Isabella Lucy BirdBesprekingen

Loved it! Apart from comments about the 'natives' this is a thoroughly entertaining read. Infectious and enthusiastic.

3.5 stars

I found the first third of this book rather dull, and the author somewhat judgmental. I was tempted to abandon it, but I'm glad I didn't.

The book is a collection of journal-style letters written by Bird to her sister, and they detail her solo journeys by horseback around Colorado in 1873. Much of the book is simply Bird describing the scenery and weather conditions, and there is some commentary on various companions she meets along the way.

Her love for a simple life lived out of doors made me long to return to my similar experience of bicycling across several states and tenting overnights.

This is a book I'd recommend primarily to nature-lovers, as not much happens story-wise.

"This is a view to which nothing needs to be added... This scenery satisfies my soul." p 55

Her views on race are despicable, but probably common for a woman of her time. She also doesn't seem to enjoy or respect the women around her. I don't know why I hoped for better, but it was interesting to read as a travelogue best-seller for the late 1800s. I am astonished at all she managed to survive -- really, I would think falling through the ice in below freezing weather repeatedly with no break to warm up would finish a person off, but it's certainly a thrilling narrative, of bracing hardships and unchinked cabins. Why didn't they chink the cabins? I would think that would be a basic sort of move, but I guess if you move to Colorado for consumption, it might make sense to stay in an airy cabin rather than a smoky one. Anyway, I found the litany of cold/snow/blizzard/ riding over unbroken terrain a lot to believe, but I enjoyed the rhapsodizing over the scenery, and was mostly able to ignore the clear Christian propaganda throughout the book. I didn't enjoy it enough to pick up another of her works, and I shudder to imagine what she might say about Native Hawaiians or Thai or Japanese people when traveling in their countries. I wanted to know more about Mountain Jim, but it appears her account of him is the main documentation that has made it to the internet.

Advanced listening copy provided by Libro.fm

My reading for a visit to Colorado was A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, a collection of letters written during a trip in 1873 to Colorado by a remarkable solo world-traveling Englishwoman, Isabella L. Bird. I recommend it to anyone living in the region as both a first-hand account of the early settlements in the state and intimate descriptions of the hard-working and at times desperate people who built them, and rapturous descriptions of the beauty and rigors of the surroundings.

This book is available from Project Gutenberg and well worth reading if only to admire the tenacity and courage of the author. Do note that PG offers other books on her travels, to Hawaii,Tibet, Japan, Persia, Kurdistan. Not most peoples' idea of proper behavior for a Victorian lady.

Interesting account of an 1873 trip to the American West by this English lady. She was pretty tough!

So vivid, makes me feel as if I've actually been to Colorado

Isabella Bird was born in England in 1831. She was unwell most of her life so her doctor essentially gave her a prescription to travel. Travel she did, becoming the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.

In 1878, she visited Japan. She hired a young Japanese man, Ito, to interpret for her and assist with arrangements. The pair set out for the interior of the country, which hadn’t been explored very well by Europeans at that point. After completing that part of her journey, she visited the indigenous Aino (now, Ainu) people of Japan.

I read one of Ms. Bird’s earlier books, Adventures in the Rocky Mountains, during my blogging break and quite enjoyed it. I could only admire a woman who, in Victorian times, not only traveled alone, but managed to summit Longs Peak in a dress. When I needed a travel book as part of the 20201 Nonfiction Challenge, Ms. Bird came to mind and this was the book that was available at my library.

What I forgot in my admiration for Ms. Bird’s accomplishments as a woman is her matter-of-fact racism. This is so disturbing! She’s a product of her time but it’s so jarring to read today! Her attitude does improve as she travels more extensively throughout Japan and grows accustomed to the culture. She really doesn’t like Japanese people at all at first. As she travels and learns the culture, she appreciates their unquestioning kindness toward guests. After a week or two of traveling, she even mentions that a young Japanese lady is the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, bar none! But this tends to be the exception more than the rule. The interior of Japan was apparently very poor at this point in history and she continually complains about how filthy everything is, including her rooms, the adults, and especially the children.

When she visits the Ainu people, she really likes them and struggles to work out her feelings in her letters. Her father was a clergyman so she’s coming from a very conservative Christian background. I did finally take some notes in this section.

Surely these simple savages are children, as children to be judged; may we not hope as children to be saved through Him who came not to judge the world, but to save the world ?

