20 Women Explorers Who Survived Brutal, Death-Defying Journeys

When Ada Blackjack joined an Arctic expedition in 1921, she was just a 23-year-old Inupiat seamstress from Alaska with no training in the wilderness. She took the position because she hoped the $50 a month would go toward treating her son’s tuberculosis. After the supply ships didn’t arrive at Wrangel Island, she treated another crew member suffering from scurvy as he died, and she was left entirely alone. She learned how to shoot, catch foxes, and defend herself against polar bears until she was rescued in August of 1923.

On May 20, 1932, Amelia Earhart, a US aviator, left Newfoundland on a flight that would make her the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone, without stopping. After almost 15 hours, she was navigating by the instruments of her small airplane in the midst of bad weather, ice piling up on the wings, a faulty altimeter, and a crack in the engine leaking flame. She kept the plane level and touched down in a field in Northern Ireland the following day.

In late 1923, Alexandra David-Néel, a French scholar and practitioner of Buddhism, at the age of 55, left with her adopted son, Aphur Yongden, a Sikkimese monk, for Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which was forbidden to Westerners. Posing as a destitute pilgrim and blackening her skin with soot, she traversed some of the Himalayan mountain passes at elevations above 19,000 feet without oxygen, often sleeping in caves. In February 1924, she finally arrived in Lhasa and stayed there for two months without being detected. She is widely believed to be the first Western woman to enter the city.

In 1766, Jeanne Baret, a French peasant girl and expert herbalist, tied her breasts with a cloth and disguised herself as a male servant to accompany Philibert Commerson, a naturalist whom historians believe already knew her identity, on a global expedition. Women were not permitted on French naval vessels, which was why she had to pose as a man to get onboard. Despite working as a pack mule, collecting more than 6,000 botanical samples, and being discovered halfway through her journey, she remains the first woman in recorded history to circumnavigate the world.

English naturalist Mary Kingsley journeyed alone through the swamps and rivers of Gabon in the 1890s, gathering fish specimens via dugout canoe and fighting off crocodiles using a paddle. On one expedition, she fell 12 feet into a hunting trap lined with sharpened wooden spikes. Thanks to her heavy Victorian skirts, the spikes did not penetrate her flesh. She climbed a 13,000-foot volcano and returned from both of her West African expeditions unharmed.

In November 1889, 25-year-old Nellie Bly, an American journalist, decided to put Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days to the test, taking off by herself in a ship, a train, and a rickshaw with just one bag in hand. She braved Atlantic gales and Indian Ocean monsoons, even pausing for a meeting with Verne himself in France, and returned to New York in January 1890, having traveled around the world in 72 days and broken the speed record.

In late 1932, Eva Dickson, a Swedish rally driver, embarked on a journey in an open four-seater Chevrolet. She set off from Nairobi, Kenya, and drove through Uganda and Chad, over the Sahara, to Algiers. More than 2,000 miles of dusty tracks and dunes awaited her. Driving in 100-degree heat and sandstorms, she repaired her radiator on several occasions, and became the first woman known to have crossed the Sahara by car.

Gertrude Bell was still a British mountaineer before she became a British political officer in the Middle East. It was August 1902, and she was trying a new route up a 14,000-foot Swiss peak when a blizzard hit. Bell and her partners were trapped on a rock face. Hanging onto their climbing rope, shivering in the wind, they stayed there for 48 hours before they were able to get down. Bell got severe frostbite. Over the next several years, she would lead camel expeditions through the Syrian and Arabian deserts, enduring sandstorms and being captured by hostile forces.

In the 1890s, Josephine Diebitsch Peary accompanied her husband, explorer Robert Peary, to northern Greenland to spend a winter near a lonely bay well above the Arctic Circle. Living in a basic wooden shelter, she endured four months of darkness, leaking coal gas, and blizzards below zero. In September 1893, she delivered her daughter at this camp, further north than any Western woman had previously been. She nursed her baby in the freezing temperatures of the Arctic.

American cartographer Fanny Bullock Workman headed a number of expeditions to the Karakoram and the Himalaya alongside her husband, charting the Siachen Glacier along the way. They battled avalanches and ice pits. On one expedition in Jammu and Kashmir, she carried scientific equipment up to 22,735 feet, establishing a female altitude record. On another plateau on a glacier in 1912, she posed for a photograph holding up a newspaper that read “Votes for Women.”

