The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [63]
WOMEN EXPLORER TIMELINE
1704 Sarah Kemble Knight journeys on horseback, solo, from Boston to New York.
1876 Maria Spelternia is the first woman to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire.
1895 Annie Smith Peck becomes the first woman to climb the Matterhorn.
1901 Annie Taylor is the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
1926 Gertrude Ederle is the first woman to swim the English Channel.
1947 Barbara Washburn becomes the first woman to climb Mt. McKinley.
1975 Junko Tabei of Japan is the first woman to climb Mt. Everest.
1976 Krystyna Choynowski-Liskiewicz of Poland is the first woman to sail around the world solo.
1979 Sylvia Earle is the first person in the world to dive to a depth of 1,250 feet.
1983 Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
1984 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to walk in space.
1985 Tania Aebi, at nineteen, becomes the youngest person ever to sail alone around the world.
1985 Libby Riddles is the first woman to win the Iditarod Dog-Sled Race in Alaska.
1986 American Ann Bancroft becomes the first woman in the world to ski to the North Pole.
2001 Ann Bancroft and Norwegian Liv Arnesen are the first women to cross Antarctica on skis.
2005 Ellen MacArthur breaks the world’s record for sailing solo around the world.
2007 Eighteen-year-old Samantha Larson becomes the youngest American to climb Mt. Everest and also the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits. (She and her father, Dr. David Larson, are the first father-daughter team to complete the Seven Summits.)
returned to Digne in 1946 to settle the estate of her husband, who had died in 1941, and again wrote books and gave lectures about what she had seen. Her last camping trip, at an Alpine lake in early winter, 2,240 meters above sea level, was at age eightytwo. She lived to be 100, dying just eighteen days before her 101st birthday.
Freya Stark
FREYA STARK
Dame Freya Madeleine Stark (1893-1993) was a British travel writer, explorer, and cartographer. She was one of the first Western women to travel the Arabian deserts, and was fluent in Arabic and several other languages. She traveled to Turkey, the Middle East, Greece, and Italy, but her passion was the Middle East. When she was thirty-five, she explored the forbidden territory of the Syrian Druze, traveling through “The Valley of the Assassins” before being thrown into a military prison. In the 1930s, she went to the outback of southern Arabia, where few Westerners had explored, and discovered the hidden routes of the ancient incense trade. During World War II, she joined the Ministry of Information and helped create propaganda to encourage Arabic support of the Allies. Even in her sixties, she continued her travels, retracing Alexander the Great’s journeys into Asia and writing three more books based on those trips. By the time of her death, at age 100, she had written two dozen books on her adventures.
Florence Baker
FLORENCE BAKER
Lady Florence Baker (1841-1916), was born Barbara Maria Szász. She was orphaned at seven, and at age seventeen she was due to be sold at an Ottoman slave market in Hungary when a thirty-eight-year-old English widower, Sam Baker, paid for her and rescued her from her captors. She was renamed Florence, and years later she became Samuel Baker’s wife. They were a perfect match: Sam was an established explorer, and Florence a natural-born adventurer, and so the two of them traveled to Africa, searching for the source of the Nile and shooting big game. They managed to reach the secondary source of the Nile, which they called Lake Albert in honor of Queen Victoria’s recently deceased husband, and then in 1865 they made the journey to Britain, where they married (and where she met her stepchildren, Sam’s children by his first wife) and where Sam received a knighthood. They returned to Africa in 1870 to report on the slave trade