Visiting the Volcano

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 34, 1 January 2001, Page 59

Lydia Wevers

Visiting the Volcano

Isabella Bird and Constance Gordon Cumming in Hawaii

Isabella Bird began her travelling life with a sea voyage to America recommended by her doctor in 1854. Two years later the letters and records of her journey were published as The Englishwoman in America. Her second extended journey away from Europe took place in 1872 when she left, again for health reasons, on a tour of Australia intended to last eighteen months. She was 40. She wasn’t taken with Australia or New Zealand and left Auckland for San Francisco after a brief and unimpressed journey from Bluff in hot summer weather of 1873. The desert sea and the dusty browns of Australia and New Zealand compared unfavourably with the ‘cool shadow and entrancing green’ 1 of Honolulu reached after a nerve-racking voyage through hurricane conditions on the unseaworthy and rat-infested Nevada. The only other woman on board, a Mrs Dexter, had a sick son with her who lay ‘in a most critical state in the deck-house’ requiring constant nursing.

The only hope for the young man’s life is that he should be landed at Honolulu, and she has urged me so strongly to land with her there, where she will be a complete stranger, that I have consented to do so, and consequently shall see the Sandwich Islands. 2

Isabella Bird’s highly gendered, acculturated and perhaps disingenuous reasons for deciding to break her journey resulted in a stay of six months in Hawaii. The publication of her letters to her sister Henrietta in 1875 as The Hawaiian

Archipelago (an extremely successful book which reached its sixth edition by 1886) established Isabella Bird as a pre-eminent Victorian traveller and travel writer. Anna Stoddart, author of a popular 1906 biography of Isabella Bird (also known as Mrs Bishop) 3 identified her and Constance Gordon Cumming as among the four Englishwomen who had established ‘a well grounded fame’ as travellers; the others were Marianne North and Mary Kingsley. Dorothy Middleton has described Bird as ‘the most dramatic of Victorian lady travellers’. 4

Like most educated Victorians, Bird was a prolific letter writer who used letters as a way of record-keeping; her letters were semi-public documents passed round circles of friends. In a letter to her publisher, John Murray, in 1873, she described the origins of her manuscript: ‘I wrote journal letters to my sister of a highly descriptive kind, and even with the disadvantage of laborious accuracy.’ 5 Constance Gordon Cumming also wrote and published her book Fire fountains , 6 in the form of letters, to her sister Nell.

As Claudia Knapman 7 and others note, travel writing is a particular literary genre, a ‘reworking of the journey experience’ and ‘cannot be read in the late 20th century as if it consists of unmediated descriptions of ‘real’ events and places’. Knapman comments that the use of letter or diary styles by women writers amounts to a gendered subgenre, constructing the travel writing of women as more ‘domestic’ and personal, and ‘generally conformed to topics and stylistic conventions suitable for ladies . . . [T]he masculinist heroic discourses of exploration, discovery and colonialism were unavailable to women. ” s The kind of freedom travel gave to Bird and Gordon Cumming is carefully packaged for consumption by readers. Retention of the letter form in the printed text suggestively frames a readership around the family hearth. Within the comfortable boundaries of the family letter, discussion could range widely and mix various kinds of information, including elements of masculinist heroic discourse, through the ‘person’ of the writer, whose experience and personality saturates the medium of expression, even in the formalised printed version of her handwritten, posted text. In her preface Bird comments that her letters were corrected by reference to other works on Hawaii and advice from ‘friends at Honolulu’, and the printed text mixes a personalised ‘feminine’ narrative with a highly researched travelogue.

