Aww, the sweet feeling of predictability. Theresa starts us off with, the particularly unhinged story of Jeanne de Clisson, the Lion of Brittany. This female French pirate was an absolute menace for 13 years as she pillaged her countrymen in a revenge plot.
Angie, is well, the sweet amazing soul she is, week after week, as she shares the story of Mary Kingsley. This Victorian adventurer makes a name for herself trekking through Africa and hanging out with cannibals.
This story pairs well with:
Catalina de Erauso, the lieutenant nun
Transcript:
Hi and welcome to the Unhinged History Podcast. The podcast where two compulsive nutjobs were doom scrolling one day, reading the history memes and then rabbit-holing about those memes and then joining forces tell each other the memes about the stories we’ve only recently learned and one day we decided to record said conversation. I’m host one. I’m host two. I’m Angie.
That’s Teresa. Oh hey look we can do that. We have names. Do we? I do. All right.
I’ll go with it. I mean I often hate toots or sister or whistle sounds but you know whatever. I mean shoot I think most of the things I’m called are bleeped out on polite television. I was going to say you have a name for radio and then I realized that doesn’t work.
No it’s just beep and sheet beep. Yeah you know. That’s I don’t know what do you want me to say?
Richard Poo. Let me talk into my coffee cup and not into the microphone. I’m sorry I’m still I’m still drinking hot beverages like I’m never going to get another hot beverage again. So I apologize.
I mean you are just coming off of a cold where you would just text me and go can we delay recording. You don’t want to hear me speak. You think you do but you do not want to hear me speak. I can assure you you did not. Like this is the very best I’ve sounded in ten days. Several of those days I had almost no voice and when I did I could get like three words out it was a croak and then I would just die after that like there’d be no words after that. That’s how you get through with not doing your notes is you just so I was doing it.
Yeah. Honestly I like that for you. My notes are fabulous. Okay well I’m going to tell you my notes then. Yeah let’s go. Okay I’m going to tell you the story of Jean-Déclissons. Okay.
Okay. My sources, Library of Congress, French Women and Feminists in History, a resource guide. Jean-Déclissons. Jean-Déclissons, The Lioness of Brittany by M.A.
Delaney. Okay so I listed a couple of podcasts. I dipped into the Poisoner’s Cabinet, Episode 229, Jean-Déclissons, Lioness of Brittany and then there is the Queen’s podcast.
They did an episode on her as well. And so I’m going to take you all the way back to your 1300. I love this. Okay so we’re in Brittany. She’s born, she’s of noble birth. Maybe a lesser noble but still a noble? We’ll take even the lesser. Noble is a noble. Right. Blue-ish blood, blue enough. Yeah.
Works for me. She is Jean-Louise Boren in Brentville. Apparently she comes from a line of salt farmers. Oh. I don’t know why that was never a job that was in my wheelhouse. You know it should have been in mine but I immediately dipped back to the moisture farmers of Luke Skywalker’s lineage. Yeah, gross. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don’t know why but that was related. These are things. So when she hits the ripe old age of 12, our girl gets married. Oh, of course. He’s a 19-year-old dude. He’s previously been married because… Oh. These are things. The plague.
You know, I don’t… Yeah, maybe. I didn’t see that anywhere but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. Because he’s already gotten one notch under his belt, he already has a kid that he brings to the marriage. And their marriage lasts just over four years.
Great. During this time, they have two kids. He fights in quite a few local skirmishes and while he’s gone, she’s manning the fort. Like, she’s literally being the lady of the land. And so we’re thinking like age 14, she’s managing an estate. Don’t we all wish we could manage something at age 14 only to realize at age 30 that we could have just had a bedtime that would have been fine. Yeah, that’s literally all we need.
I just want to nap and somebody to make my snack. Please and thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome. I don’t need to be in charge. Mm-hmm. But as her dude is off fighting all these skirmishes, he dies.
Oh, that’s unfortunate. And so she gets married again. This time she gets married to the son of the Duke of Brittany.
Okay. So he is…this is a very fortuitous marriage. This is her moving right on up in the world. That marriage gets annulled, which is weird. That’s unfortunate. And there seems to be that this was some kind of like political maneuvering bits.
Okay. That, you know, maybe because he is the son of the Duke of Brittany, that they could have gotten him a more advantageous marriage. And yeah, so she’s cute, but you could marry this other person and do better by your family.
Who has more acres and more castles and more servants. I mean, whatever it is, right? I mean, this is one of those big reasons why… Who’s dad I play poker with on Tuesdays. Right. And you can’t shun the family.
Right. So, you know, that seems really bizarre as far as, you know, getting that done. They get the annulment set up, so she just goes through it. But she’s still got some wealth from hubby number one. She’s got a couple kids.