She’s still degrading them but if she’s worried about their souls, at least she sees them as humans who have souls and feelings. Then she has a longer theosophical argument with herself.

The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, without hope, and without God in the world; though at its lowest and worst considerably higher and better than that of many other aboriginal races, and– must I say it?–considerably higher and better than that of thousands of the lapsed masses of our own great cities who are baptized into Christ’s name, and are laid at last in holy ground, inasmuch as the Ainos are truthful, and, on the whole, chaste, hospitable, honest, reverent, and kind to the aged.

She’s still calling them savages but she’s finally admitting that they’re more moral than a lot of Christians. I don’t think we can call her “woke” by modern standards, but for the time, she’s practically a paragon of acceptance, I guess.

That aside, the bulk of the book is monotonous. I don’t know if she visited in an exceptionally rainy summer or if the interior is a temperate rainforest, but most of the book can be summed up with, “It rained; I slept in a disgusting hovel; I rode an obstreperous, ill-treated horse; it rained even more; I crossed a flooded river; I slept in a disgusting hovel; repeat.”

There were a few notable exceptions to the monotony and I wish Ms. Bird had written more consistently like this. The Shrine of Nikko (I think we call it the Toshugo Shrine now) astounds her and she describes it extensively. She writes beautifully about seeing a young bride preparing for her wedding. The rest is rain and mud until she visits the Aino, where her writing really shines. It doesn’t rain as much while she’s visiting them, so she thoroughly describes their appearance (in unconsciously derogatory terms), their religion, their customs, some of their mythology, and their culture, all of which is fascinating.

I preferred Adventures in the Rocky Mountains overall (although I do remember now that Ms. Bird always refers to Native Americans as savages too), because there’s more going on than just rain and mud. I’d recommend that book over this one but if you’re looking for more of this author’s works, certainly give Unbeaten Tracks in Japan a try.

A rich and involving travelogue written in the early 1870s, Isabella Bird's extracts in Adventures in the Rocky Mountains were composed as long letters to her sister, and have that immediacy of being written on location. She was writing at a time when much of the landscape of the American West remained unsettled – "there no lumberer's axe has ever rung" (pg. 57) – and her book would be fascinating even if only for this reason. The fact that Bird also has the language at her command – the descriptions of colours and shapes of landscape are vivid but never taper off into verbosity – only heightens the grandeur of this slight book. Nature is "rioting in her grandest mood" (pg. 63) and some of the sights Bird describes satisfy the soul and make you wonder at how stunning the virgin country must have been at that time. "There is health in every breath of air" (pg. 42), and the author brings it to you, providing an awe-inspiring and quietly restorative read.

Por primera vez en castellano el relato de un viaje asombroso realizado en solitario por una mujer que hizo época al retratar los misterios del inexplorado Japón del siglo XIX. Aislado, cerrado a los extranjeros, muy pocos occidentales se adentraban en el interior del país, e islas como la actual Hokkaido, habitada por los ainus, guardaban secretos sin desvelar. Auténtica pionera, mujer valiente, de sólidas convicciones, y más que probada curiosidad, Bird atraviesa la espina dorsal del norte de Japón desvelando la ignota vida rural del interior y visitando remotas tribus aborígenes como los antiquísimos ainus, de cuya cultura poco o nada se tenía noticia en Europa. No será un viaje fácil, ni cómodo pero merecerá la pena.

In what started as letters to her sister Isabella Bird paints vivid pictures of a very young Colorado as she travels from the Sandwich Islands to Estes Park, Colorado. Because the trip to the Hawaiian islands is so fresh in Bird's mind, she can't help but make interesting comparisons between the tropical island and the wild western plains. She even wears the same clothes in both climates. As with Bird's other adventures, her courage and tenacity shine through her prose. Most memorable for me was the fact Bird would don a long skirt and ride polite side saddle in the company of men but alone she would wear pants and ride western style. Comfort, not propriety, was her ultimate goal.½

