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Sue Gild on Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, SF Issue 72

Hell and Good Intentions

It was the title that first attracted me, so many years ago. What adventure-hungry 13-year-old girl could resist On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers? My first love, Huck Finn, was overthrown within minutes. He was just a boy who had floated down a river on a raft; this was a young woman, a heroine, who had braved wolves, bandits and terrible hardships in a noble cause. And it was a true story! I longed to be Kate Marsden and ride through the Siberian wastes, a handsome Russian officer at my side. It was not to be: the book, borrowed from an elderly aunt, vanished during a house move and eventually real life supplanted schoolgirl dreams.

Then, two years ago, while rummaging in a second-hand book­shop, my eye was caught by a book whose cover showed a team of horses racing wildly through a snowstorm, a light timber sledge bucking behind them and wolves at their heels. Here was my lost book, reprinted and with the added bonus of a preface by that other intrepid traveller, Eric Newby. Immediately I was under the spell of that remarkable woman again.

Kate Marsden was born in 1859. Little is known of her early life except that, aged 19, she served as a nurse in the Russo-Turkish War. There she first came across lepers and was told, to her horror, that they were shunned and despised in many places: ‘There is no cure – the best remedy is to shoot them – poison them – anything to put them out of their misery.’ She vowed to devote her life to caring for lepers and when, a decade later, she heard of a herb said to alleviate the symptoms of leprosy, she determined to travel to the only place it could be found – Yakutsk, in the depths of Siberia.

The account of her extraordinary expedition opens in Moscow in 1890, where Kate and a female friend (whom she has somehow per­suaded to accompany her) arrive in icy mid-winter. She hopes to raise interest and funds for the 5,000-mile trek to Yakutsk, but she faces setbacks from the be

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It was the title that first attracted me, so many years ago. What adventure-hungry 13-year-old girl could resist On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers? My first love, Huck Finn, was overthrown within minutes. He was just a boy who had floated down a river on a raft; this was a young woman, a heroine, who had braved wolves, bandits and terrible hardships in a noble cause. And it was a true story! I longed to be Kate Marsden and ride through the Siberian wastes, a handsome Russian officer at my side. It was not to be: the book, borrowed from an elderly aunt, vanished during a house move and eventually real life supplanted schoolgirl dreams.

