Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Many of the Chinese immigrants found jobs building the transcontinental railroad, where they became known as coolies. The word “coolie” was derived from an Urdu word referring to unskilled labor; the British had learned it in India and passed it along to the Americans, who applied it out west. The workers on the Union Pacific mostly came from Ireland, but on the Central Pacific, which ran from California to Utah, they were mostly Chinese. The man who oversaw the construction of the Central Pacific line, Charles Crocker, praised the Chinese laborers for their discipline and industriousness, and eventually came to prefer using them for jobs that had to be done quickly. When pressed by doubters, Crocker would point out, “They built the Great Wall, didn’t they?”

  The Chinese railroad workers prepared for themselves meals involving oysters and cuttlefish and abalone, bamboo sprouts and seaweed and dried mushrooms, strange foods that mystified and repelled the men who mostly ate the boiled beef and potatoes provided by the railroad. The Chinese drank only tea; as it turned out, boiling the water for the tea helped avert the dysentery that afflicted many of the white workers, who drank their water directly from streams. The Chinese used the stream water to wash their clothes and, warmed by a fire, for daily sponge baths; again, this was different from the typical white railroad worker, who, noted one observer, “has a sort of hydrophobia which induces him to avoid the contact of water.” They were small (most stood less than five feet tall) and had hairless faces and wore their hair in pigtails, which made them seem, to the other workers, like women. Still, they often did the jobs that the whites were not able, or not willing, to do themselves. At night they wove reeds into baskets in which, during the day, they hung over gorges to place packets full of black powder into crevices dug into the faces of cliffs. When the packet was secure, the Chinese worker lit the fuse and then yelled to a crewman above to haul him up before the powder exploded. This was how railroad beds were carved into the sides of mountains, to make the narrow, vertiginous passes like the one on which Cyclone Bill Downing had set the fast mail train careening. “Good engineers,” reported Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine, “considered this undertaking preposterous.” It is indisputable that many of the men laying powder in this manner were killed or injured on the job, but the exact numbers will never be known, as the Central Pacific Railroad did not keep records of Chinese casualties. Black powder, of course, was originally a Chinese invention, and the workers did not ask for instructions in handling it. They used the powder, as well, to blast holes directly into mountains, creating tunnels through which the trains would travel. It was an almost unimaginably laborious process of drilling, blasting, scraping, and hauling; the men worked in shifts around the clock, and when the day was over they might have carved away as much as twelve inches.

  Elsewhere, on flat land, the Chinese workers cleared forests for railroad tracks. These were primeval trees, often well over a hundred feet tall, with trunks up to eight feet in diameter. The workers would saw the trees down to stumps, then blast the stumps from the ground with black powder. Clearing a good-sized stretch of forest required thousands of barrels of powder; to observers the work sites brought back unhappy memories of Civil War battlefields, the air ringing with explosions, made dangerous by flying rocks and shards of wood turned into shrapnel, and indeed in any given week a railroad crew would set off as much black powder as was used by both Union and Confederate armies during the battle of Antietam.

  After the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, some of the Chinese railroad workers went back to China, while others fanned out through the West seeking other forms of work. Throughout the 1870s anti-Chinese sentiment grew in the United States, whipped up by politicians who were discovering that no region of the country was immune from racial prejudice, and that even a few thousand votes swayed by fear and hatred could make the difference in a close election. Further, during a time of rising labor unrest (in 1877, for instance, a national strike tied up much of the country’s railroad lines), it was helpful to refocus the resentments of American workers away from their employers to a group of working people even more vulnerable and exploited than they were. One of the leaders of the anti-Chinese campaign, Republican senator James G. Blaine of Maine, wrote a letter to the New York Tribune in which he characterized Chinese immigrants as “vicious,” “odious,” “abominable,” “dangerous,” and “revolting,” and asserted that the United States government had the right to bar them just as surely as it had “the right to keep out infectious diseases.” George Hazelton, a congressman from Wisconsin, described the Chinese immigrant as a “monstrosity” who “lives in herds and sleeps like packs of dogs in kennels.” For his part, Representative William Calkins of Indiana saw Chinese immigrants simply as “a cancer in your own country that will eat out its life and destroy it.”

