New York’s Grand Central Depot (Illustration Credit 4.3)
It was six o’clock on Thursday, November 14. Elizabeth Bisland was going around the world.
NOVEMBER 14, 1889
New York Harbor
THERE WAS A BLAST FROM A HORN. AT 9:40 A.M., WITH A SUDDEN SHIVER of movement, the Augusta Victoria pulled away from the Hoboken pier. Nellie Bly stood at the port rail with the other passengers and waved her cap to those she was leaving behind; she could not help but wonder if she would ever see them again. Seventy-five days, which had seemed so short in the planning, now seemed an age. Smoke poured from the ship’s three funnels in thick black columns, then turned an irresolute gray and dissipated into the sky. The timbers of the deck thrummed softly beneath her feet. Behind her, just beyond the greenery of the Battery, the Tribune’s brick clock tower, seeming part schoolhouse, part church steeple, rose over the city’s newspaper district; before the day was out, Bly knew, her name would be repeated a thousand times there, in every newsroom and beanery and oyster saloon, wherever the men of the press congregated.
In the distance she could see the lighthouse and telegraph station of Sandy Hook; to the east, the morning sun silhouetted the Statue of Liberty. The great lady stood with torch aloft, still the brown of a penny, the copper of her exterior having not yet developed its verdigris patina. Her official name was Liberty Enlightening the World, but she was most often referred to simply as “Bartholdi’s statue.” The Alsatian sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi had originally meant for her to stand at the entrance to the Suez Canal, where, in the veil and dress of an Egyptian peasant woman, she would have held up a lantern that symbolized the light of Egypt bringing progress to Asia. That plan, however, had been rejected by Egypt’s ruler Khedive Isma’il Pasha as too expensive, and so Bartholdi went back to the drawing board, where he converted progress into liberty. He draped his figure in the robes of ancient Greece and turned the lantern into a torch, and the statue, when it was finally built, became a gift from France to the United States in honor of the American centennial. The U.S. Congress, however, refused to allocate the funds needed to build the granite pedestal on which she would stand, and the centennial came and went without the statue there to commemorate it. Eventually the American fund-raising committee had the idea of displaying the statue’s right arm outside Madison Square Park to bring attention to her plight. For seven years, from 1877 until 1884, the immense slender arm had risen gracefully over the treeline of the park, but little progress was made until Joseph Pulitzer issued a personal appeal for funds in the pages of The World. From the paper’s working-class readers, many of them immigrants, came pennies, nickels, sometimes dollars. Within five months the $100,000 was raised—80 percent of it from donations of less than a dollar—and two years later the Statue of Liberty proudly stood at the entrance to New York Harbor, her presence a testimony not only to the immigrants who were already transforming the life of the city, but also to the seemingly illimitable power of its press.
The Augusta Victoria slid smoothly toward the open water of the Atlantic. Some of the passengers began to settle themselves into deck chairs, wrapping steamer rugs around themselves against the chill of the day. Word had begun to circulate among them that the young woman in the plaid coat was the reporter Nellie Bly, embarking on a race around the world. One of the passengers struck up a conversation with her, pointing out that a voyage truly begins only when the harbor pilot disembarks and the captain assumes command of the ship. “So now,” he said, “you are really on your tour around the world.”
She did not immediately reply. Tour around the world: something in his words called up thoughts of seasickness. Never having been on a sea voyage before—and being prone of late to nauseous headaches—she had feared that she would fall victim to the malady known among ocean travelers of the time as “the green monster.” Now she began to notice more acutely the humming of the engines, the constant vibrations in her feet, the queasying rise and fall of the ship. Her face must have betrayed her discomfort, for the man asked her, not unkindly, “Do you get seasick?” That was enough; she looked blindly down for a moment, then rushed to the rail and threw up over the side. When she turned back around, wiping the tears from her eyes, she noticed that the passengers nearby were smiling; other people’s seasickness, as it turned out, was an endless source of amusement aboard ocean liners. One of the men said dismissively, “And she’s going around the world.”
