Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Their guide to Tokyo was a sweet-mannered Japanese man wearing a gray kimono and a black American hat, who would be taking them to the famous temples at Shiba. At the train station they hired a party of jinrikishas and set off on a broad, smooth road overshadowed by pines. A lacquered gateway led into the temple grounds, where a shaven-headed Buddhist monk led them up a steep hillside to the tomb of Iemitsu, the seventeenth-century shogun who had closed off Japan from the influence of the outside world. The stone steps were covered with moss and strewn with glossy red camellia blossoms. A light breeze brushed their cheeks as they ascended the hill; sunlight filtered through the canopy of pine trees above them. At the top of the hill an avenue of gray stone lanterns led to the shogun’s burial place. The tomb was made of dark-hued bronze, the black paneled gates in front decorated with gilded Sanskrit characters. Inside, the walls were a deep red, the color undimmed by the passing of the centuries; the ceiling displayed a magnificent carved frieze on which lacquered and gilded dragons, birds, lotus flowers, chrysanthemums were tangled in intricate profusion. The petals of a giant stone lotus curled up from the mosaic floor. The room seemed to her like an immense and perfect jewel box, gilded and inlaid with precious stones, the richly colored lacquers as hard and polished as gems.

  Elizabeth Bisland walked out of the tomb of Iemitsu, squinting in the mild late-afternoon sunshine. She had come from, as she thought of it, “the country of common-sense, of steam-ploughs and newspaper enterprise,” to arrive at a land of porcelain and poetry, where even the most commonplace things were beautiful. She turned for one more look at the tomb and was suddenly reminded of Nicolas Poussin’s painting (done, as it happened, in Iemitsu’s lifetime) depicting shepherds of antiquity outside a tomb inscribed with the epitaph Et in Arcadia Ego: “I have been in Arcadia,” the idyllic pastoral land of which Virgil wrote. The Buddhist monk had smilingly warned her of the exceeding loveliness of the shogun’s tomb, and having seen it Bisland decided that she would forgive fate in advance for any future trick, because it had given her this day of unmarred beauty. “Et ego in Arcadia,” she cried to the monk as he walked beside her down the flower-strewn stairway, “I too have been in fairyland!”

  She did not want to leave Japan, and promised herself that someday she would return, but the Oceanic was ready the next morning to depart for Hong Kong. The passengers had a last glimpse of Mount Fuji as Japan sank slowly into the distance. It would be a five-day sail southwest across the East China Sea. As the land disappeared, the wind began to pick up; masses of dark cumulus clouds gathered ahead of them. Another storm was brewing. Later that day Elizabeth Bisland heard the news that the silent young Chinese passenger with the waxen face had died. One of the sailors hung a canvas screen across the corner of the steerage deck where he had lain, and the ship’s doctor went gravely back and forth from behind it. Though the young man would not be alive to see it, he would nonetheless reach his native land—an agreement between the steamship lines and the Six Companies, a Chinese-American benevolent society, forbade burials of Chinese immigrants at sea. The Six Companies furnished at least a dozen coffins to each Pacific steamer bound for China, as well as a supply of embalming fluid for the ship’s doctor. When a Chinese passenger died his body was embalmed and placed in a coffin, which was sealed up and stowed in the ship’s hold. In Hong Kong the body was delivered to the Tung Wah Hospital, which arranged for its disposition to family or friends. The expense was paid by voluntary contributions made by the Chinese passengers and crew on the ship, from a dime to a dollar apiece. A pan containing cubes of Chinese sugar was placed beside the coffin, and each of the Chinese on board dropped in a contribution and removed a sugar cube; it was supposed to bring good luck.

  NOVEMBER 25–26, 1889

  Mediterranean Sea

  NELLIE BLY’S FIRST MORNING ABOARD THE VICTORIA DID NOT GO WELL. THE night before, after her hurried excursion to the telegraph office in Brindisi, she had arrived back at her cabin, crawled exhaustedly into her berth, and recalled nothing at all until a few hours later, when she suddenly awoke to find herself standing upright by the bed, as wet as the proverbial drowned rat. For a few seconds she stood insensible, wondering where she was and how she had gotten there; then her head cleared and she heard the rasping swish-swish of scrub brushes on the deck above her and she understood at once what had happened. Before going to sleep she had opened the porthole above her berth to let a bit of air into the room, and in the morning she had received the full force of a sailor’s scrub water as it sloshed down from the deck through the open porthole. Now that she was awake, of course, she might get dressed and go up on deck, but Bly was never one to rise early if she could avoid doing so, and she had no intention of greeting the dawn while cruising the Mediterranean with no story deadline and no editor within thousands of miles of her. So she just dried herself off as best she could (she had not included a change of nightgown in her gripsack) and went damply back to bed.

