In the second half of the 19th century, a few women – independent and adventure-driven, made a name for themselves in the world.
Among them was Scotland-born Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming, a wandering female travel writer and artist who ‘broke the mould’ at a time when women rarely travelled solo and were expected to always be by their husband’s side.
As a writer, her first published work was an article titled ‘Camp Life in the Himalayas’, which appeared in 1869 in Good Words, a popular periodical at the time. After her first work, she wrote extensively for a wide range of journals.
Her first book, covering her travels to Scotland and India, was also published. However, she didn’t see it come off the press. The job was finished by a colleague and friend Isabella Bird because Gordon-Cumming had left suddenly for Fiji. Yes you’ve heard it right — Fiji!
This was how her trip to the South Seas in the dramatic 1870s came about. Shortly after a visit to Edinburg, Scotland she received a letter inviting her to an expedition to Fiji with the Hamilton- Gordons. Gordon-Cumming or Eka as she was fondly called by close family and friends was invited by Lady Gordon to accompany her to Fiji where her husband, Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, who had just been appointed Fiji’s first governor after the cession of 1874.
“Needless to say I accepted with delight,” Gordon-Cumming shared about the excitement she had about her trip to Fiji. On March 23 the Fiji-bound party assembled at Charing Cross railway station, London before crossing to France from where they boarded the Singapore-bound ship Anadyr at Marseilles.
From Singapore the group travelled to Brisbane and then to Sydney where Gordon-Cumming was billeted with Commodore James Goodenough who was an officer in the Royal Navy and went on to become Commander-in-Chief, Australia Station.
The commodore, along with Edgar L Layard (the newlyappointed consul in Fiji), was instrumental in the lead-up towards the annexation of Fiji to Great Britain. He travelled throughout Fiji to speak with the chiefs and settlers on their views of annexation.
Gordon-Cumming would later described him as ‘a saint and martyr’ following his death in September 1875. Once in Fiji the Gordons and Gordon-Cumming stayed for a while at Government House with Sir Hercules Robinson who had been involved with Britain’s annexation of Fiji on October 10, 1874.
Before this, they had to lodge in various places in Levuka town while their quarters were being constructed at Nasova, the first site of Fiji’s Government House.
At Nasova she met Baron Anatole von Hugel who described her said on October 16, 1875 as ‘very tall, lanky, and pronounced ugly……She talks much and pleasantly’. On May 16, he said of her ‘rather distinguished herself by bumptiousness’ and on September 26 ‘in excellent spirits and capital company.’ From his writings, it seemed Baron Anatole von Hugel was first critical of her.
As for her hosts, Arthur Gordon seems to have found her trying at times. In those days, early Fiji was perceived a dynamic place of cultural interactions and exchanges.
Centuries before the arrival of white men, canoes of indigenous Pacifi c people had voyaged here from other Pacific isles, and transported people and objects for trade. Gordon-Cumming found Fiji’s tropical beauty of irresistible that she never waisted a moment to capture natural sceneries of the island.
When she first arrived in Levuka , Ovalau, she spent time painting the island from the ship Egmont because ‘the view thence was lovely’. Because the Gordons’ official home at Nasova had not been completed when they arrived, Gordon-Cumming was billeted at a bungalow perched on the hill overlooking the harbour belonging to Captain Havelock and his wife.
While life on Ovalau was not luxurious, the natural surroundings were plentiful.
She wrote: “We have not come to a land fl owing with milk and honey in any sense”.
She was candid with her writing, sometimes blunt in her descriptions of things she was not familiar about. Of the indigenous Fijians she said “these brown men are a fine race. They are very honest, though sometimes they cannot resist borrowing large English bath-towels, which make most tempting sulu (i.e. kilt) and nice cambric handkerchiefs are a tempting covering for carefully-dressed hair”.
In her writing on September 29, 1875, she spoke highly of Ratu Seru Cakobau after meeting him. “…at last I really have seen the King of Cannibal Islands, and a fine stately old fellow he is, with a bright intelligent countenance, and very chief-like, commanding carriage,” she said.