And then she meets this man named Oliver de Cason in 1330. He’s wealthy. He’s got a son from a previous marriage. Now, there’s actually some kind of ambiguity here because they’re going to go on to have five kids.
There’s possibly the fact that maybe she had her first son with Oliver while married to husband number one. Unclear. Okay. So just because they got married in 1330 does not mean that that was the first time they shacked up. Gotcha.
Okay. So there might be some fuzzy birthdays. You know, it’s like on your wedding day when it’s like, when’s the baby two?
Only in this case it was how old are you? Oh, I see. Yeah. So hold on to that. Oh, sorry.
You look just like her new husband. Yeah. So that’s kind of a fun thing. Hold on to that though. We don’t know a ton about the relationship, but the, it’s easy to note that the annulment went through and then very quickly things line up because Oliver’s wife dies just the year before.
So this isn’t his first rodeo either. So their marriage is very likely a love match. I like this. It’s at least a like match.
It’s a like match at least. And then there’s this line, which comes on the heels of that last sentence. She insists on a pre-nump. Yeah, girl.
Which I did not know 1300s pre-numps for things. She demands that he provides for the children of her previous marriage. Good.
Which I am here for. Together they go on to have a sizable chunk of land because she’s got her land. He’s got his they’ve got theirs. She’s controlling areas in a in point two.
That’s probably not how you say it. And Oliver is holding a castle at Cassonne along with other territories. And like I said, they have five children between them. Ambiguous ages of the first one. Okay, I love this. So despite them being in love, she does take him to court for failing to meet expectations.
That I find more impressive than having a pre-nump in the 1300s. She doesn’t believe he’s providing for his stepchildren. And there’s also this little matter of the dowry that he owes her.
And the king is so assuming she has no father at this point. Did we did did that? I just completely missed that part. I mean, I’m I didn’t go that deep into this.
I mean, I figured I had a lot of details for 1300s. I did not think I was going to be quizzed on when did daddy dearest I mean that’s fair. I was just thinking like the the logistics of her first husband dying. Like wouldn’t she have gone right back into the protection of her father who then would have made the next advantageous match.
Right. Like, I mean, she got the son of the Duke of Brittany. I mean, I think she was doing pretty good on her own.
I mean, maybe dad did help out with that. I don’t know. Anyhow, wait a minute, but I like it either way. She is going after her.
How about me? She is setting herself up like she is getting what’s hers. So the king is exciting with her and giving her forcing hubby to do right by her and honor his word.
But okay, so there’s that, but I’m going to back up a second because there’s a lot of like now we’re going to go back. So 1328. We have Charles IV of France who dies childless being the closest heir his nephew, the English king, which is Edward III. Now, the French nobility, they’re like, no, no, no, no, no, no, Eddie III and our king because.
We didn’t go for him. Pretty much, right? They think that there needs to be a native Frenchman who rules that you can’t just have some Englishman just sitting up on your throne saying he’s king and calling it that. And so they end up having a very bloody long lasting conflict that would come to be known as 100 years for even though this sucker last 116 years because. 116 years war is hard to like get out of the. I mean, I was kind of equating it to any kind of construction work you have done around the house.
It’s always more expensive and it takes longer than whatever they tell you. Yeah. Yeah. So as this is going on, there’s also a parallel conflict, which is the war of Bretton succession. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. So there’s a couple of things happening simultaneously. And so we have 1341. We’ve got the Duke of Brittany, who is John III, daddy, the Duke of Brittany, who, you know, finished like having like marriage number two.
I could say hubby number two because that’s not true. That guy, that guy lived, but he dies without an error. So I don’t know what happened. Maybe she got out of that marriage and everybody underneath him collapsed like a flan in the cupboard, unclear. But it plunges that region of the country into turmoil. Charles DeBoy, the husband of John III’s niece, Johanna, he ends up seceding the Duke of Brittany.
I’m going to need you to draw me a map. So. So John III, the Duke of Brittany, his niece is Johanna. But John III is the Duke of Brittany’s son, who was originally married to our girl.
Our girl. I don’t know. I didn’t figure out what happened to him. But I don’t know if I’ve got it. I just was a little confused for a second. You know, chicks can inherit. So Johanna like inherits the man who marries me gets title.
Love this for her. I don’t. What if she won’t be like. I’m being sarcastic. Oh, okay. Because imagine man who marries me gets the title directly translates to I am now forever in a bidding war for my title.
Yeah. Like I, the opportunity to marry for love is like almost done. It’s a foregone conclusion.