A few days after she arrived in Honolulu, Isabella Bird tackled the volcano of Kilaulea and, as in most other travel accounts of Hawaii, including Constance Gordon Cumming’s some six years later, this difficult and dangerous journey is a centrepiece of her book. Visiting the volcano emphasised the tensions of Bird’s and Gordon Cumming’s respective positions as ladies and travellers both literally—for example, they both had to conclude they could only physically achieve their objective by riding a horse like a man —and discursively. Is climbing to the edge of a dangerous volcanic crater a suitable activity for a lady? Is there a lady in the text? Their texts work to accommodate these shifting pressures, and the choice of the letter

or diary style suggestively frames domestic social structures and discourses as a primary claim on the author, a frame which demarcates but does not entirely configure the directions of her narrative. Claudia Knapman argues that a significant dimension of Bird’s and Gordon Cumming’s travel writing was self reflexively critical: ‘Assiduous as they were in conforming to the appropriate literary conventions and emphasising that they were ‘ladies’, both Bird and Gordon Cumming provided subtle but persistent subthemes that were a critique of Western lifestyles.’ 9

Travelling to Hawaii effected a boundary-crossing in Isabella Bird’s perception of her relation to the social and physical world, a change which her biographer Mrs Stoddart attributed to improved health, but which is represented in a richly social and gendered language. Brian Musgrove has observed: ‘ln travel, the territorial passage from one zone to another, the border crossing, represents a critical moment for the identity of the mobile subject. The territorial passage is accompanied by—or even metaphoric of —another movement; the shift from “seeing with one’s own eyes” to discerning the meaning of what is seen.’ 10

Bird suffered from back pain, insomnia and neuralgia, archetypal symptomatology of a middle class Victorian woman caught, as Dorothy Middleton put it, in a ‘dutybound world’, 11 and providing the biographical context in which Bird’s text displays characteristics associated with l’ecriture feminine, including writing about the body.

Her symptoms were not alleviated by her visits to stay with friends in Australia and New Zealand, both of which appear in her travel accounts only in terms of an unfavourable comparison. But when she is well out of sight of Auckland on her way to Honolulu she writes to a friend:

My two friends on board this ship have several times told me that I have imbibed the very spirit of the sea. It is to me like living in a new world, so free, so fresh, so vital, so careless, so unfettered, so full of interest that one grudges being asleep; and instead of carrying cares and worries and thoughts of the morrow to bed with one, one falls asleep at once to wake to another day in which one knows there can be nothing to annoy one —no door-bells, no ‘please mems’, no dirt, no bills, no demands of any kind, no vain attempts to overtake all one knows one should do. 12

Three days after her arrival in Honolulu, Bird is invited to visit the volcano of Kilaulea by friends anxious for a travelling companion and, despite her misgivings about leaving Mrs Dexter and her sick son, sets off at two hours’ notice on a packed ferry to Hilo, a place she finds ‘so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose’. Hilo is a ‘new world’. 13

Isabella Bird went to Hilo and the volcano with a Miss Karpe, her travelling companion, a woman with great energy and an ‘adept in the art of travelling’. Having undergone a spinal operation some years before, Bird describes herself as ‘weak’ and ‘insecure’, unable to ride to the volcano for the pain in her spine. Her host, Mr. Severance, the Sheriff of Hawaii, suggests she follow the ‘Hawaiian fashion’ and ride astride: ‘lt was only my strong desire to see the volcano which made me consent to a mode of riding against which I have so strong a prejudice ... the native women all ride astride. ... A great many of the foreign ladies on Hawaii have adopted the Mexican saddle also.’

Bird’s letter about her trip to the volcanic crater foregrounds the physical exertion and the toll it has taken on her body. Her ‘bruised aching bones’ and ‘overwhelming fatigue ’ mean it is hardly possible for her to write but, in a double figure of the painful body and its wonderful success against the odds that is also characteristic of Bird’s self-representation and self-dramatising, she manages to produce a 23-page narrative about her ascent of Kilaulea.

