnamed female porters

However, I have this to say of the women porters, they compared admirably with the men both in staying qualities and strength, doing their day’s march with no more complaining, besides having superficial duties either incumbent upon them or volunteered, which the men had not.

One worthy addition to Mrs. Sheldon’s book is that unlike the books of most male explorers, she has taken the trouble to carefully list all 153 names of every porter or askari (soldier) who helped her.
Maybe there is some descendant in East Africa who knows what happened to some of the five women porters: Lidia, Beda, Suzzan, Burt Hamis and Burt Hamis Mzuria, but it is most unlikely as native people like them who helped white explorers are all long lost to history.

Mrs. Sheldon’s unique cane and bamboo palanquin was designed by her friend Henry S. Wellcome (founder of the pharmaceutical company that is now GlaxoSmithKline) and it was described in one newspaper report as containing all the comforts and luxuries of a Pullman palace car. There has probably been nothing quite like it in African safaris, before or since! On one occasion, a 15ft long python took a fancy to it and on waking up to discover this giant creature wrapped over her gave even the tough and redoubtable Mrs. Sheldon a case of the vapours!

Mrs. Sheldon's book can be found at the Internet Archive, and she is also the subject of a recent feminist biography "The White Queen" by Tracey Jean Boisseau, published by Indiana University Press.

All images from "Sultan to Sultan" and the Library of Congress.



Mrs. Sheldon's Guns



From the cave to the pole?

This wonderful cartoon image by Australian illustrator Matt Davidson says something about the achievements of feminism since the days of the cave-persons. It is amusing, but also rather alarming. What would the sufragettes have thought about a generation of women who think that sliding around almost naked on a pole is some kind of achievement for female equality?  Are we in danger of joining a slippery slide back to the caves? The article by Ardyn Bernoth that accompanies the cartoon can be read here.

Queens of Coal

There is currently a special exhibition on at the UK National Coal Mining Museum on the Coal Queen Beauty Pageant which ran in the 1970s and 1980s, but this seems such superficial objectification-of-women nonsense when compared to the backbreaking work of these girls' bucket-carrying female ancestors who are the true queens of coal and who worked in and around the collieries of Great Britain during the 19th century.

Up until 1842, women and children worked underground for a pittance doing hard labour that even robust men avoided or would find difficult. Some women actually wielded picks, but most were just treated as beasts of burden. They carried coal in baskets on their backs as they climbed up stairs out of the mine and in some collieries, they even had chains around their waists in order to haul wagons through narrow passages on all fours. Conditions were abysmal, the working day was long and there were no occupational health and safety regulations, and women and children were almost considered dispensible by many colliery owners. The accident rate was high - from falls or encounters with machinery and railtracks - some of which might have occurred due to the cumbersome female clothing of the era. Testimony evidence given to the Ashley Commission makes for distressing reading. Some women endured miscarriages as a result of the work and even after giving birth they would be expected to be back at work the next day. Some examples of the evidence can be read on the Victorian Web here

After the 1842 reforms initiated by Lord Shaftesbury came into force, women and children were banned from working underground but they were given other surface jobs such as sorting and screening coal by hand. But this was also arduous dirty work and they still had to carry coal in baskets on their backs. 

A DVD has been produced by a local English history group about these often-forgotten women. To the men they might have been called the "Pit Brow Lasses", but they really were Coal Queens.

Pressgangs and Poetry

As often happens when going in search of women whose achievements have been obscured by history, the route can be an interesting and serendipitous journey in itself. After reviewing “A Merciless Place” in my previous post, I was intrigued to find out more about any individuals – men or women - who had endured and survived the late 18th and early 19th century tragedies and horrors of West Africa as so vividly described in that book. One diversion led me to the Royal Naval doctor in Sierra Leone, Dr Thomas Masterman Winterbottom, an early researcher into sleeping sickness and later founder of the South Shields Maritime College (now South Tyneside College), among his numerous achievements. Clearly he survived “the white man's grave” as he lived to the ripe old age of 93.