I would have to think so unless like the stars align just right. But anyhow, so. Joanna and her hubby, they assume the position and they get a lot of support from French nobility, right? But we have John’s, Jonathan’s half brother who kind of opposes Charles’s right as Duke. And so he petitions the English King because everybody can’t keep their fingers in their own politics for support.
And so now we’ve got two different conflicts that are feeding this political turmoil. Right. Okay. Okay.
So basically politics in France at this time is not a very fun place to be. This feels right. Yeah. I mean probably Britain and France at the same time are probably really. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So Oliver, just because I’ve said a ton of names, who is our girl, Jean’s husband, third husband. Who she like marriage.
Yeah, she loves this dude. Okay. He sides with the French. His brother is on the bridge. Oh, of course. And Oliver gets captured by the English and then he gets released. He ends up having like this really low ransom. He’s released for a dude who is the first oral staffer. And like a prisoner swap. Yeah, basically. But he also like there’s also like a little bit of a fee attached to it as well with a suspiciously low ransom. Matter of fact. Meanwhile, why is it suspiciously?
That is hilarious. Well, okay. So that little, that little details can be super important here in like a paragraph. So stick with me. Okay. Okay. Sorry.
I just immediately thought of Caesar was like, what’s suspiciously low, Teresa? Well, okay. So put a pen in that. Put a pen in that. Okay.
Because there’s a dude who’s captured alongside our dude Oliver and he’s never released. So this is kind of, you know, raise an eyebrow. The kids say this is us. Okay. Okay. So that’s happening. And we get Charles Debois. He’s not too keen on Oliver now. He’s like, he used to be my dude, but now I’m kind of concerned that this might be a setup. Like perhaps he could be a plant. Like maybe he could have turned coded and now be a spy. Maybe.
If you need help. I mean, I wouldn’t say blink twice. I would more say you turned on me. You rat bastard. You rat bastard.
Got it. So it’s now 1343. The English and the French have signed a truce and they said they’re going to celebrate the tournament. Okay. So this is looking good.
Ish. The French King invites Oliver and about 12 to 14 other minor lords, depending on what text you read to a tournament in Paris. Small problem. There’s no actual tournament.
It’s a trap. And all of the lords are accused of treason. So you let me get excited for a tournament story. And I lifted your hopes just high enough to smash them on the rocks of disappointment. I was really hoping the black knight was going to enter and save the day, but like whatever.
I mean, okay. So back home, Jean is frantic. She’s home with the kids and she is not having a good day. She’s doing everything she can to stay up off these legal battles. She’s trying to get a stay and she ends up even bribing the guards to help him escape. She is doing everything. Now she’s ended up getting discovered that she’s bribing the guards to help him escape and the guards get in big trouble for this and she flees doesn’t get caught, but she’s tried in absentia and found guilty.
Okay. And just like her trial happening without her, you know, his Oliver’s trial is also sham. So he gets tried next without any evidence. He’s convicted and beheaded.
His head is sitting in Brittany and it’s put on a spike. Yeah. Okay.
You’ve heard this part of the story. I’m ringing bells. Yeah. Okay. I was going to say I have a question, but I didn’t want to like blow it.
So I just be excitedly gasping. She takes her young sons to go see the head. As you do. And she makes her sons swear an oath of revenge against the king. That’s intense. I mean this girl, she does not go half hearted on anything. Meanwhile, the king is busy seizing her lands to fund his war efforts.
How did you do? And so she decides to do the next logical thing. She sells everything that she can get her hands on. Okay. And she manages to raise the force of 400 men. Okay. And then she leads this army and she starts attacking many French strongholds, including allegedly a place called the Chateau de Tofou, a garrison that is owned by a friend of hers and also an officer of Charles de Bois or de Blois.
I don’t think I said the L before. During which her army massacres the entire garrison except for one survivor. Her army just rampages along the Normandy coast, burning many villages to the ground. She does buta cause this place. Love this for her.
Now some sources say when she goes up to the Chateau she goes up by herself. Like to just ring the bell. Like hello. You remember me? Hi. Yeah. So why don’t you open it for me?
Oh it’s open. Bois who just comes swarming out of the trees. Love this visual. Yes.
I’m picturing her in like 1950s housewife attire. Oh really? Yeah. The Bois fringe. Yeah.
No I’m here for it. I can’t think that it’s period accurate but honestly for the remake we’re just going to… Yeah. It’s not period accurate at all but like I’m just seeing it, you know? Yeah. So during this rampage the king hears about it because she’s leaving a sole survivor at each place.
Oh my God I love that for her. Just to leave a message. Yes. I want to make sure you know it was me. Hi. We’re playing phone tag. I’ve called a couple of times. I texted you an email.