Bird’s writing is both highly visual and highly personalised. The energy and dramatic effect of her response to her environment is increased by the way in which she positions herself as the weaker member of the party. She is the slightly foolish figure who is only just able to stay on her horse and who compares unfavourably with both the picturesque and efficient Hawaiian guide, Upa, garlanded with flowers and loaded with equipment, and the competent Miss Karpe who ‘mounted her horse on her own side saddle, dressed in a short grey waterproof, and a broad brimmed Leghorn hat’. Isabella Bird was wearing

my coarse Australian hat which serves the double purpose of sunshade and umbrella, Mrs Thompson’s riding costume, my great rusty New Zealand boots, and my blanket strapped behind a very gaily ornamented brass-bossed demi-pique Mexican saddle which one of the missionary’s daughters had lent me.

It was difficult to stay firm in her saddle: ‘every comer was a new terror, for at each I was nearly pitched off on one side, and when at last Upa stopped, and my beast stopped without considering my wishes, only a desperate grasp of mane and tethering rope saved me from going over his head.’ Miss K on the other hand, remains ‘provokingly erect’ as tiredness, pain and night advance upon the little party. The story of the difficult twelve-hour ride to the volcano is textured with observations on the landscape, the drama of Isabella Bird’s worsening physical condition and the social dynamic of the group, in which Bird sets herself comically and dramatically against the conditions and the other members of the party. The halfway house is locked, so after a short break they continue on in a darkly comic mode with Upa the guide insisting on flogging their reluctant horses and Miss K’s voice rasping unceasingly in the dark. As darkness descends the melodrama increases and Isabella Bird sees what for a moment she thinks is a pool of blood glowing on the track until ‘The heavens became redder and brighter... and Kilaulea was in all its fiery glory’.

Like all Victorian women travellers Isabella Bird was extremely determined in the pursuit of her wishes. Although she has exhausted herself getting there and lies awake most of the night in the crater house at Kilaulea, watching ‘the fiery vapours rolling up out of the infinite darkness and . .. dreading the descent into the crater’, she sets off the next day with Upa her ‘ comical native guide ’, and the rest of her party,

climbing down to a surface so hot and fragile she falls through it several times into holes full of acid steam which bums through her dog-skin gloves. But the long comic/ heroic preamble of the journey intensifies the shift into an apocalyptic language and experience when the crater is reached and worldly concerns drop away.

As the party reaches the edge of the crater lake Hale-mau-mau ‘I think we all screamed, I know we all wept, but we were speechless, for a new glory and terror had been added to the earth’. Isabella Bird introduces her four-page description of the fire fountains, the colours, the movement of the lake, the steam jets, the lava, with the usual traveller ’ s trope when faced with a wonder of the natural world —what she saw was ‘unimaginable, indescribable’. When Joseph Clark, a midshipman on the United States Exploring Expedition, climbed to the crater lake in December 1840, he too ‘did not expect my pen can give any thing like an adequate description of this place’. Seated on the brink of the crater ‘with my feet hanging over the edge’ Clark thought about the nothingness of man, Judgement Day and ‘this magnificent display of Almighty Power’ until he and his friends were ordered to move by the commodore. 14 Clark describes the dangers of the journey to the crater, the wide and deep chasms which cross the path, the recklessness of his approach to the crater edge, its gases and liquid fire, the volatility of the environment which opens with a new lava flow as they are watching, and the expressed unease and discomfort of the ‘natives’ about the activities of the Europeans.

Bird’s description of the crater activity is loaded with transcendental freight like Clark’s —‘a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul’--but she also attempts a more detailed description of what she sees. When Isabella Bird visited, 33 years after Clark, the volcano was no less active and dangerous, but her description of where she stood and how it affected her is downplayed: ‘We were able to stand quite near the margin, and look down into the lake, as you look into the sea from the deck of a ship, the only risk being that the fractured ledge might give way. ’ She stood at the edge of the crater so long that the soles of her boots burned and her ear and one side of her face blistered.

