The Blessing of a Good Thick Skirt

Mary Kingsley was, by any sensible measure, a serious explorer. She canoed up the Ogooué, traversed Fang country, and in 1895 became the first European woman to summit Mount Cameroon by a route no European had used. The British Museum got new fish out of it. Three species still bear her name.

She did all of this in a high-necked black blouse, a long black woollen skirt, buttoned leather boots, and a small sealskin hat. She would, she said, rather have perished on a public scaffold than wear trousers.

When an eight-foot crocodile tried to climb into her canoe on the Ogooué, she fetched it a clip on the snout with the paddle, dressed as if for tea. She waded mangrove swamps in the skirt up to her chin, emerged with leeches round her neck "like astrakhan collars," salted them off, and walked on. What the skirt made of all this is not recorded.

Then, near Efoua, she stepped onto a covered Fang game pit and dropped fifteen feet onto nine ebony spikes, each a foot long.

The skirt held.

"It is at these times," she wrote, "you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt."