Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Another member of the World staff was sent on a shorter but no less important journey, just across City Hall Park to 261 Broadway, where the leading international travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son, had its New York offices. At Cook’s a tentative itinerary for Bly’s trip was worked out. If all went according to plan, the Augusta Victoria would deposit Nellie Bly in Southampton, England, on November 21. In Southampton she could catch an overnight train to London and then proceed onward by train to Brindisi, Italy, arriving on the twenty-fifth. There she would board the Peninsula and Oriental steamer Cathay, bound for points east. Christmas she would spend in Hong Kong, and then, after a three-day layover (one of the very few pauses allowed for in the schedule), she would depart for Yokohama, Japan. On January 7 she would board a Pacific steamship, with the goal of reaching San Francisco by January 22. The last leg of her journey would be a train to New York, which, barring unforeseen delays, would allow her to make a triumphant return to the World offices on January 27. Seventy-five days, then, around the world.

  The itinerary, The World admitted in its announcement of the trip, was “very pretty on paper, but it is a case of man proposes and God disposes.” As Henry Jarrett’s companions in the Players Club had pointed out, a trip of some thirty thousand miles brought with it nearly as many details, all of them just waiting to go wrong. Nellie Bly, for instance, might become sick en route (this was by no means a remote possibility, given the extreme changes in climate she would endure, from damp, drizzly London to sun-baked Aden), and, as The World noted, “a fever-racked patient is hardly a fit subject to play the part of Mercury.” She might encounter one of the sea storms called typhoons, or one of the sandstorms called simoons. Icebergs were a constant danger; in the previous eight years three dozen steamships had been damaged by ice on the North Atlantic. There was, literally at every moment, the chance of a mechanical breakdown, which was bad enough if it occurred on land or in port but potentially catastrophic on the high seas. Even a seemingly minor delay could result in a missed connection, leading to further delays, like a boulder gaining speed as it rolls downhill, with disaster the inevitable result.

  The World made very clear that Nellie Bly would simply “take her luck as a first-class passenger, using the facilities which are now demanded by travellers.” She would not be permitted to hire any chartered locomotives or special boats to help her make especially fast time, for that would undermine the trip’s central purpose—to determine how quickly and efficiently a typical traveler could move around the globe using only “the ordinary lines of commerce.” Intent on having Bly’s trip be seen as more than just a publicity stunt, The World was busily promoting it as another instance of public interest journalism, in which Nellie Bly would experience at first hand the latest conveniences and lingering hardships of the modern age of travel. Bly had been instructed to keep her eyes and ears open while she sped around the globe, and The World promised its readers that she would return with “suggestions for improvement in travel, in treatment of travellers, in costume and what not, all told in a woman’s gossipy fashion.”

  WILLIAM GHORMLEY HAD made good on his promise to create a traveling gown in a single day; so, too, did Bly’s regular dressmaker, Florence Wheelwright, from whom she had ordered a second lightweight dress for warmer weather. On Wednesday night, though, making her final preparations for the trip, Bly discovered that the dress simply would not fit into the traveling bag she had bought. She faced a stark choice: either bring a second bag or go around the world in only one dress. She gave up the extra dress.

  Bly was absolutely determined to carry only a single bag on her trip, and not just because she wanted her travel to be reduced to its most efficient possible form, with no need to check trunks or look after wayward bags that might or might not ever catch up to her as she sped around the globe. Just as important, she wanted to give the lie to the timeworn notion that a woman could not travel without taking along several pieces of luggage. (Even The World, in its first report of her trip, marveled that Bly was not taking “a Saratoga nor even a thin flat state-room trunk, when many a belle thinks herself going in wretchedly unprovided fashion if she does not take a round dozen of great roomy trunks for a fortnight’s stay at a Summer resort.”) The year before Bly’s trip, the popular travel writer Thomas W. Knox had published How to Travel: Hints, Advice, and Suggestions to Travelers by Land and Sea All Over the Globe, which contained a chapter entitled “Special Advice to Ladies.” The chapter consisted of nine pages of remarkably specific advice about how to pack one’s bags for a transatlantic voyage. It recommended that the female traveler bring a small steamer trunk and satchel into her stateroom, containing all of the items that would be necessary while on board, as well as a larger trunk to be stored in the ship’s hold; ideally, that trunk should measure approximately fourteen square feet at its bottom.

