In July 1926 my father arrived in Monrovia with the Harvard African Expedition, a scientific safari led by Richard P. Strong, MD, head of tropical medicine at Harvard Medical School. The rest of the crew were two other medicos (from the same school), an entomologist, a botanist, a zoologist, and two 21 year-old gofers, Harold J. Coolidge (nephew of the leader) and his friend Loring Whitman, expedition photographer and my father. (If you know the history of the world ecological movement, you may recognize Coolidge's name, as he is one of its three founding fathers.) My father wrote a diary of the trip, which was in Liberia roughly 6 months, as did most of the other expeditionnaires; I have copies of four of the others and as far as I can tell one other seems to be irretrievably lost. At the end of the trip Strong wrote and edited an account of the trip, "The African Republic of Liberia and the Belgian Congo" (HUP, 1930). Thus I have five diaries of the same trip plus albums of photographs (some 400 stills), not to mention quite a lot of moving picture material, as well as Strong's published account to work with. Well, it will come as no surprise that I have, over the last six years, assembled these into an account of the trip. Towards the end I began to interpolate some other non-trip material because it was interesting and relevant, e.g., stuff about Henry M. Stanley, because he seemed to be a hero of Strong's, and because in their Congo River portion of the trip they passed through places that made Stanley famous (and infamous). In this regard I decided to look up Lady Dorothy, who was mentioned one day in Coolidge's diary, as one of several causes of irritation to the American charge d'affaires in Monrovia. Apparently her book had come out and had caused the Liberian Government a certain degree of peevishness, which was in turn making it harder for the American legation to smooth the way for the Harvard expedition. So of course I turned to the internet and eventually came upon your site.
When you wondered if anyone could judge how accurate Lady Mills' account might be, I realized that I might be one of a small number of people who could evaluate what she wrote, in so far as I had direct diary material covering the same places and the same time. So I acquired "Through Liberia" and read it and can, finally, tell you what I think.
1. No question, she went there (not, I think, that this was in doubt). Her descriptions of places are closely correspondent to the diaries, both in Monrovia as well as in the interior. Her pictures are like those my father took, too.
2. Her characterizations of the Africans she traveled with also corresponds well to those described by members of the HAE. On those fairly infrequent points when she goes into detail as to facial decoration (e.g., use of chalk, Mano hair styles), she is corroborated by HAE diaries and pictures. There is only one time when she commented on appearance--the Gio men filing their teeth to points--that was not commented on in the HAE. And I think they would have, too, had they seen it. Generally, her comments on dress (and the frequent lack of it) is accurate.
3. She did not invent the "pidgin" used; her renditions correspond to those mentioned in the HAE materials.
4. Her problems with porters are mirrored in the HAE; if anything, this was more of a problem for her. The change to mostly female porters in the latter part of her trip is also part of the HAE experience.
5. Her discussions of the motivations and thoughts of the interior indigenes I take with something of a grain of salt; certainly problems of communication almost utterly prevented the HAE members from learning details of this sort, and Lady D's Teacup was almost her sole source of interpretation. On the other hand, where she discussed the general resentment of whites she was pretty much on target.
6. The big question is whether or not her very extended discussion of cannibalism, and her evident conclusion that it was alive and well, was well founded. Here, too, I doubt that the information she reports would be considered good evidence. And while she herself keeps saying that she knows that it's gossip, nonetheless she presents it as if it were evidence. Since cannibalism was a VERY sore point to the Liberian government, it's easy to see why her book should so irtritate them. The HAE looked for evidence of cannibalism, and found nothing compelling. Obviously there used to be cannibalism, and it was a topic of interest.
7. A similar issue derives from her comments on Devil Bush; in most ways her comments parallel those of the HAE, but when she gets into the mortal danger of those on the road when a devil is roaming... the HAE does not support her. Of course, the HAE had no anthropologist, and so Dr. Strong took it upon himself to perform these duties. Dr. Strong should have left it to someone else (his view of natives wasn't far from Lady D's, and she was no anthropolgist herself).
8. Lady D confessed that she had no way of knowing where she was, and her map at the beginning of the book is quite inaccurate as to the placement of the towns she went through. The HAE took very careful readings and even so decided that their positions had to be taken with something like a ten-mile uncertainty. But they did travel through quite a few of the same places, and you can sort of figure out where she went on the HAE map. The end of her trip, however, which she reports in almost a sort of dream state, it seems (well, she was sick), strongly suggests that she may have dipped well down almost to Sino (where she talks about "First Padebo town") before working her way east through the Padebo forest across to Cape Palmas. It's hard to be sure, of course. It's not likely that she crossed Eastern Liberia as far north as she thought, anyway. I suspect that she stopped taking notes in that portion, and relied on memory, and may have gotten towns out of order.
I hope that this goes in some measure towards answering your question. I still know nothing more about Lady Dorothy's life than I did before, but I certainly found her engaging enough, and suspect she would have made a pretty nice traveling companion. I'd like to think someday someone would say as much of me!
[follow-up email]
In follow up to my previous comments on Lady D's accuracy, I must confess that two of my objections turned out to be meritless: I found a comment in Strong's text to the effect that the Jarquellis men filed their teeth to points, and when I finally found a decent map of Liberia (NOT easy! The one I found finally is on the UN website, so I figure it's probably somewhat accurate) I found that some towns she said she went through (e.g., Tchien) were indeed as far north as she thought. Meanwhile, through rereading both her book and the Harvard materials I found many other correlations. I wish I knew what her educational background was - could she, for instance, have had any training in anthropology? One curious (if not funny) finding is that her book must have influenced Strong in one particular: when he published his text in 1930, he included a map that incorporates her map and route (although he doesn't say so). Thus his map shows two Tappi Towns (his 'n' hers); but internal evidence shows very strongly (but not conclusively) that her Tappi Town was the same as his. The two are 25 miles apart, and I think this represents her degree of uncertainty. Reading her book again makes me feel that it is hard to take her seriously, she is so very unacademic. Are all her travel books the same? In particular, does she leave unexplained in the others why she bothered to go at all? I get the impression from her forward that she actually planned to go to Liberia, and got help specifically for such an endeavor, but no explanation why. Did she hit it with a dart?
One thing about Through Liberia that you might be able to answer: how on earth did she manage to get it published so quickly? She left Liberia in mid-April 1926, notes in hand, and the finished book was back and circulating in Liberia (minimum of two weeks travel time, London-Monrovia) in mid-July. Assuming she wrote the whole book in transit back to London, that still means she had her first edition on the streets in two months. Wow. Well, things could go faster those days. The Harvard expedition was nothing but a tentative feeler in January, and off and running in June, landing with 2 tons of stuff in Monrovia in July.