Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  There was simply no avoiding how beautiful she was. Her beauty was remarked upon again and again, in every article in which she was mentioned, its peerlessness presented less as literary flourish than as objective statement of fact. She was, claimed The Journalist, “undoubtedly the most beautiful woman in Metropolitan journalism”; an article on “Feminine Bachelors” in the Philadelphia Inquirer declared that she was “the prettiest writing woman in New York.” A New York friend of Lafcadio Hearn’s was at a party one evening when Elizabeth Bisland entered the room. “She was a devilishly beautiful woman,” the friend recalled, “and it wasn’t a minute before she was the center of a crowd composed of all the men in the room, while the women still sat, lonely sentinels, in every other chair.” Hearn himself came once to visit, and decided that Bisland, since arriving in New York, had “expanded mentally and physically into one of the most superb women you could wish to converse with.… It now seems to me as I had only seen the chrysalis of her before; this is the silkmoth!” He grumbled to friends, though, about how hard it was to get her attention in a crowded room. “She is a witch—turning heads everywhere,” he wrote to a friend in Philadelphia; “but some of her best admirers are afraid of her. One told me he felt as if he were playing with a beautiful dangerous leopard, which he loved for not biting him. As for me she is like hasheesh: I can’t remember anything she says or anything I myself say after leaving the house; my head is all in a whirl, and I walk against people in the street, and get run over, and lose my way.”

  Elizabeth Bisland herself could not help but be aware of her own beauty, and the intoxicating effect it seemed to have. She was flattered by the attentions of men, but at the same time she distrusted the way men doted (that was the verb she used) on a pretty woman. She found little appeal, as it turned out, in being cast as a goddess, a devil, a leopard, a witch. It all seemed terribly unreal to her. In later years she would come to prefer the company of European men, who seemed to listen more intently to what she had to say. She wrote, “Mentally American women do not interest American men.”

  ELIZABETH BISLAND WROTE for several newspapers, but the hectic pace of daily journalism was never exactly to her taste. She much preferred the more deliberate contemplation allowed by a monthly schedule, and the more serious attention many magazines were willing to devote to books and literature. So when John Brisben Walker, who had recently taken over The Cosmopolitan, asked her to write feature articles for the magazine and, better still, to take over its “In the Library” column, she happily accepted.

  John Brisben Walker was forty-one years old, with wavy black hair and a handlebar mustache; he stood six feet tall and had a barrel chest and the erect bearing of the West Point cadet he once had been. He took great pride in his physical vigor—every year on his birthday, well into his old age, he would leap over a four-barred gate and declare that he was good for another year. Walker had a gift for making money, but his particular genius lay in finding schemes that managed to combine his two greatest passions: social reform and free publicity. His most ambitious venture was The Cosmopolitan’s Correspondence University, which offered free study by mail with professors from the nation’s most prestigious colleges, in the subjects of “English, Philosophy, Sciences, and Modern and Dead Languages”; within two years more than twenty thousand people had enrolled, and Walker, overwhelmed by the demand, was forced to discontinue the program. The Cosmopolitan once offered a prize of three thousand dollars (equal to more than $75,000 today) to the horseless carriage that would most quickly make the trip from City Hall Park in New York to the town of Irvington-on-Hudson, in Westchester County. On another occasion Walker announced that The Cosmopolitan was making plans to assemble a “World’s Congress” that would bring together one hundred delegates “representing the highest thought and most practical statesmanship of all nations.” Though that foray into international diplomacy never materialized, Walker did once send an emissary to Spain to discuss the possibility of the United States purchasing Cuba’s independence for the price of one hundred million dollars. The Spanish government duly refused the offer, but The Cosmopolitan had received its publicity.

  John Brisben Walker (Illustration Credit 4.1)

  On the morning of November 14, 1889, John Brisben Walker read the first reports about Nellie Bly’s race around the world. There was, he understood at once, a grandeur to this enterprise. The carriage ride from his home in South Orange, New Jersey, to the ferry station in Jersey City had never seemed quite as slow as it did that morning, nor the trip across the Hudson. Disembarking at Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan, he was carried along by a tide of men in black suits and hats, all of them, like him, bound for the office. In the streetcar all the way up to Madison Square his mind was occupied with thoughts of railroads and steamships. He knew something about world travel; as a young man he had spent some years living in China, serving as an adviser to the Chinese military. The World, he believed, had made a grievous error in its planning.

  The Madison Square Bank building stood on the northwest corner of the square. Entering the building, Walker strode up the stairs; he had taken the entire third floor for his newly launched magazine and, to the astonishment of the city’s publishing industry, had signed a seven-year lease. Gathering his staff around him, Walker asked, “How quick can a woman go around the world?”

  The magazine’s business manager, A. D. Wilson, replied that Nellie Bly proposed to make the trip in seventy-five days, and had already set sail that morning on the Augusta Victoria.