You can put my last email. Tool circle back. So the king he decides that he wants to stop her because apparently this is how you get her to stop her shenanigans.
Like you have to escalate to this kind of thing before he stops leaving you on red. So she decides she’s going to push out to sea and she sails off to England and she meets King Eddie III. And Eddie III is pretty excited by meeting her. As he’s meeting her, it’s 1343 now, our girl is found guilty of treason and this results in the confiscation of the rest of her lands that she hadn’t maybe sold or hadn’t previously been seized. Meanwhile, King Eddie III is like doing the most because he ends up granting her income from lands in Brittany, English owned lands. Well, because I’m thinking like Eddie III is probably stoked. She’s caught like she has to work for him. Right. So he’s basically giving her like some money because she needs it. And she takes the money from Eddie III and she buys three merchant ships and she buys merchant ships because they’re faster. This is a genius.
Okay. She paints the ships black and she dyes the sails red. I did not know that fact.
She names the flag. That is so menacing. Oh my gosh. This girl, she just knows how to tell a good story. Leaving the ones soul survivor.
Just doing the sole rampage off the coast. Like she names the flag of her black fleet. My revenge. Yes.
Yes. And then she sails the English Channel looking for French commerce ships and she’s actively avoiding the Navy. Her ship. As opposed to Kim Chaka who is actively trying to find the Navy. And hitting fishing vessels.
Every time. Or their own vessels. You know. But anyhow, so she’s doing this thing with her ships where they would corner a commerce ship and then her men would swarm aboard and then she’d board the boat to the ship with an axe. And she’d look through the crew and identify any French nobles and she’d be had the nobles first herself.
Yes. And then reportedly she would kick their bodies overboard and then they’d loot the ships and kill everybody but one person. So they don’t burn the ships. They just leave the one. The one that steer the wheel.
Yeah. The one that goes God. She blessed. But she wanted to do the nobles first because she wanted the nobles to know they were no better than the lowly men and that they weren’t going to be able to talk their way out of it. Love this for her.
I mean honestly she just went so hard. It is so lovely. When I told you the story I was just like I’m back. I found my old groove. This is me back on my bullshit.
I am here for this. I missed your bullshit. So she goes through and hunting these ships for 13 years. She’s on her bullshit. She’s on her bullshit for 13 years. And this earns her the moniker the lioness of Brittany. Is that all I got to do?
It’s just 13 years of acts will be Angie. Would you just commit to the bit? I think I could. Like yeah. I mean I don’t want to be the lioness. It would go very differently if you just walked in with an axe.
Just set it down on the table. Yes. I’m your mother. You wanted to talk to me about his behavior problems.
Darling do you wait outside? Yeah that would be hilarious. I would pay to watch. Minnie how? The lioness of Brittany. If you look through her story there’s a lot of ambiguity on what’s fact, what’s fiction, what’s been legendized out of her.
Girl because she’s a legend one way or the other. I’m sure it’s hard to tell the difference. You know at some point you’ll just be like, and she would drink their blood. Honestly this checks. Yeah. I mean sure.
Why wouldn’t you? Her both called my revenge. Yeah. Like I drank it out of one of their skulls. Dive the sails red. With their blood. Girl. Didn’t want to waste.
Waste not want not. So she’s often referred to as an English privateer, but there’s no proof of such an agreement because to be a privateer was actually like you had a piece of paper for it right? Now the French historian Jean Rizart wrote in his famous Chronicles of Medieval History in the Hundred Years War that Jean had the heart of a lion and in Paris they called her the tragic widow.
Okay. Because in Paris they were like, she’s such heartbroken. Just the hysteria of heartbreak. Yeah. She’s just the antihero. I mean kind of.
Right? She’s just setting things straight. Now our story does take a turn because at one point she encounters a French naval vessel and reports are that she fights and fights.
It’s, I don’t know much about the particulars here. In fact, like I know it was around this time that the French had their first cannons on these boats, but did this boat have cannon? Did she go up against cannon? Unclear.
Gotcha. She fights and fights. They’re not prepared to stand up against a French naval ship, right? Her men are dying. Eventually she can see that her defeat is a fork on conclusion. So she boards a lifeboat and some sources say that she’s able to bring on her two sons and another source says she’s also able to squeeze on like some other surviving crew. Either way, she’s adrift in the English Channel for five or six days of rowing in the freezing cold. Her youngest son dies of exposure. She keeps him in the boat, rows back to Brittany.
When she’s in Brittany, she buries her son and then she goes back out to war. Fair. I would have done the same thing. This is the house of the dragon.