Returned from the crater, Bird’s text turns its attention to the quotidian detail of their accommodation in a shift of register which reflects her movement away from the climax of the volcano but also helps demarcate her identity as a traveller from the trippers and tourists who write their puerile comments in the ‘Volcano Book’ at the guest house. The ‘immense quantity of flippant rubbish’ in the guest book, some of which she quotes, acts as a context for her own considered and detailed account of the inn, the cooking apparatus, the rooms, food, and other occupants, a ‘party of native travellers’, a trajectory which brings her to focus again on her companion, Miss K and herself. Miss K is ‘the typical American travelling lady who is encountered everywhere from the Andes to the Pyramids, tireless, with indomitable energy, Spartan endurance and a genius for attaining everything’, whereas ‘myself is a ‘limp, ragged, shoeless wretch’.

Bird’s writing works constantly to position the mobile female subject, transculturated by her territorial passage. Her text, herself as a traveller and her exploits, oscillate between heroic masculinist activities and modes and domestic and personal topics and conventions; between a consciousness of the problematic fluidities of her status as a single female European in a strange society and her claim to identity as a genuine heroic traveller. Her response to the crater is both measured--she estimates the size of the lake, height of the walls and so on, and keeps a deliberate tone —and also studded with apostrophes. While actually in the crater she notes the dangers and presents herself as incontrovertible but understated evidence of them (her burned shoes and blistered skin), but implies that standing on its edge is not unlike being safely on the deck of a ship. A running comparison is maintained between her companion Miss Karpe (with her masculine strength and capacity) and Miss Bird’s own weakness and incapacity: limp and shoeless, hardly able to stay on her horse. The result is a feminised text of heroic masculine activity, carefully balanced between promoting the reader’s recognition of what she has achieved and not overplaying her hand, so we remain aware of the comedy and drama, the antiheroic and the heroic, her tired body emphasising its relative femininities as well as the costs and dangers of what she has done.

When Marianne North met Isabella Bird for the first time in 1882, she expected to find someone very fragile and small but instead found ‘a very solid and substantial little person, short but broad, very decided and measured in her way of talking, rather as if she were reciting from one of her books’. 16 Constance Gordon Cumming first met Isabella Bird in 1870 when she was staying in the Scottish Highlands with Lady Middleton, who one day had to fetch a lady who was doing a tour of inspection of schools: ‘ln the evening Lady Middleton returned accompanied by a tiny and very quiet little lady, and we all wondered at her pluck in undertaking such arduous journeying all alone’. 16 The person of the lady traveller as she is encountered in Bird’s text falls somewhere between these two impressions. Bird’s self-representation as a weak and foolish woman insistently inflects the narrative of her travel and allows for a cultural space in which the idea of a lady and the idea of a traveller do not cancel each other out. She is never represented as too tough to be feminine, because she is always less tough than someone else, and her heroic masculinist and European activity is undercut by her self-representation as a grotesque foreigner and an invalid.

Constance Gordon Cumming’s Fire fountains' 1 was the fourth of her travel books and sprang from a long-standing desire to visit Hawaii. She had already spent several years in Fiji, visited New Zealand, and extensively cruised the Pacific before deciding to visit and write about Hawaii, partly because of the ‘marvellous accounts of volcanic action’ sent home by William Ellis, one of the first Europeans to climb Kilaulea, and ‘other enterprising travellers’. Gordon Cumming thought her book on Hawaii was ‘the most interesting of my varied travel notes’I*' 1 *' and she also published

articles about her trips to the volcanoes of Kilaulea and Haleakala in the April and June issues of Scribner’s magazine in 1881. Despite noting that a long stream of successive travellers have ‘all alike exhausted] the power of language to convey their own impressions of indescribable grandeur’, 14 she embarks on her own attempt to describe the crater of Kilaulea at the end of October 1879, proving Stephen Greenblatt’s point perhaps that the ‘primal act of witnessing’ is the ‘foundational rhetorical device which fabricates and accredits the travel text’. 20

