Freya of Arabia

After a childhood spent roaming Europe, Freya Stark began saving money to take Arabic lessons. Once fluent, she traveled into areas few outsiders had ever been, documenting her travels in best-selling books. Listen in to learn more about Freya of Arabia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delae to Chuck Reboarding. And
not too long ago, we talked about a few real
Indiana Jones possibilities and one of the guys who made

(00:22):
our short list. We didn't go into too many details
about him, but one of the guys who made our
short list was the very famous T. E. Lawrence, better
known of course as Lawrence of Arabia. And I think
Lawrence of Arabia could still make a really great solo topic.
But today we're going to discuss someone who's occasionally associated
with him, Dame Freya Stark, who's sometimes called the female

(00:45):
Lawrence of Arabia. To me, those Stark really reminds me
less of Lawrence of Arabia and more of another podcast
subject we've discussed, Ottoman traveler Elea Cellaby. They explored mostly
different areas of the world. They were obviously separated by
several centuries, but they really stand out from other adventures
we've talked about before because of their attention to detail.

(01:08):
They were almost more writers before they were travelers. You
know that that was what they were really focusing on.
They bothered to meet all different types of people and
learn local customs, speak people's own languages, and they always
preferred the slow road to I think, if you remember
when we talked about Evlia, he didn't like ships, kind
of because he was scared of them, but it made
his travel really slow. And the same is true for Freya,

(01:31):
who could have taken a car a lot of places,
but preferred to travel by donkey or by mule, you know,
really take her time with it. There were some differences
between them, though. Chellaby ultimately produced one epic travel account
and one very impressive map. Stark, writing in the modern age,
broke her accounts down into volumes. In her one hundred years,

(01:53):
she produced twenty four travel books and autobiographies, and eight
volumes of letters. Many of them were best sellers, depicting
arrest by the French, trips to the fortress of the Assassins,
the secret life of Haren's, and a month long siege
at the British embassy in Baghdad. But her personal life
and her penchant for wild hats is really just as

(02:15):
interesting as this sort of professional life she had. It
all starts in an appropriately bohemian fashion. She was born
in January thirty one, eightee in a mom watch studio,
to artistic parents who were also first cousins. When she
was only two years old, her parents started wandering, carrying
her and her baby sister over the Alps in a basket. Yeah,

(02:37):
very romantic founding life. The most settled period of her childhood, though,
was spent in her father's home at Devonshire, where she
slept in a bed her mother had painted with ships.
Again all very romantic and appropriate for her later life.
But the family basically lived all over Europe, and she
grew up speaking English with an accent, which is kind
of ironic considering she was often thought to be quintessential

(03:01):
english woman. Um German was really her first language. She
also knew French and Italian as a child, and learned
a few other languages later on. As we'll see, it
wasn't really quite as fun as it sounds, though, this
life of childhood wandering, but it really did make Freya resourceful.
She didn't have very much formal education, and she and
her sister would instead study with occasional governesses, pick up

(03:24):
a few things, and just read as much as they could,
according to Jacqueline McLean and Women of Adventure. She later
said quote, our wandering life made us precocious and pretty tough.
But when Freya was ten years old, her mother left
her father for a twenty three year old broke Italian
count and took the kids with her to northern Italy.
Before her mother's money was cut off, the count bought

(03:46):
a rug and basket factory and the family managed to
make a meager living off of that. Then, just before
phras thirteenth birthday, while visiting the factory, she got her
hair caught in some machinery. It pulled her up to
ceiling and mangled her scalp and her right year before
she could finally be freed, so horrible infections almost killed her,

(04:07):
but doctors in turn ultimately were able to save her
life with skin graphs that came from her thighs. But
the accident really made her quite self conscious. She would
dress her hair over the right side of her face,
and later she would wear large hats. You know we've
mentioned that already, But um it also gave her some
time to recover too, and some time to start exploring

(04:29):
new things. While she was recovering, she started to read
adventure stories and get really fixated on the idea of travel,
something um I guess she had grown up doing but
wasn't really doing by this point, just sort of stuck
in northern Italy, where she was pretty unhappy. Eventually, though,
her father, who was now living far off in Canada,

(04:49):
agreed to send her to college in London, where she
studied English literature and history. She wasn't there for long, though,
before World War One began and she had to return
home to Italy, and there she became a nurse. During
the time that she was gone, though, her younger sister, Vera,
who was just eighteen at the time, married her mother's
Italian count boyfriend. Kind of a strange situation there, it is, indeed,

(05:14):
according to Claudia roth pier Point in The New Yorker,
there's some disagreement between Stark's biographers about how this actually
played out. Some of them suggests that the count first
courted Freya, or that he simply chose Vera instead, and
that whatever the case, they had a very happy life
together with four children, and this left Freya feeling either

