Once in Sierra Leone, she lived with local tribes to learn how to survive all the crazy things that would try to kill her in the jungle. After a few months she went back to England for a year, but when she returned to Africa she was prepared for a long trip straight into the history books.
She traveled alone into parts of the continent that few, if any, Europeans had ever gone before. She stayed with the Fan (sometimes called the Fang) tribe, who were well-known cannibals. Despite actually being stalked as food at one point, she still preferred them to having tea with the Christian missionaries she sometimes met.
theguardian.com
A feeling shared by so many Sunday school children.
Another time, while canoeing down a river, a huge crocodile tried to get into her boat, and she only escaped after hitting it with her paddle. During a storm, she found herself a yard away from a leopard, but she stayed still until it went away, since she didn't "think it ladylike to go shooting things with a gun." When everything wasn't trying to kill her, she was making up feats for herself to accomplish, like discovering many new types of fish and climbing Mount Cameroon, an active volcano and the fourth-highest point in Africa, by a route no European had ever taken before.
victorianweb.org
You don't have three fish named after you because you don't want it hard enough, dammit.