Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Goodman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Fame is a bee” is from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Goodman, Matthew.
Eighty days : Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s history-making race around the world / Matthew Goodman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52728-8
1. Bly, Nellie, 1864–1922—Travel. 2. Bisland, Elizabeth, 1861–1929—Travel. 3. Women journalists—United States—Biography. 4. Voyages around the world. I. Title.
G440.B67136G66 2013
910.4′109252—dc23 2012046344
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket design: © Kimberly Glyder Design
Jacket illustration includes images © Corbis
and © Getty Images
v3.1
“You have a strange way, Ralph, of proving that the world has grown smaller. So, because you can go around it in three months—”
“In eighty days,” interrupted Phileas Fogg.
—JULES VERNE, Around the World in Eighty Days
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 | A Free American Girl
CHAPTER 2 | The Newspaper Gods of Gotham
CHAPTER 3 | The Secret Cupboard
CHAPTER 4 | “How Quick Can a Woman Go Around the World?”
CHAPTER 5 | “I Think I Can Beat Phileas Fogg’s Record”
CHAPTER 6 | Living by Railroad Time
CHAPTER 7 | A Map of the World
CHAPTER 8 | “Et Ego in Arcadia”
CHAPTER 9 | Baksheesh
CHAPTER 10 | An English Market Town in China
CHAPTER 11 | “The Guessing Match Has Begun in Beautiful Earnest”
CHAPTER 12 | The Other Woman Is Going to Win
CHAPTER 13 | The Temple of the Dead
CHAPTER 14 | The Mysterious Travel Agent
CHAPTER 15 | The Special Train
CHAPTER 16 | “From Jersey to Jersey Is Around the World”
CHAPTER 17 | Father Time Outdone
EPILOGUE
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
PROLOGUE
NOVEMBER 14, 1889
Hoboken, New Jersey
SHE WAS A YOUNG WOMAN IN A PLAID COAT AND CAP, NEITHER TALL nor short, dark nor fair, not quite pretty enough to turn a head: the sort of woman who could, if necessary, lose herself in a crowd. Even in the chill early-morning hours, the deck of the ferry from New York to Hoboken was packed tight with passengers. The Hudson River—or the North River, as it was still called then, the name a vestige of the Dutch era—was as busy as any of the city’s avenues, and the ferry carefully navigated its way through the water traffic, past the brightly painted canal boats and the workaday tugs, the flat-bottomed steam barges full of Pennsylvania coal, three-masted schooners with holds laden with tobacco and indigo and bananas and cotton, hides from Argentina and tea from Japan, with everything, it seemed, that the world had to offer. The young woman struggled to contain her nervousness as the ferry drew ever closer to the warehouses and depots of Hoboken, where the Hamburg-American steamship Augusta Victoria already waited in her berth. Seagulls circled above the shoreline, sizing up the larger ships they would follow across the sea. In the distance, the massed stone spires of New York rose like cliffs from the water.
For much of the fall of 1889 New York had endured a near-constant rain, endless days of low skies and meager gray light. It was the sort of weather, people said, good only for the blues and the rheumatism; one of the papers had recently suggested that if the rain kept up, the city would be compelled to establish a steamboat service up Broadway. This morning, though, had broken cold but fair, surely a favorable omen for anyone about to go to sea. The prospect of an ocean crossing was always an exciting one, but bad weather meant rough sailing, and also brought with it the disquieting awareness of danger. Icebergs broke off from Greenland glaciers and drifted dumbly around the North Atlantic, immense craft sailing without warning lights or whistles and never swerving to avoid a collision; hurricanes appeared out of nowhere; fires could break out from any of a hundred causes. Some ships simply disappeared, like Marley’s ghost, into a fog, never to be heard from again. The Augusta Victoria herself was lauded in the press as “practically unsinkable”—the sort of carefully measured accolade that might well have alarmed even as it meant to reassure. A twin-screw steamer of the most modern design, the Augusta Victoria had broken the record for the fastest maiden voyage only six months earlier, crossing the Atlantic from Southampton to New York in just seven days, twelve hours, and thirty minutes. Arriving in New York, she was greeted by a crowd of more than thirty thousand (“The Germans,” The New York Times took care to note, “largely predominated”), who swarmed aboard to get a closer look at the floating palace, taking in her chandeliers and silk tapestries, the grand piano in the music room, the lavender-tinted ladies’ room, the men’s smoking room swathed in green morocco. Transatlantic travel had come a very long way in the half century since Charles Dickens sailed to America, when he eyed the narrow dimensions and melancholy appointments of his ship’s main saloon and compared it to a gigantic hearse with windows.
Dockside, the minutes before the departure of an oceangoing liner always had something of a carnival air. Most of the men were dressed in dark topcoats and silk hats; the women wore outfits made complicated by bustles and ruching. On the edges of the crowd, peddlers hawked goods that passengers might have neglected to pack; sweating, bare-armed stevedores performed their ballet of hoisting and loading around the ropes and barrels that cluttered the pier. The rumble of carts on cobblestones blended with a general hubbub of conversation, the sound, like thunder, seeming to come at once from everywhere and nowhere. Somewhere inside the milling crowd stood the young woman in the plaid coat. She had been born Elizabeth Jane Cochran—as an adolescent she would add an e to the end of her surname, the silent extra letter providing, she must have felt, a pleasing note of sophistication—though she was known to her family and her old friends not as Elizabeth or as Jane but as “Pink.” To many of New York’s newspaper readers, and shortly to those of much of the world, her name was Nellie Bly.