Then, two years ago, while rummaging in a second-hand book­shop, my eye was caught by a book whose cover showed a team of horses racing wildly through a snowstorm, a light timber sledge bucking behind them and wolves at their heels. Here was my lost book, reprinted and with the added bonus of a preface by that other intrepid traveller, Eric Newby. Immediately I was under the spell of that remarkable woman again. Kate Marsden was born in 1859. Little is known of her early life except that, aged 19, she served as a nurse in the Russo-Turkish War. There she first came across lepers and was told, to her horror, that they were shunned and despised in many places: ‘There is no cure – the best remedy is to shoot them – poison them – anything to put them out of their misery.’ She vowed to devote her life to caring for lepers and when, a decade later, she heard of a herb said to alleviate the symptoms of leprosy, she determined to travel to the only place it could be found – Yakutsk, in the depths of Siberia. The account of her extraordinary expedition opens in Moscow in 1890, where Kate and a female friend (whom she has somehow per­suaded to accompany her) arrive in icy mid-winter. She hopes to raise interest and funds for the 5,000-mile trek to Yakutsk, but she faces setbacks from the beginning: despite letters of introduction from the Queen and the Princess of Wales, she is suspected of being a spy. Eventually, however, she succeeds in attracting the patronage of members of the Russian aristocracy and starts to plan the journey. Endearingly, she admits that this provides a moment of excitement and pleasure (she is, after all, only 31 and has a lively interest in clothes): ‘Even my own attention, I must confess, was diverted from the lepers for a moment in thinking what to wear,’ and the list of capes, furs and woollen undergarments is a long one. As to provi­sions, they included 40 lbs of plum pudding, ‘because I like it, and it keeps well’. At last, armed with a letter from the Empress, she is ready to set off: but it quickly becomes obvious that, wrapped as she is in layer upon layer of heavy clothes, she cannot climb up into the sledge. Before a humiliatingly large crowd of onlookers she has to be hoisted into it by some muscular policemen, then ‘packed and stowed away’ before the driver will take his seat. Luckily Kate is blessed with a sense of humour and a sense of the ridiculous, and this is a moment of light relief before the appalling discomfort to come. The post-houses where she and her companion stop at night are bare and stinking, the walls crawling with bugs, but welcome even so after a day in the horse-drawn sledge: ‘You ache from head to foot; you are bruised all over; your poor brain throbs until you give way to a kind of hysterical outcry . . .’ The driver yells constantly and whips the horses on, ‘but, oh, for five minutes’ peace! Bumping, jolting, tossing; heaved, pitched and thumped.’ Things improve markedly when a Russian soldier called Popoff is appointed to assist her: ‘When we came to post-houses it was often a problem with me, weighted and hampered as I was with so many clothes and wraps, how to scramble out of the sledge without assis­tance: but this man stretched out his hands, and I just tumbled into them, furs and all.’ He helps her off with her furs and high boots and serves her devotedly, and she declares that she would trust him with her life. He is, however, ‘only a common soldier’, and at Omsk the Governor decides that she needs a more suitable escort. He appoints Petroff, a military attaché, to join the expedition. Petroff speaks French and a little English and proves invaluable, for Kate speaks no Russian and her companion, who has acted as inter­preter, has become so ill she has had to leave the expedition. Petroff accompanies Kate for the entire way and attests to her account of the journey in the Appendix. (Despite my romantic imaginings when I first read this in my early teens, there seems to be no hint of any indiscretion – and indeed how could there have been, sewn as she was into her woollen and fur-lined armour of chastity?) On and on plunges the expedition, over icy tracks and swollen rivers. When at last she arrives, exhausted, in Yakutsk, she describes it with wry understatement as ‘not a pretty place’. Yakutsk is one of the coldest places in the world, where in winter the temperature drops to minus 58°C. ‘Even one’s eyelashes freeze,’ she notes, ‘so that it is almost impossible to see.’ Here there is a moment of delight at last when she is given a specimen of the miraculous herb. Encouraged, she determines to travel to Viluisk (now Vilyuysk), hundreds of miles north-west of Yakutsk, where there are reports of lepers living in terrible conditions, and only one doctor to care for 70,000 people in an area larger than France. She will do what she can to alleviate the immediate suffering of the unfortunate lepers and report on the practicality of establishing a hospital. By the time she is re-provisioned and ready to set out it is early summer. The ice has melted, temperatures are soaring and the swamps and marshes swarm with mosquitoes and flies. One reads on in fascinated horror. There are bears, wolves, a forest fire . . . and everywhere she finds gangs of convicts held in appalling conditions and pitiful lepers, abandoned, starving, with no medical care or, indeed, any other human contact. As she hands out packets of tea and bibles, even Kate’s fortitude is tried. ‘Some of the worst details are too repulsive to write about, even for the sake of increasing sympathy for the lepers,’ she notes. Her health of course breaks down and when, nearly a year after the start of her journey, she arrives back in Moscow she is exhausted. On her return to England Kate wrote the account of her journey in order to raise awareness of the state of the lepers and to raise money for their relief. On Sledge and Horseback, published in 1893, was not met with great acclaim: many frankly did not believe that a single young woman could have endured such hardships. Had she made it all up? Popular fiction at the time was full of stories of women battling through forests, escaping savages, enduring starvation; and in her novel I Would Be Private, Rose Macaulay, herself a serious traveller, poked fun at the genre. Surprisingly, Eric Newby too fails to do Kate justice. He dismisses her in his preface as a middle-aged nurse and missionary enamoured of the rich and royal, and suggests there is no evidence that her jour­ney achieved anything. Newby made light of his own hair-raising experiences in India and Afghanistan, and I suspect he found her rather earnest. What in the end happened to Kate? Were we to believe that she retired to leafy suburban Surrey and joined a knitting circle, con-scientiously sending Christmas parcels of hand-knitted socks to long-abandoned leper colonies? As a teenager I preferred to imagine that she returned to a true heroine’s welcome and married the dash­ing and adoring Russian officer who had accompanied her through so many near-disasters. In fact the truth is even more satisfying: she raised a great deal of money which enabled her to found the St Francis Leprosy Guild – a charity which still exists – and she contin­ued to work for many years to alleviate the plight of lepers. She was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Sadly, Kate’s story does not end well. There was continuing con-troversy over her account of her journey, allegations of misuse of funds and suggestions of homosexuality. In desperation she wrote My Mission in Siberia: A Vindication (1921), and subsequent investigations cleared her of any wrongdoing, but her reputation was tarnished. She never recovered her health and died, an invalid, in 1931. The essence of a good adventure story is that it fires the imagina­tion. Kate Marsden’s book did just that and planted in me a lifelong fascination with other courageous and independent women travellers – Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird, Freya Stark, to name just a few – but these women were, in general, motivated by a lively curiosity and the excitement of exploration and discovery. There can be no doubt that Kate Marsden’s motives were purely altruistic, inspired by her com­passion for the abandoned and suffering untouchables. It is this warmth and generosity of spirit that shines through her story and makes the book so unforgettable.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Sue Gild 2021


About the contributor

Having abandoned her dream of tracking the Siberian wastes, Sue Gild became in turn journalist, caterer and law lecturer before retiring to the warmth of southwest France.

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