Adventure Search

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 234, 2 October 1937, Page 9 (Supplement)

Adventure Search

Sex Emancipation and Spread of the Spirit DOWN TO THE COLD PLACES It was reported from London that Mr. E. W. Walker, the leader of the British expedition Which sailed for the Antarctic Continent a month or two ago, received applications from 1300 women eager to become members of the expedition. All of these applications were declined, as Mr. Walker believes that women could not stand up to the strenuous conditions of an expedition which will spend a lengthy period ill the Antarctic. The expedition consists of 32 members, including the crew of the schooner in which they embarked. The schooner, which was rechristened the Sliackleton, in memory °f Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famous Antarctic explorer, who died in 1922, is expected to reach- Lyttelton, New Zea, land, in November, and wijl spend a month there before sailing for the Antarctic, where the summer months will be spent in scientific work. The expedition will return to Lyttelton for the winter, and will go back to the Antarctic in the following summer.

_ The fact that 1300 women want to join this expedition is an indication of the extent to which the spirit of adventure has spread among women, and the rapid advance that has been made in the emancipation of the sex from the shackles which for centuries man imposed on her. Up to the present no woman has set foot on the Antarctic Continent, ■but it may happen in the near future that we shall hear of an expedition to th« Antarctic consisting exclusively of women.

With regard to tit© Arctie, woman has already broken the ice, so to speak. The finst woman to be allowed to join an expedition to the Arctie regions was Mrs. Peary, wife of Commander Robert "E. Peary. In 1891-92 she accompanied her husband in an expedition which sledged 1300 miles from MeCormick Bay to the north-east coast of Greenland. But of course Mrs. Peary was not the first woman to travel in the Arctic regions. For centuries Eskimo women have lived there with their families.

Woman Warriors. In all ages and in all countries there have been adventuresome women who have invaded spheres of activity which were regarded as predominantly masculine. England has produced female soldiers, sailors, pugilists, pirates and highwaymen. In the American Civil War there were female combatants on both sides. Those on the side of the North included Sarah Taylor, a girl of 18 years, who was the idol of the Tennessee regiments; Mary Ellen Wise, who was wounded as a private in the 34th Regiment of Indiana Volunteers, and Mary Dennis, a lady of 6 feet 2 inches, who held & commission in the Stillwater Company of the First Minnesota Regiment. And there was a " female military company" over thirty strong, formed at Falmouth, near Covington, Kentucky, who paraded in a uniform consisting of "an apron of old-fashioned cut, made of red. white and blue—the part covering the bosom representing the stars, and the lower part tlie stripes, whose graceful drilling presented at once a most novel and highly pleasinn- spectacle."

There were female soldiers in the Great War. "Russia during the last stapes of its participation," writes Mr. Reginald Hargravea in his entertaining book, " Women at Arms," "not only provided a female 'Battalion of Death' under the command of a colonel's widow, "Madame Botchiareva, but witnessed the donning by many peasant women of the military garb, which enabled them tn fipbt side bv side with their menfolk, thus following'the precedent set by the women of Serbia in the war between Turkey and the Balkan League in 1912." An Irish Fighter. As far as is known only one "Englishwoman and one Irishwoman took pnrt in the Great War as combatants. The representative of England was a girl named Dorothy Lawrence, and her activities at the front line were limited to ten days; but the Irishwoman, Flora Sandes, who was well known in Australia, served with the Serbian army for nearly three years. She left England in August, 191*4, for the Serbian front as a nurse in an ambulance unit, and stayed in Serbia during the early montfts of the conflict. She returned to England in 1915 to recuperate, and when, she went back to Serbia in November of that year she found the Serbian army in full retreat before the Austrians and Bulgarians. She was unable to reach her ambulance unit amidst the confusion created by the retreat, and at Pi-Slip she attached herself to the regimental ambulance of the Second Serbian Infantry Regiment. In this disastrous retreat, which continued week after week, the wounded had to be left behind to the mercy of the advancing enemy, and there was little work for the nurses attached to the regiment to do. Miss Sanders drifted along with the retreating headquarters of the Second Infantry Regiment. On the slopes of Mount Chukus the rearguard halted to stem the pressure of the pursuit while the main body climbed to the crest. Miss Sanders was among the rearguard, who. under the protection of the rocks, held up the enemy advance. But before she had been hiding behind the rocks for half an hour she began to resent being shot at, and she got hold of a rifle and some ammunition, and blazed away like the rest of the men in her vicinity. A Pledge of Help. At her own request, she was subsequently enrolled as a soldier in the fourth company of the first battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment. Her entry into the war as a combatant was applauded by the Serbians, who regarded her presence as a pledge of help from Great Britain in their fight against heavy odds. "Welcomed enthusiastically by her fellow private soldiers," writes Mr. Hargraves in "Women at Arms," "she lived with them the life they led. ate with them the harsh, meagre food they ate, suffered the same perils and hardships that they underwent, and throughout it all she was accorded a chivalry of comradeship that remembered her sex, only to respect it." From that time to the end of the war she took an active part in the fighting. She was promoted successively to the rank of corporal, sergeant and sergeantmajor. In the victorious advance of the Serbians in 1918 to regain their country from the invader, she was wounded and taken to hospital, where she shared a tent with another wounded female soldier, Sergeant Milunka, a Serbian peasant girl, who was attached to another battalion of the same regiment « Sergeant- Major Sandes. °