I still haven’t seen it, but these are things. But 1350, the king dies and the historical record starts getting quieter about our girl. Now we do know that she ends up meeting an English knight named Sir Walter Ben. Bentley. And Bentley ends up doing some wrestling to get some control of Jean’s lands that the king had seized, and he isn’t getting them back for her. And it’s around this time that we have the Black Death kicking off in the area.
So this is kind of a crazy time. But she seems to have had a decent life with Sir Walter Bentley. We don’t know a ton because he gets real quiet, but she dies in 1360 a few weeks apart from her husband. So she married him? Yes, she ended up marrying Sir Walter Bentley.
Her son that she had with Oliver de Clisson who stayed or who lived, his name is also Oliver. He becomes known later in life as the butcher due to his brutality in battle. Oh, and who he learned it from? He got it from his mama.
Yeah, he did. But that is the story of Jean de Clisson, the lioness of Brittany. Oh, that was so fun. I had no, I’m just reeling over the black ships with the red sails like that’s terrifying.
She had me at an axe. I mean, fair, totally fair. Yeah. I mean, she had me at the lioness of Brittany like I need to know the story behind that, but like I have black ships with red sails and an axe.
Yeah, I’m going to sell everything I own to raise an army of 400 men to just start burning and pillaging everything that reminds me of French nobility. Love this for her. She’s just, you know, she’s just doing what we all want to do every now and then, you know, honestly, you know, like this is my rage rooms are such a thing. So I love going to the dump. Just chuck everything in there and watch her break. Right?
Yeah, they fan. I have no idea how to segue into my story. Not a clue. Sharp departure. Sharp. Yep.
Do keep your hands and feet inside while we make this sharp left turn. My story, I’m just going to start with my my sources. Women in exploration.org. There’s a fabulous Atlas obscure article. Just going to give you the title. Mary Kingsley, Victorian female explorer. It’s kind of a boring title, but it’s it’s fun later when you know why.
Okay. This is by a towel towel homes. It was written in 2015. There is an enchanted learning dot com, which has like a breakdown of like all sort of different people. So explores is one of their categories. It’s kind of cool. So it’s just like a little blurb to kind of what your whistle and lo.org. I also wick pd add some stuff because we get into a part of British history.
I’m not really familiar with so I need to understand a little bit of timeline stuff. Okay. And my disclaimer before I actually start my story is I think I’m in a phase right now where I’m just really interested in extra nuanced people because this individual is one of them. So I just I just love her but for strange reasons. So with that being said, I’m going to tell you the story about Mary Kingsley. She so her story that I’m going to give you is only about six to seven years of her life. The rest of her life is spent sort of as a domesticated home life.
Okay. So she start her story starts in Highgate, London. She’s born on October 13 1862. Her name is Mary Henrietta Kingsley. She’s the daughter of Mary Bailey and George Kingsley.
Now George, he’s a pretty interesting fellow. Her dad, he according to Wikipedia is a writer, traveler and medical doctor. And it was him being this private physician to he catered to several aristocratic families and patrons. So in doing so, he’s well traveled.
According to again, Wikipedia, he had adapted this idea of foreign travel as a means of treatment for your ailments. Okay, now hold on. What year is this? She was born in 1862.
So this is in the years just prior and during her childhood. Okay. And I just have to say like, where do I find a doctor that tells me foreign travel will cure my problems? See, I’ve seen recent studies about that. But then the comment thread was like, okay, but where like, if I need to travel every six months to Europe for my mental health, where do I fund that?
And then also, how do I afford both it and the healthcare? That’s true. We are Americans. So he, as he’s attending his different patients, he is often traveling with them to these locations, either in an official capacity as their doctor, or as a traveling companion.
That’s how you do it. It’s, I think you’d feel better the south of France. And I should accompany you there.
You may need your vitals checked every now and then. In this fashion, he travels a good chunk of the world. And while he’s doing so, he’s reading, he’s writing, and he is learning like everything he can about the people, about the things he’s encountering, the people he’s encountering, the things that he’s seeing, but he never makes it to Africa. So when his daughter’s born, she kind of grows up as Alice Obscur says, as an armchair explorer, her dad’s library is full of all sorts of science and travel literature. She never, she’s never schooled, but that’s like, despite that fact, she’s very well educated. Like she never leaves his library and she has access to everything that he’s, he’s got in there. And so while brother does get sent off to Cambridge, she is just sent to the library. And I’m kind of ticked off about that. Like I would have liked to go on to Cambridge.
Thank you so much. But this is 1862. So were they even letting women in at the time?
I’m not sure. I don’t think so, at least maybe not in the capacity that she wanted to be in. Either way, she maybe she didn’t mind, I don’t know, but that fact will come up later. Another interesting fact that’s going to come up later and just, I just really want you to keep this particular one like on simmer on the back burner, she’s raised agnostic.