Her narrative strategy was quite different from Isabella Bird’s. Far from recreating the comedy and drama of a journey to one of the great sights of the world, Gordon Cumming’s tale is weighed down with research, scattered with ponderous domestic advice and threatens to end in complete anticlimax. In Dorothy Middleton’s opinion, Gordon Cumming’s books are ‘almost unreadable, so informative are they’, produced by someone who ‘painted, observed, botanised, missionised and, above all, collected information as a duty. ’“ 1 However Brian Musgrove has observed that the ‘travel text always supplements the insufficient act of “witnessing” with epistemological reflection’ .' 2 Gordon Cumming’s accumulation of information is an act of positioning in a different mode from Bird’s strategy of self-dramatisation, but the texts of both women participate in the discursive operations by which the travel text colonises its audiences to the spectacles on offer, including that of the mobile subject, and reflexively naturalises and acculturates the unfamiliar territories on view. Although both texts display what has been called the specularity of imperial ownership, 23 Bird’s narrative mode dramatises human relations, including cross-culturally, whereas Gordon Cumming’s text is both narratively and literally (being written by an artist) preoccupied with reporting the visual. Her progress up the mountain was slow:

I allowed my good, sure-footed steed to choose his own pace, and, being heavily weighted with an English side-saddle, large sketching blocks and other artist’s materials, as well as sundry changes of raiment, that pace was so deliberate that it gave me twelve hours in the saddle before reaching my destination. 24

Her companion on the ride is the Reverend A. O. Forbes, who is travelling to visit his flock on the other side of the mountain. However, after his initial appearance he is hardly mentioned again and never becomes the dynamic presence in Gordon Cumming’s journey that Upa or Miss K are in Isabella Bird’s. On the way she describes at length each change in terrain or plant life and each brief and incidental human encounter of this ‘tedious though interesting ride’. When she is actually in motion, Gordon Cumming’s text works to objectify the world through laboriously descriptive economies, but when she pauses the domestic eye of a pragmatic imperialist housekeeper takes over. The halfway house is full of ‘native travellers’ and Gordon Cumming and her party congratulate themselves on having brought luncheon (so they don’t have to wait for the slaughter of a hen) and on having with

them a ‘skin of Brand’s beef-tea, the value of which I have proved many a time, and which I much prefer to Liebig, partly because it becomes as hard as leather and will keep for any number of months ’. Many of her observations reveal ironclad assumptions about her relation to and occupation of the world she is travelling in, and gather it into a normalising imperialist discourse. Noticing that breadfruit and orange trees are rare and often sickly, she concludes that the local people are ‘so careless’ that they won’t take the trouble to plant new ones for a future generation, which leads her quickly to a plangent theme beloved of white colonisers:

Perhaps the secret of it all lies in the knowledge that the race is so surely and swiftly fading away. There are very few children, and such as there are do not seem to be greatly prized. Even in this rest-house, I noticed that the party consisted of half a dozen women, a man and a baby. The women were amusing themselves making flower leis, one was making a hat, the others playing with pet dogs; and the baby was handed over to the tender compassions of the great, big, gentle, man.

The second half of the ride proves very tiring and, like Isabella Bird, Gordon Cumming apologetically succumbs to riding ‘in the Hawaiian manner’: ‘Oh weariness! I tried shifting my position, and riding after the manner of the ladies of Hawaii, a califourchon, which proved some relief, but I confess I was awfully tired.’ The vehemence with which both women protest their reluctance to ride astride, and

furnish excuses for it, suggests their level of anxiety about the reader’s response — the proprieties of being a lady traveller are pulled into focus by certain significant activities, which must be both disclosed and excused.

