Petticoats in the Jungle

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The Voyages & Ventures series celebrates the bold souls who stepped beyond the world they knew and discovered far more than maps could promise. Each volume brings a different frontier to life with wit, humanity, and meticulous storytelling – inviting readers to travel beside the explorers who dared to follow curiosity into the unknown.

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Petticoats in the Jungle: The Audacious Travels of Mary Kingsley is the vivid, sharp-witted, and irresistibly engaging story of one of the most unlikely explorers of the nineteenth century – a woman who traded the quiet duties of a London household for canoes, rapids, volcanic slopes, and the tangled paths of West Africa.

When Mary Kingsley set out alone for the region Victorian maps labelled “unexplored,” she carried neither grand ambition nor official backing. What she brought instead was something far rarer: the humility to listen, the curiosity to look closely, and the stubborn courage to see the world for herself. Through forests alive with stories, markets humming with trade, and rivers navigated with astonishing skill by the people who knew them best, Mary discovered a West Africa far richer, more intelligent, and more complex than any book in her father’s library had ever suggested.

This is her journey – told with the wit, verve, and clarity that made her one of the most original observers of her age. From paddling upriver with canoe-men who combined humour with expertise, to trekking through Fang country and dismantling Europe’s most persistent myths, to climbing the volcanic vastness of Mount Cameroon in a skirt that refused to stay where it should, Mary emerges as both a brilliant witness and an unforgettable travelling companion.

But the story does not end with exploration. Returning to London, she became an unlikely public figure whose sharp, unsentimental critiques of colonial policy unsettled the empire’s most comfortable assumptions. And when war broke out in South Africa, she set aside fame without hesitation, choosing instead to serve as a nurse in hospitals overwhelmed by fever and fear.

This book brings together all the layers of Mary Kingsley’s remarkable life – scholarship, adventure, humour, humanity – and reveals why her voice still matters. It is a tribute to curiosity as a compass, to courage expressed through clear-eyed observation rather than swagger, and to a woman whose journeys continue to inspire anyone drawn to the world’s wild edges and hidden truths.