  For her single carrying bag Nellie Bly chose a sturdy leather gripsack measuring at its bottom sixteen by seven inches. In that small space she managed to pack a lightweight silk bodice, three veils, a pair of slippers, a set of toiletries, an inkstand, pens, pencils, paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a flask and drinking cup, several changes of underwear (flannel for cold weather, silk for hot), handkerchiefs, and a jar of cold cream to prevent her skin from chapping in the various climates she would encounter. (That jar of cold cream, Bly would later admit, “was the bane of my existence.” It was large and bulky and often kept her bag from closing, but she refused to give it up.) With these few provisions she felt confident that she could meet whatever conditions she might encounter along the way. “If one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling,” Bly liked to say, “and not for the purpose of impressing fellow travelers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.”

  There was, of course, the problem of laundry, and this was an issue to which she gave close consideration in the days before her departure. On the railroads, she knew, there would be no laundry service available, but fortunately the longest railway journey of the trip, between San Francisco and New York, was scheduled to last only four days. The transoceanic steamships, though, maintained their own laundries, and Bly had discovered that the steamers that would take her across Asia, though smaller than the ocean liners, produced amounts of washed clothing each day to rival even the largest laundries of New York. Bly had decided not to bring any jewelry other than a thin gold band that she wore on the thumb of her left hand. She believed this ring was a lucky talisman, as she had been wearing it on the day of her interview with The World two years earlier, when she had lost all her money and desperately needed a job. She was also bringing with her two self-winding watches, one of them set into a leather band on her wrist (a highly unusual style for the period), to be adjusted to the local time as she traveled, and the other snug in her pocket, this one a beautiful gold-plated 24-hour watch, which, in anticipation of her return, would remain set to New York time. On Wednesday night Bly went to the World office, where she received £200 in English gold and Bank of England notes as well as $2,500 in American gold and bills that she would attempt to use at the various ports she visited, to test how widely American currency was accepted around the world. The gold she would keep in her pocket, the notes in a chamois leather bag tied securely around her neck.

  The next morning, at the pier in Hoboken, Bly received five copies of that day’s World, the issue announcing her departure aboard the Augusta Victoria; the papers were not intended to be given as mementos to foreign hosts, but simply to accompany her all the way around the globe, so that on her return they would become, in The World’s phrase, “rare souvenirs.” Bly stowed the five newspapers at the bottom of her gripsack, where she also carried the temporary passport that had been so hastily obtained by Edward Van Zile. She was not carrying a revolver, though it had been suggested to her as a suitable companion piece for the passport. She believed strongly that the world would greet her as she greeted it; and in any case, she insisted, if her conduct w
as proper she would always find men ready to protect her.

  NOVEMBER 14–21, 1889

  Atlantic Ocean

  The Augusta Victoria, of the Hamburg-American Line, had a straight stem and a long graceful body, and its three funnels were the color of heavy cream. It was often referred to as one of the “greyhounds of the ocean.” It was a twin-screw steamer, which meant it contained a system of double propulsion—twin engines connected to twin shafts and twin propellers. The two mechanisms, separated by wooden bulkheads running from stem to stern, could be operated independently, so that if one was damaged or otherwise incapacitated, the other, as a Hamburg-American advertising pamphlet noted, “will continue to work and propel the ship with perfect ease.” Thus the twin-screw ship could depend for its passage entirely on mechanical power: steam had at last conquered sail. The stand of masts that had defined countless generations of oceangoing ships had now evolved, vestigially, into bare flagpoles, the array of billowing canvas sails giving way to smaller flags of country and company. Four hundred sixty feet long, with four complete decks, the Augusta Victoria was the largest ship ever built in a German yard. It had accommodations for 364 first-class and 116 second-class passengers, and another 695 could ride in steerage. Nellie Bly was berthed in stateroom Number 60, on the port side. Like the ship’s other first-class accommodations, hers was a pleasant, surprisingly high-ceilinged room, and one with an especially desirable location, as she was directly amidships, the section of the ship least affected by the vibration of the engines and so least likely to bring on attacks of seasickness.

