The skirt first. Long, black, heavy, the same thing she'd have worn in a London parlour, and she went up the Ogooué in it. Fell into a game pit in Gabon — about fifteen feet, spiked at the bottom — and the skirt took the spikes instead of her legs. She said afterwards she'd have been far worse off in trousers, and I've never been able to argue with her about it.
She paid her own way by trading. Out went cloth, tobacco, fish hooks; back came rubber and ivory. No committee, no subscription, no sponsor to please. Two years of it, 1893 to 1895, mostly in what's now Gabon and Cameroon, much of it in a canoe she was not paddling. The men who were paddling: Wiki, Kiva, Fika, and Ngouta the interpreter, who by her own account enjoyed almost none of it. She puts their names in the book. I've gone looking for those names elsewhere and they are not anywhere else.
The advice before she sailed ran heavily to don't, most of it from people who'd got no further than the shipping office. She was born in London in 1862 and thirty when she first went out. Dead at thirty-seven, typhoid, at Simon's Town, nursing prisoners of war.
Travels in West Africa is much funnier than its reputation, Inés — she tells the game-pit story herself and gives the skirt the credit outright, something like a remark about the advantages of good thick skirts. People shelve it under exploration and it reads like a woman talking across a table.
Typhoid at Simon's Town in 1900, nursing Boer prisoners, and she was thirty-seven. It's spread by contaminated water and food, so in a crowded camp it moves fast and the nurses are about as exposed as the patients. She'd asked to be buried at sea.