(05:35):
that she had made the wrong choice or that she
had been passed over. Others suggests, though, that Vera had
a horrible life with the count and that Freya was
instead troubled by her sister's unhappy situation. Still, I mean,
I'll say it again, just kind of a strange situation
more than kind of definitely odd to have your father
stepfather become your husband and since you were ten. But

(06:00):
Freya had her own broken engagement to while she was
acting as a nurse in Italy. Her fiancee had left
her when she got typhoid. But after the war was over,
Freya and her mother lived in a house on the
Italian riviera and they were just barely scraping by. They
were very poor. Freya grew flowers so that she could
sell them and supplement their income. Again, she was isolated,

(06:23):
she was bored, and to get away from this really
claustrophobic life, she got into mountain climbing and started scaling
the Alps. And she started studying again, something I guess
she had sort of put aside for a while while
she was nursing. A teacher of her suggested, well, why
don't you learn a new language? You know, she already
spoke English, German, French, Italian. Why don't you learn a

(06:45):
language that's a little bit outside of the ordinary, and
he suggested maybe Icelandic would be a cool one to learn.
But Frea had a smart hunch that there was potentially
more promise in learning Arabic. So after World War One,
the Ottoman Empire had been broken up and the British
and the French controlled much of the Middle East, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,

(07:07):
Jordan's and Freya knew that large parts of the Air
speaking world were starting to open up two travelers, archaeologists, cartographers,
and people doing government work. And so she hoped that
no in Arabic would get her interesting work and quote
lead me out into some sort of fairy land of
my own. Plus she had romanticized notions of Arabian nights

(07:27):
from her readings as a girl. Yeah, she was hoping
it would be some grand adventure in a way for
her to go somewhere new, someplace far away from where
she was. So she took her study very seriously. She
saved you know, we mentioned she was barely scraping by here,
but she saved her lessons at the London School of
Oriental Studies and added Persian to her repertoire too, as

(07:50):
well as improving her Arabic. But it wasn't until nineteen,
after her sister Vera died from a miscarriage that Freya
decided that it was time to put her skills into practice,
time to go for it and travel like she had
always wanted to. So she started off by taking a
cargo ship to Barut, and she recognized that that was

(08:11):
a good starting place for her because had a strong
French influence. It wouldn't be completely foreign. She could work
her way in, she could keep studying Arabic, and she
was really welcome when she came to town because she
said that people thought she was their quote, neither to
improve nor to rob, just to learn stuff, just to

(08:31):
observe and really practice her language. By March of now
confident in her language skills, Freya traveled to Damascus. According
to McLean, this was kind of the first bubble popping
of that romantic Arabia idea that she had. She found
this city war torn, cold, full of fleas, and herself

(08:52):
sick with dysenterry. But she also proved her Early Travelers
medal by not letting any of that stop her from
exploring Ruin and wandering the city. Yeah, she really got
out there and did what she had hoped to do,
But of course she didn't get her eventual reputation as
a bold explorer for just powering through dysentery, you know,
getting out there. It is admirable, but um, you know,

(09:15):
she had to do more than just wander around an
already well known city. She got that reputation because she
went to places where she wasn't supposed to go in
the first place. And her first major expedition like this
was south of Damascus to the Druis tribe in a
region that had rebelled recently rebelled against French control and

(09:37):
had been suppressed by the French. And then the French
had actually placed the entire area under martial law and
bar travelers from entering. So she was definitely not supposed
to be visiting there, but Freya and a British friend
slipped at the border and dodged the French authorities as
long as they could. When they were finally caught, Freya
and her friend played dumb traveler lady. They were just

(09:59):
kind of like, oh, a goodness, are Thomas cook guide
book must have misdirected us? Why did we get here.
We shouldn't be Yeah, I didn't know. That didn't quite
work though. The French authorities thought that they might be spies,
and so they were sent to the army barracks. But
Freya managed to charm her way out of there. She
uh took part an army dinner's horse rides. She even

(10:20):
got permission to keep traveling. And most importantly, she had
Drew Street cred now since she had been arrested by
their enemies, the French. Yeah, she was cool with the
drews Now. So her next trip, which took place in
nine started in Baghdad, which at the time was British
controlled but very diverse. It was filled with Arabs and Greeks, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Persians,

(10:43):
and she really took advantage of that diversity too. She
opped her study of Persian, she began learning folklore. She
was very interested in history and literature and that type
of thing, and this improved Persian of hers prepared her
for the main goal of the strip, which was to
visit the Elbors Mountains in modern Iran, which held the