Bly joined in the laughter that followed; silently, though, she was marveling at her own boldness.
NELLIE BLY’S JOURNEY to that ship had started almost exactly a year before, in the fall of 1888. Sundays were the days Bly customarily devoted to thinking up ideas for new stories, and though good ones were never easy to come up with, on this particular Sunday she had spent most of the day and half of the night searching in vain for even a single suitable idea. Of late her exhausting work pace had begun to take a toll on her; after a lifetime of near-perfect health, she had started to get migraine headaches, some of them so severe that she was confined to her bed. Now, once again, her head was aching, and the longer she tossed and turned in bed the more frustrated she became. Her want of ideas kept her from getting sleep, and her want of sleep kept her from getting ideas, and by three o’clock in the morning she had decided that she could think of nothing worse than being a newspaper columnist, and at some point the thought occurred to her that she wished she was at the other end of the earth.
That thought brought her up short. She could use a break, that much was certain—in her two years of work as a newspaper journalist, she hadn’t taken a single day of vacation—so why not a trip around the world? She lay in bed for a while contemplating the prospect of it. Growing up in Pennsylvania, she had heard countless family stories of her great-uncle Thomas Kennedy, who as a young man had traveled around the world. The trip had taken him three years and had ruined his health, but he had done it, and it was what people remembered about him. Of course, she had no intention of spending three years working her way around the world, as her uncle had done; she had always been too restless to sit still for long, too impatient to discover what came next. If she could make it around the world as swiftly as, say, Phileas Fogg had, she would definitely consider doing it. But was it actually possible to make the trip in eighty days, as Jules Verne had imagined it might be? As she pondered that question she could feel her body relax, and before long she had drifted off to sleep, secure in her determination that she would soon know whether she might become a real-life Phileas Fogg.
The next day, Monday, she set off for Bowling Green on lower Broadway; the offices of most of the city’s steamship lines were clustered there, in a row of ancient brick houses that had once belonged to the families of wealthy merchants. Bly entered one of the offices and picked out a selection of timetables for ships and trains. With some trepidation at what she might find, she sat down and began to consult them. At first the tables seemed to be nothing more than long columns of random numbers, but little by little she began to piece them together. The regular business of the steamship office went on all around her; well-dressed New Yorkers came in to buy tickets, compare fares for different classes of accommodation, inquire about lost baggage. She stared at the pages spread out before her like a mathematician who has stumbled onto the solution to a long-vexing problem, checking and rechecking her work.
A trip around the world, she now felt sure, could be accomplished in eighty days. With some luck, it might be done in as little as seventy-five.
Excitedly gathering up her papers, Bly left the steamship office and set off for The World’s headquarters. At the foot of Park Row stood the Herald’s office building, a white marble palace with black walnut doors flanked by six richly ornamented columns. Farther along the street’s few short blocks were the offices of the Mail and Express, the Commercial Advertiser, the Times (struggling in its fourth decade, and widely considered too respectable ever to be successful), the Daily News, the Mor
ning Journal, and, at the end of the street, the Tribune, its impressive clock tower facing the statue of Benjamin Franklin at Printing-House Square. The World, where Bly was headed, was midway up the street, at 31-32 Park Row.
John Cockerill, the paper’s editor in charge, would have been expecting Bly, as she came to his office every Monday morning to discuss story possibilities. With his large body and massive head, Cockerill seemed scarcely less imposing than he had when she first came to interview him about women journalists. “Have you any ideas?” he asked her as she sat down.
“One,” she replied. To this Cockerill said nothing; he played with the pens on his desk, waiting for her to continue. “I want to go around the world,” said Bly. “I want to go around in eighty days or less. I think I can beat Phileas Fogg’s record. May I try it?”
Cockerill was not enthusiastic; he told Bly that The World’s editorial staff had thought of that very idea some time before, and though nothing had come of it, the intention of the editors had always been to send a man. However, Cockerill said, he was not personally opposed to her going, and he suggested that the two of them go talk to the paper’s business manager, George Turner.