Isabella Bird was a middle-aged Victorian-era Englishwoman who apparently hadn’t read the middle-aged Victorian-era Englishwoman manual and thus traveled all over the world alone. And rode astride (except when somebody might be watching). Her book narrates her adventures in the Colorado Rockies in 1872-73. Interestingly, she doesn’t give a particular reason why she stopped over in Colorado (she was on her way back from a trip to Hawaii, and she doesn’t volunteer why she was there, either). At any rate, she did quite well for herself while here; rounded up cattle for an Estes Park rancher, engaged in a very discrete flirtation with the one-eyed desperado Rocky Mountain Jim (“desperado” is her word; about half the male population of Colorado is “desperados”, which, given the year was 1872, probably wasn’t far wrong), and became the first woman to ascend Long’s Peak (in October, at that). Sometimes you wonder if Isabella was totally clueless, incredibly lucky, or just gifted with the sublime self-confidence of a Proper Englishwoman. I favor the last. Her writing is almost modern seeming – she gives credit to the scenery but eschews the paroxysms of overblown language that flow from the quills of other Victorian travel writers, and has just enough of a sense of humor to provoke a grin now and then. For Coloradans, the best parts are probably her descriptions of the towns she passes through – Fort Collins is “altogether revolting” and has “less bugs but more flies” than Greeley; Longmont (“Longmount” to Ms. Bird) is “as uninviting as Fort Collins” and Boulder is “hideous”. (Denver, at least, has “good shops and fair hotels” and is sufficiently tamed that “shootings are as rare as in Liverpool”). To be fair to Ms. Bird, Coloradans seemed to be rather prejudiced against Englishwomen, but generally came around when Ms. Bird demonstrated her willingness to pitch in and wash dishes, cook, and herd livestock. I think I’d like to hear more of Ms. Bird; she continued her travels to Japan, Malaya, the Punjab, Kurdistan, Persia, China, and Canada. A pleasant and quick read.

A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains
1873 Mining towns and other adventures on her way home to England.
Isobella Byrd traveled on horseback and met quite the variety of colorful characters.
Book contains a collection of letters from Isobella to her sister as she describes in very detail her travels and things she sees along the way.
So very detailed it sounds so beautiful. Boric acid use for getting rid of bugs-we use it today even!
So many sites are seen up close and personal.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

Isabella L. Bird was a famous 19th century English travel writer. The setting for this memoir is 1873, mostly in and around Estes Park, CO which at the time was a remote outpost. Life revolved around food - wild game which was rare even by this time, or cattle, or dairy and flour. Despite being in the so-called "wild west", Isabella maintains she never slept outdoors, an idea she found repellent, because there were plenty of homesteads around, The rule of the land was any house was available to travelers so long as you either paid or provided some sort of help. On her scramble to Long Peak she says there was snow-pack year-round at the top, but a recent Google Maps view shows it very snow-less. At one point she travels on the road that is now I-70, the main east-west highway through CO. Later authors surmised Isabella had a romance with "Mountain Jim" Nugent whom she found attractive (but not a man for marriage she says) and this is the part of the narrative with the most life. Overall the writing is evocative of the place and time and still fresh after 140 years.

On advice of her doctors to take a sea voyage for her health, Bird traveled to Australia & New Zealand. On her way to North America and the Rocky Mountains, the shaky paddle wheel steamer she sailed on stopped in Honolulu. Friends convinced her stop and visit and she stayed for more than sim months. She visited most of the large Hawaiian islands except for Molokai on which was located the leper colony although she saw many lepers in her travels as the disease was rampant in the islands.

Because there were few roads, travel was by horse using Mexican style saddles which Bird had to adapt to from her English style riding experience. Adapt she did as she road the east coast of the Big Island through rain swollen streams almost drowning her horse and herself. She rode to the top of Mauna Kea. On another trip she rode to the Halemaumau Crater where she & her companion stood so close to the edge they suddenly realized that it was hollow under their feet and if the ledge collapsed, they would fall into the caldera. They also had to dance around to keep their boots from burning on the hot rocks. She rode and slept in sub-zero temperatures.

Her Scottish conservative religious background made her frown on the dress, morals and laziness of Hawaiians but the longer she stayed, the more she realize that Hawaiians were a happy people who really did not have to work as food was plentiful and mainly free to be picked.

I have been to Hawai'i several times and found this volume fascinating as she describe what Hawai'i looked like in the late 19th Century compared to what it is like in the 21st Century. A plus is her prose is extremely readable making the pages turn quickly.

Riding a horse around in snow and snow storms is not really very interesting. Her trip seems to be more an endurance test than fun or interesting but I guess this is just not my cup of tea. Shi is incredibly cheerful.

