The ETYFish Project
NAME OF THE WEEK
Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862-1900)
What if you decided to leave your home and family to collect fishes in Africa? And what if you had no idea how to get around Africa and didn’t speak any of its languages? And what if you had no formal education in the sciences? And what if you lived during Victorian times, when travel to places like Africa was fraught with extreme danger — long sea voyages, disease, violent natives, venomous creatures in the bush?
And what if you were a woman, traveling alone?
None of this daunted Mary Henrietta Kingsley. Born in England in 1862, she refused to live the life of a genteel Victorian lady. Instead, when her ailing parents died within months of each other, she took her modest inheritance and booked a two-week steamboat trip to Sierra Leone in 1893.
Mary lived with the locals, who taught her survival skills for life in the wilderness. (Confused to see a white woman traveling alone, they often asked where her husband was.) She returned to England in December and spent the next year acquiring the supplies and financial support to mount a more elaborate expedition. She wanted to collect. Reptiles, insects, shells, grasses, ethnographic artifacts. But mostly fishes.
While many remained skeptical of Kingsley’s skills and ambitions, ichthyologist-zoologist Albert Günther of the British Museum was clearly impressed. Knowing that she was planning to visit the interior of Gabon, he suggested that she focus on the “mighty” Ogowe River. And she did.
“The means of preserving and transporting the specimens were naturally limited,” Günther wrote, “as Miss Kingsley travelled alone with a native crew; besides, whilst traversing the region of the rapids, which extends over some hundred of miles, the upsetting of her canoe was a matter of frequent occurrence. Nevertheless she succeeded in bringing home in excellent condition a collection of eighteen species of Reptiles and about sixty-five species of Fishes, which will be enumerated or described in this paper, besides a number of other, especially entomological, specimens.”
Günther named five fishes after her, three of which remain valid today: the mormyrid (or elephantfish) Paramormyrops kingsleyae, the African tetra Brycinus kingsleyae, and the climbing gourami Ctenopoma kingsleyae. Boulenger named two cichlids after Kingsley: Chromidotilapia kingsleyae in 1898 and Pelmatolapia mariae in 1899. In 2013, Decru, Vreven & Snoeks added to Kingsley’s legacy by naming Hepsetus kingsleyae, an African pike characoid, in her honor.
Kingsley became something of a celebrity upon her return to England. She wrote two bestselling books about her travels. She gave lectures. And she angered the Church of England by criticizing missionaries for their attempts to corrupt African religions. Her lectures and writings helped Europeans better understand the impact (both good and bad) of British imperialism in Africa and the little-known lives of native Africans.
Kingsley returned to Africa in 1899 to collect fishes from the Orange River in South Africa. Shortly thereafter, the Boer War broke out. Horrified by the war, which she regarded as imperialism run mad, Kingsley volunteered to work as a nurse in Cape Town, tending to injured Boer prisoners of war.
“All this work here, the stench, the washing, the enemas, the bedpans, the blood, is my world,” she wrote to a friend.
The confines of a prison hospital proved more hazardous than the dangers of the wild. Two months later she contracted typhoid fever. On 3 June 1900, Mary Kingsley died at the age of 37. ... See more