“It is impossible for you to do it,” Turner said firmly when he heard what Bly was proposing. In the first place, he explained, she was a woman and therefore would require a protector to travel with her. The World couldn’t very well have a young female reporter wandering across the farthest reaches of the globe without a chaperone; it was far too dangerous. Most newspapers were uncomfortable about sending their female reporters around the city, much less around the world. And even if it was possible for her to travel unaccompanied, as a female traveler she would require so many bags—probably a dozen trunks or more—that she would never be able to make the rapid changes that this sort of lightning trip would require.
Bly tried to protest, but Turner cut her off. “There is no use talking about it,” he said. “No one but a man can do this.”
In her year at The World, Bly had braved the terrors of an insane asylum, had exposed the corrupt workings of the state’s most powerful lobbyist, had put herself at risk to identify a predator when the police themselves had been unwilling to do it. She had proven to her own satisfaction that she possessed as much drive and determination as any male reporter, but she was perfectly willing, if called upon to do so, to prove it once more. “Very well,” she said angrily. “Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and I’ll beat him.”
George Turner looked at her for a moment. “I believe you would.”
NELLIE BLY LEFT TURNER’S OFFICE that day having at least obtained the promise that if The World was to send anyone racing around the world, it would be she. For the next year the idea was hardly discussed, as Bly and her editors moved on to other stories. Still, they were by no means the only ones who had considered the possibility of such a trip: the notion of a race to beat Phileas Fogg’s eighty days around the world was an idea that seemed to be hanging in the air, ready to be plucked. At some point during the course of that year The World received a letter from a reader in Toledo, Ohio, outlining such a trip and putting himself forward as the man to carry it out; a similar letter was subsequently received from a reader in Bangor, Maine. That same year a Washington correspondent on the World staff proposed to undertake a timed race around the world; he had apparently given a good deal of thought to how it might be done, and was deeply disappointed to learn from his editors that the idea was already under consideration. In the fall of 1889, the New York theatrical agent Henry C. Jarrett was discussing the notion with several other members of the Players Club, a Gramercy Park social club founded by the legendary actor Edwin Booth. Much as Verne had imagined with Fogg at his Reform Club in London, Jarrett’s friends at the Players Club stoutly declared that an eighty-day trip around the world was inconceivable—too many things, they insisted, could go wrong—while Jarrett maintained that such a trip could be not only conceived, but accomplished. And as had happened with Fogg and his whist partners, the discussion grew spirited enough that eventually wagers were made on the proposition.
Henry C. Jarrett, as it happened, had already made his mark in the field of record-breaking travel. In 1876 he had organized a cross-country train trip that carried his theatrical troupe from New York to San Francisco in only eighty-three hours—less than half the time such a trip normally required. The consummate impresario, Jarrett had persuaded James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the publisher of the Herald, to underwrite half the cost of the trip in exchange for exclusive rights to the story. Now, before he began preparing for an around-the-world journey, Jarrett stopped by The World’s offices to inform the editors of his plans, hoping that the paper would sponsor the trip as the Herald had his earlier one. (In the intervening years The World had supplanted the Herald as the city’s most widely read newspaper.) Hearing that the trip had already been promised to Nellie Bly, The World later reported, Jarrett “courteously and gallantly gave way to the young lady.”
Jarrett had been gracious in stepping aside, but as The World’s editors were acutely aware, he could well change his mind and offer his idea to one of the city’s other papers, particularly if enough time passed without an announcement of a trip by Bly. And even if Jarrett held to his word, there was no assurance that someone else would not get the same idea. By this point it was clear that a kind of critical mass had been achieved: someone, sometime soon, was going to race around the world. To The World’s editors, the prospect of Henry C. Jarrett, or some other would-be circumnavigator, embarking on a well-publicized race under the aegis of a rival newspaper was highly distressing—particularly given their paper’s recent downturn in sales—and anxiety seems to have pressed them into action. Late in the afternoon of Monday, November 11, John Cockerill sent Nellie Bly a note requesting that she see him in his office at once.