(11:06):
ruined fortress of the Assassin. And um, I think I've
heard the assassins in conjunction with it's how we have
our word assassin or assassinate um. But I didn't know
too much about them, and I think they could make
a pretty cool podcast subject on their own. But they
were a murderous medieval fact that would do just what
you'd expect them to do infiltrate groups and then assassinate somebody. So,

(11:30):
traveling in what became her signature style, no servants, view guides,
lots of medicine, lots of little presents, and embossed letters
of introduction, starts set out with mules. The fortress had
already been explored, but Stark updated maps, she relocated a
misplaced mountain, and she documented all the people that she

(11:50):
met along the way. She also popularized the place writing
The Valleys of the Assassins and other Persian travels, which
became a hit not just for the main attraction and
which of course was the assassins, but for the other
personal details that contained, like an account of a poor
woman offering Freya the only tomatoes from her garden, but
secretly slipping her son the leftover juice that came out

(12:13):
of spicing them. And I think this is a good
point to mention too, that Stark is really well known
for her depiction of women's lives. According to Roth pier
Pont that New Yorker article we mentioned earlier, um she'd
often be the first European woman in an area, So
the first people who would be really interested in her
were of course the the local women. You know. They

(12:33):
were interested in seeing their first European lady, and so
she would make friends with them, start talking with them first,
and learn about bridal customs and clothes and jewelry and
harems and kids and just the day to day life,
and through them ultimately gained access to the men's world,
but pick up a lot about kind of an unexplored
aspect of life in the meantime. So after a third

(12:57):
two year trip, Stark began to be seen as Middle
East expert. Back home, the Royal Geographic Society honored her
and began to help fund future trips of hers. So
in four she decided her next trip would be less
about mapping and more about discovery. She really wanted to
find an ancient trading spot believed to be the origin

(13:17):
of the Frankinstance trade route and possibly the capital of
the Queen of Sheba. Pretty much any foreign explorer, we
should say here, um, pretty much any explore in the
Middle East at the time wanted to find Shablah, which
was believed to be buried, but the area was a
harsh desert and contested ground between two warring tribes, so
it's pretty dangerous to attempt this. And to make matters

(13:41):
worse and even more difficult, Stark would have to cross
into independently controlled northern Yemen, where foreigners were not welcome,
and so she'd have to do it in secret. So
she went traveling with Bedouin guides and um got you know,
decent ways before she caught measles from a child and
a harem on a stop along the way. She got

(14:02):
pretty near to sha Boa, but she got thick again,
this time with malaria, and then she made a bad
mistake about mixing medication. She combined her malaria medicine with
her dysentery medicine, which caused major heart problems and uh.
She ultimately had to be evacuated by the Royal Air Force.
But while she was in the hospital, this mustage has

(14:23):
been so disappointing. While she was in the hospital, a
German photographer found the fortress ruins. She did later get
credit from the guy who explored them more fully, but
she didn't get to see them or discover them herself. Rather,
when World War Two began, Freya chose her English alliances
over her Italian though her home was in Italy and

(14:44):
her nieces and nephews were all Italian. She joined the
Ministry of Information and was posted to Audun as the
South Arabia expert. Her job was basically to keep Yemen
and later Cairo and Baghdad pro British or at least neutral,
so she essentially became a pr woman, a propaganda woman.
She'd battle Nazi or fascist propaganda with pro British propaganda,

(15:08):
trying to convince people that the British could win the war,
which was something that was a little bit on the fence.
In the early years. She had also helped disseminate news,
she'd translate Reuter's reports for a broadcast, and she'd even
personally arrange propaganda exhibitions herself. In northern Yemen, for instance,
she snuck in a projector claiming that it was some

(15:30):
sort of portable commode and made friends with the minister there,
or made friends with the minister's wife there, she would
have tea with her, chat with her in Arabic to
sort of get comfortable with everybody. Movies and recordings were
forbidden there for religious reasons, but Stark found a way
around that by describing the movies to the ladies of

(15:52):
the Harem, and she must have done it enticingly enough
that the ladies were eventually allowed to watch. They eventually
pressured somebody to allow them to watch the movies, and
soon enough the men were also watching these pro British
propaganda films, and uh Many credits Stark for at least
partially being responsible for keeping Yemen neutral during World War Two.

(16:15):
In Cairo, she recruited members for an anti fascist pro
democracy group called Brotherhood of Freedom. She had just gotten
to Baghdad to start a new chapter there when a
pro Nazi coup took place in April. Most British allied
foreigners tried to hunker down at this point, but Stark
just took a jaunt to Tehran and then remarkably came

(16:37):
back to Baghdad because she was worried about all her
empty friends. She was arrested by frontier police but managed
to talk her way out of it, claiming that she
couldn't possibly stay without a lady's maid, and she kind
of flattered the guard a little bit um and this
was just the ladies made part of it was really
it was opposite to her actual way of living about it.

