 |
| From: Daily Gardener |
Charlotte Isabel Wheeler-Cuffe was born in Wimbledon, Surrey (present-day London) to William and Rose (née Langrishe) Williams, the maternal granddaughter of the politician and clergyman Sir Hercules Richard Langrishe, 3rd Baronet of Knocktopher, Kilkenny. She was the niece of the architect and engineer Richard Langrishe (1834–1922).
On 3 June 1897, Charlotte married Otway Fortescue Luke Wheeler-Cuffe (later Sir Otway Fortescue Luke Wheeler-Cuffe, 3rd Baronet), of Leyrath (Lyrath), a civil-engineer for the Public Works Department in British Burma (now Myanmar). Following her marriage, Wheeler-Cuffe settled there with her husband where she would sometimes accompany him on official inspection tours of the roads in remote regions. She described these tours in some of the hundreds of weekly letters to her mother.
After her mother's death in 1916, she continued the routine of writing once a week to her husband's cousin, Baroness Pauline Prochazka (1842–1930) who then lived at Leyrath, Kilkenny.
She would be unlikely to describe herself as a mountaineer but her enthusiasm for mountaineering is evident in that she wholeheartedly embraced the challenge of mountain climbing, and provided no evidence that she considered such endeavours solely the preserve of men. Indeed, she found such excursions enchanting, enervating and educational and rarely turned down an opportunity to engage in them. Observing, collecting and illustrating were all part of her botanising endeavours and she was enchanted by the scene: 'The cloud effects of light and shade rolling across the flanks of these great massive mountains are so wonderfully beautiful that I feel inclined to do nothing but sit and watch them all day'.
 |
| From: Daily Gardener |
The physical geography of the region proved alluring and in a letter she included a sketch map, which she claimed 'is only a guess as I have no map which gives it here'." Her cartographic and surveying skills had been honed over the decade she had spent in Burma accompanying her husband on many of his engineering projects and she undertook a trip with Otway to Mindon, 46 miles away, and assisted him in preparing the plans for a road-building project. She made 'a map of the whole road from here to Mindon, scale 1 inch to 1 mile' and, although it was signed off by Otway, 'he said that my initials must go somewhere "unbeknownst", so we put a lovely monogram at the end of the north point instead of the usual arrow points'.
Ascending Mount Victoria [Nat Ma Taung (Khonuamthung in Chin), also known as Mount Victoria, is the highest mountain in Chin State of Northwestern Myanmar.]
In early 1911, Wheeler-Cuffe declared to her mother that Winifred MacNabb, wife of the Deputy Commissioner, had invited her 'to spend part of the hot weather up on Mt Victoria, the highest mountain in Burma . . .I'd sooner go there than to a "civilized" place'. While Mount Victoria in the Chin Hills is not actually the highest peak in Burma at over 3000 metres, it was considered at the time to be among the highest in the land. The area had been originally surveyed and mapped around 1885 as part of the Survey of India, but Europeans rarely visited thereafter.
Charlotte fully embraced the scientific and aesthetic appeal of climbing Mount Victoria. After a week botanising around Kampetlet, the party began their ascent and their entourage was an admixture of peoples, transport animals, food supplies, equipment and bedding. It included three pack ponies and about a dozen Chin coolies carrying their luggage. She described the coolies as 'the weirdest, wildest looking folk you ever beheld', but recognised that enrolling their labour was central to their success. The group zigzagged across the spur on which Kampetlet was located until they reached the first crest (about 8000 feet) of the long ridge that terminated with Mount Victoria. They were travelling through evergreen forest... with patches of pine here and there. The ground clothed with wild strawberries in bloom and thickets of wild yellow raspberries and glades of bracken fern - Oak and Ilex, wild cherry and crimson tree rhododendron. In fact it is very like Woodstock (in Kilkenny) on a very large scale.
In this expedition, the following morning the two women rode
their hired police ponies until the main path ended and they
proceeded along foot tracks established by the Chins. For the final
ascent to the summit, the superintendent 'rigged up a chair on poles
for us, carried by four coolies, in case we could not take the ponies
the whole way'. While the superintendent may have regarded this
gesture of transporting the women on improvised sedan chairs
appropriate, both had extensive experience of trekking and had the
requisite fitness and constitution for the final climb. They
discarded their chairs after a few hundred yards, preferring to
ascend on foot:
The first mile was up an open hill side, covered
with bracken fern, primulas and blue gentian, with big pine trees
here and there then up a very steep, scrambly goat path with scrub
jungle and thickets of tiny (and very prickly!) Scotch roses ... Then
along a scratch of a path a few inches wide, around a strip of pine clad
shoulder, rising on our right and across a saddle covered in more
fern and gnarled tree rhododen- drons.
The terrain did not deter
them and at 9000 ft some of the red blossoms of tree rhododendrons
observed earlier 'still shone like great rubies against the
sunshine'. Wheeler-Cuffe recorded that the white flowering
rhododendrons stopped at 8000 ft. They continued through dense forest
until they reached an open area dotted with the same red
rhododendrons, here gnarled and twisted and stunted by the wind, and
the most exquisite.
On the final saddle before the summit, they stopped for breakfast. Providing detailed observations of the physical geography of the region and its plant life characterised her depiction of the ascent. She made a record that later would be useful for species identification and observed that 'The air was thin and cool and clear - we were just 10,000 ft now and when the wind blew it was distinctly cold; (it freezes hard here in winter)'.
On arriving at the summit she observed a rounded knoll 'with one gnarled rhododendron on the side of it'. It was the red-flowering species she had mentioned regularly during the ascent and in her watercolour it formed the focal point of the image . The party gazed over miles of jumbled mountains in what she described as 'unadministered territory' where the Svild' Chin tribes still raided one another.
It is claimed that these 'represent the earliest collection from Kew as far as can be determined' , and thus perhaps confirms her as the first European to provide detailed knowledge of this region's natural history.
While this first visit did not yield any published reports, it laid the foundation for a second trip the following year.
 |
| Mt Victoria |
The web of connections she developed in the colonies enabled her to circulate scientific knowledge across the globe. In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897-1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service.
Much of the above from:
On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant-hunting on Mount Victoria in early 20th-century Burma by Nuala C Johnson School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 INN
