The Excursion Editor answered that “the young lady in question” was “about twenty-three years of age” (Bly was, of course, twenty-five), that she stood five foot three (she was actually two inches taller than that), had dark hair and gray eyes, and was “fairly good-looking. She is quiet and reserved, her manners are genteel, though she is full of determination, and, girls, she does not chew gum.”
NOVEMBER 23–25, 1889
Calais, France, to Brindisi, Italy
Nellie Bly and Tracey Greaves arrived in Calais shortly before midnight, with nearly two hours to spare until the departure of the mail train bound for Brindisi, Italy. The glow of the meeting with the Vernes still lingered in Bly’s mind, how Jules Verne had traced out her route side by side with that of Phileas Fogg, how Honorine Verne had expressed her confidence that she would beat Fogg’s time. All the way to Calais, Greaves later wrote, “Nellie did nothing but talk about the motherly kindness of Mrs. Verne.” The Calais agent of the International Sleeping-Car Company met them at the station. Against company regulations he offered to open the train’s sleeping car ahead of time, to allow Nellie Bly the opportunity to go to bed, but though she had barely slept in more than forty-eight hours she turned down the offer. “This is the first time since I started when I really felt I had an hour to call my own,” she said. “I want to look about a bit.”
So Bly and Greaves walked down the pier and out along the shore. The air was cold and fresh, and in the moonlight the sea looked like a sheet of molten silver. Down the beach they paused to admire the Calais lighthouse, a skyscraper rising improbably from the water, thin and white and rounded on top, like a rocket ship that might have been imagined by Jules Verne. After a while they turned and headed back to the station, waiting in its coffee shop until a railway official came in to announce that the boat from England had just arrived; as soon as its mail was transferred from ship to shore, the train for Brindisi would be off. Before long Bly was saying a warm goodbye to Tracey Greaves, thanking him for the many courtesies he had shown her. Then she stepped aboard the train; she was traveling alone once more.
The train from Calais to Brindisi (the India mail train, as it was commonly known) was one of the most famous in the world, despite being designed more for the transport of mail than of people. It carried only a single Pullman sleeper car with twenty-one berths; reservations had to be made no later than twenty-four hours before departure and were usually filled long before then by travelers who wanted an exceptionally fast trip across the Continent regardless of price—it cost more to travel from Calais to Brindisi than from New York to San Francisco. Leaving Calais every Saturday morning precisely at one-thirty, the train sped down France’s western coast to Amiens, skirted the suburbs of Paris, and ran through Burgundy to Dijon; crossing the Italian border during the night, the train arrived in Turin around lunchtime, then continued south along the Adriatic coast until it reached the port city of Brindisi, where its mailbags would be unloaded onto ships bound for India and Australia.
Exhausted, Nellie Bly went immediately to bed, and despite the noise and rocking of the train she slept soundly and awoke feeling surprisingly refreshed. The car had only a single washroom, where she cleaned herself as best she could at a washstand piled high with dirty towels. Many of the male passengers were playing cards; the air in the car was already thick with cigar smoke. Breakfast was nothing more than coffee and bread served by the conductor and porter from a greasy portable stove, and lunch was scarcely better. For hours the train rode through wheat fields brown and barren, pastures where red cattle grazed, but Bly could seldom make out much detail; through the begrimed windows of the train the landscape looked blotched and blurry, as in one of the modern French paintings. In the evening a dining car was attached to the train, but some of the other women informed Bly that it was not considered suitable for them to dine in a public car with the men, and so they took dinner in their compartments. When the sun went down the car grew much colder, and Bly put on her ulster and wrapped herself tightly in her traveling rug, yearning again for the luxury of American trains. That night she turned in early; she piled her coat and all of her clothes on top of the berth’s single blanket and lay awake half the night shivering and thinking about how fortunate the train’s passengers had been the week before. In the very mountains through which they were now passing, the train had been attacked by bandits: those passengers, at least, had been given some excitement to get the blood moving.
The next morning Bly threw open the shade and looked eagerly out of the window for balmy Italy, but she saw there only a dull screen of gray, almost as though the shade had not been lifted. For a confused moment she wondered if, for once in her life, she had risen before the sun, but according to her wristwatch it was ten o’clock. Quickly she dressed and found the porter.
