Back in June 2020, we met up with a Johor Guide (Mohdnunwaualifro Abdullah of Panz Adventures) to see about promoting his skills and services to the expat community in JB. He brought along his good friend Zulkifly Ab Latif who was a travel writer for the New Straits Times. Sadly Zulkifly passed away in April 2021 while hiking in Gerik, but his legacy to Lawrence and myself is telling us to read this book written by Isabella Bird telling of her travels in Malaya in 1879. This book has provided the basis for our next documentary on the history of Malaysia, but more about that later.
First let me tell you something about this fascinating lady; just a few highlights relevant to our film project. Isabella Bird was a Victorian travel writer extraordinaire! She puts the challenge of our travels to shame! She was born in Yorkshire in 1831, the eldest daughter of an Anglican clergyman. At the age of 18 she underwent spinal surgery (for a tumour?) and this caused her much discomfort in later life. At the age of 23, her father sent her off to Canada and North America. She wrote her first book about this trip, with some success, and then resigned to settle down with her family. At the age of 44, her father sent her off on travels again ‘for her health’, this time to Australia which she thought to be a ‘prosaic hideous country’. She did not think much better of New Zealand!
But on her return journey home, she stopped off in California and then stayed with friends from the ship in Hawaii. She loved horse riding through the vast open spaces of Hawaii and caused a scandal when she decided to ride ‘like a man’ rather than ride side-saddle like a lady and endure the considerable back pain. She created a riding costume of ‘full Turkish trousers and dresses reaching to the ankles’. This way she could behave like a man, but never appear manly. First impressions we very important for a Victorian lady. When Isabella met a problem, she didn’t complain, instead she tried to find a solution or simply make the best of things. In 1875, Isabella wrote her second travel book about her time in Hawaii. This was the first book to really make a name for herself in the publishing world, called ‘Six Months in the Sandwich Islands’.
From Hawaii, Isabella traveled to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains where she met Rocky Mountain Jim. He was a wild man and scoundrel of some reputation… and possibly the love of her life! Her tales of life in the Rocky Mountains was published in 1879 and established her reputation as a travel writer extraordinaire. Back home in Scotland, Isabella was suffering from neuralgia, fevers, spinal pain and bouts of depression. And again doctors advised her to travel. So in late 1878, and lately married, she chose to visit the northern parts of Japan, knowing that there would be novelty in such a trip. And indeed her book describes the poverty of the rural Japanese in some detail. She wanted to tell what she saw, not the postcard view of Japan that the world expected. This horrified many, but her accounts of the customs of the rural population in what is now known as Hokkaido make a fascinating read.
Isabella’s return journey home from Japan took her to Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Singapore. In Hong Kong, Chief Justice Snowden urged her to visit Malacca on her way home, and lent her a book about the city. The Colonial Secretary in Singapore suggested that she might like to visit the nearby Native States of Malaya. There was a steamer leaving the next day so she had to decide quickly. Isabella was never one to give up on such an opportunity.
Despite the poverty in rural Japan, there was a system of rest houses along the roads/tracks where she could sleep. She had to cope with flea-infested bed mats, and the stares of the locals, but she was her own boss, travelling simply with an interpretor. Malaya in contrast had no system of accommodation for travellers and very little infrastructure. As a result, she was taken under the wing of the British Residents and administrators, and rarely went out unescorted. She wrote long letters home to her sister Henrietta, describing everything she had done and seen. It is these letters which formed the basis of her most successful book ‘The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither’.
Isabella Bird became one of the first lady Fellows of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society, and continued to travel to remote inhospitable places and write about all these adventures. She went to nursing school and dedicated herself to establising a missionary hospital in remote central Asia in memory of her late husband.
In her sixties, she learnt the skills of photography and had several journeys into remotest China, taking heavy camera equipment everywhere she went.
After reading Isabella’s book ‘The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither’, Lawrence and I were struck by the characters of the British Residents and administrators and what it took to ‘take over’ Malaya in the late 1800’s. Isabella arrived just a few years following some major brutal civil wars and matters were by no means settled. So we planned to retrace Isabella’s travels through Malaya, and use this story as the backdrop to say something about life in British Malaya (the Native States) in 1879.
While Isabella did attempt to learn something about the lives of the local community, her experiences were fashioned by officialdom. But Isabella was not the only Englishwoman writing about life in the Native States. Emily Innes was the wife of a magistrate working in the remote parts of Selangor. She was at the rough end of the colonial system and was not too happy to read Isabella’s account of the country she lived in. So, in 1883, her book ‘The Chersonese with the Gilding Off’ was published. Yet another fascinating description of the lives of people in Malaya in the late 1800’s.
So, we dissected Isabella’s book, trying to figure out exactly where she had been and who she had met. And we read tons of stuff online written by historians of the period. By retracing her steps, we would need to travel to places new to us. Most of the buildings she stayed in and/or described are long gone as they were mostly wooden structures. If she had arrived 10 years later, then the towns would have been transformed with stone-built structures which we could film. So, this documentary was going to be a challenge on more than one account! But then along came COVID-19 and all travel options ceased. It became impossible to make this documentary as all the points of interest were outside the State of Johor where we live. Indeed, so much has been impossible of late that Lawrence and I decided it was time to leave Malaysia and put this project on hold. We hope to return one day to make this documentary, but in the meantime Lawrence has reworked the script into a series of 21 blogs! All relatively bite-sized but allowing him to say a bit more about the events and personalities leading up to Isabella’s time here. And, since we do not have photos of many of the places and people she visited, we have had to supplement what we can find on the web with drawings and paintings produced by ourselves! We have been in lockdown for three months now, so this has been a therapeutic occupation when stuck at home!
If you would like to read Lawrence’s blogs, please check out his website www.lawrencegray.net/Travel/blog-2 and look for In the Footsteps of Isabella Bird — the Lost Documentary. The latest blogs appear at the top of the page, so please scroll down to the bottom for the Introduction, and work your way up. Lawrence is producing short vlogs to introduce each blog so we are hoping to get all these ready before it is time to leave…….
FURTHER READING...
If you would like to know more about Malaysian history, or writings by other foreign explorers of the country and its culture, here are two interesting books to look out for.
Other sources of information we found particularly useful were the Singapore National Archives and www.jstor.org (look out for anything written by J.M. Gullick).
And if you would like to read the works of other intrepid female travellers, here are a couple of recommended reads.
Click here to return to Travels in Malaysia 2021.
Click here to return to Helen Gray’s homepage.