Melanie was Inspired by a Victorian Woman Explorer
Melanie first became intrigued by the story of Mary H. Kingsley while working on her Ph.D. at the British Museum, where she came across specimens of freshwater fish collected by her Victorian predecessor. Kingsley was an intrepid British explorer who first explored Gabonese rivers in 1894, and in 1998 Melanie's expedition to Gabon followed in Kingsley's footsteps just over a hundred years later.
The Extraordinary Life of Mary Henrietta Kingsley
Born in London on November 13, 1862, Mary Henrietta Kingsley was a British explorer of western and equatorial Africa. Disregarding the conventions of her time, after the deaths of her parents Kingsley set out to study African religion and law with a view to completing a book her father had left unfinished.
Kingsley sailed alone to the Gulf of Guinea port of Caliber (now Nigeria) and from there traveled inland to the Niger River region in the north and the lower Congo River region to the South. She went back to England in 1894, but returned to West Africa later that year, traveling by steamboat up Gabon's Ogooué River.
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