Photo courtesy Edward Kirton

But in the process, I stumbled upon a legendary woman whom I really ought to have known more about, given my own family links to Dr Winterbottom's home town of Arbeia (South Shields) but who was perhaps considered persona non grata by earlier generations of town councillors and has only in recent years come into her own right, being commemorated in a statue by Billy Gofton raised in 1987 on the Lawe Top overlooking what would have been her old haunts.

Dorothy (Dolly) Peel (1782-1857) has become part of Tyneside folklore and as inevitably happens in such instances, reports of her activities must be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. The following extracts from The Borough of South Shields, published 1903 by George B. Hodgson, are the main source of information about her. 

"... Dolly Peel, a fishwife, who in the days before free trade did not scruple to eke out a livelihood by hoodwinking the excise officers, and smuggling ashore brandy, tobacco, cigars, lace, scents— in fact, anything dutiable. She did quite an extensive trade in the contraband way, and would take - and execute - orders for any excisable article that might be required. She was a strong, muscular woman, and absolutely fearless, as the pressgang more than once discovered. A gang was one day in hot pursuit of her husband, who managed to reach home — an upper flat in Shadwell Street. Dolly, singlehandly kept the pressgang at bay until her husband got out of the window on to the roof. He was captured at last and sent on board a man-o'-war, where Dolly accompanied him. When he was in action Dolly was with him and rendered service in the cockpit*. She had a nerve of iron. Had she been an educated woman she might have made a reputation as a poetess. As it was, she was famous for her ability to rhyme extempore on any subject. She composed an address in poetry congratulating Mr. Robert Ingham (with whom she was a great favourite) on his return as the first M.P. for South Shields; also a song on the loss of the barque Dove of Sunderland, laden with Russian tallow, which came ashore on the Herd Sand on November 20, 1836. It was a very hard winter for the 'Townenders,' as the inhabitants living at the 'low end' of the town were called by Shields folk, and Dolly made it appear that the wreck of the 'Russian tallowship' as it was called, was a special dispensation of Providence to help them."   [* In this definition, cockpit means the compartment below waterline in old warships where the wounded were taken and treated during a battle.] 

and

"What is believed to have been the last severe 'press' in South Shields was made at the outbreak of the war with America in June 1812, when the most stringent methods were adopted to secure men. For instance, it was a regular practice, when the Tyne collier fleets made Flamborough Head, for the convoy to bring the ships up and board every vessel. It was during this press that the famous encounter took place in Military Road, South Shields, between the press-gang, locally known as 'Hunter's Gang' from the commander of the shore party, and one Ralph Peel, the husband of the still more famous Dolly Peel, who is said to have followed her husband aboard on one occasion when he was pressed, and served with him in the Navy. On this occasion the shore gang was reinforced by a detachment from the receiving ship in Peggy's Hole. A great crowd collected, and a serious disturbance ensued, during which it was alleged that a pistol was fired, the bullet passing through the lapel of an officer's coat. On another evening, a boat's crew from the receiving ship landed at the Coble Landing in Pilot Street, and, each armed with a cutlass, made a clean sweep of all the young and middle-aged men, wearing the bluejacket and trousers of the seaman, found in the Low Street, carrying them all aboard. At this time, when the whole Mercantile Marine and Transport service of Great Britain only employed 120,000 men, it was estimated that at least 40,000 British seamen were manning American vessels in order to avoid impressment."

Dolly's husband is called Ralph Peel in this account but, according to both the 1841 and 1851 Census Returns, he was a Mariner named Cuthbart, born in 1781, and the couple lived at addresses that certainly sound apt for smugglers – Ropery Stairs and Lookham Stairs respectively – neither of which exist in modern South Shields. Cuthbart died in 1856 and Dolly a year later.

As to the suggestion that Dolly nicked the cargo of Dove, the Marine Intelligence column of The  Newcastle Courant, 25 November 1836 doesn't mention it – or maybe the lesser part not recovered was Dolly's doings.

