In the words of Gussie Van Buren, half of the incredible pair of sisters who first crossed America on motorcycles, “the woman can if she wants to.” Here’s a look at some of the most inspiring adventurous women in history who flouted societal conventions, broke barriers, and proved that women can travel as far and as high as any man.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir: Explorer of the New World
‘Thorfin and Gudrida on the Shore of Vineland,’ 1877. Icelandic explorers Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir led an expedition to Vinland (the coastal region of North America visited by the Norse Vikings) circa 1010 AD Impression by l Artist Albert Bobbett from “Our Country: A Family History for All Readers, From the Discovery of America to the Present Time”, Volume 1, by Benson J. Lossing.
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Around 1000 AD, or roughly 500 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, the young Icelandic explorer Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, nicknamed the “Far Traveler”, crossed the Atlantic, settled ashore and took off. had a son.
Gudrid’s exploits are immortalized in two Viking sagas, The Greenlanders saga and The saga of Erik the Red. While some aspects of the sagas, including ghosts and dragons, are clearly fictitious, several archaeological finds support Gudrid’s exploits. In 1975, a spindle, evidence of at least one Viking inhabitant, was unearthed at L’Anse aux Meadows, a Newfoundland settlement believed to have been established around the time Gudrid visited North America. And in 2001, an ancient longhouse was discovered in an Icelandic valley described in the sagas as Gudrid’s last resting place. Oddly enough, the buried house was unlike any other structure of its time in Iceland. What it looked like most: a peat house in L’Anse aux Meadows.
READ MORE: What was the life of women like in the Viking Age?
Jeanne Baret: Botanist and adventurer of the high seas
Before the Industrial Revolution, most European peasants lived, worked and died within a day’s journey. Jeanne Baret, born in 1740 as a day laborer in Burgundy, France, was a notable exception: she became the first woman to tour the world.
In February 1767, Baret, disguised as a man, boarded the ship L’Étoile as an assistant to Philibert Commerson, who had been chosen as “Doctor-Botanist and Naturalist to the King” on the tour of the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville-the -worldwide expedition. In fact, Baret was Commerson’s lover and also a skilled botanist. As Commerson is often plagued by ill health, Baret is believed to have collected thousands of plant specimens herself during this more than year-long endeavor, without any official recognition. Was it not for a small mention in Bougainville’s book, A world tour, Baret’s remarkable maritime feat would certainly also have been forgotten.
READ MORE: 7 adventurous women who broke all the rules
Sacagawea: Native guide and translator of Lewis and Clark
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Much has been said about the early 19th century Lewis and Clark Expedition to the hitherto unexplored lands of the American West. What is not known is to what extent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s two-year mission would have been possible without their young Native American guide and translator, Sacagawea.
Born in 1788 or 1789, Sacagawea, a member of the Lemhi group of the Native American Shoshone tribe, lived a short but remarkably eventful life. After being captured by the rival Hidatsa tribe at the age of 12, she later married French-Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. The couple’s combined language skills would prove to be beneficial for Lewis and Clark, allowing the expeditionaries to communicate with the tribes and make purchases of vital supplies.
Equally important, if not more, was Sacagawea’s likely calming effect on the Native Americans they encountered. One of them, he thought – especially a woman carrying a baby on her back – surely couldn’t mean part of the war. His intimate knowledge of difficult terrain also proved invaluable. After she successfully guided Clark’s party through the Rocky Mountains using a route known today as the Bozeman Pass, it got a lot of praise. “The Indian woman… has been of great service to me as a pilot across this country,” Clark wrote in his diary on July 13, 1806.
READ MORE: 10 Little Known Facts About the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Isabella Bird: Victorian Adventurer
Isabella Bird at 80
Elliot & Fry / Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images
Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1831, Isabella Bird suffered from many childhood ailments and underwent spine surgery in 1850, unlikely signs of the fearless life she went on to follow. conducted. Encouraged by her doctor to travel, however, Bird ventured aboard a Royal Mail Cunard steamer in 1854 for her first transatlantic crossing.
This first trip to Canada and the United States would form the basis of a passion for travel. In the decades that followed, Bird would climb to the top of volcanic peaks in Hawaii, face a grizzly bear near Lake Tahoe, reside among members of the native Ainu tribe in Japan, camp across the Himalayas, and travel through sparsely populated areas. known from Iran, Kurdistan and Turkey. Bird, who captured her long journeys in 10 books, became the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1891.
