DISCOVERIES

LOOKING FOR LOVEDU Days and Nights in Africa By Ann Jones; Alfred A. Knopf: 266 pp., $26 “History,” Ann Jones writes, “reserves the title ‘Great Explorer’ for men.” Perhaps for good reason. Conquering, hurrying, planning and fixing vehicles are important functions, typically the province of men. But Jones’ travel models are the three “sporty girls” whose applications were declined by Sir Ernest Shackleton when he was putting together his fateful expedition. “I’d traveled all my life on the strength of street smarts and a woman’s skills,” she writes, “observation, conversation, a conciliatory smile, and a sixth sense attuned to auras, bad vibes, and other intimations of disaster.” These skills were put to good use in Jones’ search for the elusive tribe of Lovedu, a tribe of “single mothers” and their rainmaking queen. “The Queen was an afterthought,” Jones insists when she describes the genesis of her expedition to Africa. It was an excuse to drive the length of Africa. Jones begins the trip with a British photographer referred to only as Muggleton. They Ricky and Lucy their way through the Sahara. Resting at a posh hotel in Uganda, Muggleton becomes unbearable, a control freaking “petrol-head.” At every border, he has to be restrained from arguing with the gendarmes. Jones drums up a lot of corporate support for the journey in the form of fancy equipment. Muggleton gets the Land Rover, his baby. “When neither party has a wife,” Jones thinks, just starting out, “it’s the woman who gets to play the part.” Muggleton, with his wisecracking humor and his car mechanic skills, is a good companion, but at the bitter end of the journey, Jones finds two women to visit the rain queen in northeastern South Africa. Queen Modjadji has 25 wives. When asked what wisdom she might have for the women of the West, she replies: “I could teach them how to dance.”

UNBEATEN TRACKS IN JAPAN By Isabella L. Bird; Travelers’ Tales: 348 pp., $14.95

Isabella L. Bird was born in England in 1831 and died in 1904. She wrote about her travels in Canada, Hawaii, Korea, Turkey, Japan and Tibet. She prided herself on seeing the true country wherever she went, on ignoring the guidebooks and heading out for the territory. She is fierce in her observations, lacking in humor but lyrical in her descriptions of landscape. It pleases her, in this and other accounts, to go where other women dare not go. She rarely seeks the company of other Europeans. In “Unbeaten Tracks in Japan,” a record of her 1878 trip, Bird writes in the form of letters to her sister. Her complaints are nearly evenly balanced with her delights: Fleas in the yadoyas (inns) in the countryside are the bane of this particular trip. Most nights, it seems, she barely sleeps, between the fleas and the mosquitoes. It also seems to rain on just about every day of her journey. But she is intrepid. Bird travels with a translator, a good but cocky kid. She is never afraid, just exasperated and sometimes appalled at the poverty she encounters (in remote villages, the women often do not wear shirts). She is delighted by the children, “gentle creatures, but too formal and precocious.” Overall, she feels that the Japanese people are melancholy: “I should be glad to hear a hearty aggregate laugh, even if I were its object. The great melancholy stare is depressing.” Her observations about Christianity and its civilizing effects are understandably dated. “I have become quite used to Japanese life,” she writes toward the end, “and think that I learn more about it in traveling in this solitary way than I should otherwise.”

THE ICE MASTER The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk and the Miraculous Rescue of Her Survivors By Jennifer Niven; Hyperion: 416 pp., $24.95

Expedition leader Vilhjalmur Stefansson was, in Jennifer Niven’s telling of this fateful 1913 voyage, the exact opposite of the exemplar Ernest Shackleton. Stefansson purchased the cheapest ship possible for a voyage he billed as a scientific exploration of the Arctic; it was, in fact, a land-grabbing voyage for Canada. He abandoned his ship and his men when the Karluk, which was not an ice-breaking vessel, became trapped for 10 months in an ice floe. The only good thing he did was hire Capt. Bob Bartlett, who emerges (since each tale of exploration must have one) as the true heroic figure. Eleven of the 23 men died. Many kept extensive diaries. It is from these accounts and newspaper stories and conversations with relatives and survivors that Niven creates her story. Particularly riveting are the accounts of the days trapped on the ice, as the characters’ personalities emerge. When the Karluk sinks, its scientists and crew set out across the ice to Wrangell Island. Arctic voyages were the deepest notches an explorer could boast about in the age of polar exploration. In many ways, the Karluk was doomed more by lack of leadership than it was by ice.