Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  “There is one question that all women dread to answer,” Robert McCormick told her—his voice, lightly accented, revealed his Virginia origins—“and as very few will give a truthful reply, I will ask you to swear to the rest first and fill in the other questions afterwards, unless you have no hesitancy in telling me your age.”

  “Oh, certainly,” she said with a laugh. “I will tell you my age, swear to it, too, and I am not afraid. My companion may come out of the corner.”

  The passport having been completed, McCormick took a moment to discuss the peculiarities of various women he had encountered coming to the Legation for passports. “I remember once,” he recalled, “eight or ten girls came at the same time for passports, and each one of them managed to avoid letting any of the others see what her exact age was. There was some maneuvering required to bring that about, I can assure you.”

  Bly took a last sip of coffee and began drawing on her gloves. “Very entertaining,” she said, “but we must be off.”

  A few moments later she and Greaves were again in a carriage hurrying through the streets of London, first to the World offices near Trafalgar Square, where she received the cables awaiting her arrival and the “bon voyages” of the handful of newspapermen gathered there, then back east to the offices of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company on Leadenhall Street to purchase the tickets that would cover her journey from Brindisi, Italy, all the way to Yokohama, and then west again to Charing Cross Station to reserve seats on the morning train running down to Folkestone, the departure point for the ferry across the English Channel to Boulogne. The two had just enough time to bolt down a quick breakfast of ham and eggs with coffee at the Charing Cross Hotel next door and then find their way to the Folkestone train. It was at times like this, rushing madly from place to place, that she was delighted with her decision to carry only a single bag. At last, four hours after arriving in London, all of their business had been transacted and Bly and Greaves could settle in for the ride back to the south of England. The trip to London had taken Bly perhaps fifty miles out of her way, and added a good deal of extra complication when she was already exhausted from lack of sleep, but still, she knew, the trip was a necessary one, for it had allowed her to obtain the passport that would make the rest of her journey possible. That passport, with Second Secretary McCormick’s official seal on it, was now safely tucked inside her gripsack. Not until many years later would it be discovered that Nellie Bly had sworn to Robert McCormick that she was twenty-two years old.

  She was twenty-five.

  IN 1871 JULES VERNE WROTE to his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, about a new novel on which he was currently at work: “Have I been slaving? Can you doubt it? If you only knew how much this trip around the world in eighty days amuses me in writing it! I dream about it: If only it will amuse our readers as much.” By that time the forty-three-year-old Verne had become the most successful practitioner of the literary genre that would eventually come to be known as science fiction, but in the late nineteenth century was more often called “scientific romance.” It was a career for which he had been preparing all his life. Born in Nantes, a harbor town on the north shore of the river Loire, as a boy Jules had spent endless hours sitting on the stone wall that ran along the ancient quay, watching the ships sail in laden with bags and crates marked with thrillingly indecipherable languages: blue-sailed fishing boats, high-masted schooners, and most magical, the pyroscaphe, an experimental form of paddleboat, long and low with an arching beam at its bow like the head of a mythical sea creature, churning up great clouds of foam in its wake as it made its way slowly down the river. Jules loved tales of adventure, devouring the translated novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Robinson Crusoe, and his favorite of all, The Swiss Family Robinson. He dreamed of seeing the world for himself, and once, when he was eleven, he managed to talk himself aboard a schooner that needed a new cabin boy. The ship was bound for the West Indies, but Jules made it no farther than the next town along the Loire before the captain discovered his real age and dropped him off on the quay, from where his father brought him back home. In the future, he promised his distraught mother, he would travel only in his imagination.

  As a young man Verne moved to Paris and began to study law, with the idea of following his father into the family law practice. But he didn’t much care for his studies, and he spent most of his time writing plays and librettos for comic operas. Though he did manage to graduate, in the end he decided to brook his father’s disappointment and not take over the practice. “I may become a good writer but I would never be anything but a poor lawyer,” he wrote by way of explanation, “since I habitually see only the comic or artistic aspect of things, while their precise reality escapes me.” When he was twenty-eight he married Honorine de Viane, a young widow with two children, and to support his new family began working, of all unlikely professions, as a stockbroker. Still, he kept writing, and in 1863 he published his first novel, entitled Five Weeks in a Balloon, about a scientific expedition across the African continent. The book did well enough that he was able to quit the brokerage (not surprisingly, he had never been very successful there) and devote himself full time to writing adventure stories that merged fact and fantasy, science and speculation. His early novels, among them A Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, took readers on fantastic trips to undreamed-of places, anticipating twentieth-century technologies such as the rocket ship and the nuclear submarine; the novel about which he wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, however, was very different, for it went no farther than around the world, and involved only technologies—primarily the steamship and the steam locomotive—available to anyone with enough money for a ticket.