“It is a most extraordinary thing,” he said. “I never saw such a fog in Italy before.”
There was nothing to do except sit and stare out at the shrouded landscape. Silently she counted the number of days she had been away from New York, subtracting them from the number that would have to elapse before her return; she had, she figured, seventeen thousand miles still ahead of her, and sixty-five days in which to cover them, which came to an average of 261 miles that had to be traveled every day, or somewhat more than ten miles per hour, every hour, for the duration of her trip. When these calculations grew monotonous she thought about how one might go about introducing brown uniforms for railroad employees in the United States (those worn by the conductor and porter, brightened by gold braid on the collars and cuffs, were so much nicer than the plain blue ones found in America), and after a while she began to notice how the train guards signaled the conductor not by pulling a wire inside the car but by blowing a little tune on a bugle, and how the engine whistles were less a nerve-rattling blast than a plaintive appeal, like a shepherd calling after his flock. Somewhere out there the Adriatic lay hidden like a stage set behind a curtain; at times, when the train slowed down, she could hear the beating of the waves. She had seen little of England, less of France, and now was seeing nothing at all of Italy. All day the fog refused to lift; from morning until night she rode through Italy—sunny Italy, as the guidebooks loved to call it—and only once did she get a glimpse of the country she had heard so much about. It was near sunset, and the train had stopped at some station along the line. She went out on the platform to stretch her legs, and as she did the fog dissipated for a moment, and suddenly lying before her was a beautiful beach, the water dotted with fishing boats propelled by red triangular sails that reminded her of monarch butterflies fluttering about in search of nectar.
The India mail train arrived in Brindisi at one-thirty Monday morning, three and a half hours behind schedule, but still more than an hour before the steamship Victoria of the Peninsular and Oriental Line was due to depart. The train station was ringed by men loudly offering the use of their carriages, but beyond the station the town was dark and silent. A few ruined houses were all that remained of Brundisium, the great port city of the ancient Romans, where Virgil died after contracting a fever in Greece. Beyond the walls of the town, now, marshes were being drained; the most recent Baedeker guide warned visitors that “the environs are fertile, but malarious.” One of the train guards volunteered to escort the female passengers to their ships and make sure that they were not charged more than the correct fare. An omnibus was hired, the sleepy passengers climbed aboard with their luggage, and the carriage set off for the nearby piers, first to the steamer that was soon to depart for Alexandria, and then on to the Victoria, which would take Nellie Bly as far as Ceylon.
A long breakwater sheltered the harbor from winds; the night air was chilly but carried a hint of the tropics. The train guard accompanied Bly and the other passengers up the ship’s gangplank. With the guard’s help Bly located her cabin, but she waited there only long enough to drop her bag. She wanted to cable The World to say that she had arrived in Brindisi, and so the two went to ask
the purser if there was time to stop by the telegraph office in town before the ship departed. She could make it, the purser told her, adding, “If you hurry.”
The train guard took Bly back down the gangplank and into the town. They walked through winding, unlit streets until at last they came to an open door where he stopped; she followed him inside. The room was bare but for a pair of desks, on one of which a sheet of blank paper lay beside a pen and an ancient inkwell. Bly thought that everyone had retired for the night and her cable would have to wait until the next port, but the guard explained that it was customary to ring for the proprietor. He pulled at a bell that hung by one of the desks, and after some time the window opened and a head appeared.
Nellie Bly told the telegraph operator that she wanted to send a cable to New York. That was fine, he replied, but where exactly was New York? Astonished and amused, Bly did her best to explain, and as she did, the operator brought out a pile of books that he consulted to determine what line he should use to send her cable and how much he should charge for it. She wrote out her message on the blank sheet of paper; two days later it would be printed on the front page of The World, under the headline NELLIE BLY HEARD FROM:
BRINDISI, Italy, Nov. 25.—I reached Brindisi this morning on time after an uneventful trip across the Continent. The railway journey was tedious and tiresome, but I received no end of courtesy from the railway officials, who had been apprised of my coming. In a few hours I will be on the bosom of the Mediterranean. I am quite well though somewhat fatigued. I send kind greetings to all friends in the United States.
