2-982-523 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Late Madame Ida Pfeiffer, 1858. Engraving after a painting by Miss Emily Marie Schmäck, a relative. 'The record of [Madame Pfeiffer's] adventurous career reads like a story in the Arabian Nights...In 1842 she...traversed Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt...she proceeded, via Cape Horn, to Chili, and thence to Tahiti... She next reached China...proceeded to Calcutta, and...Bombay...began a perilous journey to Mosul, travelling, as she described it, like the poorest Arab...she continued her journey through Persia, and, returning homewards by way of Russia, Constantinople, and Athens, reached Vienna in November, 1848...In 1852 she was at Sarawak, whence she penetrated into the interior of Borneo...[In] Java and Sumatra...she went among the cannibal tribe of the Batacks, hitherto generally avoided by Europeans, but whose fierce nature her calm and quiet bearing subdued, and she appears even to have won their respect, since none but a superhuman being, they asserted, could have ventured amongst them...Although not a scientific traveller...Madame Pfeiffer has done much to advance the cause of knowledge...She was able to take bearings and distances, to make meteorological observations, and has contributed largely to the science of entomology'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.