Despite its great success and being considered a classic today, the film adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines garnered some criticism because one of the characters, Sir Henry Curtis, the man who hires hunter Alan Quatermain to search for his missing brother in Africa, was turned into his wife, Elizabeth Curtis, on screen.

A woman, in short, in an era when it was uncommon to see them on expeditions in those regions. However, there were a few; and one of them bore some resemblance to the movie’s protagonist, not because she looked like Deborah Kerr but because she also traversed African regions in search of a loved one. Her name was Olive MacLeod, later better known as Olive Temple.

Let’s go back to the last quarter of the 19th century, to the year 1877, when Reginald MacLeod of MacLeod and Lady Agnes Mary Cecilia Northcote got married. He, a treasurer of the Crown, would be knighted and rise to the directorship of Shell company, while she was the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, later distinguished as the first Earl of Iddesleigh.

Illustration of Olive published in El Paso Herald in 1913, work of AEJ and Kerry
Illustration of Olive published in El Paso Herald in 1913, work of AEJ and Kerry. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

It is worth noting, as a curiosity, that Olive’s father also held the leadership of the MacLeod clan and firmly believed in the legend of what is called in Gaelic Am Bratach Sìth, that is, Fairy Flag, a banner that, according to legend, was made by fairies and protected the members of that clan.

The couple had two daughters. The eldest, Flora Louisa Cecilia, was born in 1878 and would succeed her father as the twenty-eighth leader of the MacLeods, residing in Dunvegan Castle on the Scottish Isle of Skye, whose museum houses the aforementioned flag. The younger daughter was named Olive Susan Miranda, born in 1880.

Her childhood was uneventful, and her significant entry into History with a capital H began with the tragedy she suffered in 1910 when her fiancé accidentally died in an internal skirmish among locals in French Sudan.

Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, Rifle Brigade (The Prince Consort's Own)
Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, Rifle Brigade (The Prince Consort’s Own). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

This was Boyd Alexander, a lieutenant in the British army whose passion for ornithology had led him to visit the Gold Coast (a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea, now Ghana) and the Bonin Islands (also called Ogasawara, a Japanese archipelago), gaining enough experience to join a scientific expedition in 1904 that traveled from the Niger River to the Nile, exploring the Lake Chad basin accompanied by his brother Claude and Captain G. B. Gosling. Alexander was the only survivor of the group, as tropical diseases claimed his companions.

He survived and returned in 1907, publishing a chronicle of his adventure the following year titled From the Niger to the Nile and receiving the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. With his well-earned popularity, Alexander met with another survivor from the previous trip, the Portuguese collector José Lopes, to embark on another expedition in 1909, but this time things would not go well. After visiting Claude’s grave in Maifoni, in the Sultanate of Borno, they got involved in a shootout between natives north of Abéché, the capital of the Ouaddaï region, in present-day Chad.

A stray bullet killed Alexander; his body, recovered by French soldiers, was buried alongside those of his brother Claude and Captain Gosling. This ended the wedding promise he had made to Olive MacLeod for his return, but she did not resign herself to that fatal destiny and wanted to pay him a posthumous tribute by visiting his grave.

Boyd Alexander on his expedition
Boyd Alexander on his expedition. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

This meant traversing six thousand kilometers through a continent still not very well known, and additionally, she was a white woman. If few Western men had been seen in those northern regions of Chad and Cameroon, even fewer women had. However, nothing could dissuade Olive.

The expedition took her six months and proceeded similarly to those undertaken by male explorers: contrary to the typical movie image, where they are shown at the head of a long caravan with a rifle in hand, they usually went at the rear, carried on litters because they spent most of the journey sick, plagued by miasmas and diseases unknown in Europe.

Thus, Olive sometimes rode a donkey, other times she walked, and when the terrain was particularly difficult, like in swampy areas, she was carried in a litter by her porters.

Portrait of olive around 1912
Portrait of olive around 1912. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Olive was able to pray at Boyd Alexander’s grave and gained admiration from the French colonial authorities in Fort Lamy, who recounted what had happened and even named some local waterfalls after her.

She explored the region, crossed Lake Chad in a rowboat (which she called “the North Star of explorers”), landed on Kika Island (where she discovered and hunted gazelles), and even searched for the legendary Hajer-el-Hamis mountains, which many Muslims believed to be where Noah’s Ark had stranded after the Flood.

As seen, Olive did not limit herself to paying her unfortunate fiancé the intended funeral tribute but also gathered an interesting collection of indigenous specimens and art and folklore pieces throughout her journey. These are now displayed in the Maidstone Museum: located in Kent, England, where her family resided, the backbone of this institution consists of antiquities bequeathed in 1855 by its founder, the physician and antiquarian Thomas Charles, but it includes natural history and other sections expanded by Olive’s contributions.

Photographs taken by Olive and published in her book
Photographs taken by Olive and published in her book. Credit: Internet Archive Book Images / Wikimedia Commons

Since Olive undertook that adventure well into the 20th century, she was able to do things unthinkable for 19th-century explorers, such as using a camera to capture ethnographic and natural aspects she encountered along the way.

This visual material was included in the account she published in 1912 recounting her experience: Chiefs and Cities of Central Africa, a title that is quite informative of its documentary and anthropological nature. Given that customs were different back then, that same year she also ended her singlehood by marrying Charles Lindsay Temple.

Temple, an aristocrat, son of the baronet Sir Richard Temple, was younger than her, born in 1871, and had a consistent diplomatic career, having been consul in Pará and vice-consul in Manaus between 1898 and 1901. Thirteen years later, already married and decorated with the Order of St. Michael and St. George, he was appointed vice-governor of Northern Nigeria.

More photographs taken by Olive in Africa
More photographs taken by Olive in Africa. Credit: Internet Archive Book Images / Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to this position, he had access to important official documentation that in 1919 allowed him to publish, hand in hand with his wife and with numerous photos and watercolors of their own, a book about their life in Africa titled Notes on the Tribes, Provinces, Emirates and States of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria.

Later, Temple finished his Nigerian service and returned to Europe with Olive. They did not settle in Great Britain but in Spain, specifically in Granada, on Carmen de los Fosos street, where he died in January 1929 due to kidney failure.

She then did go to England, settling for a while in Kent. However, she did not forget the Spanish period and returned to the city of Granada, where she died in May 1936, two months before the Civil War broke out. Both are buried in the local cemetery.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on June 26, 2024: La mujer que atravesó África en 1910 para visitar la tumba de su prometido, y está enterrada en Granada

SOURCES

Jennifer Speake (ed.), Literature of travel and exploration. An encyclopedia

Vincent Hiribarren, A history of Borno. Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State

Samantha Harris, An early 20th female traveller to Africa

Gerald Brennan, Al sur de Granada. Un inglés en La Alpujarra

The New York Times, Through darkest Africa to find slain lover’s grave

The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles)-Museum Winchester, Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Founder’s Gold Medal

Wikipedia, Olive Temple

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