(16:59):
She's so good at talking her way out of these situations,
even if it involves saying something completely counter to what
she really believes. So the Guard did send her on
her way to Bagdad, where she slipped into the British
embassy just as they were stand backing the doors for
a month long siege. So Phrase spent the next month
with three and fifty other people inside that embassy. Since

(17:22):
the Royal Air Force Base had been closed by the
Iraqi Army, the British were attempting to uh shell the
base try to reclaim it so they could get their
folks out. But despite sniper fire and summer heat and
obviously close quarters in the embassy made people were sleeping
in the lawns, Stark, who was after all by this
point kind of a British celebrity, really tried to keep

(17:45):
morale up and keep folks entertained. They were already piano
concerts and things that would be staged, but she gave
a lecture about her travels. She made sure that the
ladies were gonna have soap and face powder, even though
in that request is granted. Even the one Iraqi policeman
supposed at least that he couldn't imagine why the harem
inside would bother thinking about something like face powder, because

(18:08):
they were all about to be murdered. Um. When the
siege finally did end, according to rough Pierrepont, Hitler was
only able to commit two squadrons of planes because he
had been in the process of sending these huge numbers
of troops to the Soviet Union. So when the siege
finally did end, Stark promptly headed out but three new
hats and um this kind of a side note there too.

(18:32):
She was really into not only hats, but close. She
apparently wrote, there are few sorrows through which a new
dresser hat will not send a little gleam of hope. However, fugitive,
I think that's kind of a surprising reminded me of
Louise Boyd, almost with her flowers she would wear in
the Arctic on her Arctic expedition. Um that this lady,

(18:53):
who obviously could rough it for a while, was still
pretty interested in hats with clock patterns on them, in
interesting clothes and that type of thing. Well, in ninete
she took those hats with her on the road when
she was sent on a tour of the US to
try to influence American politicians to oppose the creation of
a Jewish state in Palestine. While she was welcomed as

(19:15):
a famous writer, her speeches did not go over well
at all, nor did her assertion that immigration required Arab consent.
She was really dismayed that many people considered her an
anti Zionist and was horrified to be considered anti Semitic.
While she wrote a book during this period, it was
her last on Arabia. Politics just turned out to be
not really her thing. She preferred history instead, and she

(19:38):
preferred its traveling to After the war, she moved back
to Italy. She found that Fascist officers had been living
in her house, and she got married. This is a
very odd interlude in her life. She married a historian
and diplomat who she had met through her wartime work
and who had she had known for a few years. Unfortunately,

(19:58):
he was known to be gay by pretty much everybody
except for her, and the marriage was not what she
was anticipating. She had not been expecting a marriage between friends,
and the two separated pretty soon after. Though she did
continue calling herself Mrs Freya Stark, which I think is
an unusual little nod to her married state. She didn't

(20:20):
get divorced either. She must have really liked to have
that and Mrs title, but have her own name attached
to it. She was made a Dame of the British
Empire at age seventy seven. Wrote until her death in
nineteen at age one hundred, traveled until she was ninety three,
visited much of Iran, retracing the route of Alexander the
Great's army, going to remote spots in Afghanistan and her

(20:43):
seventies and uh. In her eighties and nineties she stuck
mostly to Europe, escorting her many god children on travels
as well, so she sort of passed on the travel
bug in a way. It sounds like she did some
of her god children to have even written about her accounts,
and of course later in life too, she was doing
a lot of photography and was considered pretty great at
documenting places in an interesting, interestingly architectural way. For such

(21:09):
a lifelong traveler, though, it's maybe not too surprising that
she even saw her own death as as a type
of journey. She told a friend quote, waiting for death,
my dear, is very much like being in an old
fashioned steam train setting out on a journey. Her story
and her fame are more remarkable too, And you consider
that she wasn't a great explorer, as in, she didn't

(21:30):
make many important discoveries per se. Her bigger contribution was
really her ability to observe and to document change, you know,
paved roads, new states, things like that, as well as
traditions of all classes, men and men and women. And
her books are filled with incredibly descriptive passages. And she

(21:50):
could convince people to open up to her, and that
was a real talent, partly because she spoke their language,
and many of the people she met on her travels
became lifelong friends hers too. But I think what might
be the most notable thing about for A Stark's life
was her almost complete disregard for danger. She just really
didn't care. She could almost always get out of things.