In her article for Scribner’s magazine , ‘The greatest active volcano’, Gordon Cumming described what happened after she arrived at the crater. Tired after her arduous ride she took a day off to do some sketching and paid no attention to the detonations and falling sounds going on around her, as she’d been told since her arrival in Honolulu that she was lucky enough to be in Hawaii during an active volcanic period. When she descended into the crater the following morning she found ‘no fire-waves, and only some small fountains spouting rather feebly ... the rest was all chaos —jagged masses of tumbled crag jutting up through volumes of dense white smoke ... lurid clouds of sulphurous steam wholly veiled the scene.’ 25 Fire fountains dramatises the disappointment more directly, its broken syntax and clusters of dots reproducing Gordon Cumming’s emotions, and the gaps and holes in her expectations as a traveller and a writer. When she arrived at the crater house and looked upon the sight she’d been dreaming of for years:

Well I don’t quite know how to put it... The fact of the matter is ... I’m afraid I am rather disappointed . . . My mind was full of ‘sportive fire fountains’ and ‘awful detonations’, and all that sort of thing; but I was utterly unprepared for the dull hideousness of the actual scene ... I saw only a huge sunken pit... lying 600 feet below me, and paved with a cold blue-grey something, which might be leaden-coloured water, but which I know to be lava.

Gordon Cumming’s account of her journey to the volcano is one of the many occasions in travel writing when an ‘indescribable’ sight is all too describable, and her reaction to the inactive crater makes it clear that Gordon Cumming’s act of witnessing is a preconceived expectation of a sight already inscribed as an iconic moment of travel. The disappointment of anticlimax slackens both the impetus and structure of the text and its author ’ s momentum. Her twelve-hour ascent over the lava flows of Kilaulea seems to have exhausted Gordon Cumming’s willingness to be impressed by what she finds, and sapped her energy to continue to the next, larger, crater, Mokua-weo-weo:

I suppose that if I were a truly energetic traveller I should feel bound to toil up that weary mountain and look down into its crater, but I honestly confess that I have not the smallest wish to do so ... The whole journey is over a dreary desolate waste of lava, only varying in degrees of roughness, and all of repellent ugliness ... in the course of our thirty miles ride from Hilo I have seen ... every form that lava is capable of assuming.

She does, however, gather herself together and sets off on 29 October to visit the edge of the crater. Almost ten pages about the ‘scene of dreary desolation’ is taken up with description of the lava, its forms and colours and shapes evoked for the reader in an array of peculiarly Victorian imagery: coils of rope, tresses of silken hair, the slag of ironworks, nests of snakes, huge silver seals, the monsters of the Crystal Palace, and a velvet curtain in an artist’s studio. Meaghan Morris has commented on the morbidity of travel description, ‘a vast descriptive regime for destroying (and for Baudrillard replacing) reality’ 26 and Gordon Cumming’s superabundant descriptive detail moving through its procession of manufactured images seems designed to replace the landscape of lava with the features of industrialised Britain. When she finally reaches the edge of Hale-mau-mau, the lake of fire (according to William Ellis in 1823 ‘one vast flood of burning matter’), Gordon Cumming’s text resorts to capitals: ‘THERE WAS NONE’. The space of her disappointment is intensified by a link with another act of insufficient witnessing: ‘To all appearance we might have been standing on Highland crags looking down through the mists on some dark tarn. ’

Feeling ‘aggrieved and defrauded’, Gordon Cumming and her party begin their descent and pause to watch a ‘blowing cone’ which begins to roar as they approach it. Three days later a new lake of fire has formed in the crater and Gordon Cumming

shifts thankfully from the expressible language of disappointment to the traveller’s favourite idiom, a trope for heightening the reader’s apprehension of the extended description that always follows: ‘lt is a scene of marvellous beauty, and is inexpressibly fascinating.’ When Gilbert Mair was asked by Sir Arthur Gordon (then Governor of Fiji) to take care ‘of a Scotch lassie, a Miss Gordon Cumming, an authoress’ in New Zealand, he ‘conjured up quite a tender romance’.