Works from the 19th century can be difficult to read due to dense, repetitive prose and the repulsive attitudes of the time. Bird is a woman of her period, yes, and her biases are pretty clear up front, but she is a complex, fascinating person who would be remarkable even in our time. This is a woman who, because of her "nervous condition," was advised to indulge in open air travel. Therefore, she traveled around the world by herself multiple times. Her six months in the Sandwich Island (aka Hawaii) immediately followed an adventure in New Zealand. I found her prose surprisingly easy to read and quite enjoyable. She is a white woman of privilege, yes, but her outlook on the "heathen natives" evolves substantially in her time on the islands. She falls in love with the place and the people, and trusts them absolutely. She shocks people wherever she goes. She's a white woman, traveling by herself most of the time, sitting astride on a Mexican saddle and riding through absolute wilderness of the Big Island in 1871. She seizes various opportunities--things I sure wouldn't do. A man she just met invites her to climb up Mauna Loa to see the eruption? Off she goes! She is not averse to sleeping on the ground with her saddle as her pillow. Bird learns passable Hawaiian and eats as the locals do, mastering two-finger poi and appreciating whatever her hosts will share (though she accepts the fleas grudgingly).

For my research purposes, her descriptions of Hilo and Kilauea are fabulous. She obviously loves plant life, and goes into detail about the plants around her, mentioning the Latin names if she can.

Bird's book is in public domain and available from various small publishers. I wish my copy had been typeset a bit differently, but it didn't strain my eyes and the binding is fine. I wouldn't mind reading more of Bird's books--she was quite a bestseller in the late 19th century--as she has really gained my respect.

I completed A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, which I own and is a public domain book. One more book to check off my tbr list. :)

The chapters are actually long, highly detailed letters chronicling Isabella Bird's journey from San Francisco to Colorado during the 1870's. The detailed descriptions of all things botanical are one of the highlights and most pleasureable aspects of the book. Isabella certainly lived a colorful life and had some wild experiences during her travels. Much of her travels were on horseback during inclement weather. I haven't decided if she was brave or just naive and lucky to have survived some of the situations she found herself in; maybe a combination of both? It seems individuals were much hardier back then and the types of letters written to chronicle such events could probably be considered a lost art form now.

Four stars and highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about bygone eras in the US and books in letter or diary format.

For more information about the author's journey please refer to: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?...

I found this interactive map very helpful, as it allowed me to envision and better understand the author's travel routes.

Favorite Quotes:

"Very uninviting, however rich, was the blazing Sacramento Valley, and very repulsive the city of Sacramento, which, at a distance of 125 miles from the Pacific, has an elevation of only thirty feet. The mercury stood at 103 degrees in the shade, and the fine white dust was stifling." - Isabella L. Bird
(She didn't mince words. This made me chuckle; Sacramento can certainly feel like an oven during the Summer.)

"The most attractive tree I have seen is the silver spruce, Abies Englemanii, near of kin to what is often called the balsam fir. Its shape and color are both beautiful. My heart warms towards it, and I frequent all the places where I can find it. It looks as if a soft, blue, silver powder had fallen on its deep-green needles, or as if a bluish hoar-frost, which must melt at noon, were resting upon it." - Isabella L. Bird½

This is a true story about Isabella Bird. Her doctor recommended the air of America to improve her health. Her adventures in the 1870's west are amazing. She travels courageously across the Rockies by horseback, alone. The letters written to her sister during her six-month journey through the Colorado Rockies in 1873 are inspiring.

A collection of letters written by the author from the Malay Peninsula in the 19th century. A wonderful part of the world, so bought this to immerse myself in the "people, culture, landscapes and wildlife" of the region

A late nineteenth century travelogue of a trip from northern India to Ladakh and back taken by an adventurous Victorian woman and her motley caravan. The Tibetans of the title are the ethnic Tibetans of Ladakh, an area currently part of the Jammu and Kashmir district of India and closely tied to Tibet culturally and religiously. Bird became extremely fond of the people during her journey of several months, and there are some beautiful descriptions of scenery and people, but also a rather condescending and racist attitude typical of Victorian age. Some of the party's adventures are quite vividly described as well, and they underline Isabella's extraordinary character in the tightly proscribed world of Victorian English womanhood.

it was hard to follow the details of her travel but easy to get the jist. the jist being, why would anyone want to do this? always freezing cold, soaking wet, boiling hot, always in her victorian clothes, always with terrible weather even in her locations but seeming to enjoy herself.½