  That book, of course, was Around the World in Eighty Days. Its hero, Phileas Fogg, is the very embodiment of English exactitude. At eleven-thirty each morning he leaves his home on Savile Row, walks the 1,151 steps (576 by his left foot, 575 by his right) to the Reform Club, where he takes his lunch, reads the newspapers until dinner, and afterward plays whist with other club members before returning home precisely at midnight. In his habits he is as regular as clockwork, and the adjective Verne most often uses to describe him is “mathematical.” Fogg’s predictable routine, however, is disturbed one evening by a discussion around the whist table about the shrinking of the globe in the new age of rapid travel. One player suggests that a complete circumnavigation of the earth might now be made in as little as three months. “Eighty days,” corrects Phileas Fogg. The others are skeptical of Fogg’s claim—what about unfavorable weather, they ask, or headwinds, or shipwrecks, or derailments? All of those contingencies, Fogg coolly replies, are accounted for in his schedule. That might be well and good in theory, his tablemates insist, but actually putting such an idea into practice is an entirely different matter. Ever the English empiricist, Fogg wagers twenty thousand pounds—half his fortune—that he can complete the trip in eighty days or less (“i.e., in 1,920 hours or 115,200 minutes,” he elucidates mathematically). The whist players agree to the bet, and Fogg sets off on his trip that very evening, accompanied by his French manservant Passepartout—and carrying, like Nellie Bly after him, only a single bag.

  The novel contains several subplots; one, for instance, involves the pursuit of Fogg around the world by a detective named Fix (who mistakenly believes that Fogg is fleeing the country after robbing a bank of fifty-five thousand pounds), and another the rescue of a widowed Indian princess named Aouda, the intended victim of suttee at her husband’s funeral, who will remain with Fogg and Passepartout for the remainder of the trip. (Aouda eventually becomes Fogg’s wife, making him, the narrator reports, “the happiest of men.”) But the heart of Around the World in Eighty Days is the contest between time and distance: Phileas Fogg’s quest to maintain his rigidly plotted-out schedule as the clock grinds relentlessly on. Fogg is a literary expression of the solid Victorian virtues: he is honest, he is rational, he is patriotic, he is courageous,
he is chaste. More than anything, though, he is unflappable, and much of the pleasure of the book comes from watching him maintain his composure in the face of the seemingly insuperable obstacles that Verne places in his path. When there turns out to be a fifty-mile break in the Indian railway, Fogg finds an elephant to carry them on to Allahabad; when Fogg and Passepartout are arrested on a trumped-up charge in Calcutta and sentenced to seven days in jail, he pays the £2,000 bail (equivalent to nearly a quarter of a million dollars today) so that they are not late for their China Sea steamship; when a Sioux attack in Nebraska causes them to miss their train, Fogg and the others set out on a sail-borne sled speeding along the railroad tracks to Omaha. When the merchant steamer they have hired runs out of coal before reaching Liverpool, Fogg calmly purchases the ship from its owner and orders that its upper works be hacked apart and the wood used for fuel; eventually the cabins, the masts, the rails, and most of the deck find their way into the furnace, and by the time the ship reaches port it is little more than a floating iron hull.

  Still, for all of Phileas Fogg’s daring and ingenuity he is unable to keep precisely to his schedule and he arrives back in London five minutes past the agreed-upon time. He has thus lost the £20,000 wager, and has spent the other half of his fortune in pursuing the ill-fated race; he is ruined, and his future seems dark indeed—at least until the following afternoon, when Passepartout realizes that the travelers had actually gained a day in their eastward path around the globe, and that the trip they believed to be eighty days long was in fact only seventy-nine. They hurry to the Reform Club, where they surprise Fogg’s clubmates by walking in precisely as the clock strikes the appointed hour. Phileas Fogg has gone around the world in eighty days, has won his bet, and has found a wife in the process. “Truly, would you not,” the narrator asks the reader at the book’s close, “for less than that, make the tour around the world?”

