Explorers

AMELIA EARHART

Amelia Mary Earhart, born in 1897, was a pilot who received the Distinguished Flying Cross—and worldwide fame—for being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. During World War I, she trained as a nurse’s aide through the Red Cross and worked in a hospital in Ontario, Canada, until after the war ended in 1918. Around that time she saw her first flying exhibition, and she was captivated. She stood her ground when one of

the pilots flew low to buzz the crowd, and later said of the experience, “I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.” The next year, she visited an airfield and was given a ride; a few hundred feet in the air and she was hooked. She began working odd jobs, including driving a truck and working at a telephone company, to earn money for flying lessons with female aviator Anita “Neta” Snook. After six months of lessons, she bought her own plane, a used yellow biplane that she nicknamed “The Canary,” and in October 1922 she flew it to an altitude of 14,000 feet, setting a world record for women pilots. In May 1923, Earhart became the sixteenth woman to be issued a pilot’s license by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). She not only broke aviation records, she also formed a women’s flying

organization (The Ninety-Nines) and wrote bestselling books. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic alone, and the first person, man or woman, to fly across the Atlantic alone twice. Earhart was also the first woman to fly an autogyro (a kind of flying craft) and the first person to cross the United States in an autogyro; the first person to fly solo across the Pacific between Honolulu and Oakland, California; the first person to fly solo nonstop from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey; and the first woman to fly nonstop coast-to-coast across the United States. Her final accomplishment was becoming an enduring mystery: at age thirty-nine, in 1937, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean during an attempt at making a circumnavigational flight. The official search efforts lasted nine days, but Amelia Earhart was never found.

ALEXANDRA DAVID-NÉEL

Alexandra David-Néel, born Louise Eugénie Alexandrine Marie David (1868-1969), was the first European woman to travel to the forbidden city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was still closed to foreigners. She was a French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, and writer, penning over thirty books on Eastern religion, philosophy, and the experiences she had on her travels. By the time she was eighteen, she had already made solo trips to England, Spain, and Switzerland, and when she was twenty-two, she went to India, returning to France only when she ran out of money. She married railroad engineer Philippe Néel in 1904, and in 1911 she returned to India to study Buddhism at the royal monastery of Sikkim, where she met the Crown Prince Sidkeon Tulku. In 1912 she met the thirteenth Dalai Lama twice and was able to ask him questions about Buddhism. She deepened her study of spirituality when she spent two years living in a cave in Sikkim, near the Tibetan border. It was there that she met the young Sikkimese monk Aphur Yongden, who became her lifelong traveling companion, and whom she would later adopt. The two trespassed into Tibetan territory in 1916, meeting the Panchen Lama, but were evicted by British authorities. They left for Japan, traveled through China, and in 1924 arrived in Lhasa, Tibet, disguised as pilgrims. They lived there for two months. In 1928, Alexandra separated from her husband and settled in Digne, France, where she spent the next ten years writing books about her adventures. She reconciled with her husband and traveled again with her adopted son in 1937, at age sixty-nine, going through the Soviet Union to China, India, and eventually Tachienlu, where she continued her study of Tibetan literature. It was an arduous journey that took nearly ten years to complete. She

returned to Digne in 1946 to settle the estate of her husband, who had died in 1941, and again wrote books and gave lectures about what she had seen. Her last camping trip, at an Alpine lake in early winter, 2,240 meters above sea level, was at age eightytwo. She lived to be 100, dying just eighteen days before her 101st birthday.

FREYA STARK

Dame Freya Madeleine Stark (1893-1993) was a British travel writer, explorer, and cartographer. She was one of the first Western women to travel the Arabian deserts, and was fluent in Arabic and several other languages. She traveled to Turkey, the Middle East, Greece, and Italy, but her passion was the Middle East. When she was thirty-five, she explored the forbidden territory of the Syrian Druze, traveling through “The Valley of the Assassins” before being thrown into a military prison. In the 1930s, she went to the outback of southern Arabia, where few Westerners had explored, and discovered the hidden routes of the ancient incense trade. During World War II, she joined the Ministry of Information and helped create propaganda to encourage Arabic support of the Allies. Even in her sixties, she continued her travels, retracing Alexander the Great’s journeys into Asia and writing three more books based on those trips. By the time of her death, at age 100, she had written two dozen books on her adventures.

FLORENCE BAKER

Lady Florence Baker (1841-1916), was born Barbara Maria Szász. She was orphaned at seven, and at age seventeen she was due to be sold at an Ottoman slave market in Hungary when a thirty-eight-year-old English widower, Sam Baker, paid for her and rescued her from her captors. She was renamed Florence, and years later she became Samuel Baker’s wife. They were a perfect match: Sam was an established explorer, and Florence a natural-born adventurer, and so the two of them traveled to Africa, searching for the source of the Nile and shooting big game. They managed to reach the secondary source of the Nile, which they called Lake Albert in honor of Queen Victoria’s recently deceased husband, and then in 1865 they made the journey to Britain, where they married (and where she met her stepchildren, Sam’s children by his first wife) and where Sam received a knighthood. They returned to Africa in 1870 to report on the slave trade along the Nile. Later they journeyed to India and Japan before returning to Britain. Florence outlived Sam by twenty-three years and was cared for in her old age by her stepchildren.