QI The Book of the Dead

her mother and bellowing, ‘Where does this child get her language?’ When she was old enough Mary ran the household, nursing her mother and bringing up her brother Charley. She was fiercely intelligent, teaching herself to read and working her way through all the literature in the house, mastering Latin, German, physics and chemistry and losing herself in the lives of renowned explorers. As she later wrote: ‘I had a great amusing world of my own other people did not know or care about – the books in my father’s library.’ Soon she was acting as her father’s assistant, cataloguing the scientific and anthropological specimens he sent back from his travels. Though physically rooted in north London, Mary’s imagination was travelling the world.
    While her contemporaries went to dances and got engaged, she stayed home and studied. By 1887 her mother needed constant nursing. Mary consoled herself by learning Arabic and Syrian. Then in one six-week period in 1892 her whole life changed. Her father died suddenly of rheumatic fever and her mother followed soon afterwards. Mary, at thirty years of age, found herself without any obligations for the very first time.
    What she decided to do with that freedom was to go to West Africa – the most dangerous and mysterious place on earth –entirely on her own. She planned to fund her travels by trading in ivory and tobacco, eating the local food and staying in the houses of native people. For a young Englishwoman of limited means, this was brave bordering on reckless, but Mary was determined. She sent letters of introduction to traders, government officials and missionaries and solicited advice from everyone she could find. One old Africa hand gave it to her straight: ‘When you have made up your mind to go to West Africa the very best thing you can do is to get it unmade again and go to Scotland instead.’
    Mary refused to be put off. The reason for her journey was ‘the pursuit of fish and fetish’. The fishes were for Dr Günther of the British Museum and the fetishes were to enable her to complete her father’s study of primitive religion. Her extensive reading had prepared her well for what awaited her. One story that made a particular impression was that of the Dutch explorer, Alexandrine Tinné (1835–69), who had set out twenty-five years earlier to become the first European woman to cross the Sahara – but she got drawn into a vicious tribal altercation among the Tuareg and ended up with her hands chopped off and left to die by her guides. This persuaded Mary she needed to travel light and to be properly equipped. She landed in Africa in August 1893 with one suitcase, a holdall, a large bowie-knife and a revolver.
    As for attire, she made no concession to the climate: she had always worn black silk and saw no reason to change. In her voluminous, high-collared, cinch-waisted dresses and little black hat, she looked as though she was about to take a hansom to the West End rather than a dug-out up the Ogooué River. This worked to her advantage: wherever she went she was instantly recognisable. Businesslike, humorous and unflappable in the face of danger, she would march into remote jungle villages with acheery ‘It’s only me!’ In a canoe on the Congo River a crocodile reared up over the boat’s stern. She whacked him on the snout with a paddle and sent him packing. Confronted by a leopard about to pounce, she coolly lobbed a large earthenware pot, which ‘burst on the leopard’s head like a shell’. Her friend Rudyard Kipling shook his head in wonderment. ‘Being human,’ he said, ‘she must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was.’
    Her two long journeys in 1893 and 1894 explored what are now Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gabon. She became the first woman to climb the active volcano Mount Cameroon (4,095 m or 13,435 ft). To her deep disgust, the summit was wreathed in thick cloud, robbing her of her main object in going up it, which was ‘to get a good view’. Of more than a hundred fauna samples she collected for the British Museum, there were eighteen species of reptile and sixty-five species of fish, seven of which were new to science and three of which have since been named after her. She was also one of the first Europeans to see the mythical gorilla with her own eyes. ‘Never have I seen anything to equal gorillas going through the bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly perfect hand-trapeze