  The Augusta Victoria, the steamship on which Nellie Bly crossed the Atlantic Ocean (Illustration Credit 5.1)

  Bly’s first attack had occurred within minutes of the ship’s setting sail, and her physical discomfort had been made far worse by the fear that she might be sick for the seventy days of her journey to be spent on the water. It was a reasonable enough concern: she had, after all, never been on a long sea voyage and so had not developed her sea legs, the tolerance to a boat’s rocking motion that seemed to build up over time, like a violinist’s callus, inuring one to future discomfort. Moreover, it was widely known that women suffered more than men from seasickness, a misery that, like the pains of labor, could never be adequately communicated to those who had not experienced it. The sufferer was liable to feel at once freezing and feverish, unable to sit up without a sickening nausea; even the softest and most innocuous sounds—a creak of a floorboard, the lapping of the waves—reverberated inside the head as loudly and unnervingly as the yowl of an alleycat. The wretchedness of the condition was perhaps best conveyed by the old saying that those suffering from seasickness believe they will die on the first day, are sure they will on the second, and hope they will on the third. After her first voyage to Europe, Harriet Beecher Stowe had written, “I wonder that people who wanted to break the souls of heroes and martyrs never thought of sending them to sea and keeping them a little seasick.” Worse still, one could not be sure how long an attack would last, nor that any of the proffered remedies would actually lessen its agonies, for even after millennia of human travel on the water, little was known about the malady’s prevention or cure. Those afflicted were variously instructed to lie down and to stand up, to rest and to exercise, to seek out darkness and light. They were advised to drink champagne, port, brandy, rum, or salt water (the latter treatment, it was admitted, “makes the drinker very miserable for a few minutes”); to eat chicken, oysters, celery, marmalade, hot West Indian pickles, or to eat nothing at all. In his Practical Treatise on Sea-Sickness (1880), Dr. George M. Beard suggested chloral hydrate—more popularly known as knockout drops—though he cautioned that it was “not recommended for daily or long-continued use.”

  Lunch was served on the Augusta Victoria at one o’clock. On the first day, still weak from her earlier attack of seasickness, Bly made her way to the first-class passengers’ dining hall in the ship’s deckhouse. It was a large room, decorated in a rococo style that the industry journal The Marine Engineer generously termed “mixed Renaissance.” Overhead arched a canopy of stained glass; there were bronze statues, gilded mirrors, intricately painted panels done by “the best artists of the German school.” Stewards in full dress and white gloves moved noiselessly about, seeming to anticipate passengers’ needs before they were spoken. A group of musicians—the stewards of the second-class dining hall, hired in part for their musical skills—played an overture for the passengers as they arrived. As an honored guest, Bly was seated at the captain’s table, in the armchair directly to his left. Soon the captain himself, handsome and bearded, took his place at the head of the table. The waiters ladled out the soup; Bly discovered that she had an overwhelming desire not to see, smell, or taste food at least until they had reached land. The passengers began to introduce themselves. To Bly’s embarrassment, the others at the table turned out to be old hands at ocean crossings, and she thought she saw indulgent smiles on all their faces when, feeling another attack coming on, she put a handkerchief over her mouth and did her best to excuse herself politely from the table. “Miss Bly,” said Captain Albers, “you must come back every time.” One of the stewards helped her to a secluded spot on the deck, where again she was sick. Back inside the dining room, she was greeted with a hearty round of congratulations for her fortitude—“The only way to conquer seasickness is by forcing oneself to eat,” the captain noted approvingly—but the bravos of her tablemates only made her more conscious of her precarious condition, and when the fish course was placed before her she felt her stomach start to turn, and, choking behind her handkerchief, she was forced to excuse herself to the deck for a second time.