An urgent editorial summons was an unusual enough event that Bly spent the entire trip downtown wondering just what she had done to bring on a scolding. She entered his office and sat down by his desk, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence. Finally looking up from his writing, Cockerill asked her, “Can you start around the world day after tomorrow?”
“I can start this minute,” Bly replied.
The steamship City of Paris was leaving New York for Southampton on Wednesday morning, Cockerill said, and it would surely arrive in time to catch the mail train out of London bound for the Italian port city of Brindisi. But the editors of The World preferred to book her on the Augusta Victoria, leaving Thursday morning; that way she would not have to spend an extra day in London waiting for the Brindisi train and could thus cut a day’s travel time from her trip. Still, he warned, there was a risk: if the Augusta Victoria was slowed by rough weather crossing the Atlantic, she might fail to connect with the mail train.
“I will take my chances on the Augusta Victoria, and save the extra day,” she said.
Nellie Bly walked out of Cockerill’s office, her head filled with a thousand things. Outside, New York careened around her. Night had fallen, and the electric lights shimmered in the puddles left from the morning’s rain. On Park Row white clouds of steam, produced by underground printing presses, wafted up through grates in the sidewalk; the illuminated clock face on the Tribune tower shone like a full moon. By the thousands the city’s working people, sewing girls, typewriters, clerks, streamed from the buildings into the streets, like her, heading home. Only she among them, though, was about to race around the world. Her astonishment gave everything a soft edge of unreality. It was Monday night; by Thursday she would be crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
That evening she and her mother went to the Broadway Theatre, where Edwin Booth himself was performing as Hamlet. The next morning, sometime after ten o’clock, she set off for the studio of the dressmaker William Ghormley (Robes et Manteaux), on Nineteenth Street east of Fifth Avenue, in one of the city’s most exclusive commercial districts. Ghormley had opened his shop ten years earlie
r, and over that time he had become one of the favored dressmakers of New York society, his agents in Paris, Lyons, London, and other European fashion capitals always on the lookout for the latest styles and colors.
“I want a dress by this evening,” Bly told him.
“Very well,” Ghormley replied unconcernedly, as though a young woman requesting a dress on a few hours’ notice was a regular occurrence. Usually one of his creations required at least several days in the making, and this was by no means exceptional. The one hundred fifty gowns ordered by Mrs. Vanderbilt for the female guests of her famous 1883 ball had kept Monsieur Lanouette’s one hundred forty dressmakers working around the clock for five weeks.
“I want a dress,” she added, “that will withstand constant wear for three months.”
William Ghormley brought out several different materials from his storeroom in the back and tossed them onto a small table. He held up the fabrics in front of him to study the various effects in a pier glass on the wall; he performed his examinations as carefully and unhurriedly as a veteran medical man, maintaining a lively conversation all the while but never taking his gaze from the work before him. Within a few minutes he had decided on a plain blue broadcloth and patterned camel’s hair as an attractive and durable combination for a traveling gown, and immediately set to work measuring and cutting. By the time Bly left the shop, around one o’clock, the dress had been boned and fitted; she was to return again at five for a final fitting.
Meanwhile, in the World offices downtown, furious preparations were being made. To everyone’s great dismay, it turned out that Nellie Bly did not possess a passport, and so the editorial writer Edward S. Van Zile had been immediately dispatched to Washington, D.C., to obtain one. Van Zile arrived in Washington late Monday night, and the next morning managed to obtain a meeting with no less a personage than Secretary of State James G. Blaine. Hearing of The World’s passport dilemma, Blaine promised Van Zile that he would personally handle the matter. The secretary of state proved to be as good as his word, and the next day, Wednesday, he delivered a temporary passport for Nellie Bly. At once Van Zile sped back to New York, arriving in the city at four-thirty Thursday morning—exactly five hours before Bly’s scheduled departure—with Special Passport Number 247 in hand.
Eighty Days Page 10