Annie Smith Peck, an American classicist, began her expedition in 1908, at age 58, to become the first person to scale the North Peak of Mount Huascarán in the Peruvian Andes. With no bottled oxygen or crampons, with no synthetic fabrics but only woolen layers and hand-woven shoes made of grass, she endured altitude sickness, biting cold winds, and the departure of the porters en route. She successfully reached the top of the mountain at 21,831 feet, and later Peru named the peak after her.

A British Red Cross nurse called Kate Marsden, sponsored by the Russian empress herself, made a horse-riding journey of more than 2,000 miles through the sub-zero taiga and swamps of eastern Siberia, searching for a rumored herb said to cure leprosy. The trip was an attempt to discover the location of remote leper colonies in the region. Marsden survived frostbite and collapse during the journey, although the herb turned out to be useless. She published an account of her travels, which raised enough money to establish a permanent hospital.

In 1930, the Anglo-Italian travel writer and cartographer Freya Stark made her way on foot and mule into western Iran to map an unrecorded valley full of ancient fortresses. She endured malaria and dysentery as tribal unrest threatened her life with both local fighters and government troops. A few years later, while exploring another valley in Yemen, she contracted a particularly virulent fever and had to be airlifted out. Stark survived and went on to publish detailed surveys of both places.

In 1861, Florence Baker and her husband, Samuel, embarked on a four-year journey up the White Nile. Born in Hungary, she took care of supplies, translated Arabic, and quelled mutinies among the porters. In March 1864, while crossing a marsh that’s in modern-day South Sudan, Florence fell ill from sunstroke and a bad case of malaria. She lay unconscious for several days but recovered. And later that month, she and her husband became the first Europeans to set eyes on Lake Albert.

In 1891, at the age of 44, May French Sheldon, the publisher known as “Bebe Bwana,” organized and led a party of 103 men on an expedition from Mombasa to Mount Kilimanjaro. No European man supervised or accompanied her. On the return trip her porters, inadvertently or not, dropped the wicker carrier she rode in down a steep ravine twice, falling 20 feet each time, and she suffered terrible injuries, including spinal injuries that left her temporarily paralyzed. She refused to give up command and was carried out of the jungle on a litter. She made a full recovery.

Harriet Chalmers Adams, an American explorer, rode with her husband through every country in South America for about 40,000 miles on horseback, by train, dugout canoe, and river steamer. She crossed 15,000-foot Andean passes, survived vampire bat bites and terrible tropical fevers, and fought rapids that sent her boat crashing against rocks. Her writing and photographs of the journey sparked a series of features in National Geographic.

In 1924, American naturalist Delia Akeley went on a solo scientific expedition into the Belgian Congo’s Ituri Rainforest to live among the Bambuti Pygmies and collect specimens for the Brooklyn Museum. She survived a debilitating tropical fever, perilous infections, poisonous snakes, and a charging stampede of wild bull elephants in thick jungle. She completed her research and made it back to the United States, where she lived to age 100.

Isabella Bird, an English writer with a chronic spinal illness, rode alone on horseback about 800 miles across the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the autumn and winter of 1873, at age 42. She was accompanied at times by an outlaw called Mountain Jim. She survived blizzards, fell through ice on a river, met a grizzly, and climbed a 14,259-foot summit in deep snow. She turned down Jim’s marriage proposal and returned home alone. Then she published her story as a book.

In the period from 1926 to 1938, Louise Arner Boyd, an American, used her inheritance to fund and lead seven scientific expeditions to the fjords of East Greenland aboard a Norwegian sealing vessel. She faced perilous Arctic storms, hull grounding, and jammed pack ice while innovating new photographic survey techniques to map glaciers that had never been mapped before. A part of Greenland was named for her, and in 1941 she was put in command by the US government of a secret wartime survey.

The Icelandic Norse navigator Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir (also called Gudrid the Far-Traveled) left Greenland and sailed to the coast of North America in an open wooden ship in about 1000 AD, hundreds of years before Columbus did. Gudrid survived being shipwrecked off the coast of Greenland, long sub-Arctic winters, and fighting with the native people she met there. She gave birth to a son while in North America, and he became the first European child on record born on the continent. She returned to Greenland and eventually made her way back to Europe.

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