  Yes, he had seen the reports in The World, Walker said. The Cosmopolitan, he now announced, would be sending its own woman reporter to race against Nellie Bly. Their competitor, however, would travel west rather than east—for, as experienced travelers knew, from October through April the winds across the South China Sea blow from the northeast. On her route Nellie Bly would be heading directly into the wind, and as a result she would lose, according to standard calculations, between three and four days; she would also, upon returning to the United States in January, have to contend with the difficulties and delays attendant to a cross-country train trip amid the snows of winter. To demonstrate the confidence he had in his decision, he planned to make a public wager with the publisher of The World—his $1,000 against Mr. Pulitzer’s $500—about which competitor would arrive home first.

  The Cosmopolitan’s competitor, however, would have to leave without delay. Walker checked his pocket watch; it was already past ten. He sent Wilson off to the famed travel agency Thomas Cook & Son to determine, as the agency’s magazine Cook’s Excursionist later reported, whether an around-the-world trip could be arranged on such short notice (“This we explained we could readily do”) and to purchase the necessary railroad and steamship tickets. Then he dispatched a messenger to Elizabeth Bisland’s apartment, only a few blocks away, with the instruction that she should come at once.

  At eight o’clock that morning Elizabeth Bisland had been awakened by the maid with the breakfast tray, on which were also the morning newspapers and a pile of letters. Bisland was pleased to see half a dozen acceptances of invitations she had sent out for tea the following day; there were a few notes from friends as well, and a bill, and a notice from her tailor that a dress she had ordered was ready for a final fitting. She had a leisurely breakfast and read the papers. The Madison Square Theatre, just a few blocks away, was beginning matinee performances of Little Lord Fauntleroy; the boy playing the title role, in the estimation of the Sun, was “a prodigy without the parrot traits so dreaded in children on the stage.” The Times reported that the previous evening had been “ladies’ night” at the New York Press Club—on that night the club’s members, all of them men, had been allowed to bring their wives and daughters. That morning’s World contained another installment of Robert Louis Stevenson’s latest novel, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, which the paper was trumpeting as “The Greatest Story of Modern Times.” If Bisland noticed the news about Nellie Bly’s race aroun
d the world, she never made any mention of it. She might also have missed the small item about the new fast mail train that had left New York the previous evening for San Francisco, with the goal of cutting a day’s time from the delivery of transcontinental mail; in retrospect, it was an article that would have been worth her attention.

  At half past ten, the apartment’s buzzer rang. A messenger was waiting to pass along the information that John Brisben Walker wished to see her as soon as possible. Bisland pressed him for more details, but he had none to relate; all he could do was repeat Mr. Walker’s instructions to come to the office right away.

  It was only a few minutes’ walk from her apartment to the offices of The Cosmopolitan. The morning was chilly but clear, the thin November sunlight a restorative after several days of rain. Bisland, though, would scarcely have noticed, her mind too filled with questions about what might have precipitated such a sudden and mysterious request. John Brisben Walker was known to be a very demanding employer—“the stiffest man in New York to work for,” by one account—restless, ambitious, occasionally impulsive. Perhaps her most recent feature article had caused consternation among some of the magazine’s more important readers: she had suggested that carefully planned tenement buildings, providing modern hot water plumbing, shared laundry facilities, and a well-stocked reading room and making provision for cooperative marketing and cooking among the tenants—and paid for by charitable millionaires—might “reconcile some of the terrible inequalities that make anarchists among a people with the most liberal institutions, the greatest natural wealth, and the most wonderful industrial development on the globe.” It was, of course, possible that some of the magazine’s backers were not as forward-thinking as was Mr. Walker himself. By eleven o’clock she had reached the headquarters of The Cosmopolitan, where she was immediately ushered into the office of the publisher.

  John Brisben Walker wished her a cordial good morning. He asked whether she might leave New York that evening for San Francisco, and then proceed onward from there around the world; if at all possible, he was hoping that she could do it faster than anyone ever had before.

  It was some time before Elizabeth Bisland responded to this. At first she thought he was joking; he did not smile, though, or say anything more, and slowly it dawned on her that his request was in earnest. The next half hour was spent with Walker insisting that he wished her to make the attempt, and Bisland insisting with equal vehemence that she meant to do nothing of the sort. To begin with, she said, she had no desire to go around the world, and she was certainly not qualified to make the trip—she had never even been out of the country. Walker brushed that objection aside; the fact that she had never been to foreign lands, he explained, would make her impressions of them all the more fresh and vivid. Bisland protested that she had guests coming the following day, and that she did not have the appropriate clothing for such a long journey.

  But these arguments, as she herself well knew, were easily countered and were, in any case, beside the point; her more serious concerns lay elsewhere. From her very first efforts to become a published writer—when she had walked to a neighboring town to mail her poem to the Times-Democrat—she had always striven to emphasize her writing rather than her identity. In the words of one who had known her back in New Orleans, she was “the very essence of culture and refinement, and about the last person in the world that one would associate with hoop and spangle journalism.” It was all well and good for a sensation writer like Nellie Bly to turn herself into a public curiosity, offering herself up for the amusement of anyone with a few pennies to spend on a paper, but for her this held not the slightest appeal. She had no interest at all in seeing her name in a newspaper headline. Yet this was precisely what lay ahead of her, she knew, if she undertook the race around the world: it was just as certain as any destination on the itinerary.