"The Dove, Adamson, of Sunderland from St Petersburg with hemp and tallow bound to London sprung a leak at sea and endeavouring to get into this port on Sunday last, got upon the Herd Sand at the entrance to Shields Harbour. The crew, with a great part of the cargo, is saved."

Another Courant report from June 1849, lists Dolly attending court as the aggrieved party in an assault by one Elizabeth Morton, “an old offender”, in which Dolly was awarded the princely sum of five shillings plus costs. Two fighting fishwives – one of whom was nortorious for taking on the pressgangers - was probably something to steer well clear of.

Why she was a “great favourite” of the local MP isn't detailed and a little puzzling, even if politicians in those days could be less guarded about their friendships than modern ones.

Maybe she supplied him with favours in the way of cheap baccy and booze as, judging from her gummy photograph from the Newcastle Libraries collection, her attractions were unlikely to be of the more salacious variety!

If anyone reading this knows whether Dolly's poetry still exists and/or where it may be found, please contact me. 

"A Merciless Place"

Most Australians will be aware of the background to the First Fleet of 1788 – that it was England's way of getting rid of her undesirables by sending them as far away from the mother country as possible. They may also know that prior to this, convicts were sent to America but that the practice was forcibly ended after the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

“A Merciless Place” by Emma Christopher tells the story of what happened to some of these men (and a handful of women) in the intervening years, and it makes for both powerful and disturbing reading. While the first years at Sydney Cove have often been described as hellish, they couldn't possibly have been as bad as West Africa.
The slave-exporting Gold Coast was feared by Europeans as one of the deadliest places on earth and became known as the “white man's grave”. Its intense heat and humidity were notorious. Diseases like yellow fever, dysentery and typhoid were rampant. Add the avarice, greed and brutal savagery of slave-dealing, plus superstition, tribal and racial conflicts, and it is inevitable that the worst of human behaviour will come to the fore.
Introduce to this already-deadly mix shiploads of harshly treated, poorly nourished men and boys from English cities who are forced to become convict soldiers rather than face the hulks or the gallows. Some of them are hardened criminals, others just innocent victims of fate and a cruel justice system. They are transported in slave ships, are expected to guard slaves, yet are slaves themselves - some even suffer the greatest indignity of all, flogging by slaves.
Most die within a few weeks or months of their arrival. Officers who survive become corrupt, dealing in slaves on the side. It is inevitable that mutiny threatens and discipline breaks down in the ranks, with even more suffering by way of starvation and punishment at the hands of guards who had themselves been thieves and murderers. The few who escape often do so by sheer luck, cunning or ruthlessness, by defecting to piracy or to Britain's enemies, the Dutch.
Emma Christopher's historical research is thorough, meticulous and detailed, but it is not light reading and the litany of disaster and inhumanity can numb the reader after a while. The impact of the book is best where she gives us insight into the stories of specific individuals such as the upper-class conman of many aliases, William Murray Mackenzie. He was transported first to Virginia, then Africa. His gruesome death at the hands of a relative and one of the scheme's founders, Kenneth Mackenzie, is particularly shocking even for the cruel age in which they lived.
A positive aspect to this enterprise - if there could be such a thing - is that the authorities were reluctant to send women convicts into this inferno of depravity and only a few women's names are mentioned. Another who had originally been sentenced to Africa was "Hell Fire Moll", or Mary Humphries. She was fortunate to be despatched to New South Wales instead where she later married another First Fleeter, John King.
This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand more of the background to the origins of the First Fleet. It also expands on the even lesser-known history that when the African experiment was seen to be failing, convict ships were diverted to the Mosquito Coast of Central America and Honduras (Belize). An exploration was also undertaken as to a possible convict settlement at the mouth of the Orange River on the border of what is now Namibia and South Africa, but the land proved too barren to support a colony.
In sheer desperation to solve the convict problem for once and all the British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, took up the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks and others to try Botany Bay, and thus it was that on 13 May 1787 the approximately 1,000 individuals destined to become Australia's founding fathers and mothers finally set sail for New South Wales.