NELLIE BLY.
Leaving the telegraph office, Bly was startled by the warning sound of a ship’s whistle. She had been so preoccupied with her cable that she had forgotten entirely about the Victoria’s impending departure. For a moment her heart stopped beating. She looked at the guard and he looked at her. “Can you run?” he asked.
She said that she could, and the guard took hold of her hand. Down the silent, deserted streets they ran, until at last they rounded a corner and found themselves back at the pier. Bly looked out at the water, straining to see through the darkness. Then she felt she could breathe again.
The ship for Alexandria had gone, but hers still lay safely in port.
NOVEMBER 21–25, 1889
Pacific Ocean
SLOWLY AMERICA SANK OUT OF SIGHT, GREEN HILLS GIVING WAY TO a rolling blue plain of sea. The White Star steamship Oceanic, of the Occidental and Oriental Line, set sail from San Francisco at exactly three o’clock Thursday afternoon, November 21, with Elizabeth Bisland on board. As of today she had been traveling for a full week, one quite unlike any other she had ever lived through, and she was still feeling the effects of that mad rush by train across the country. Even amid the luxury of the Palace Hotel—with its marble-paved courtyard and wood-paneled rising rooms and concierges on every floor, communicating with the front desk via an ingenious series of speaking tubes—she had had little time to rest, what with the final preparations to be made for her trip, the sightseeing expeditions organized by her newspaper hosts in the city (they had been so gracious she could not possibly say no), and of course the constant interruptions from curiosity seekers wanting just to get a glimpse of her, that newfound celebrity, that inexpensive freak show. She was relieved finally to be rid of them, excited to be leaving her country for the first time, and very much looking forward, on this long voyage across the Pacific, to leisurely meals with congenial companions, to many long hours of reading and writing and many more with no greater obligation than just to gaze at sea and sky: to the opportunity of returning to her senses.
The Oceanic, Bisland could tell right away, was a magnificent ship, with its black hull and white body, the single white funnel with black topband and four masts gaily flying the White Star and the O&O house flags under the Union Jack (she thrilled to feel herself, for a time, under English rule). Built by the White Star Line in 1870, the Oceanic, an observer had remarked, was “the ship which makes possible the concept of a steamship as a travelling palace.” The first-class staterooms all had electric call buttons to summon stewards; water taps replaced the jugs that had been used in the past; and, happily enough, lavatories had been placed near the staterooms, rendering unnecessary those middle-of-the-night treks across the ship to the closest one, or, worse, the resort to chamber pots that sloshed around during the night and could be tipped over by any sudden wave. Downstairs, the ship’s steerage was crowded with Chinese immigrants returning to their homeland. “There were,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “424 coolies on board.” As the Oceanic set sail many of the steerage passengers stood at the lower rail tossing overboard little pieces of paper. It was a Chinese tradition; each of the papers contained a prayer for a safe voyage. The scraps of paper fluttered in the wind like autumn leaves before disappearing into the sea.
The breeze was picking up, the air turning cold. Above her Bisland could see crewmen setting topgallant sails to catch the rising wind. The worrisome news began to circulate among the passengers: a storm was coming. At that she went below to her stateroom to prepare for her first night at sea, which gave every indication of being a rough one. For the next four days Elizabeth Bisland’s only memory of the Pacific Ocean was of a foaming flood of emerald water beyond the porthole, which cast the room into a sickening green twilight. Her head pounded and her stomach lurched; lying in her thin berth, eyes shut tight, she could feel herself descending the seven rounds of hell. She did not eat and she barely slept, for the nights were positively terrifying. It seemed as if every plank in the ship groaned, joints racked by dozens of hard ocean crossings; the ship beat ceaselessly up and down with the pulse of the sea. She watched with indifference as her possessions slid like Alpine skiers back and forth across the stateroom floor; the bouquets given her by well-wishers lay tossed about the cabin like sprays scattered over a grave site. It was comforting to remember that her last will and testament had already been written, but hateful to imagine a death at sea. The longest plummet line ever dropped had gone down here and only found bottom at a depth of four thousand fathoms: nearly five miles straight down. The vast, salt, dread, eternal deep, Byron had called it. Anyone falling overboard, she mused, would never reach the earth that lay beneath the water, would just float forever in those soundless depths, drifting along in the slow flux of the undersea tides, surrounded by strange, formless protoplasmic life; in those blue solitudes of silence he would lie enclosed through the ages as in a crystal sarcophagus, a burial as splendid and secure as those of the Pharaohs.… She tried to will her mind away from morbid thoughts; she counted, again and again, the six wooden slats of the upper berth above her. Later on, she knew, when she remembered nothing else of this room she would still remember those six boards.