Imagine therefore my disillusionment when I beheld a tall, massive person, clad in large patterned shepherd’s plaid coat, vest, and short skirts, stout grey hose, and wearing a huge Kilmarnock bonnet adorned with a whole grouse wing, and she introduced herself as ‘Miss Gordon Cumming, sister of the Lion Slayer.’ She had light hair and eyebrows and a high complexion ... However the lady was very companionable, though she expressed preconceived opinions on every possible subject, and disagreed absolutely with my remarks on the Maoris, about whom I am supposed to know something. 27

Isabella Bird and Constance Gordon Cumming shared a number of attributes and assumptions. Middle class, well off, educated Victorian women, they were made unusual by their willingness to travel in relatively unfamiliar parts of the world, endure arduous physical conditions and write about it. These characteristics have caused their work to be read as protofeminist—evidence of nonconformism and independence. s However, as Rana Kabbani has observed, all travelogues worked to bring the Empire home" 9 and the work of Mary Louise Pratt, Edward Said and others has demonstrated how travel writing contributed to static and codified knowledges of non-European peoples and places that reinforced Euro-imperialist expansion and perception. 30 Claudia Knapman has argued that the experiences of women travellers like Bird ‘provided comparisons that allowed her the leverage to critique aspects of her own society’ 31 and in The Hawaiian Archipelago there are numerous examples of Bird’s relative openness to Hawaiian life and culture, beginning with her assertion that ‘the natives are not savages, most decidedly not’. On her way into the crater at Kilaulea accompanied by a ‘comical native guide, who mimicked us constantly’, Bird ‘was conscious that we foreign women, with our stout staffs and grotesque dress looked like caricatures, and the natives, who have a keen sense of the ludicrous did not conceal that they thought us so. ’ Positioning herself against the Hawaiian women as well as her travelling companions allows Bird to shift through a range of mobilities which reflexively stabilise her self-representation. In marked contrast to Bird’s ability to represent herself as the ludicrous foreigner in the company of individualised and friendly locals, Constance Gordon Cumming deferred her long ride to the crater of Kilaulea ‘in the hope of some white escort turning up’, and remarked to her sister:

‘You know my prejudice against ever travelling without a responsible “pale face” at least, when I can avoid it.’

The narrative of Gordon Cumming’s travel is continually crossed and diverted by her impulse to deliver information. The article for Scribner’s finishes with pages of chronological listing (previous accounts of eruptions and volcanic activity which amount to a kind of European biography of Kilaulea), and the story of her journey to Kilaulea in Fire fountains bogs down in description and reporting. Her book is driven by desire to present her experience as a testimonial to her powers of observation and comparison: she has done her research and is a serious source of information; she strives to make her witnessing sufficient. The kind of detail used by Isabella Bird as a self-characterisation of foolishness, frailty and courage is absent from Gordon Cumming’s text as she moves through the landscape weighed down by her zinc painting block, umbrella, opera glasses and information. Both are textual strategies for dealing with the anxiety of the indeterminacies produced by travel —the mobile subject whose primal act, to borrow Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase, is witnessing, and who is trying to preserve a proper relationship between home, the reader and the new world she bears witness to. Duty, responsibility, and knowledge are the attributes of the lady traveller just as ill health can be both her reason for leaving in the first place and her means of soliciting the protection of the reader once she is standing on the brink of an active volcano, or riding astride across the lava flows.