  In 1882 the U. S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from entering the country for the next ten years; it was the first federal law ever to ban a group of immigrants on the basis of their race or nationality. The stirring words of the poet Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, proclaiming to the rest of the world that the United States would welcome “your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” did not then apply to Chinese; eventually Koreans, Japanese, and Eastern and Southern Europeans would also be barred from entering the United States. In the 1880s America, long a country with a policy of open immigration, began a new tradition of exclusion. “Hereafter,” the Chicago Times noted approvingly, “we are to keep our hand on the door-knob, and admit only those whose presence we desire.”

  BEFORE THE OCEANIC set sail across the Pacific, Elizabeth Bisland had composed a quick note addressed to her editors at The Cosmopolitan and sent it back to shore by pilot boat. She did not mention the low spirits that had afflicted her in her stateroom crowded with strangers, adopting instead the tone of cheerful determination that she would maintain, at least publicly, throughout the trip. She wrote, “Everyone has been charming to me. The officers of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company promise to get me through on time. My stateroom is filled with flowers and books, and even strangers sent me great baskets of flowers and came down to the wharf to see me off. Good-bye, I hope to be at The Cosmopolitan office on the 26th of January.”

  The note appeared in the “In the Library” column of The Cosmopolitan’s January 1890 issue, which was published in early December of 1889, while Bisland was still steaming across the Pacific to Yokohama. The column would be taken over by William S. Walsh for the duration of her trip. “Starting from New York at the briefest possible notice,” Walsh explained, “she is at this moment nearing the coast of Japan, and is engaged upon a series of articles upon the incidents of the voyage around the world.” Despite publisher John Brisben Walker’s public wager with The World about whose competitor would return first, The Cosmopolitan, maintaining a sense of decorum, chose to characterize Elizabeth Bisland’s undertaking only as a “voyage,” a “trip,” and a “journey,” never as a “race.” Still, no one would have had much difficulty reading between the lines. “Before Miss Bisland started on her westward trip,” Walsh wrote, “the New York World had sent out its most accomplished correspondent, Miss Nellie Bly, who has rendered valuable services not only to The World but to the public on repeated occasions, to make the same journey, traveling eastward. Her start antedated that of Miss Bisland by about nine hours.” Nor did The Cosmopolitan join The World in insisting that the trip would provide an instructive test of modern means of travel and communication. Walsh noted pointedly, “It is, of course, understood that no important results are likely to be attained from such a trip, nor anything of scientific value demonstrated; but, under the sprightly pen of Miss Bisland, the incidents of the journey are likely to prove of a thoroughly entertaining character.”

  The Cosmopolitan, of course, was a monthly magazine, while The World was a daily newspaper; by the time the “In the Library” column about B
island appeared, The World had been promoting—or, in the locution of the period, “booming”—Bly’s trip every day for almost a month, often several times in a single issue. And even though Bly was already far better known than Bisland, widely acclaimed for her work as an undercover journalist, none of her earlier successes had brought anywhere near this level of attention. Revealing the crooked doings of corrupt public institutions was one thing; traveling around the world faster than anyone ever had before was something else entirely. The endeavor was daring, it was unexpected, and there was an appealing patriotism in the notion of an American attempting to capture a record held by an Englishman—albeit a fictional one. The laudatory notices soon began to appear everywhere. Nellie Bly, declared the Boston Herald, was “not merely a smart girl; she is a mighty brave one.” In the Detroit Commercial she was “this plucky young woman,” and in the Atlanta Constitution the “enterprising young lady reporter.” “Miss Bly is pretty when she talks and smiles, for then her face brightens up and her eyes sparkle and there is a turn at the corners of her mouth that is very fascinating,” observed the San Francisco Examiner. “In a word, she is a plain every-day girl, with a wonderful head and warm heart.”