  The idea for the novel seems to have been born in the summer of 1871, when Jules Verne, sitting in a Paris café, noticed a newspaper advertisement for a tourist trip around the world being organized by the British travel agent Thomas Cook. That previously unthinkable notion—that not just a single country or continent but the entire globe might be the subject of a tourist excursion—was itself traceable to the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, which established for the first time a direct water route between Europe and Asia. In conjunction with the new transatlantic railroad in the United States (completed just six months earlier), the opening of the canal meant that a traveler could now pursue a more or less direct path around the world via train and steamship. The inevitable next question was how quickly such a trip might be completed, and though no one could yet say for sure, speculation began to center on a period of eighty days. Shortly before the completion of the Suez Canal two French journals published itineraries for an eighty-day trip, and the 1869 volume L’Année scientifique et industrielle also imagined the possibility of circling the globe in eighty days. Still, this was no more than a hypothetical construct based on the arrival and departure times of ships and trains. Theory was one thing, as the Reform Club members reminded Phileas Fogg; actual practice was quite another.

  The first of the real-life “globe girdlers,” in the phrase of the time (a reference to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who claimed that he would “put a girdle round about the earth”), was named, fittingly, George Francis Train. Train was a wealthy businessman who had amassed his fortune, in part, by buying up real estate along the Union Pacific railroad corridor around Omaha. According to The Biographical Review he was also “one of the most eccentric men in America.” In 1872 he ran for president as “Citizen Train,” becoming perhaps the only candidate in American history to charge admission to his campaign rallies. When meeting someone for the first time, Train would shake hands with himself (a practice he claimed he picked up in China); he wrote poetry in alternating lines of red and blue; on at least one occasion he walked down the street stark naked; and in his later years he vowed that he would speak with no one in the world but children. In 1870, however, George Francis Train did complete a circuit of the world—a trip that went relatively smoothly, other than an incident in Marseilles in which he got caught up in an insurrection against the French government, declared himself the liberator of France, and was thrown into prison. Still, he managed to make it around the world in exactly eighty days (that is to say, eighty days of travel time, excluding the time he spent in a French prison), and afterward Train insisted to anyone who would listen that he was the “real” Phileas Fogg.

  George Francis Train, however, was not the only man who could legitimately make such a claim. Another possible Fogg antecedent was the Cleveland city official who circled the world during the years 1869 and 1870 and sent back letters chronicling his travels to the Cleveland Leader newspaper, which were subsequently collected in a book entitled Round the World: Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt. He required a good deal longer than eighty days to make it around the world, but his credentials as a source for Verne lay elsewhere: for his name was William Perry Fogg.

  Jules Verne himself always insisted that he had never heard of William Perry Fogg, and that his protagonist’s name was simply a play on the word “fog,” which Verne thought to be emblematic of the character’s London home. (“When I found ‘Fogg’ I was very pleased and proud,” he later told a British journalist.) Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours first appeared at the end of 1872 as a serialization in the Parisian newspaper Le Temps and subsequently, as Around the World in Eighty Days, in English and American newspapers. Appearing in book form in 1873, it quickly became the most beloved of all Verne’s novels, selling more than a hundred thousand copies in France during his lifetime and hundreds of thousands of copies more in translation around the world. In 1874 the book was turned into a play; adapted by the French dramatist Adolphe D’Ennery, Around the World added not just one but two shipwrecks to the narrative and featured the appearance onstage of a locomotive, a nest of snakes, and, most thrillingly for the audience, a live elephant. Like the novel, the play was both a critical and a popular success, running in Paris for more than two years. Verne himself had been concerned about the play’s prospects, and before it opened he invited his friend Félix Duquesnel, a drama critic and playwright, to attend one of the rehearsals. “Between ourselves, a success?” Verne asked him afterward. “No,” replied Duquesnel, “a fortune.”