The crater at Kilaulea was a major destination for 19th century travellers in the Pacific. By the time Isabella Bird and Constance Gordon Cumming arrived it was already a set piece of travel description, one of the iconic locations of the Pacific landscape. On the front cover of the first edition of The Hawaiian Archipelago is a gold blocked illustration of a Hawaiian woman riding astride in the ‘pau’ or riding dress, ‘flying along astride, barefooted, with their orange and scarlet riding dresses streaming on each side beyond their horses’ tails’. In her text Bird contrasts these ‘free-and easy’ female riders with ‘several of the Nevada’s officers, riding in the stiff wooden style which Anglo-Saxons love’. The differences of Bird’s and Gordon Cumming’s texts, published within eight years of each other, and springing from substantively common ground, are suggested by Bird’s comparison of riding styles, and remind us that the mobile female subject, crossed into another territory, manifests herself in internal as well as external difference. As the century lengthens, travel writing about the Pacific throws a net across the sights and peoples of the ocean that brings them in for European consumption —as tourists, as readers, as colonisers--and allows the European readership to glimpse an alterity. This is particularly pointed in the case of lady travellers, whose texts enact both a highly conservative and a highly adventurous culture, an ambivalence which both releases and maintains in place the protocols and pressures of European imperialist and domestic discourses. The shared defence against the unfeminine practice of riding astride stands in for the greater unfemininity of going to the crater at all.

Turnbull Library Record 34 (2001), 59-72

References 1 Isabella Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six months among the palm groves, coral reefs & volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (London: John Murray, 1875), p.l 8. 2 Ibid, p. 12. 3 Anna M. Stoddart, The life of Isabella Bird (Mrs Bishop), 3rd edn. (London: John Murray, 1908). 4 Dorothy Middleton, Victorian lady travellers (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 19. 5 Letter to Mr Murray, 13 December 1873, quoted Stoddart, Life, p.BO. 6 Constance Gordon Cumming, Fire fountains, 2 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1883). 7 Claudia Knapman, ‘Western women’s travel writing about the Pacific Islands’, Pacific Studies, 20 (2) (June 1997), 31-51. 8 Ibid p. 35. 9 Ibid, p. 44.

10 Brian Musgrove, ‘Travel and unsettlement: Freud on vacation’, in Travel writing and empire postcolonial theory in transit, ed. by Steve Clark (London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 31. 11 Middleton, Victorian lady travellers, p. 20. 12 Stoddart, Life, p. 79-80. 13 Bird, Hawaiian Archipelago, p. 56. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations from Isabella Bird are from this work, mostly from p. 64-91. 14 Joseph Clark, Lights and shadows of sailor life (Boston: John Putnam, 1847), p.l 87. 15 Quoted in Middleton, Victorian lady travellers, p. 19. 16 Stoddart, Life, p. 73. 17 Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations from Constance Gordon Cumming are from Fire fountains (see note 6), v.2, p. 124-237. 18 Constance Gordon Cumming, Memories (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1908), p. 348. 19 Gordon Cumming, ‘The greatest active volcano’, Scribner’s magazine (April 1881), 926-936. 20 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous possessions: The wonder of the new world (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), quoted in Travel writing and Empire, p. 35. 21 Middleton, Victorian lady travellers, p. 4. 22 Musgrove, ‘Travel and unsettlement’, p. 31. 23 Ibid, p. 35.

24 Gordon Cumming ‘The greatest active volcano’, Scribner’s magazine, April 1881, p. 926. 25 Ibid, p. 929. 26 Morris suggests there is something ‘morbid even “doomed” about description’ in travel writing; see ‘Panorama: The live, the dead, and the living’, in Island in the stream: Myths of place in Australian culture, ed. by Paul Foss (Sydney: Pluto, 1988), p. 160-87. 27 Gilbert Mair, Reminiscences and Maori stories (Auckland: Brett Printing and Publishing, 1923), p.l 15. Mair claimed this meeting was in 1882, but Constance Gordon Cumming’s visit to New Zealand was in the summer of 1876-1877, and by 1882 she was back in Scotland. 28 See Knapman, ‘Western women’s travel writing about the Pacific Islands’. 29 Rana Kabbani, Europe’s myths of Orient: Devise and rule (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 7, quoted in Knapman, ‘Western women’s travel writing about the Pacific Islands’, p. 39. 30 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial eyes (London: Routledge, 1992), Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). 31 Knapman, ‘Western women’s travel writing’, p. 40.