  She had not been asleep long before she heard a man’s voice calling her from the doorway. “Miss,” he said, “will you have your tea now?” Bly mumbled that she was not in need of any tea, and after the door closed managed again to get back to sleep, but she was shortly awakened by another voice asking, “Miss, will you have your bath now?” A woman in a white cap was standing over her. Bly was tempted to say she had already had her bath that morning—a shower-bath—but she held her tongue and replied only that she would get up in a few minutes.

  “Well, you are a lazy girl!” the stewardess exclaimed. “You’ll miss your bath and breakfast if you don’t get up this instant.” For a moment Bly wondered if she were back in boarding school being scolded by the housemistress, but again she kept her thoughts to herself and said only, “I generally get up when I feel so inclined.” She intended to sleep, and whether it pleased the stewardess or not mattered little to her. Before long, though, the steward had once more put in an appearance.

  “Miss,” he said stiffly, “this ship is inspected every day and I must have the cabin made up before they come. The captain will be here presently.”

  There was, at this point, nothing to do but get up. Bly made her way down the hall to the bathroom, but no matter how she manipulated the faucet she was unable to turn on the water. She asked a steward passing by where she might find the stewardess.

  “The stewardess,” he told her, “is taking a rest and cannot be disturbed.”

  Bly was astonished. “The impudence and rudeness of the servants in America is a standing joke,” she would later write, “but if the servants on the Victoria are a sample of English servants, I am thankful to keep those we have, such as they are.”

  THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL Steam Navigation Company—the P&O, as it was universally known—had been in operation since 1837, when, as the Peninsular Company, it received a contract from the British government to run mail ships from London to Lisbon and Gibraltar. Very quickly its area of operations was extended to Malta and Alexandria, and in 1840, having now added “Oriental” to its name, the company was incorporated under royal charter to carry the British mails throughout the Far East. In 1887 the P&O celebrated its golden jubilee, which, fortuitously enough, coincided with that of Queen Victoria; to commemorate the double anniversary the company launched four new ships, each of them larger than any it had produced before, and gave them the impeccably patriotic names Victoria, Britannia, Oceania, and Arcadia.

  On the Victoria, Nellie Bly put away the woolen traveling dress that she had been wearing since she left New York, exchanging it for a lighter silk bodice. She was delighted to have left behind the rough, choppy waters of the North Atlantic, the cold wind that blew across the English Channel, the fog that had so bedeviled her in Italy. Here passengers in summer clothes lounged on steamer chairs or lazily promenaded on the broad white deck, sheltered from the sun by a canvas awning stretched overhead. Bly had expected that the English passengers would hold themselves aloof from her, but she quickly discovered that many of the wom
en wanted to know all about America, and admired and even envied an American woman traveling on her own. After only a few days one of them confided to her that a rumor had begun to circulate that she was an eccentric American heiress traveling around the world with little more than a hairbrush and a bankbook, as was confirmed when a young man sidled up to Bly on deck and introduced himself as the Honorable Wyndham Curzon of London. He was small and had a bushy red mustache and, Bly decided at once, an unattractive face. Mr. Wyndham Curzon said he had been watching her and had come to the conclusion that she was the sort of girl he liked. He was the son of an earl, he explained, but it was his great misfortune to have been born the second son, and as his older brother would get both the money and the title, his sole ambition in life was to find a wife who would stake him to £1,000 a year. In that regard he wondered whether she might consent to marry him, and he asked flirtatiously what she would do with him if she did. Bly gazed at him; after a moment she replied that she would put him to work—a response that produced, as she had intended, “a rather dampening effect.”

  Another young man told Nellie Bly that he had been traveling constantly since he was nine years old, and had always suppressed the desire to marry because he did not believe he could find a woman who could travel without innumerable trunks. This, Bly thought, was an especially curious requirement for a wife; she had earlier noticed that this young man always dressed impeccably, changing his outfit several times a day, and now she was curious enough to ask how many trunks he carried with him. “Nineteen,” he replied at once, and Bly no longer wondered why he might want to find a wife who traveled light.