So just, just hold that, hold that thought. When she’s 26, she does leave England for a short trip to Paris, but that’s it until a few years later when unfortunately, both of her parents die like in the same year of each other. So it’s now 1892. She’s 30. Now I had mentioned earlier, you know, Papa Kingsley, he’s traveled and he studied people all over the world.
This is including places like the Pan New Zealand Australia, but he never sets foot in Africa. So Mary’s like, well, I’m sort of the only one and I’m done caring for my parents. I’m done with this domestic life.
I’m already 30. I’m going to, I’m going to do it. I’m going to study Africa. So like she kind of sets out to fill the whole of his study because he has no information to provide. So she sets off for the port of Freetown in Surleyn. And she goes about her business in a really unusual way for a lady of her position and Englishness. The other European women who are currently in West Africa at the time, they’re either missionaries or like administrators wife.
She’s neither, right? So she arrives on behalf of Hattson and Cookson. They’re a firm that works in trade. She arrives as an accredited mercantile trader. She brings credit.
Right. Like she has plans. So she brings with her standard cloth, tobacco, fish hooks. She plans to exchange this for things like ivory and rubber amongst the people she encounters. Now don’t let it totally fool you that she did take advantage of her position of being a white woman during this time in Africa. But by that, I mean to say that she uses that position to use local guides and porters to help her get around.
That feels right. Don’t think for a second that she behaved or thought like most of her European counterparts. Kinsley shows respect for the indigenous African culture she encounters as well as works to understand them. She has no problem pointing out the failures of her contemporaries in this. Like she sees the hypocrisy and she has no problem saying it like it is. In fact, she would say, quote, we belong to the same section of the human race with whom it is better to drink than to fight. And I just love her for that. I mean, you know, I’m here for that. Right.
Like, let’s do it. She knew in her time even that it was better to see Africans as friends rather than enemies. And I genuinely think that that speaks to her nature because she was so sort of cloistered, I think, in her younger life, but she had access to all of this information that dad was sending back.
Right. So she’s clearly understanding like I want to understand these people. Why would I make them my enemy?
Like why would I do things to be difficult? And like I said, she wants to study. She wants to learn. So she befriends all of the people she encounters. And so she, as she’s starting to dig in and like really begin her work, she’s taking notes, she’s looking around, she notices a handful of things like right off the bat. Firstly, she notices that the regions she’s visiting are governed by this local sort of religious aspect that includes fetishism.
Okay. I had to look this up because it’s not how we understand it today. Is the fetish going to be like a small little like greegery pouch kind of deal? It could be. So basically it’s a material object like a talisman or an amulet.
And they are like the home to supernatural forces. Some of the things I looked up suggest that there are basically two components here. You have the object like the greegery bag or the amulet that and then the force that give it that object life essentially, right?
However, right. Typically in order to activate this item, a sacrifice must be made. I’m unclear what the sacrifice is and if it’s different for different things. But she notices this and she’s, I think she’s kind of taken by it. The other thing that she notes is that quote, there are neither asylums, prisons, nor workhouses, yet the same classes, the Sikhs, the criminal and idol exists and under fetish law, none of them starve. So she’s saying that people are still being cared for regardless of their position both in the community. And she also notices that the legal and religious and social systems of the Africans are being deeply damaged by the Europeans because colonialism and the Europeans desire to put their customs into practice literally everywhere they go.
So the Alps of Scyra had a really, kind of really good breakdown on this. They say that Kingsley basically viewed the British colonial government as extremely ignorant. She did not believe that Africa needed to be reformed. That said, and this is where her nuance comes in, she didn’t argue against colonialism itself, but rather how it was handled. She still considers Europeans the more advanced of the two people, but thought that planting themselves in Africa was for all the wrong reasons.
Okay. So she’s definitely still working through some stuff, right? However, she did note that while she had a rather poor impression of other traders before she left for Africa, she noticed that their relationship was actually far better than that of like the administrators and the other missionaries that she would encounter. Additionally, in her first few months of the fieldwork, she would write, quote, one by one, I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me, and I found them either worthless or wanting. So I think she is definitely taking the opportunity to look at herself, look at her culture and look at the situation around them.
So remember earlier when I said she was race agnostic and to like keep that on your burner? Kingsley was notorious for upsetting the Church of England with her thoughts and her feelings on missionaries. She like even before she left England, she had been skeptical of missionaries. She was under the impression that the missionary literature didn’t really actually describe the country, but rather pointed out quote how it was getting on towards being what ought to be. In short, sources say that their work in Africa as quote the killing of a man’s soul to save his life. This is clear that she saw as an insupportable practice to which she makes it abundantly clear in her lectures and writing like will you people just leave them be you are damaging everything about their system like please do stop. I love this however. Oh right.