  Indeed, though later Verne would complain that he had received much less than his fair share for the play, and moreover that he had sold the novel for “a tenth of its value,” it was his tale of the circumnavigator Phileas Fogg that finally secured his fortune, and transformed him from a popular adventure novelist into a literary celebrity, an author who could no longer stroll unnoticed amid the Parisian crowds, whose name appeared in society columns and who was deluged with love letters containing locks of his female admirers’ hair. Verne already owned a yacht, the Saint-Michel, but now he traded it in for a new, larger one, and then another (Saint-Michel II and III), on which he made tours of northern Africa and Scandinavia. The boat was one of his few indulgences; the mansion in the northern city of Amiens had been purchased at the behest of his wife, who enjoyed far more than he did the bourgeois life of the French provincial city. Verne’s own daily routine was near monastic: he slept where he worked, in his little study decorated only with busts of Shakespeare and Molière and a watercolor of the Saint-Michel on the wall. Each morning at five o’clock he rose from his narrow iron bed and sat down at the plain writing desk, where he worked through the morning, stopping only briefly to eat the breakfast that Honorine had placed by the door exactly at seven. He was in bed again by eight-thirty each night, often having politely excused himself from one of his wife’s many social engagements. And so the novels kept coming, sometimes at a rate of two per year. In 1886 Verne’s brilliant but mentally ill nephew unaccountably shot him; he was hit twice, one of the bullets lodging in his ankle. Surgeons wer
e unable to remove the bullet, and for the rest of his life Verne walked with a limp and often suffered a good deal of pain. No longer was he able to sail his yacht; now, as he had promised his mother long before, he could travel only in imagination. The next year he entered local politics, winning a seat on the Amiens city council as a member of the Radical Republican party (both politically and theologically he was a thoroughgoing nonconformist), a position to which he would be re-elected three times.

  In the fall of 1889, Robert H. Sherard, The World’s Paris correspondent, contacted Verne to ask if he might meet a young female journalist by the name of Nellie Bly, who was setting out to beat Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day trip around the world. The paper’s managing editor had cabled Sherard from New York with instructions to set up the meeting; Robert Sherard later recalled that the editors thought “it would give a good advertisement” for Bly if she could visit the illustrious writer and, in a sense, receive his imprimatur for her trip. According to Sherard, Verne was initially hesitant about the idea, not understanding what purpose would be served by such a meeting, but after some discussion he agreed to meet the young lady. The news was sent back to Bly via The World’s London correspondent, Tracey Greaves, who made the necessary changes in her train schedule to allow for a brief detour on the way from London to Calais. When Nellie Bly’s train rolled into the station in Amiens, Jules Verne and his wife, Honorine, were waiting for her on the platform.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1889

  Amiens, France

  About to meet one of the world’s most famous men, Nellie Bly worried that her face might be soot-stained from the train ride, her hair tousled under her cap. It was late Friday afternoon, and she had barely slept since Wednesday. Already that day she and Tracey Greaves had traveled by train from London to Southampton, endured a rough crossing of the English Channel (apparently inured now to seasickness, she had stayed up on deck with the men rather than join the other women below), and then eaten another quick meal at a small, dingy restaurant in Boulogne before boarding the train to Amiens. On the Amiens train she managed a nap at her seat; it was a pleasant sleep, filled with dreams of home, but she woke up feeling chilled and achy, wishing she could stretch out. The compartment’s foot warmer was shared by all five of the passengers, and Bly guiltily realized that she must have stepped on some toes while she slept; the man across from her kept giving her angry looks over the top of his newspaper. Her feet were burning hot, but her back was freezing cold. The accommodations here were not at all like those on American trains, where a first-class carriage was as comfortable as a first-class hotel. If she had been on an American train, Bly thought, she would have been able to tidy up en route, but these European trains with their locked compartments were useless for that. On the train to Southampton she had come to understand why English girls needed chaperones, locked away as they were into those private compartments, where they might be knees to knees with a stranger for hours at a time; in the larger American carriages, on the other hand, everyone in the crowd was a potential protector. There was safety in numbers: that was the lesson mothers should be teaching their daughters. She was pondering this as the train pulled in to the station at Amiens.