  Elizabeth Bisland at the time of her trip around the world (Illustration Credit 4.2)

  He was proposing to pay her a handsome salary, said John Brisben Walker; he would bring her on as a full-time employee of The Cosmopolitan, amply compensating her for any writing income she might lose while on the trip (one news report put the salary at $3,000 a year for two years “whether she lost the race or won”). It is possible as well that Walker suggested that she would lose her job if she refused his request—all Bisland would ever say about it was that he made “substantial arguments.” John Brisben Walker had already amassed fortunes in iron and alfalfa and was in the process of amassing still another, in publishing. In later years he would become the first president of the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association and the first president of the American Periodical Publishers’ Association; he was a man exceptionally skilled at getting his way, and by the time Elizabeth Bisland left the office she had been persuaded to make the trip.

  Bisland left the office in a kind of stupor. She took a cab to a previously scheduled fitting with her tailor (where, after “a vigorous interview,” she managed to convince him that she could wear that dress at six o’clock that evening), and then returned home. For the next several hours Bisland’s apartment was a scene of bustle and confusion. Fifty people had been invited for five o’clock tea the next day; her sister Molly said that she would make the necessary apologies. Two dinner engagements, as well, had to be broken. She had letters to write, maps and schedules to consult, bags to pack. She was having trouble anticipating exactly what lay ahead of her. There would be railway dust, sea damps, tropical heat: that much at least she knew. The thought occurred to her that she could not be both a hard-working bee and, in the saying of the day, a butterfly of fashion, and that helped to simplify matters. She finally settled on two cloth dresses, half a dozen light bodices, and a silk dress for evening wear. She made sure to pack lots of hairpins, as they had always had a way of playing hide-and-seek with her, and she knew that if this happened in a foreign country it would undermine her mood. She packed shoes, and gloves, and underwear (silk, she thought, would not gather dust, nor conduct changes in temperature), and a nightdress and dressing gown, and slippers as well, and toiletries of all sorts, and a sewing case for necessary repairs along the way, and a traveling inkstand for the writing she planned to do, and a supply of books and paper. For colder weather she packed a heavy wool overcoat and a travel rug to wrap herself in while aboard ships and trains; for wet weather, a pair of rubber overshoes and an umbrella. It would not do, she warned herself, to forget anything now, or to make any mistakes, particularly ones that could not be rectified later. She finally managed to get all of her belongings inside a steamer trunk, a Gladstone valise, and a shawl strap that she could sling over her shoulder.

  For her traveling outfit she selected a new black dress (the one her tailor had finished that very afternoon) with a newmarket coat, and a glazed black sailor’s hat she had never worn before. Outwardly she remained calm, but her mind was racing. She had woken up that morning to her usual routine, and now she was embarking on a trip around the world. As the hour grew later the sensation began to creep over her that she was living inside a nightmare from which she could not awake, and just when she was about to give in to despair the hansom cab arrived to take her to the Grand Central Depot at Forty-second Street. She had a berth reserved on the New York Central Railroad’s Fast Western Express, the most popular through train in America.

  The traffic moved slowly along Fourth Avenue, but before long the distinctive mansard roofs of Grand Central had come into view. The building was made of brick trimmed with white-painted cast iron, giving it the look of a fancily iced layer cake. The New York Central Railroad occupied most of the western side of the depot, on an avenue named for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Commodore Vanderbilt, as he was called (though his naval service consisted solely of owning a fleet of steamships), had begun buying up New York Central stock in the 1860s, consolidated his hold on the business with bribery and price manipulation, and at the end turned it over to his son William; his dying words to his son were, “Keep the money to
gether, hey. Keep the Central our road.”

  Inside the station, the atmosphere was one of barely suppressed hysteria. The daily tide was now flowing back out of the city, bound for the quieter towns to the north. A uniformed porter led Bisland past rows of ticket offices and waiting rooms to the train shed at the rear of the depot. Six hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide, the Grand Central train shed was the largest enclosed space in the United States. An arcade of ornately decorated trusses rose up its sides, as in the vault of a medieval cathedral. The ceiling, a soaring dome of glass and iron, glowed purple from the setting sun; it seemed to retain light as the roof of a conservatory retains heat. Twelve tracks ran in parallel lines out of the shed, with elevated platforms between each pair. On one of the platforms a group of friends and colleagues had come to see her off. The last few minutes passed in a blur: there were hugs and kisses farewell, final instructions, a large bouquet of pink roses, everyone talking at once, a trunk bumping up a stair, the musty smell of a sleeping car, a settling back into soft plush, and then a shrill whistle and a jolt as the wheels lurched into motion.