Gordon-Cumming was lucky to be at the funeral of Joeli Bulu, the Tongan who came to Fiji as a missionary with Reverend James Calvert and was with Reverend John Hunt in Rewa before moving to Viwa Island. Bulu was later responsible for the conversion of hundreds of villages in Cakaudrove on Vanua Levu. On Bulu’s death on May 1877, Gordon is known to have described the missionary as ‘the king’s (Ratu Cakobau) old friend’. He was buried beside his friend John Hunt on Viwa.
‘They are all very much attached to him; and some of them are generally with him now, fanning or just watching beside him. Lady Gordon, the governor’s wife, sent him a parcel of jujubes and acid drops,’ Gordon-Cumming wrote.
“Many other Fijian and Tongan ministers and teachers who were his friends have grave-sites effaced by hurricanes or lost in scrub. When Bulu died some of Fiji’s most able evangelists were going to New Britain. At home in Fiji the ardor of a second generation was cooling off. The mission met problems in the mountainous interior of Viti Levu, a region suspicious of the infl uence of Bau”. On her travels to Viti Levu, she visited the Rewan peninsula and described Suva Harbour as “simply lovely”.
‘From the fl at (which is the site of the town in the air) we look across to hills in form like those of Torridon in Ross-shire (Scotland) but covered with densest tropical vegetation, and watered by many rivers, each lovelier than the last.
“This morning I had a good walk in the early morning to get a sketch of a lovely site. Then after breakfast we rowed up one of the rivers and lunched on a grassy bank under a shady citron-tree, as far up as we could take the boat”. She called the Rewa River a “certainly very fine river”.
“It receives the waters of various mountain-streams and itself becomes so large a body of water, that, ere to that of the Thames at London Bridge”. On Christmas Day of 1875, Gordon-Cumming noted the killing of large numbers of pigs for feasting. She put what she saw this way:
“Today, in honour of Christmas, this oft-recurring pig festival has been thrice repeated, and you can fancy how saturated with grease are the unfortunate mats near the door! “I have induced the owner of the wooden tray, which did duty on this day and on Christmas Eve, to sell it to, and shall take it away as an interesting memorial of the strangest Christmas dinner which has yet fallen to my share”.
Apart from her book, Gordon-Cumming was also well known for capturing a number of Fiji’s island sceneries. The exquisite watercolours by the travel writer and artist Constance Gordon-Cumming plus those by naval artist James Glen Wilson helped give a glimpse of what early colonial Fiji looked like. She travelled to places like Ra, Ovalau, Gau, Rewa, Lau, Kadavu and Levuka.
Her painting titled Our Home in Fiji was a depiction of the early town of Levuka as seen from Nasova, where Sir Arthur Gordon resided in a wooden building with thatched roof.
The main part of the building looked seaward, with two wings on each side. Her painting on A Chief’s Kitchen showed a chief’s bure with clay earthenware, bark cloth, a small fi replace and weapons.
Her painting on The Kauvadra Mountains gives an insight into her admiration for the rugged terrain of Fiji’s equal to Greece’s Mount Olympus.
She wrote: “Another day filled with impression of beauty. Few bits of Scotland can compare with the mountain scenery of these isles. “I only wish it were possible to make expeditions inland, and explore the dark ravine and corries which seam the great mountain-range of the Kauvadra, a long the vase of which we have been riding all day.
“It was a beauty not lost on the Fijians, who believed this to be home of the principal god in their pantheon, Degei, adopting the form of a giant python living in a cave”.
Between 1881 and 1892, Gordon-Cumming had published books on her expeditions to Fiji, Polynesia, Hawaii, California, Egypt, China and Ceylon.
And after her lifetime of wanderings and travels that had brought her to the isles of Fiji, Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming died at Crieff, Scotland on September 4, 1924. She was aged 82.
