Natural History Museum). She spent most of the next twelve years on expeditions, travelling to New Guinea, the New Hebrides and other islands in the Pacific Ocean. In New Guinea she made a collecting expedition to the coastal area between Aitape and Jayapura (known as Hollandia at the time) and visited the nearby Cyclop Mountains. She treated indigenous populations with respect, learning from them, and was known in the islands as ‘the woman who walks’ and ‘the lady of the mountains’. In her writings she recorded indigenous ways of life that few outsiders had ever seen, and that were beginning to disappear even in her time. World War II and semi-retirement During the Second World War she returned to England and did war work, but injured her back descending from a train during the blackout. After the war, in 1949–50, she travelled to the Pacific islands again, but due to ongoing pain, decided to give up active exploration. She assisted at the Natural History Museum for many years as an unpaid volunteer. She supported herself with the income from her writing, living frugally. In 1954, after hip replacement surgery, at the age of seventy-three, she felt well enough to again go on an expedition to Aneityum in the South Pacific. She had a house, named 'Red Crest', built for herself about five kilometres inland from Alelgauhat village. During her nine-month stay she collected 10,000 insects and 500 plants. She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1955 New Year Honours, and was granted a civil list pension in the same year for her contributions to entomology, giving her some financial security. In an interview, given at the time of the award, she is reported to have said "We drop down, or get run over, but we never retire." She continued to work at the museum, writing and classifying specimens, until her death in London on 15 April 1969. Family Her older brother, Colonel Robert Ernest Cheesman (1878–1962), was a desert explorer, a diplomat in Iraq, Arabia and Ethiopia, and the author of In Unknown Arabia (1926) and other works. He is credited with discovering Gerbillus cheesmani. He was also an OBE. Their entries are listed next to each other in the Dictionary of British and Irish botanists and horticulturalists. The British artist Edith Cheesman was her older sister. Discoveries Insects Evelyn Cheesman made