READ MORE: 5 things Victorian women didn’t do (a lot)
Nellie Bly: pioneering investigative journalist
In 1887, Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran on May 5, 1864, faked mental illness to be admitted to Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, one of New York’s most notorious mental hospitals. Bly’s paper in the newspaper that followed would change the course of American journalism and create a whole new style of immersive reporting now known as investigative journalism.
A few years later, Bly made waves again, with a travelogue of her record 72 days circling the world through everything from steamboat to donkey. She sailed against a monsoon in the South China Sea, as her cabin filled with water, and recounted fascinating sights from alligator hunters in Egypt to snake charmers in Sri Lanka. She not only broke the fictitious record set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne Around the world in eighty days, but also cemented her legacy as one of history’s greatest journalists.
WATCH: The Extraordinary Voyages of Jules Verne in HISTORY Vault.
Harriet Chalmers Adams: Turn-of-the-Century Explorer and Journalist
For Harriet Chalmers Adams, born in 1875, the daring adventures began early: at the age of eight, she rode the vast Sierra Nevada mountain range on horseback with her father. In 1903, with her husband Franklin Pierce Adams, she began a journey that would cover 40,000 miles in Central and South America, trekking the Andes 23,000 feet high, descending into the Amazon wilderness and crossing an ancient inca route.
Adams didn’t just travel; she also documented her exploits in National Geographic, brought back from the trenches during World War I and criticized injustices as she saw them. “There is no reason why a woman cannot go where a man goes, and further,” she proclaimed in 1920. After being rejected by the Explorers Club of New York, Adams became the founding president of the Society of Woman Geographers in 1925.
READ MORE: 7 of the bravest women on the US border
Gussie and Addie Van Buren: sisters of cross-country motorcycling
Descendants of US President Martin Van Buren, sisters Augusta and Adeline Van Buren became the first women to travel America coast to coast on two solo motorcycles. Departing from Brooklyn on July 4, 1916, they also became the first women to climb Pike’s Peak in the Rockies on any type of motor vehicle, before arriving in San Francisco on September 2. Without highways, not even much paved. roads, their journey was treacherous. The sisters fell off their bikes several times and were also arrested several times, not for speeding, but for wearing men’s clothes.
“Their intention had a dual purpose,” historian Robert Van Buren wrote of his aunts for the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame. They wanted to prove that women were capable of being military horsewomen for the United States’ upcoming entry into World War I. he wrote. While the military ultimately rejected Addie’s candidacy as a dispatch rider, the sisters would always make history for their courageous and repulsive run.
READ MORE: How WWI helped women ditch the corset
Annie Londonderry: Pioneer Cyclist
In an 1896 interview in the New York World, suffragist Susan B. Anthony praised the bike: “I get up and rejoice every time I see a woman pass on a wheel. It gives women a feeling of freedom and empowerment. Two years earlier, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky embodied that sentiment when she rode a 42-pound Columbia bike and walked down Beacon Street in Boston to begin her journey around the world.
Kopchovsky, known as Londonderry on her excursion, has shaken societal norms by leaving behind her husband and three young children, at least temporarily, and has self-funded her travels through an assortment of lucrative programs. (His new name, for example, was a promotion for one of his sponsors, the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire.) Although there is some doubt as to whether Londonderry actually rode a bicycle. all across the world – there is strong evidence that she has traveled some portions in a steamboat – she has indeed traveled thousands of kilometers solo, which in itself is a pioneering feat.
READ MORE: 7 of the most fearless female daredevils in history
Valentina Tereshkova: first woman in space
Born into a peasant family in Maslennikovo, Russia, in 1937, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova made her first parachute jump at the age of 22 under the aegis of a local aviation club. Her skydiving skills caught the attention of the Soviet space program, and in February 1962 Tereshkova was selected to begin intensive training to become a Soviet cosmonaut.
June 16, 1963, on board Vostok 6, Tereshkova will go down in history as the first woman to travel in space. After 48 orbits and 71 hours, it then performed its most important parachute jump of all time: to descend to earth after re-entering its atmosphere at about 20,000 feet.