Inside her stateroom the air seemed tainted. It was a smell she recognized, the sweet aroma of joss sticks mixed with the bitter fumes of burning opium; she had smelled it for the first time only a few nights before, in the Chinese Quarter in San Francisco, where her hosts in the city had organized a late-night excursion for some of the passengers from the fast mail train. The sensation she had felt as a young woman living in New Orleans—that a foreign city had somehow been transplanted onto the American mainland—struck her even more forcefully in the Chinese Quarter, jostled about by a crowd dressed in loose-fitting black silk, the streets as busy at midnight as at noon. Even at that hour everyone had seemed cheerful and wide awake; their high-pitched chattering reminded her of guinea fowls she had kept as a girl. Upstairs, above the frail-looking balconies, windowsills held jars of chrysanthemums, the blossoms yellow and ragged around the edges like old newspaper. An off-duty detective had been enlisted to show them some of the sights; he led them down rickety, greasy stairs through back corridors hidden from the street, past open doorways that revealed steaming restaurant kitchens where white-aproned cooks barked and cackled at each other, their pots hissing on the stove. Old men squatted on their heels smoking cigarettes
. The night air was chill and damp, rank with mysterious, vaguely suggestive smells that seemed to emanate from every grate and doorway. Here and there red light leaked through a shuttered window; it was impossible to know what lay behind those shutters.
Once, as they approached a building, they heard a shout from somewhere and in an instant the street swarmed with men with hands clasped under their blouses. The detective showed them inside the building, where a man, the owner no doubt, sat alone at a long table quietly smoking a cigarette; a minute earlier the room had been filled with gamblers playing fan-tan, but that single call of warning had emptied it out. This was an old building, Bisland reflected, which had long been put to other uses; now it was an illegal gambling parlor. All through the Quarter, Chinese immigrants had gutted houses and reconstructed the interiors to suit their needs. San Francisco was changed by their arrival; they were not. Tens of thousands of them already lived in the city, with untold millions of hungry countrymen waiting behind them. She returned to her hotel feeling that she understood for the first time why California had put an end to Chinese immigration; the Chinese Quarter, she later wrote, was “a place that left a sinister, menacing impression on my mind.”
By that time nearly one in three of San Francisco’s workers was Chinese. They worked as laundrymen, cooks, waiters, servants, gardeners; they built houses and dug ditches and operated sewing machines. Some of them had started out in the California gold mines, but they soon discovered that Chinese miners were forbidden access to the so-called mother lodes; if they tried to move to a better mine the white workers would as a matter of course beat and rob them, and, for humiliation, cut off their pigtails. The men who committed these crimes were rarely punished, as the Chinese were not allowed to testify in court. They were also not allowed to vote or to obtain citizenship; though they paid school taxes, their children were denied entry into public schools. It was during this period that a new phrase entered the American idiom, referring to a remote possibility of success: “a Chinaman’s chance.” A Chinese-English phrase book of the period, published in San Francisco, taught English-speaking employers such useful phrases as Can you get me a good boy? He wants eight dollars per month? He ought to be satisfied with six dollars. When I find him useful, I will give him more. I think he is very stupid. If you want to go out, you must ask me. Brush my clothes. Light the fire. Wash the floor. I want to cut his wages. Chinese speakers learned: Yes, madam. Dinner is on the table, sir. When shall I begin? I beg you to consider again. You must not strike me.
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