Around the world in a Model T: the adventures of Aloha Wanderwell, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in a car

She was as adventurous as Indiana Jones, as audacious as Amelia Earhart. She was making films at the dawn of Hollywood’s golden age and driving in parts of the globe that rendered the term “off-road” redundant. She was a six-foot-tall tomboy and a feminist icon long before anyone knew what that meant. She was Aloha Wanderwell. Or rather, she wasn’t. She was born Idris Galcia Welsh, in Winnipeg, Canada, in October 1906, but nicknamed Aloha by her family because she loved Hawaiian dancing.

Fast-forward to autumn 1922, and after a peripatetic childhood, 16-year-old Aloha – fluent in French, German and Italian – is fretting at being confined to Chateau Neuf boarding school for young ladies, in Nice, France, and surviving on a diet of romantic novelettes smuggled in by a housemaid. Her eye falls on a stray sheet of the Paris Herald and an advertisement calling for a woman with “beauty, brains and breeches” to join a round-the-world motoring tour. She sneaks out of school and wangles her way into the auditorium where the American expedition leader is giving an illustrated lecture. As soon as it’s finished, Aloha dashes forward to introduce herself.

The American in question was Captain Walter Wanderwell, a maverick entrepreneur whose chubby facial features masked an iron determination and a cheerfully elastic approach to any rules and regulations he hadn’t made himself. Except that his real name was Valerian Johannes Pieczynski, he’d awarded himself with the spurious military rank, and he’d been born in Torun, Poland.

Seventeen years older than Aloha, “Cap” had roistered through life – he was interned in the United States during the first world war on suspicion of being a German spy – before hitting on the idea of motoring around the globe. By the 1920s, Henry Ford’s Model T had been rolling off the production lines for a dozen years and was transforming travel, granting the freedom of the road to anyone who could afford US$325, a not unreasonable sum for the average US worker at the time. Filmmaking was also changing exponentially, and Cap seized on the idea of recording his pioneering four-wheeled exploits and showing the results to paying audiences along the way.

Having scraped together enough funds to sail to Europe, and separated only slightly rancorously from his wife, a one-time Broadway chorus girl called Nell, Cap needed to enlarge his support crew and head further afield. Cue Aloha, armed with her mother’s dubiously granted permission and – in the words of her autobiography Call to Adventure, published 80 years ago last November – “an eagerness for the enterprise and an overwhelming joy in living”. She was taken on as secretary but soon outstripped her job description.