Misplaced feminine zeal - Order of the White Feather

The 100th anniversary of the First World War is only a few years away, and there will no doubt be many memorial events when that occurs. From this historic perspective, we can find it difficult to understand the thinking of that era, that whole populations would accept their governments' decisions so readily and that nations would rush headlong into hell before exploring every possible diplomatic solution to avoid conflict.

That particular War is also well known for the devil-may-care attitude of many of the young men of the time who thought it would be a “lark” and went off on what they thought would be a great adventure only to be brutally maimed, gassed, sent mad, or have their lives cut short in the most horrific and barbaric of situations. Its repercussions flowed for decades afterwards.
The War was also a watershed in the advancement of women, in that many of them stepped in and took over male jobs for the first time and proved that they were far tougher and more resilient than the “feeble” stereotype so beloved of Victorian and Edwardian men.
However, not all women did their bit in practical and admirable ways and some became involved in a shameful organisation that caused untold psychological damage to not only the men who became its victims, but to subsequent generations of their families. It was known as the Active Service League and its “award” was the Order of the White Feather – white feathers being presented in public places to men who were perceived to be cowards.
Surprisingly, one of its founders was the Tasmanian-born and ardent anti-suffragist, Mrs Humphrey Ward (Mary Augusta), whose family included such famous literary figures as Matthew Arnold and Aldous Huxley.
It seems remarkable today that a woman of high intellect committed to social reform for women and children such as Mrs Ward could have thought that financial, military, constititutional, and international problems could only be solved by men!

Another prominent woman who was anti-suffrage and became involved was Baroness Orczy, the popular author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel" books, and she hoped to recruit more than 100,000 women to the cause of shaming men into volunteering for the War.

Eventually, the practice of presenting men with white feathers as a symbol of their cowardice at not being in uniform got out of hand and it became necessary for returned soldiers, often wounded or invalided home, and men in protected industries to be issued with special pins so that they wouldn't be accosted in the street by zealous females keen to show them up.

There aren't any really good websites detailing the activities of the League, but some basic information about the white feather movement and the distress it caused can be found here.

Many writers and film-makers have used the symbolism since the 1902 novel by A E W Mason, “The Four Feathers”, up to the 2004 novel in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear entitled “Birds of a Feather”, which also uses this practice to construct an excellent plot that is both chilling and convincing.

"Women's Melbourne" - a valuable publication and resource

Women's History Month may have just ended, but it is essential that female "herstory" continues to be brought to light, no matter the season.
There is a well-known quote by Myra and David Sadker in their salient 1994 work entitled Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls that has become almost a catchcry among those who feel passionate about how history is taught to new generations of girls: "Every time a girl reads a womanless history she learns she is worth less", and so it is wonderful to see that many historians, authors, academics and others are constantly striving to change this attitude.

A fantastic (and free!) publication was launched this week in Australia that will help to illuminate both famous and little-known women associated with the City of Melbourne. Published by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and supported by the City of Melbourne Grants Program, Heritage Victoria, and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, it was a "labour of love" of the National Trust's Senior Historian, Celestina Sagazio, and is entitled Women's Melbourne.
The book is most entertaining, informative and well-illustrated, and gives suggestions for a series of self-guided walking tours of Melbourne streets that focus on the women associated with them. There are buildings that once housed world-famous Melburnians such as Dame Nellie Melba and Helen Reddy, while others are primarily best known to Australians such as soon-to-be Saint Mary McKillop and Caroline Chisholm.
It is fascinating to learn new and interesting facts about women from every walk of life from prostitutes and madams to socialites and sufragettes, from artists and architects to doctors and politicians, and no doubt some of the women I have personally discovered for the first time in the pages of Women's Melbourne will inspire future blogs. (A previous subject - Nellie Stewart - is associated with a number of the sites mentioned including the Princess Theatre and the demolished Melbourne High School.)
Congratulations to Celestina and all those who assisted her in this excellent work.