Hello AskHistorians. I work as an aide in an Elementary School (Grade 5) and our students are being assigned explorers to report on. The reports are pretty neat, they are in the form of an interview that the students write. I'm encouraging them to get creative and make it something like "Conan O'Brien interviews Henry Hudson" to get them engaged.
Anyway, I told their teacher that since the kids are having some trouble conceptualizing it, I would come up with an example for us to show the class so they could better understand the assignment. Since the curriculum consists of a bunch of Dead White Guys^tm I'd like to feature a female explorer or navigator to blow their minds. Any idea?
TL;DR: Can you suggest any female explorers or navigators I can research and present to a 5th grade class so that they learn that people other than Western European men helped shrink the world?
I hesitate to post this since i don't have much information on her but, the only one i know about is Alexandrine Tinne, a very wealthy Dutch woman turned explorer. But, she was from the 19th century and, in the end, she wasn't very succesful. She travelled in northern Africa and was the first western woman to reach several places, but not the first outsider, as far as i know.
Besides, i'm not sure how relatable a wealthy heiress would be to your class.
I'm afraid that I am completely unaware of any female explorers and navigators during the "Age of Discovery". As a rule, women (and Europeans in general) only quite rarely engaged in long-distance travel, particularly by ship; additionally, the upswing of patriarchal dominance in "masculine" lines of work at this precise time period effectively blocked women from involvement in nearly any part of seafaring, save the selling of flesh, food, and drink in ports. The odds of a (cis- or appearing) woman being able to serve on the crew of a ship is very low, before we even consider the idea of captaining a ship.
The one source that pops to mind for this question is Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, by Mary Elizabeth Perry. However, even this feminist history focuses primarily on the effects upon gender roles caused by the large quantity of Sevillian men who left on ships to the New World. The New World, and associated trade and travel, was very male-dominated throughout the entire period.
I'd be extremely pleased to be proven wrong, but I have an unfortunate suspicion that I am all too correct. In a sense, though, given the sheer quantity of blood on the hands of the Dead White Men^tm in the "Age of Discovery" canon, it's for the best that the class find female role models elsewhere.
Hopefully one of the Australian contributors can flesh this out for you, but I've only heard that Lady Jane (Griffin) Franklin did some exploring down under. She's more widely know (to me in Canada anyway) as the woman who funded endless search attempts for her husband, Sir John Franklin, of the famously ill-fated Franklin Expedition attempt to find the North West Passage.