QI The Book of the Dead

she reacted angrily. She was no feminist: she disparaged agitators for equal rights as ‘androgynes’ or ‘men-women’. ‘As for encasing the more earthward extremities of my anatomy in trousers,’ she wrote in Travels in West Africa , ‘I would rather have perished on a scaffold.’ Despite this ardent assertion of her womanhood, she never came close to marrying, and her one serious crush (on Matthew Nathan, the acting governor of Sierra Leone) went unrequited. Perhaps her ‘maiden aunt’ persona put him off. In Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), he tells a revealing story. He first met Mary at one of his own aunt’s tea parties and was so entranced by her that he offered to walk her home. When the conversation strayed to cannibalism, he invited her up to his rooms ‘to talk it out there’. Mary at first accepted the invitation, ‘as a man would’, and then suddenly remembered herself: ‘Oh, I forgot I was a woman.’ Fraid I mustn’t.’ Is there a faint hint of flirtation here? Kipling doesn’t say. It’s more likely that her time in Africa had blunted her English social radar. She once wrote to a friend that she did not go to Africa as a ‘tonic’. Rather, after the trauma of her parents’ deaths, she thought ‘having been for so many years so close to death and danger in the most dreadful form they can come to one, namely the fight for the life of one we love, that a mere English social life was, and ever will remain, an impossibility to me, so I went off to carry on the old fight, where it is at its thickest, in the Terrible Bight of Benin.’ Like Peary and his Arctic, Mary had found her soul mate in a place rather than a person.
    In 1899 she set out for Africa for the last time. Her objectivewas to collect samples of freshwater fish for the British Museum from the Orange River in South Africa, and then make her way ‘home’ to West Africa. However, by the time she arrived, the Anglo-Boer War had broken out. Mary volunteered as a nurse and was sent to tend injured Boer prisoners of war in Simon’s Town camp near Cape Town. The conditions were dreadful and disease was rife. Mary drank wine in place of water to reduce the risk of infection but it was to no avail; within a few months she succumbed to typhoid. She died alone, asking her nurses to leave the room as she was dying. Only thirty-seven years old, she was buried at sea, as she had requested; but with full military honours, which she had not. It was not quite the end of the story. The coffin was insufficiently weighted and bobbed off over the waves. A lifeboat had to be launched in pursuit and the casket dispatched to the deep by attaching anchors to it. Mary Kingsley had never been easy to pin down.

     
    If Genghis Khan sought power, Peary fame and Mary Kingsley freedom, what drove the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was knowledge. Explorer, geographer, cartographer, geologist, mineralogist, botanist, sociologist and volcanologist, he is a giant of nineteenth-century science, linking the heroic voyages of Captain Cook and the conceptual revolution of Charles Darwin. He died just six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, but without him, it might never have been written. When Darwin boarded the Beagle in 1826 he had Humboldt’s Personal Narrative tucked into his knapsack, a book he was still reading and re-reading (and still taking notes from) right up until his death in 1882. ‘He was the greatesttravelling scientist who ever lived,’ Darwin wrote in his diary. ‘I have always admired him; now I worship him.’ He wasn’t the only one. Goethe claimed that he had learned more in an hour’s conversation with Humboldt than in eight days of studying books. Thomas Jefferson counted him a close friend and sought his advice on what vines to plant at his country estate in Virginia. By his early thirties, Humboldt was said to be the second-mostfamous man in the world after Napoleon. When the two met briefly in 1804, the yet-to-be-crowned Emperor greeted him patronisingly: ‘You collect plants, Monsieur?’ When Humboldt modestly agreed that he did, Napoleon turned smartly on his heel with a curt ‘So does my wife!’ He later tried to deport him as a spy.
    Humboldt did a very great deal more than ‘collect plants’. His name is in every botany and biology textbook – as well as every atlas – in the world. He has a penguin named after him, and a