Ida Pfeiffer's First Journey Around the World

Pfeiffer left Vienna on 1 May 1846 and reached Hamburg on the 12th, where a fast brig that happened to be called the Ida was ready to sail for Brazil. She let it go: she had promised to wait for a travelling companion, the Bohemian botanist Count Berchtold, whom she had met on an earlier journey to the Holy Land. He arrived only in mid-June. On the evening of 28 June the two embarked on the Danish brig Caroline, bound for Rio de Janeiro, and sailed down the Elbe past Cuxhaven into the North Sea.

Location precision: The book doesn't name the quay; the pin marks Hamburg's harbour front at the Landungsbrücken.

Brazil began badly. On 27 September 1846, walking with Berchtold up the forest road to the new German colony of Petrópolis, she was followed by a runaway slave who suddenly attacked them with a long knife and a lasso. Their parasols were hacked to pieces; Pfeiffer was cut twice in the arm, wounded the man in the hand with her own clasp knife, and Berchtold's hand was slashed before two horsemen came round the corner and the attacker fled into the wood. Two days later, arm bandaged, she carried on with the trip.

Location precision: The attack happened on the forest road below the colony; the pin marks Petrópolis.

Visitor guidance: Petrópolis, later the Brazilian emperor's summer capital, is about an hour's drive from Rio; the Imperial Museum is its main sight.

Undeterred, Pfeiffer travelled up the Macacu River and over the mountains to Nova Friburgo, a small town of about a hundred houses founded by Swiss, French and German settlers, where she spent days with a naturalist couple. From there she went deep into the forest with a single servant to visit the Puri, an Indigenous people of the region. She collected insects and plants all the way — the beginning of the natural-history collections that later paid for her travels.

Location precision: The forest villages aren't located; the pin marks Nova Friburgo, her base.

From Rio she took passage on the English barque John Renwick, rounded Cape Horn in the southern summer and reached Valparaíso on 2 March 1847. She was not impressed: "The appearance of Valparaiso is dull and monotonous" — two long streets at the foot of bare, sandy-looking hills, with houses and the churchyard perched above. But she was fascinated by the port's eating houses, its workers' customs and the talk of gold and silver mines in the interior.

Location precision: The pin marks central Valparaíso.

Visitor guidance: Valparaíso's hillside quarters, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are reached by century-old funicular lifts.

On the long crossing to China the ship called at Tahiti. Britain and France had long quarrelled over the island; now it was a French protectorate, and Queen Pomare, who had fled to another island, had come back to Papeete only five weeks before Pfeiffer arrived. One evening she saw the queen: tall and stout, in a sky-blue satin gown given by the King of the French, jasmine flowers in her ears — and shoes and stockings forced on for the occasion, though she usually went barefoot. Pfeiffer also visited the grave of King Pomare I.

Location precision: The pin marks Papeete, the town where she stayed.

Landing at Macao on 9 July 1847, Pfeiffer went on to Canton, where foreign women were almost never seen and crowds followed her shouting abuse. With a German merchant as escort she still saw more of the city than any western woman before her. Then a missionary offered to take her right round the city walls, on one condition: she must dress as a man, since no woman had ever made the trip. She agreed, and set off early one morning through narrow streets past house altars still lit from the night.

Location precision: Little of the old wall survives; the pin marks the Zhenhai Tower, a gate tower on its northern line.

Visitor guidance: The Zhenhai Tower in Yuexiu Park houses the Guangzhou Museum.

After Ceylon and a long journey across India, she left Bombay on 23 April 1848 for Baghdad, then an Ottoman city. She stayed four weeks, sleeping on the roofs and in the cool cellars against the heat, and rode out to the ruins of Babylon and the tower mound of Birs Nimrud — 132 miles in the saddle in three and a half days. Her plan to go on to Isfahan collapsed when news came that its governor had been murdered and the province was in revolt, so she joined a caravan north to Mosul instead.

Location precision: The pin marks central Baghdad.

On 8 July a caravan guide in rags, "his countenance resembled that of a robber", collected her at Mosul. She rode with him through the Kurdish mountains by way of Rawanduz and Urmia, stayed with a Kurdish family and was let off by three robbers, before reaching Tabriz, the seat of the Persian crown prince's viceroy. It was Ramadan. Through letters of introduction she was received by the viceroy Bahman Mirza and, as a woman, visited his wives and other Persian ladies in their homes.

Location precision: The pin marks central Tabriz.

From Tabriz she rode north with caravans into Russian Armenia and Georgia, crossed the Black Sea, and came home via Constantinople, Athens and Trieste. She reached Vienna on 31 October 1848 — the very day imperial troops stormed the city to crush its revolution — and had to wait outside the walls in great anxiety until the gates opened on 4 November and she knew her family was safe. Her book appeared in 1850. She went round the world a second time in 1851–1855 and died in Vienna in 1858.

Location precision: The book doesn't say where she entered the city; the pin marks St Stephen's Cathedral in the centre.

Visitor guidance: Her grave is in the section for distinguished citizens at Vienna's Central Cemetery, where she was the first woman buried.