Career

She traveled extensively in South America, Asia and the South Pacific in the early 20th century, and published accounts of her journeys in the National Geographic magazine. She lectured frequently on her travels and illustrated her talks with color slides and movies. Born in Stockton, California to Alexander Chalmers and Frances Wilkens.

The New York Times wrote that she "reached twenty frontiers previously unknown to white women."

In a later trip she retraced the trail of Christopher Columbus"s early discoveries in the Americas, and crossed Haiti on horseback.

Adams served as a correspondent for Harper"s Magazine in Europe during World War I. She was the only female journalist permitted to visit the trenches. From 1907 to 1935, she wrote twenty-one articles for the National Geographic Society that featured her photographs, including "Some Wonderful Sights in the Andean Highlands" (September 1908), "Kaleidoscopic Louisiana Paz: City of the Clouds" (February 1909) and "River-Encircled Paraguay" (April 1933).

She wrote on Trinidad, Surinam, Bolivia, Peru and the transport-Andean railroad between Buenos Aires and Valparaiso. In 1925, Adams helped launch the Society of Woman Geographers.

In all, Adams is said to have travelled more than a hundred thousand miles, and captivated hundreds of audiences.

The New York Times wrote "Harriet Chalmers Adams is America"s greatest woman explorer. As a lecturer no one, man or woman, has a more magnetic hold over an audience than she."

She died in Nice, France, on July 17, 1937, at age 61. An obituary in the Washington Post called her a "confidant of savage head hunters" who never stopped wandering the remote corners of the world.

Of women as adventurers, she wrote

I"ve wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of exploration.

Why did women never go to the Arctic, try for one pole or the other, or invade Africa, Thibet, or unknown wildernesses? I’ve never found my sex a hinderment. Never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man, could not surmount.

Never felt a fear of danger. Never lacked courage to protect myself.

I’ve been in tight places and have seen harrowing things.