Clodagh Finn: Olive’s African odyssey — a canoe, crocodiles, and a love story
Olive Archer could have led a comfortable, privileged life in early 20th-century Ireland.
In 1926, Irish missionary Olive Archer, age 28, boarded a canoe and set off on the crocodile-infested waters of the Luapula river in central Africa to join her husband-to-be Patrick Kerr Dixon, an Irish doctor and missionary in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
“Our canoe is a big one,” she wrote, “but we are very cramped as all our luggage [including an iron bath tub] is on board.”
She and fellow missionary Miss Bryde were joined by African sisters Martha and Emmy — “to protect their virtue” — as well as two kittens. At first, Olive thought the kittens were baby leopards but later noted, with definite disappointment, that they “turned out to be only wild cats”.
That comment alone, contained in her eye-opening diary, reveals the spirit of this young woman born in 1898, the eldest of Emily Archer and her wealthy timber merchant husband Thomas Archer’s seven children.
She grew up in the comfortable surrounds of Laragh House in Co Wicklow and went to Alexandra College in Dublin. She was an excellent student and a gifted artist who completed beautiful pencil sketches of her classmates, which still survive.
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Had she chosen to, Olive Archer could have led a comfortable, privileged life in early 20th-century Ireland. All that changed, though, when she met Patrick Dixon, a Trinity College medical graduate at Merrion Hall, the Plymouth Brethren Christian church in Dublin (now the Davenport Hotel).
Patrick Kerr Dixon, a lieutenant with the Royal Garrison Artillery Cadets during World War 1, returned to study after the war. He was awarded a gold medal in natural sciences at Trinity in 1922 and graduated with an honours degree in medicine in 1924.
He would later be decorated by the Belgian government for his work treating eye diseases in the hospital he established in Africa, but his vocation was not just medical; it was also spiritual. In 1926, he joined the Garenganze Evangelical Mission and left for Chibambo in the south of what was then the Belgian Congo.
In April of that year, his young wife-to-be set out to join him.
The journey was beset by problems. Her party of 19 was meant to travel by road, but heavy rain and floods forced them to take a canoe down the river Luapula. The heat was stifling. The entire crew got diarrhoea. Ants infested their food. The mosquitoes feasted on them in the evenings.
At times, the people they met en route were less than friendly. And there were crocodiles and hippos in the river. Just the day before, they were told, an African man had been taken from his canoe by a crocodile as he paddled and was never heard of again.
Then, the final straw; the steering in their canoe gave out, adding further delays to an already held-up journey. Yet, through it all, Olive Archer remained upbeat and determined.
At one point, she even tried to convert two old men mending their nets outside their hut, but they were having none of it.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of proselytising, it is striking to see the strength of Olive’s faith and that of her travelling companion, Grace Bryde, a seasoned Australian missionary who travelled around Africa by foot and bicycle, preaching and giving medical aid to leper patients.
Olive provides this wonderful description of Miss Bryde competing with the mosquitoes to spread the Lord’s word: “We had a meeting sitting outside the chief’s house and it was hard for Miss B to make her voice heard above the continuous smacking of shoulders, arms and legs, and the exclamations caused by the sharp bites of the little wretches.”
The chief — “a thorough old gentleman” — was a man called Kapenda who was head of a Christian village. The travelling party spent Easter Sunday, April 4, 1926, with “these dear native Christians”.
Olive paints this evocative picture: “It is the first wholly native church I have seen yet, and I felt a tremendous privilege to remember the Lord with them – no white person there but Miss B. and I … nothing could have been more dignified and more reverent than the quiet little crowd of men and women with bowed heads, and the fine old chief passing around emblems in his bare feet on the earth floor.”
Two days later, when they were back on the river, the “steering gear went properly bust”. Temporarily stranded, the party thought about continuing in smaller canoes, but that would leave them vulnerable to crocodiles.
Olive writes with admirable nonchalance:
She describes the rest of her extraordinary journey in a diary and letters sent home. They were carefully kept by her family, along with her watercolours and drawings, and very kindly shared with this column by her grand-niece Jane Ellis.
Jane shares her aunt’s instinct for storytelling — and art. She wrote a short story based on her aunt’s life and she is a visual artist, printmaker and member of the artist collective Black Church Print Studio at Temple Bar, Dublin. She is now working on a set of linocut prints based on Olive’s original watercolours for an exhibition to run in 2026, the 100th anniversary of her great-aunt’s extraordinary river trip.
“Olive’s diary,” she says, “encapsulates a perfect little parcel of the past. It opens a small window into her thoughts, perceptions and aspirations.”
It certainly does, and it also contains within it a powerful love story. Olive writes of the rush of emotion that ripples through her when she first hears news of her fiancé Patrick: “Hearing that he actually was here — that he had been seen — made me feel quite queer. Miss Bryde just looks at me, but we said nothing — then. Later we rejoiced.”
She writes, with great humour, of finally arriving at her destination, Chibambo, at night and seeing her future husband and his friend running to meet them in their pyjamas. When they heard the boat’s motor horn, they scrambled out of bed, lit a lantern and rushed up the road.
“A great rush of shyness came over me, and Patrick was the same, and for quite half-a-minute we all stood opposite each other in the narrow road, nobody moving. Indeed it was not easy to see who was who in the dim light of the lantern. However, in that half-minute we had sorted ourselves out, and somehow I was in Patrick’s arms and kissing the right man.”
Then the laughing began and the teasing about the pyjama-clad greeting: “It was really awfully funny. I said to P, ‘After this long, dangerous journey through fire and water (or mud and water!) this is a nice way for you to meet your bride!”
