She wrote an account of this in her book The English Woman in America, which was published in and was going to be the first of many books detailing her travels and adventures.
Whenever she was back from her travels, Isabella lived with her sister, to whom she used to write long letters, many of which were published. Despite the spinal surgery, she kept suffering from a bad back and was often bedridden, but she kept going, and in she embarked on a trip to Australia, New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands. From there, she went to Hawaii and North America and spent the last months of in the Rocky Mountains, where she got to finesse her horse riding and had a short-lived romance with a cowboy.
I dreamt of bears so vividly that I woke with a furry death hug at my throat, but feeling quite refreshed. Back home in Edinburgh in , she developed an interest in science and medicine that led her to meet Dr. John Bishop, who she would have married a few years later. She went on to travel through Japan, the Malay Peninsula, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, where she contracted typhoid fever, after which she returned to Scotland. There, Henrietta died in June and in Isabella married Dr.
Bishop, ten years her junior. After his death in , Isabella devoted herself to the cause of medical missions, studying medicine at St. She was made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in and a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, to which no woman had previously been admitted. But then, we mustn't let our prejudices get ahead of us. She had what Victorians called "a sensitive and nervous temperament.
At 23, she traveled to Boston, across northern America all the way to the frontier town of Davenport, Iowa, then back by way of Montreal and New York. Her book The Englishwoman in America is equal parts priggish and insightful -- prejudice wonderfully muted by objective observation.
Example: the trip on Lake Erie from Detroit to Buffalo. Before she boards the steamer Mayflower, she watches militia parading with a silly-looking brass cannon. Then she reminds herself that militias like this beat the British at Lexington and Saratoga. She describes the Mayflower as an elegant ton ship driven by a thousand-horsepower, non-condensing, high-pressure engine. It has inch pistons with a foot stroke.
She also ominously mentions that her Mayflower perished soon after, in a storm. She shares the women's cabin with another white woman, two slaves, and five freed black women. Huge waves batter the boat on the second day. Terrible fear and seasickness are all around her. She comforts the seasick infant daughter of a wretchedly ill freed slave. In she left for India. She traveled to Kashmir and to Ladakh in the far north on the border with Tibet.
During her travels one of her horses lost its footing while crossing a river. The horse drowned and Bird suffered two broken ribs. The two traveled together through the desert in midwinter and arrived in Tehran half-dead. After depositing the major at his new duty station, Bird set out alone and spent the next six months traveling at the head of her own caravan through northern Iran, Kurdistan, and Turkey.
On her return to England, Bird spoke out against the atrocities that were being committed against the Armenians in the Middle East and met with Prime Minister William Gladstone and addressed a Parliamentary committee on the question. By this time she was extremely well known in her native land and was made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the first woman fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
However, she was not happy being still and in she set out again. Bird traveled first to Yokohama in Japan and from there into Korea.
She spent several months in that country and then was forced to leave at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War that was to lead to the occupation of Korea by Japan.
She went to Mukden in Manchuria and photographed Chinese soldiers headed for the front. She then went back into Korea to view the devastation of the war. She traveled by sampan up the river as far as she could go and then went overland into the province of Sichuan.
There she was attacked by a mob that called her a "foreign devil" and trapped her in the top floor of a house, which they then set on fire. She was rescued at the last minute by a detachment of soldiers.
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