Clodagh Finn: Olive’s African odyssey — a canoe, crocodiles, and a love story

Olive Archer could have led a comfortable, privileged life in early 20th-century Ireland. Picture: courtesy of Jane Ellis

In 1926, Irish missionary Olive Archer, age 28, boarded a canoe and set off on the crocodile-infested waters of the Luapula river in central Africa to join her husband-to-be Patrick Kerr Dixon, an Irish doctor and missionary in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“Our canoe is a big one,” she wrote, “but we are very cramped as all our luggage [including an iron bath tub] is on board.”