On Board the Nevada, Bound for Hawaii

Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop (1831–1904) was among the most adventurous and prolific of the solitary Victorian travelers. Born in Yorkshire, the first of two daughters of evangelical Christian parents, she had an unusually sensitive disposition, and from early on suffered from a variety of ailments, including a spinal complaint that persisted throughout her life. It was anticipated that she would spend her life as an invalid, but she was advised to travel in an attempt to improve her health, and her father provided her with the means necessary for a sojourn in Canada and the United States. This seven-month trip resulted in her first book, The Englishwoman in America, published anonymously in 1856 by John Murray, who would remain a close friend and the publisher of her principal works. After her father’s death in 1858, she and her sister, Henrietta, and their mother moved to Edinburgh, where they remained until the mother’s death in 1866, at which point the two sisters took up residence on the Isle of Mull. Continuing concerns about Bird’s health resulted in travels to New York and to the Mediterranean, but her condition failed to improve. Finding the climate of Mull difficult, in 1872 Bishop sailed to Australia and New Zealand, and in 1873 went on to the Sandwich Islands (now known as Hawaii). She spent six months there, followed by an autumn and winter riding horseback—astride, rather than sidesaddle, as would have been regarded as appropriate for women—in the Rocky Mountains. Most of Bishop’s travel writings originated in letters to her sister, and this eighteenth-month journey provided the basis for the first two books that secured her enduring fame: The Hawaiian Archipelago. Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (1875) and A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Subsequent journeys took her to Japan, the Malay Peninsula, and the Sinai Peninsula, and her experiences there are recorded in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883). Her sister died in the spring of 1880; she was devastated by this loss, and a year later married Dr. John Bishop, who was ten years her junior and had been her sister’s medical adviser. He died in 1886, and the rest of Bishop’s life was largely devoted to work as a medical missionary in various parts of the world, including India, Kashmir, Persia, Kurdistan, Armenia, Turkey, Tibet, Korea, and China. As in the past, these travels resulted in a series of publications. In 1900, at the age of seventy, she embarked upon a six-month trip to Morocco, where she made her way through the Atlas mountains, but her deteriorating health prevented her from completing a full account of her journey. She was making plans for another extended trip to China when she died in Edinburgh in 1904. The letter below is the opening chapter of Bishop’s account of her stay in Hawaii, first published in London by John Murray in 1875.

Letter I. Steamer Nevada, North Pacific, January 19.

A white, unwinking, scintillating sun blazed down upon Auckland, New Zealand. Along the white glaring road from Onehunga, dusty trees and calla lilies drooped with the heat. Dusty thickets sheltered the cicada, whose triumphant din grated and rasped through the palpitating atmosphere. In dusty enclosures, supposed to be gardens, shrivelled geraniums scattered sparsely alone defied the heat. Flags drooped in the stifling air. Men on the verge of sunstroke plied their tasks mechanically, like automatons. Dogs, with flabby and protruding tongues, hid themselves away under archway shadows. The stones of the sidewalks and the brick of the houses radiated a furnace heat. All nature was limp, dusty, groaning, gasping. The day was the climax of a burning fortnight, of heat, drought, and dust, of baked, cracked, dewless land, and oily breezeless seas, of glaring days, passing through fierce fiery sunsets into stifling nights.

I only remained long enough in the capital to observe that it had a look of having seen better days, and that its business...