  Nellie Bly had her detractors, of course, those who considered her headstrong and intemperate and her attempt to outrace Phileas Fogg an absurd endeavor unfit for a woman. Particularly vitriolic was the Philadelphia Inquirer, which excoriated her as “a very ordinary, every day young woman, rather slight in form, leaning to eccentricity in dress, masculine in her tastes and ideas, and a man-hater from way back.” Overwhelmingly, though, Bly was extolled in the press as a representative young American woman (representative, in any case, of how Americans liked to think of their young women): plucky, bright, courageous, free-spirited, warm-hearted, pretty but not overly beautiful.

  Elizabeth Bisland, by contrast, was matinee-girl gorgeous, she was an aesthete and an intellectual, and she seemed to belong—though she had grown up very poor and supported herself entirely by her own writing—to the upper class. Indeed, when The New York Times ran a biographical item about Bisland, it appeared not on the news or the arts pages, but in the “Society Topics of the Week” column in the paper’s Sunday edition. “Society people are much interested in the westward trip around the world of Miss Elizabeth Bisland, who started last week to surpass the famous record of ‘Phileas’ Fogg,” the Times reported. Bisland, the paper informed its readers, was “a New-Orleans girl of excellent social position” and “exceedingly pretty,” whose “charms of manner and person have made her most popular, and although her education and surroundings, which have been those of refinement, if not luxury, have hardly fitted her for so arduous a task as to journey unprotected with the utmost haste around the globe, her friends have every confidence that her perseverance and ambition will carry her safely through.” It was an assessment strikingly similar to that of the San Francisco Examiner, which declared, “Miss Bisland is universally regarded as one of the handsomest women in New York. Hers is a distinctively southern beauty, the soft eyes and long lashes which raise languidly to look at you, the full mouth, the gentle outline of her figure, her dainty small hands and feet all pointing to the South. She has never done anything of the Bly order and a great deal of curiosity and surprise was shown here when it was known that she had started on a trip of this kind. She has a large amount of determination, however, which one does not expect in the beauties of the South, and there is no doubt that it will stand her in good stead.”

  So it was not very surprising that in early December a brief notice about Elizabeth Bisland appeared in Town Topics, New York’s powerful weekly magazine of high society gossip. The item was admiring, if somewhat patronizing in tone; after noting that Bisland “is not a creole, as many papers have endeavored to make her out,” the magazine observed, “Her home is with her sister in a delightful apartment on Fourth Avenue, where their informal and gracious hospitality is much enjoyed by a chosen few. Her little teas were especially delightful, and when half a dozen bright girls curled upon her roomy divan and drank Oolong, there was sure to be as a result a poem in the Century or a good article in one or another of the monthlies, to nearly all of which Miss Bisland is a valued contributor.” About Nellie Bly, on the other hand, the magazine was nothing short of contemptuous. Bly, after all, was a muckraking female journalist for a newspaper that was aimed primarily at a working-class audience far removed in all respects from the drawing-room elite who read Town Topics. A satiric item in the magazine entitled “Around the Whirled in 60 Seconds” presented the world traveler “Nellie Fly” as a dim-witted, barely literate buffoon who subsisted on beer and corned beef sandwiches and whose work was entirely rewritten by a young man in the “Whirled” newspaper office. The article purported to reveal a dispatch that Nellie Fly had wired to her editor in New York, reporting that the Augusta Victoria had arrived and she was now in transit for London. The dispatch read in its entirety:

  Yure brave gurl airived hear at ate thurrty this moarning, and emediately took the trane for London. Awl wel and harty.

