Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate [Paperback]

Chances are you never heard of Dorothea Bate; she was one of those last Victorian Britons who made her way into science by the amateur study of natural history. The practice of observing, collecting, classifying, and displaying natural specimens was an acceptable hobby for gentlemen and ladies, but Bate pursued it with astonishing passion and effectiveness. As much of her life as can be reconstructed is happily related in _Discovering Dorothea: The Life of the Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate_ (HarperCollins) by Karolyn Shindler. There were more than the usual difficulties of writing the biography of this important woman, and Shindler has made them part of the narrative, as the title implies. Bate's private effects, personal letters and diaries, and other mementos of her intimate life passed to her sister at Dorothea's death in 1951. The sister's home burned three years later, along with the remnants of Dorothea's life, leaving only her scientific journals and papers. It is enough, as she never married and her life consisted of her work. Shindler has fashioned an admiring narrative of a woman with many traditional feminine characteristics gamely pursuing life in the field and also in the male-dominated scientific world of the time.

In 1898 when she was nineteen, Bate marched beyond the public areas of the magnificent Natural History Museum in South Kensington, announced herself, and stated that she wanted to see the Curator of Birds, in charge of the Bird Room. The room was a male preserve, and "that she had aspirations to join them must have been one of the most astonishing ideas that any of the scientists had ever confronted." She somehow got stationed at a table of bird skins, showing her expertise at sorting them into species. She was eventually to work for the museum, both for it in the field and within it, for her entire life. She impressed the geology department the same way two years later with finds from a cave near her home, and her career of collecting took off. She traveled on her own to Cyprus, Crete, and the Balearic Islands, where her most strenuous efforts were in getting to the remote limestone caves around the islands. She found Pleistocene remains of pygmy elephants and hippos, as well as much more, and crated them up to the museum. She became a valuable in-house member of the geology department, working for the museum until her death.

Bate's scientific journals were semi-official documents that were ready to be read by others, so Shindler produces fewer actual personal quotations from them than might be expected in a biography such as this. Nevertheless, in her letters and in the memoirs of those around her, Bate does show as a woman who is "witty, acerbic, clever, and courageous." A woman who knew her at Crete said she was "one of the jolliest, most capable, and fearless girls I ever knew." She was a nurturing guide and consultant, invaluable because of her huge store of knowledge, and one later curator who tried to tally all the papers and books thanking her for her help could not keep up with the huge number. Sadly, her family never did understand her; after reading Bate's obituary, her sister admitted, "I personally never heard about many of these things she did." Shindler admits that Bate "of necessity, is defined by what she did rather than who she was," but what she did makes for a portrait of a woman happily and constructively engaged in intellectual endeavors she exuberantly assigned to herself.

Dorothea Bate was briefly mentioned in a biography of archeologist Richard Berry Seager (by Becker and Betancourt) who excavated in eastern Crete before the first world war, and I was curious to learn more about her. While other scholars were combing Crete for bones during the same period, all were male, and Dorothea seemed to be the first paleontologist in search of much older specimens...those of extinct pygmy elephants and rhinos. Dorothea's personal papers (which may have shed more light on her more intimate feelings and relationships) were all tragically consumed by a house fire, and that remains a grave disappointment for us biography readers, but author Shindler does her best to piece together the life of this brave and adventuresome spirit through her daily log books and correspondence. A very enjoyable read.