(22:11):
I think a great illustration of this was when she
was exploring ancient graves in what is today Iran and
she crossed yet another border illegally seems to be a
common theme here and was stopped by the police. When
she was delivered by the police to the governor, he
was more amazed than angry because she was alive and
she had been in this area that was riddled with bandits,

(22:33):
and in fact, she later learned that murderers had been
stalking her right before she was captured by the police.
And I think that's a such a strange example because
we've seen all these ones where she talks her way out,
but how many near misses were there too, that's true.
It's interesting too that she seems to have really like
embraced this aspect of her personality of thirst, and it's

(22:57):
really indicative. I think in this quote of hers, she said,
I wanted space, distance, history, and danger. So there you go.
I know, I'm really envious about quality and people. Well, yeah,
not recklessness. I mean, sometimes of course it's just crazy,
but sometimes I wish I had more of that, just
you know, disregard for danger, just go for it. Well, Deblina,

(23:21):
I think you will maybe want to listen to our
listener meal then, because we not only have some emails
from folks who recommended some great travel accounts. We have
some travelers as well. Oh well, I can't wait to
hear that. So loopen this thing. Back around to evah
l V who we mentioned at the beginning here. During

(23:43):
that episode, we had put out a call for favorite
travel narratives and we heard from a lot of people. Um,
I'm just going to name a few recommendations people had,
but like I said, also some folks who are doing
their own travels. I thought it was really interesting to
hear from those people. One recommendation, which came from Kathleen
was for Lefcadio Hearn, who she said was an excellent

(24:06):
observer of life in Japan in the late eighteen hundreds
who had a profound effect on the area. She also said,
though he was apparently given a shout out in a
Bond film, so an effect on culture as well. But
that was pretty neat. We heard from nia To, who
suggested a leaf Battaman's book by pronouncing that right the
possessed adventures with Russian books and the people who read them.

(24:30):
She said the book couldn't technically classify as travel writing,
it's more of travel through literature almost, but she said
that it had that strong sense of adventure, which was
something that I know we discussed a lot during the
the During our discussion of travel writing, we got another
email from listener Jordan's in Chicago and he said that
after he finished listening to the podcast from Eva Telobe,

(24:53):
our comments near the end about how we prefer travel
narratives to guide books quote really struck home with me.
He said, have a travel website, the Uneducated Traveler, and
I've always advocated traveling without a guide book, without a
structured plan. Since I travel without a guide book, my
trips never read like one either. That makes some mistakes myself,
but I want to encourage people to start exploring countries

(25:15):
and their people instead of reading about them. The world
should be ours to share, and that means traveling without
fear or hesitation, even if it's a little uncomfortable at times.
That's very stark, Askna. And then finally, just one more here.
I loved this email from Scott and Eadie. They said, uh,
they're big fans of the podcast, and in November two

(25:38):
thousand eleven, this is what they said. We left our
jobs in our apartments, sold their furniture, stored a few
remaining things and packed a truck to hit the road
for a year or more of traveling. You all along
with others like this American Life, Snap, Judgment, Risk cover
Bill from the Staple list of podcasts we listened to
while driving In the past five months, We've covered over

(25:59):
twelve thousand miles and have seen some amazing countryside from
Key West to Heila National Forests. That's a lot of
time to listen to the podcast. We listened to the
episodes about Evli Chellaby while driving into HeLa National Forests,
one of the most scenic and beautiful places we've seen.
That episode was really interesting to us, but we have
much more infrastructure, you know, GPS, Internet, iPhones, etcetera. To

(26:22):
support us than he did. It was like hearing about
a kindred spirit. He set off to discover the world
in his own way. So another another really interesting connection
to somebody who has been dead for five hundred years
that travelers today can still feel a connection to. To
a fellow writer and a fellow traveler. Yeah, and I

(26:44):
like that people are that travel has changed so much,
and that people are approaching it in so many different
kinds of ways. I like the don't use a guide
book tip, although I will say I've found some things
in guide books sometimes, you know, sometimes it's like the
seventh thing on the top ten list or whatever, and
you think it's going to be a total bust anyway,
but you just go because it's closest or something like that.

(27:04):
You just need the map, you know. Un sometimes you
just need the map. That's true too, but sometimes you
discover some weird and neat things. But it is nice
to kind of go off the guidebook path. So thank
you all listeners who wrote in to share favorite travel
narratives or just tell us about your own travels. I

(27:25):
think both Evliah and Freya would be be proud. And
if this has inspired you to go on your own adventure,
we have a cool article on our website called ten
Extreme Vacations, so maybe you can get some ideas there.
You can find that by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com for more on this

(27:48):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com puto