For two years Nellie Bly had been a reporter for The World of New York, which under the leadership of its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, had become the largest and most influential newspaper of its time. No female reporter before her had ever seemed quite so audacious, so willing to risk personal safety in pursuit of a story. In her first exposé for The World, Bly had gone undercover (using the name “Nellie Brown,” a pseudonym to cloak another pseudonym), feigning insanity so that she might report firsthand on the mistreatment of the female patients of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Bly worked for pennies alongside other young women in a paper-box factory, applied for employment as a servant, and sought treatment in a medical dispensary for the poor, where she narrowly escaped having her tonsils removed. Nearly every week the second section of the Sunday World brought the paper’s readers a
new adventure. Bly trained with the boxing champion John L. Sullivan; she performed, with cheerfulness but not much success, as a chorus girl at the Academy of Music (forgetting the cue to exit, she momentarily found herself all alone onstage). She visited with a remarkable deaf, dumb, and blind nine-year-old girl in Boston by the name of Helen Keller. Once, to expose the workings of New York’s white slave trade, she even bought a baby. Her articles were by turns lighthearted and scolding and indignant, some meant to edify and some merely to entertain, but all were shot through with Bly’s unmistakable passion for a good story and her uncanny ability to capture the public’s imagination, the sheer force of her personality demanding that attention be paid to the plight of the unfortunate, and, not incidentally, to herself.
Now, on the morning of November 14, 1889, she was undertaking the most sensational adventure of all: an attempt to set the record for the fastest trip around the world. Sixteen years earlier, in his popular novel, Jules Verne had imagined that such a trip could be accomplished in eighty days; Nellie Bly hoped to do it in seventy-five.
Though she had first proposed the idea a year earlier, The World’s editors, who initially resisted the notion of a young woman traveling unchaperoned, had only just consented to it. The previous three days had been a blur of activity, mapping out an itinerary, visiting ticket offices, assembling a wardrobe, writing farewell letters to friends, packing and unpacking and packing again. Bly had decided that she would take but a single bag, a small leather gripsack into which she would pack everything, from clothing to writing implements to toilet articles, that she might require for her journey; being able to carry her own bag would help prevent any delays that might arise from the interference or incompetence of porters and customs officials. As her traveling dress she had selected a snugly fitted two-piece garment of dark blue broadcloth trimmed with camel’s hair. For warmth she was taking a long black-and-white plaid Scotch ulster coat, with twin rows of buttons running down the front, that covered her from neck to ankles; and rather than the hat and veil worn by most of the fashionable oceangoing women of the time, she would wear a jaunty wool ghillie cap—the English-style “fore-and-aft” cap later worn by Sherlock Holmes in the movies—that for the past three years had accompanied her on many of her adventures. The blue dress, the plaid ulster, the ghillie cap: to outward appearances it was not an especially remarkable outfit, but before long it would become the most famous one in all the world.
ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 14, Nellie Bly had awoken very early—she always hated to get up in the morning—turned over a few times, dozed off again, and then woke with a start, wondering anxiously if she had missed her ship. Quickly she made her bath and got dressed. (There was no need for her to spend any time applying makeup, as only women of abominably low morals, or unimpeachably high social standing, dared paint their faces.) She tried to choke down some breakfast, but the earliness of the hour, and her anxiety, made eating impossible. The hardest thing of all was saying goodbye to her mother. “Don’t worry,” Bly told her, “only think of me as having a vacation and the most enjoyable time of my life.” Then she gathered up her coat and her gripsack and made a blind rush down the stairs before she could too deeply regret the journey that was only just beginning.
Their apartment was on West Thirty-fifth Street, near Broadway; at Ninth Avenue, Bly paid her nickel and boarded a downtown streetcar. The car was dirty and poorly ventilated, and the straw spread on the floor smelled of the recent rains. The street was choked with horse traffic; on the tracks overhead an El train screeched past. It was only seventy-five days, Bly kept reminding herself, and then she would be back home again. She got off at the corner of Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue, at the edge of a maritime district, where the low, irregular buildings grew up like toadstools along the water’s edge: rigging warehouses and sail lofts, junk shops with their mysterious curios brought in from all over the world, the grim boardinghouses and brutal-looking taverns of the sailors. At the Christopher Street depot she caught the ferry—she needed only a one-way ticket, three cents—that carried her across the Hudson River to the pier at the foot of Third Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. There she was met by two agents of the Hamburg-American Packet Company; they well understood how important it was to the company that Nellie Bly be delivered on time. The two men accompanied their new passenger aboard the Augusta Victoria and presented her to the ship’s captain, Adolph Albers, explaining to him the special purpose of her trip. An especially popular commander, Albers had a full beard and a genial manner that inspired confidence. He assured Bly that he would do everything in his power to see that the initial part of her complex journey was a complete success. He was certain, he said, that he could put her ashore in Southampton the following Thursday evening; she could then get a good night’s sleep in one of the city’s hotels and be up in time to catch one of the trains that ran each morning from Southampton to London.
