Harriet Chalmers Adams Got Around

Born in 1875, Adams lived during a time when women didn't travel extensively without chaperones. But, on the brink of the age of thirty, Adams made a three-year trip around South America with her husband, Franklin Adams. They rode horseback on the Andes and visited every country on the continent.

Exploration was familiar to Adams. Her father taught her how to ride, hunt and fish. Harriet told one interviewer, "Before I was fourteen, I had completed, on horseback, the exploration of the entire Sierra Nevada Mountain chain with my father."[1]

She married Franklin Pierce Adams in 1899 and the union proved to be the perfect match. The two adventurers began their traveling careers by motoring all over California and Mexico.

Although she was not allowed full membership in the National Geographic Society, she wrote articles about her journeys and provided photos for National Geographic Magazine. At least one of her articles, "A Prosperous Central American State with the Densest Rural Population in the Western World," about El Salvador, appeared in Volume 41 of National Geographic in 1922.

Since she was not allowed membership in the National Geographic Society, in 1925, at the age of fifty, Adams started the Society of Women Geographers. She served as its first president for eight years. The Society of Woman Geographers awarded its first medal to Amelia Earhart.

For the time period, a short list of Adams's accomplishments was quite impressive:

* Adams was the first white woman to cross the island of Haiti (on horseback)
* Visited all South American Republics
* Reached 20 frontiers unknown to any white woman (at that time)
* Been in every country in Europe
* Traveled the Amazon by canoe
* First woman war correspondent during World War I

Adams was bitten by vampire bats while camping along the Amazon, poisoned by eating a bird killed by poison arrows and broke a couple of vertebrae in her back when she fell off a cliff on the coast of Spain. She also slept among llamas to survive freezing temperatures.

Yet, despite the inherent dangers of exploration, Adams circled the world twice, allowing her sense of adventure to take her where it would. She wrote a total of 21 articles for National Geographic, as well as articles for Harper's and Ladies Home Journal.

It was estimated that Adams traveled a total of 40,000 miles in South and Central America. She also traveled extensively in Africa, the Philippines, Siberia and Mongolia.

National Geographic put Adams's writing skills and travel experience to good use during World War I. She was the first woman to be a war correspondent and was allowed to take pictures of actual battles. Being a monthly publication, National Geographic was not in a position to publish the latest news.

The magazine began issuing daily news bulletins for newspapers, most of which contained Adams's byline.

Adams never considered her gender a hindrance to exploration. She once stated, " I've wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of exploration. Why did women never go to the Arctic, try for one pole or the other, or invade Africa, Tibet, or unknown wildernesses? I've never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man could not surmount; never felt a fear of danger; never lacked courage to protect myself."[1]

Adams died July 17, 1937 at the age of 62 in Nice, France.

[1] Presenting America's World, Strategies of innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945
Tamar Y. Rothenberg, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2007