No, no, no, this is good. However, there is one missionary that she agrees with and she meets her on her second trip. So it’s December 1894. This time she’s in Africa in the area of the French Congo and Gavin. So she gets there in December of 94 by April of 95. She meets Mary Flesher and Mary is a Scottish missionary.
They’re living with the locals and she tells Kingsley about the custom of twin killing. This is a practice I knew nothing about. I knew about it. Go on.
Right. So no, Flesher is trying her hardest to eliminate this practice. And basically in short, it stems from the belief that for those playing at home that one of the twins is the offspring of the devil. And since it’s not possible to tell which child it is, both are killed and often the mother is killed with them. Flesher’s work saves many lives. This practice is obviously universally illegal now and it starts with her work. So she likes Flesher.
She likes the one that she’s like, okay, I can be on board with what you’re doing. You make sense. Kingsley spends about 15 months in total in between the two extended trips on the continent. She travels through Ghana, Sierra Leone, Angola. While she’s here, she’s living amongst the locals. This is where she learns wilderness skills. While she’s in Gabon, she is actually the first European to explore many parts of the area. Now, she’s basically a self-taught anthropologist, right?
Because Pop didn’t send her to school, despite how obviously brilliant she was, but whatever. So she’s out in the field. She has translators, notebooks, and like all the curiosity in the world. She wants to smell everything. Additionally, while she’s traveling, it must be said that she is collecting fish and insect samples for a zoologist back to British Museum, which is not entirely ideal, but at least it’s just fish and bug samples. I’m assuming she’s drying them and she’s not just like, well, some moist fish to mold in her bag.
Yeah, do you hold onto this? It starts to smell after three days? No, it’s they’re properly sampled. Like, they go back the way they’re supposed to go. And as she’s doing this, she’s doing it all in her proper Victorian skirts. Yeah. And all that comes with it.
And for like the first time ever, I think I’m in agreement with it. Typically, I think here’s where I’d be like, but pants and pockets, like get the woman a pair of pants. Not in this case. Okay.
First of all, the visual is just gold of seeing this woman like giving Tarzan Yes, cartoon. Yes. Yeah. Like, Jane, could you be cuter in your little yellow Victorian dress with your adorable little hat? Like, exactly.
Yes. So one time, Kingsley says she’s about 31 at the time. She had decided to try and find a shortcut through the forest near the West African village of Afua. When all of a sudden she finds herself at the bottom of a game pit lined with spikes. Oh, unfortunate.
She would write in her book, one of her books, it’s called travels in wet in West Africa. And I just feel like I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Quote, it is at these times, you realize the blessing of a good thick skirt. Had I paid heed to the advice of many to the advice of many people in England and adopted masculine garments, I should have been spiked to the bone and done for. Whereas save a good many bruises here I was with the fullness of my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine Ebony spikes, some 12 inches long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out. I mean, if ever there was a need for a bustle, that was it. Exactly.
And like, I’ve read that comment so many times and it makes me laugh every single time. I feel like she had a great sense of humor, like self, you know, like the self depreciating, like I just freaking love it. Also in this book, she is describing what traveling unaccompanied by any other Europeans was like. Rather her traveling buddies, they’re a group of fawn or fang tribesmen who are said to be cannibals. Which is something she had set out to learn about cannibalism. Yeah, I don’t know if that would be something I’d be comfortable in learning about outside of a book.
Not on my Pingo card, but you know, here we are. So in the time that she spends with these people, she travels through their uncharted territories. Like, please remember the visual of this white lady in big Victorian skirts doing this. She was oftentimes the first white person male or female that some of these tribesmen had ever seen.
And I love that. In fact, she has this little story she shares where she’s, this I didn’t put in my notes, but I’m just going to try to give it to you off the cuff. She is kind of walking through this forest by herself and she comes upon this group of men and they are bedecked in like shells and all this decoration and she thinks that she has accidentally walked into the sacred ritual. And she knows that if she has, she’s toast. Like, you’re not supposed to see the men in the sacred moment and if she does and she gets caught, she’s toast.
However, it wasn’t a sacred ritual. They were hunting for monkeys. And she’s discovered by one of the hunters who so basically they would dawn these these decorative beads and shells and things and they would sit like in the clearing, I guess, together very, very still until the monkeys came out of the tree to explore them.
So it’s like a trap for them. She’s caught by one of these hunters and she is like terrified and he is besotted. He has never seen a white woman before. He’s never seen the outfit that she has on and he insists that she stay and entertain them with stories of her travels. And like they share this totally unorthodox moment in the jungle where she thinks she’s most definitely going to die, but he is like just no athlete.