  And this, after editorial revision, was how it appeared in the paper:

  Beneath the sparkling sun of a golden English sky the staunch ship Augusta Victoria floated majestically into the harbor of Southampton at half-past eight this morning, and your correspondent stepped ashore a few moments later to begin the second chapter of her swift flight over the earth’s surface. The fresh, enlivening odor of the sea overspread the land, the vagrant birds seemed to whistle a chorus of welcome, the very air breathed a perfumed promise of sweet success to this quaintest of all enterprises.

  “Limit your cables to ten words,” the editor was said to have instructed Nellie Fly in his telegram to London. “Keep up your courage and keep down expenses. If you speak English as well as you write it you will be well understood in China.”

  NOVEMBER 25—DECEMBER 8, 1889

  Pacific Ocean

  On the fifth day of the voyage the storm subsided, and Elizabeth Bisland joined the other female passengers straggling back to life up on deck, pale creatures with uncombed hair tied up in lace scarves; they lay in steamer chairs wrapped in rugs and drinking beef tea, indifferent to their appearance and immune to the pleasures of conversation. Bisland spent hours marveling at the ocean. “The blue deepens and deepens,” she wrote, “until one finds no words to express, no simile to convey, the intensity of its burning azure.” She had never seen anything quite as beautiful, she thought, or as calming to the spirit. Behind the ship, the white foam that curled up from the wake was tinted with blue, like the bluish shadows in snow; up ahead, the prow flung up two delicate plumes of pearl, trimmed by the sunlight with rainbows that vanished as quickly as they appeared. She read, she took notes, she busied herself with the fancywork she had brought along. When she got tired of sitting she wandered the ship, strolling from promenade deck to saloon deck, from saloon deck to upper deck, from upper deck to lower deck.

  Aft of the saloon were the steerage compartments that held single women and married couples; forward of the ship’s first-class accommodations—and cut off from them by a massive set of iron doors—was the steerage compartment for the unmarried male passengers. Those traveling in steerage had paid about forty-five dollars apiece for their passage. According to one steamship official, the daily cost to feed each steerage passenger was no more than ten cents, as they were “quite content with boiled rice, three times a day, seasoned with a little dried fish or curry”; the result, happily enough, was “a liberal margin for profit to the ship.” Down on the lower afterdeck, Elizabeth Bisland watched the raucous games of fan-tan that went on all day among the Chinese, as well as the more contemplative games of chess and dominoes. The forward deck had a space reserved for female passengers, and a cluster of five or six usually gathered there for conversation, gentle, mild women who smiled back at Bisland when she smiled at them and exchanged amiable Chinese greetings for hers offered in English. On a bench, placed where he cou
ld catch as much of the healthful salt breezes as he could, a young Chinese man, perhaps twenty-five years old, lay motionless all day. His eyes were sunken, his face the color of old wax; he lay on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, as though he were already in the grave. Bisland had heard that it was common among Chinese immigrants to fall sick with consumption and then struggle back like this, so that they could die in their native land. The young man, she noted, “seems afraid to breathe or move, lest he should waste the failing oil or snuff out the dying flame ere he reaches his yearned-for home.”

  Elizabeth Bisland aboard ship (Illustration Credit 8.1)

  All the while the ship steamed steadily westward, through calm mornings and moonlit nights. The Pacific crossing was the loneliest of all voyages; for thousands of miles one saw neither sail nor shore, the only sign of life the seabirds that seemed to have followed the ship all the way from San Francisco. Out on the ocean for so long, it was possible for the passengers to imagine themselves the lone survivors of a biblical flood, the whole world now covered with water. The initial days aboard ship had brought first wonder, then misery, then relief; as the days passed, Elizabeth Bisland found that at times she felt a kind of despair, waking each morning to the same endless sea, the same horizon, the same birds, each day just like the one before it, with nothing to mark one’s progress except the figures marked every day at noon on the map that hung over the companionway on the deck. After a while the eye became desperately hungry for form, yearning for something, anything, to appear on the horizon, something to look at other than the vast disk of water and inverted bowl of sky.