In the 19th Century, white American women of the middle and upper classes began to travel abroad in significant numbers for the first time in history. Prior to the 19th Century, and with the exception of such women as Abigail Adams and Martha Bayard, who accompanied their parents or husbands on diplomatic missions, American women as a rule traveled only about the countryside or to frontier settlements. Beginning in the 1820s, however, and escalating after the Civil War, the prototypes of Henry James's Isabel Archer and Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg set out by the hundreds to see the world, from Europe to the Middle East and from Africa to Japan and China. The greatest number of them visited the British Isles and continental Europe. As early as 1835, according to Paul R. Baker, some fifty American women visited Rome during Holy Week. Many women were among the fifty thousand Americans who, in 1866 alone, traveled to Europe. According to Mrs. John Sherwood in 1890, there were “more than eleven thousand virgins who semi-yearly migrate[d] from America to the shores of England and France.” Women found their way to virtually all parts of the world, as the book-length travel accounts of women (far fewer than the numbers of women who traveled) show. Women published accounts of twenty journeys to China, seventeen to Palestine, eleven to India, twenty-two to Egypt, two to the East Indies, twenty to Greece, three to Arabia, six to Algeria, and four to Africa, as well as travel in Central and South America, Cuba, the Yucatan, and Jamaica.