Tell me what you all think. So I’m assuming by this point either they’re communicating. Probably for translator caught up thinking or she maybe learned a little bit of their language. I’m unclear on how they’re able to communicate, but she had a jolly afternoon with the monkey hunters. I mean, this sounds very akin to when Yasuke is discovered by Oda and he’s like, I have never seen a black man.
What are you? Yeah, it was pretty much that across the board for both parties. Like I said, she thought she walked into a sacred ritual and I don’t know if she was like trying to spy on it to figure out what it was or if she was just trying to hastily get away when one of them caught her, but either way I love the visuals. Maybe a little column A, a little column B. Yeah, I’m thinking so while in the Cameroon area, she climbs the active volcano Mount Cameroon. She traverses the 13,250 feet or for our British friends, 4,000 meters.
She was the first European to do so on the route she chose in her skirts, in full Victorian style. And I love this. You maybe could not whisper. I mean, I don’t know if you understand that, yes, you spoke into a microphone.
Whistling can’t be heard. I know, but I just need you to know I’m trying to calm myself down about how much I love the visuals. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Thank you. It’s November. It’s 1895. Kingsley returns to England and she spends the next few years traveling around the country giving lectures, all while she’s expressing her strong feelings for the people of Africa and what she sees as the good and the bad and all the things she’s learned. And I love that. Women in exploration says quote her two books travels in West Africa and West African studies, as well as her speeches and lobbying in England promoted a new understanding of these little understood tribes and people.
Could we have more of that, please? Now, 1899 rolls around and we’re in the second Boer War, which is what I had to look up on Wikipedia. I knew there was more than one, but I didn’t fully understand the Boer Wars.
It’s in full swing in March of 1900. Kingsley volunteers as a nurse in South Africa. So she’s in South Africa and she’s taking care of the prisoners of war in the Palisbury in Simone’s town, which has been converted into this sort of makeshift hospital. Can you guess what happens next?
Honestly, I can’t because so much of her story has been non sequitur for me. Right. It’s typhoid.
It’s moving through the wars and in two months she develops it and dies on June 3rd of 1900. I know. I was not expecting an emergency exit stage left.
Right. However, and I think this is interesting because nowhere else in her story, maybe in the book, I kind of like said, I can’t wait to get my hands on it, but maybe in the book she expresses this, but her wishes upon her death were to be buried at sea, which works out. Alice of Scuras says, quote, at the end of her life, Kingsley claimed pride in two things. Her hard earned ability to paddle a canoe like the natives and scientists acceptance of her fish specimens, though most would agree that she had a few other things to be proud of. In 1903, an honorary medal was founded in her name by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. And I’m going to leave her story with a quote from her that was from the year before her death.
It is nearly that I have the power of bringing out in my fellow creatures white or black their virtues in a way honorable to them and fortunate for me. Oh, do you want to see a picture of her? Yes, yes, I do.
So you can have the full. Okay, so this woman is mighty prim and proper. She is in a collar that goes literally to the bottom of her chin. It looks like a turkey neck made of fabric. She is dressed as dark colored, or it could just be this is black and white.
I don’t, you know, black, white photo, I should say that she is wearing a headpiece that is covered in flowers, very Victorian. She has a rather smug smile on her face. She really does. She seems really fun. But she’s the one who seems to be telling you the tongue and cheek stories just by her image.
I feel like she has a very McGonagall feel to her. I’ll take it. Right. So the last picture I have, I think if I’m, if I’m not mistaken, this is actually from one of her books. Okay, so she’s showing a picture of a hut made of straw or grass.
There are half a dozen villagers, mostly like children around it to me. Just like a day in the life kind of view. Yep.
I find it interesting that they have such different, like the one boy in the front has what looks to be like plaid pants on. Yeah. Yeah. And now I don’t know if this photo was taken by her or from someone within her circle, or it was added to her book after the fact, but I think it gives us a glimpse into what she was seeing either way. And I think it’s pretty fabulous. So that’s the story of Mary Kingsley who traversed Africa in her Victorian skirts. And for the first time, and I think all of my storytelling, I’m cool with the fact that she didn’t wear pants. I mean, I think probably because she’s able to sit on spikes and comfortable while she howled lustily for someone to get her out. I want to howl lustily.
I can’t say that too loud or hubs will help me in that endeavor. Many blessings. So if you’re wondering what stories we’re going to tell that are going to be as unhinged as this week, pants or no pants, then rate, review, subscribe, and join us because, yeah, on that note, goodbye. Bye.
Unhinged History 
Leave a comment