“I won’t take any sleep until I am in London,” replied Nellie Bly, “and have made sure of my place in the bakers’ dozen who go from Victoria Station on Friday night.”
Her voice rang with the lilt of the hill towns of western Pennsylvania; there was an unusual rising inflection at the ends of her sentences, the vestige of an Elizabethan dialect that had still been spoken in the hills when she was a girl. She had piercing gray eyes, though sometimes they were called green, or blue-green, or hazel. Her nose was broad at its base and delicately upturned at the end—the papers liked to refer to it as a “retroussé” nose—and it was the only feature about which she was at all self-conscious. She had brown hair that she wore in bangs across her forehead. Most of those who knew her considered her pretty, although this was a subject that in the coming months would be hotly debated in the press.
Before long some friends and colleagues came aboard to bid her goodbye and Godspeed. The theatrical agent Henry C. Jarrett presented her with a bouquet of flowers and a novel; reading, he advised, was the best preventive of seasickness and ennui. Julius Chambers, The World’s managing editor, was there as well, and had brought along with him a timekeeper from the New York Athletic Club. As the city’s leading amateur sports club, the New York Athletic Club often provided timekeepers for bicycle races, swimming races, and events of track and field; this was the first recorded instance of the club’s providing a timekeeper for a race around the world.
Nellie Bly had made her career by training herself to remain calm in difficult situations, and now, too, she managed not to betray the nervousness that she felt; the next day’s issue of The World would pronounce that she had demonstrated “not a wince of fear or trepidation, and no youngster just let loose from school could have been more merry and light-hearted.” While they waited, Bly asked one of her colleagues from The World, “What do you think of my dress?” Her tone seemed cheerful enough, but when he hesitated she demanded of him, “Well, a penny for your thoughts.”
The reporter eyed the dark blue gown with the camel-hair trim, beneath the checked overcoat; he noted aloud that she was planning to sail past Egypt, and if one of Joseph’s descendants there didn’t take that dress for his coat of many colors, then—but he was interrupted before he could complete the thought. “Oh, you spiteful thing,” Bly said dismissively, with a theatrical toss of her head. “I take back my penny offer for such an opinion as that.”
Though The World chose not to see it, her impatience was surely indicative of the complicated mix of emotions she was feeling: the intense desire to get going at last, regret at leaving behind friends and family, excitement and anxiety about the strangeness of everything she was about to encounter—strange countries, strange foods, strange languages (for Nellie Bly was attempting to navigate the world speaking only English). This day had dawned bright and beautiful, but she could not help but wonder about the seventy-four yet to come, and the twenty-eight thousand miles that lay ahead of her. If all went well, she would be spending her Christmas in Hong Kong, and her New Year’s somewhere in the middle of th
e Pacific Ocean.
On the front page of that morning’s World, a map stretching across five columns of type showed “The Lines of Travel to be Followed by The World’s Flying Representative.” The line began in New York, extended across the Atlantic Ocean to England, moved down through Europe to the Mediterranean, continued south through the Suez Canal to the Arabian Sea along the northeast coast of Africa, then shifted eastward past Ceylon and up to Hong Kong and Japan, crossed the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, and concluded through the northern part of the United States and back to New York. It all looked very well thought out, but her itinerary, Bly knew, was not nearly as firm as that solid black line made it seem. It was not clear, for instance, whether the mail train from London to Brindisi, Italy (about which she had been so insistent to Captain Albers), actually left every Friday night or not. A more irregular train schedule could mean a missed connection with the steamship leaving from Brindisi, and from there the delays would cascade, leading inexorably to the collapse of her trip. She understood that she was setting out at the worst time of year, when the Atlantic storms were at their fiercest and snow often blockaded train tracks across the American West. Moreover, she would be racing not just through space but also, in a sense, through time: during the seventy-five days of her trip she would experience the weather of all four seasons. It was a commonplace of world travelers’ tales that extreme change in temperature provided the perfect breeding ground for illness. Fever lay in wait everywhere; there was grippe in Europe, malaria in Asia. Storms, shipwreck, sickness, mechanical breakdown, even just a slackening of pace by an uncooperative railroad conductor or ship’s captain: any one, by itself, could prove fatal to her plans.
Nellie Bly in her famous traveling outfit (Illustration Credit prl.1)
She couldn’t bear the thought of returning home a failure; later on she would tell the chief engineer of one of her ships, in full seriousness, that she would rather die than arrive late in New York. She hadn’t built her career, hadn’t made it from Pennsylvania coal country to the headlines of New York’s largest newspaper, by losing. What Nellie Bly did not know, though, as she set out on her journey (and indeed would not know for many weeks to come), was that she might well lose her race, not to the calendar or to Jules Verne’s fictitious traveler Phileas Fogg, but to a very real competitor. For, as it turned out, there was not just one young female journalist setting out from New York that day to race around the world—there were two.
Eighty Days Page 1