It's rare that I read Westerns due to the genre being one of the wrongest things that ever wronged in the history of United States' literature. Another one is the holiday being celebrated today by the US Federal Government, a day that my ongoing reads of [Genesis (Memory of Fire, #1)] and [Almanac of the Dead] has thrown into piercing scrutiny. This work was the odd one out in the group in the brutal sense of the word, something I knew would be the case when I started out but didn't deter me due to, frankly, the shock I felt at learning that an English woman rode hundreds of miles in the Northwestern United States in 1873 and lived to not only tell, but write the tale. Her story is one where her deed proves her more a feminist than her word, a word that is horribly imperialist and the reason why I find more worth in a single work of fiction by an actual citizen than a hundred nonfiction pieces by tourists, but with a bag of salt these letters render the concept of the "fairer sex" null and void. It's compromised, but unlike reading something written by a white man during the same time period, this piece cuts through some of the bullshit by the sheer fact of existing.

I pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing the bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of "lunch baskets," which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic party, the last view of the Pacific, on which I had looked for nearly a year, the fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the look of long rainlessness, which one may not call drought, the valleys with sides crimson with the poison oak, the dusty vineyards, with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and between the vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth.

It helps that she's a decent prose stylist, along with the fact that for a while at the beginning, she's traveling through the area I grew up in. California is not one that crops up often in the literature I read, and when it does it is most often Los Angeles that graces the pages, a city I have my share of memories in but in no way compares to remembrance of the Bay Area. Reveler in imagery that I am, it is different when another agrees with the oddities, annoyances, and beauty that I have encountered in my daily life in and around San Francisco, a concordance that only becomes more precious when separated by almost 150 years. In other words, it made me nostalgic, but that happens rarely enough that I can afford to indulge.

In traveling there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.

Judgmental she was, but not enough to forbear having a sense of humor. This and a firm (white) head on her shoulders helped her immensely through snow storms, bears, near starvation, a useless poet with a bottomless stomach, and a particularly infamous desperado called "Mountain Jim" who Bird had the most interesting time with because she thought he was really hot. She danced around the pronouncement like any white woman did at the time, but that's how it was.

I have seen a great deal of the roughest class of men both on sea and land during the last two years, and the more important I think the "mission" of every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman—the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity, or fastness.

This is her in her last letter following up on her viewing the wife doing all the work in various settlements she stayed at as completely normal. How she would describe her own commitment to travel that would in the future venture far beyond shores both European and United States, I cannot say. However, she did write it down for those of us who need a "Look! If she could do it almost 150 years ago, so can I," every so often, so that's of merit.

Birdie slipped so alarmingly that I got off and walked, but then neither of us could keep our feet, and in the darkness she seemed so likely to fall upon me, that I took out of my pack the man's socks which had been given me at Perry's Park, and drew them on over her fore-feet—an expedient which for a time succeeded admirably, and which I commend to all travelers similarly circumstanced.

A bit of humor for the road.

Quite good really, and I read it in a Kindle public-domain freebie which lacked the illustrations. This is one that almost certainly should be read in treeware (and there seem to be a number of moderately priced current paperback editions that are easily available).

Bird is obviously writing with the prejudices of late-Victorian British imperialists. One interesting observation is of the indigenous parent who expresses a thought that he might have his son convert to Christianity (Bird's narration significantly features some Moravian missionaries) but that he himself would remain with the old religion — which reminds me of some of the compromises made by fathers in Chinua Achebe's "African trilogy."½

Isabella Bird is an amazing character, a very intrepid lady.

I was inspired to read this after seeing an exhibition of modern photographs of many of the places she visited and the geography she covered is awe -inspiring, especially as she was a lady of a certain age suffering from back problems.

My copy of the book is to be posted off to my Mum to read next.

Another fine book ended: The Hawaiian Archipelago by Isabella L. Bird. A remarkable account of visiting the Hawaiian islands in about 1872 which includes descriptions, and appreciations, of the geography, flora and fauna, volcanoes, oceans, people, food, religion, government, and climate. She loved the people she met, ate food with new to the islands Europeans and Americans, and long time inhabitants. She rode horses as well as the "cowboys" on the islands, explored the volcanoes up close and in my opinion entirely too dangerously. She does represent many of the attitudes of the European and American "settlers" however she also was willing to explore the real lives of the people who lived there before these settlers arrived. She slept in the rough with sheep herders, mountain climbers, and cattle ranchers. A remarkable woman and an interesting book even if I did skip some of the more mundane accounting of taxes, and government, and educational institutions. She did write very movingly of the lepers colony on Molokai.

I definitely recommend this book to readers who enjoy reading of unusual adventures, as well as those who love the Hawaiian islands.