  Bly, though, had made up her mind that she could not afford to be seasick, that she would heed as long as she could the captain’s advice to keep coming back to the table, and so, like a boxer who returns to the center of the ring after having been knocked down, she returned again, on unsteady legs, to the warmth and murmur of the dining room. She was aware now that every unexpected sensation—the flare of a light, a food’s aroma, even the expression on someone’s face—could by itself bring on a new wave of nausea. The band still played its distressing tunes. She did her best to focus on the story the captain was telling. Once she caught the eye of a waiter, who seemed to be watching her with an amused gleam in his eye; again Bly felt sick, and for the third time, blindly, despairingly, she rushed out of the dining room. Staggering once more back inside, she now felt that she had already passed over to the third stage of seasickness, in which one hopes for death. Her head was on fire, but her hands and feet seemed to be encased in ice. She tried to keep as still as possible; she felt she could scarcely remember a time when moving had not been a misery. The courses arrived in seemingly endless succession. She spoke little and ate less, and it was all she could do, when at last the final course had been served, to mumble that the meal had been very good and then excuse herself and head wobblingly back to her cabin, where she crawled into bed and almost immediately fell asleep.

  She slept all through the night. Later she would recall some dim, awful dreams, and waking up once to take a few sips of tea, but beyond this all was oblivion until she heard a voice calling her name. Opening her eyes, she found a stewardess and one of the female passengers in her cabin and Captain Albers standing at the door. “We were afraid that you were dead,” he said jovially.

  “I always sleep late in the morning,” she said, in as apologetic a tone as she could muster.

  “In the morning!” exclaimed the captain with a laugh. “It is half past four in the evening!

  “But never mind,” he added, “as long as you slept well it will do you good. Now get up and see if you can’t eat a big dinner.”

  Feeling half-drugged with sleep, Bly pulled herself out of bed and drank a cup of tea. When she went back up on deck she found, to her great relief, that she felt perfectly well, and at dinner that evening she did not miss a course.

  ON THE OPEN OCEAN, far from
the greenery of the land, the air smelled different, clean and crisp and mineral. The sea during that trip was often very rough. The ship’s bow plunged into the waves, sending gusts of spray in every direction, gliding beneath the water before rising, like a porpoise, for air, and then diving again. The ship rose and fell, rose and fell without cease; a seat on one of the deck chairs was like a marathon ride aboard the Serpentine Railway at Coney Island. Bly came to enjoy the rhythmic toss of the ship, though in the early days of the voyage she was haunted by the idea that her seasickness would return. Many of the women were indeed sick, and on rough days the men stayed below in the smoking room. Among some of the passengers it became a morbid fascination to observe the twenty feet of new railing near the ship’s deckhouse. The rail had been torn away a month earlier by a hurricane that battered the Augusta Victoria three days out from England; only by grabbing a steam winch had the ship’s chief officer kept himself from being swept overboard in the gale.

  On calmer days the passengers of the first and second classes idled on deck. Most spent their time reading, or chatting, or napping, or strolling. Three times another ship was sighted in the distance, and each sighting occasioned a great excitement among the passengers. Almost any break in the endless line of the horizon—a sail, a leaping fish, a seabird—that on land would be given hardly a second thought was treated aboard ship as a major event. There was shuffleboard on deck, and the venerable shipboard game called bull, which consisted of tossing leather-covered lead rings onto a numbered scoreboard. On deck the women wore heavy skirts, as the sea breezes did not respect proper decorum; some had sewn weights, or little packets of coins, into the hems. In the evenings the band played concerts under the stars. After dinner, tea was served in the ladies’ saloon, where the furnishings were upholstered in plush of a delicate lavender, while the men took cigars and brandy in the smoking room. The music room, decorated with oil paintings and rich hangings of silk and damask, contained a grand piano, and many evenings were cheerfully passed in group singing. Nellie Bly was not much for singing, and she found the long unfilled hours tiresome—she was anxious to reach England and get on with her trip—but she amused herself by noting the idiosyncrasies of the other passengers. One man, she saw, took his pulse after each meal; another, for some reason, counted the number of steps he took each day. At some point during the voyage Bly discovered that one of the female passengers had not gotten undressed since the ship embarked several days earlier. “I am sure we are all going down,” she explained, “and I am determined to go down dressed.”