Margaret Fountaine, traveling behind the fluttering of butterflies

In 1898 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. In her diaries, she would write, "I know very well that I am the only representative of my sex present, with the exception of a lady visitor." In the summer of 1900, Margaret traveled to Greece with entomologist Henry John Elwes to collect butterflies. They published a report of their findings in The Entomologist and organized an exhibition of Greek Lepidoptera together.

Thanks to her uncle's inheritance, Margaret Fountaine was able to travel the world and expand her collection. Although she traveled without a passport and did not record in her diary the dates of entry and exit of her various expeditions, it is known that in 1901 she traveled to Syria and Palestine. In Syria, she hired the guide Khalil Neimy, who would become his traveling companion and lover for almost 30 years. In 1903 she went on an expedition to Asia Minor and returned to Constantinople with nearly 1,000 butterflies. 

In 1904 and 1905, she was on scientific expeditions in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There she wrote and illustrated sketchbooks to document eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalises of many butterfly species previously unknown to scientists of the time. Subsequently, Fountaine traveled to the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. In Jamaica, for example, she gave a talk at the Kingston Naturalists' Club on "The sagacity of caterpillars".

Before World War I, Fountaine was on an expedition to India, Ceylon, Nepal, and Tibet. During that trip, she made watercolors of caterpillars and butterflies, which were published in The Entomologist. During the war, Fountaine traveled to the United States and, in 1917, published articles about her collection while volunteering for the Red Cross. 

After the war, Fountaine's last entomological expedition was to Jalil in the Philippines. A report of the expedition was published in The Entomologist. In 1928 Khalil died and, as she would write in her diary, Margaret would only find solace in continuing to raise her caterpillars. Fountaine was in her sixties and, while continuing to travel, she focused her efforts on watercolors and collecting and put aside the publication of scientific papers. He traveled to West and East Africa, Indochina, Hong Kong, Brazil, the West Indies, and Trinidad in search of rare specimens.

In 1940, at the age of 77, she suffered a heart attack in Trinidad. Local monks apparently found her dying on the side of a road with a butterfly net in her hand. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Woodbrook Cemetery, Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Shortly after, the Norwich Castle Museum in England received her legacy in the form of beautiful mahogany boxes containing more than 22,000 butterfly specimens from five continents, and a sealed Japanese chest which, at the express wish of its owner, could only be opened on April 15, 1978.

Thus it took 38 years after the death of this pioneer to discover the vicissitudes of her travels and her life through the twelve volumes of her personal diaries that she had begun writing at the age of 15, just a century earlier, on April 15, 1878, and which reveal that, like a butterfly, Margaret Fountaine's life was characterized by the freedom to fly and by personal transformation. Upon opening the chest, a handwritten note read: "To the reader, who may not yet be born, I leave this record of the wild and fearless life of one who never grew up and who enjoyed and suffered much."

Those who knew her described her as a woman who had the courage of an explorer, the passion of a collector, the eye of an artist, the patience of a researcher, and the precision of a scientist.