Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/187

 Australia and New Zealand, and recovering her health went on in 1873 to the Sandwich Islands. There she stayed for six to seven months, and then spent the autumn and early winter of 1873 in America, mainly in the Rocky Mountains, where her riding powers came into play. This tour lasted in all eighteen months, and the outcome of it was two notable volumes 'The Hawaiian Archipelago. Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Vol- canoes of the Sandwich Islands' (1875), a book of interest to men of science as well as to the general reader, and 'A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains' (1879), a collection of letters originally published in 1878 in the 'Leisure Hour,' which was subsequently translated into French.

While at home at Edinburgh in 1876-7 she closely studied the microscope, and engaged in the promotion of the national Livingstone memorial, to take the form of a college for the training of medical missionaries. These interests brought her the acquaintance of her future husband, Dr. John Bishop, who was her sister's medical adviser. In April 1878 she set out for Japan, where she spent seven months travelling through the interior and visiting the country of the hairy Ainos in the island of Yezo. After five weeks in the Malay Peninsula (January and February 1879), she reached England in May 1879 by way of Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula, where she contracted typhoid fever. This tour supplied material for 'Unbeaten Tracks in Japan' (1880) and 'The Golden Chersonnese and the Way thither' (1883). In June 1880 her sister died, and on 8 March 1881 she married Dr. Bishop, ten years her junior, at St. Lawrence's Church at Barton-on-the-Heath, the Warwickshire home of her father's family. Her husband died after a long illness at Cannes in March 1886.

Thenceforth Mrs. Bishop largely devoted herself to the cause of medical missions, which she considered 'the most effective pioneers of Christianity' ( p. 325). In 1887 she studied medicine at St. Mary's hospital, London, and in 1888 was baptised by Spurgeon by way of consecration to the missionary cause, not as joining the baptist denomination. At the, end of 1887 she was in Ireland while the 'Plan of Campaign' was in operation, and described the episode in 'Murray's Magazine' in the summer of 1888. She left for India in February 1889. Proceeding to Cashmere, where she came into close touch with the Church Missionary Society, she went on to Lesser Tibet, and described it in 'Among the Tibetans,' published by the Religious Tract Society in 1894. She was back at Simla in October, and soon travelled from Karachi to Bushire, thence to Bagdad and Teheran, an 'awful journey' ; and through the Bakhtiari country, Western Persia, Kurdistan, and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea. She reached London again in December 1890. An intention to establish a hospital at Nazareth was frustrated by the opposition of the Turkish government. Instead, she founded in the early stages of this long and adventurous journey the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Cashmere, and the Henrietta Bird Hospital for Women near Amritsar in the Punjab. In 1891 she published 'Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan,' as well as two articles in the 'Contemporary Review' on the persecution of the Christians in Asiatic Turkey, entitled 'The Shadow of the Kurd.' Her meetings with the Nestorian Christians on her difficult tour added to her zeal for mission work. In a missionary address given by her in 1893 on 'Heathen Claims and Christian Duty' (published in 1905 by the Church Missionary Society as 'A Traveller's Testimony') she said that she had ' been made a convert to missions, not by missionary successes, but by seeing in four and a half years of Asiatic travelling the desperate needs of the un-Christianised world.'

By 1890 Mrs. Bishop's fame was fully established as a traveller and a missionary advocate. She addressed the British Association in 1891, 1892, and 1898, was made in 1891 a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and in 1892 a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, to which no lady had previously been admitted.

In January 1894 she left England once more, and was absent for three years and two months, till March 1897. Through Canada she passed to Japan, Corea and China. Four visits were paid to Corea ; on the first she explored the Han river and crossed the Diamond Mountains to the east coast of the peninsula. After a visit to Chinese Manchuria, she went up the Yangtze and into the interior of China, through the province of Szechuan to the borders of Tibet, thus spending fifteen months and travelling 8000 miles in China alone. On her way she founded three hospitals as memorials to her husband, parents, and sister, one in Corea and two in China, as well as an orphanage in Japan. On her return to England she published 'Korea and