  When yet another hopeful young man approached her on the subject of marriage she admitted to him—in strictest confidence—that rather than being an American heiress she was, in fact, a beggar; as her health was bad a few charitable societies had raised enough money to send her on a long trip in the hope that she might benefit from the sea air. This news, of course, was promptly spread around the Victoria, and the parade of suitors came to an end.

  NOVEMBER 27, 1889

  Port Said, Egypt

  Late in the afternoon of November 27 the Victoria anchored at the Egyptian town of Port Said, near the entrance to the Suez Canal, to take on coal. Thirty years before, Port Said had been little more than a strip of bare sand, its only permanent inhabitants some flocks of pelicans and other varieties of water bird. The town had come into existence in 1859, after the French consul in Egypt, Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, persuaded his childhood friend Mohammed Said Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, to provide land for a new canal that would provide the long-dreamed-of bridge between the Eastern and Western worlds. Lesseps needed a port for the northern end of the canal, which in honor of his patron he named Port Said. Painstakingly, Egyptian laborers dredged a deep artificial harbor and built two immense breakwaters, each jutting out more than a mile into the harbor. The breakwaters were made of huge blocks of stone placed atop one another, nearly thirty thousand in all, each of the blocks twelve cubic yards in size and weighing twenty-two tons—a scale of construction not seen in Egypt since the time of the pharaohs.

  The silt churning at the bottom of the harbor turned the water an odd brown color, the waves at the breakwater tossed into a thick white foam like the head atop a chocolate soda water. Dozens of steamships from all over the world lay at anchor, some loading coal and others stopping only to discharge or take on passengers. Port Said was one of the largest coaling stations in the world, the harbor workers able to load a vessel at a rate of two hundred tons per hour. Still, it would be several hours before the Victoria would be ready to sail again, and the ship’s passengers prepared for a brief visit to the town, the men arming themselves with canes and the women with parasols—to keep away the beggars, they told Bly. Bly had neither cane nor umbrella with her, and she turned down their offers to provide her with one, “having an idea,” she wrote, “probably a wrong one, that a stick beats more ugliness into a person than it ever beats out.”

  Cattle to provide beef for an ocean liner anchored in Port Said (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  As soon as its ladder was lowered the Victoria was besieged by a fleet of small boats, the boatmen jostling for position, yelling, fighting, even pulling one another into the water in their determination to be first in line to receive the ship’s passengers. Several clung to the ladder as if it was a matter of life and death and would not relinquish their holds until the captain of the Victoria ordered some of the ship’s sailors to beat them with long poles. As Bly and the others stepped into the first boat, several members of her party were grabbed by rival boatmen and dragged onto other boats. “The men in the party used their sticks quite vigorously,” Bly would later recall, “all to no avail, and although I thought the conduct of the Arabs justified this harsh course of treatment, still I felt sorry to see it administered so freely and lavishly to those black, half-clad wretches, and marveled at their stubborn persistence even while cringing under the blows.” Having finally settled into the boats, the passengers ordered the boatmen to head to shore; midway across, however, the boatmen halted their craft, and in forceful and perfectly intelligible English declared that they would not land until they had received payment for the trip. They had long experience in dealing with the English and their sticks, one of them explained to Bly, and had learned never to land an Englishman before he had paid in full.

  Bly and the others in her party walked up the beach to the main street of Port Said. At once they were surrounded by groups of men offering their services as guides, others extending handfuls of Turkish candy and cigarettes for sale. Some simply held out empty hands. Baksheesh, they cried over and over in the universally understood term for charity, baksheesh, baksheesh. Shirtless native boys beseeched the group to ride on the donkeys that waited patiently beside them. Over time the boys had learned to attract attention by calling the donkeys by the names of statesmen or famously beautiful women of whatever country the tourists came from. “Here’s Gladstone!” they called to the Englishmen of the Victoria, pushing the shy creature forward. “Here’s Mrs. Maybrick! Here’s Lillie Langtry!” Nellie Bly was no stranger to burros, having lived for several months in Mexico, but they were a novelty among the other passengers, most of whom were eager to take a ride; so several dozen of the passengers rounded up all of the available donkeys, mounted them, and set off laughing and shouting through the town, bouncing up and down in the saddles, while the boys walked behind, urging the animals on with sharp hisses and, when necessary, prodding them with pointed sticks.

  In Port Said particles of coal dust floated in the air, and the town wore the gray, greasy look that Bly remembered from coal towns back in western Pennsylvania. On the unpaved sandy streets passed a raffish mix of Arabs, Jews, Russians, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, the crowd like a kaleidoscope rotating endlessly, always turning itself into something new. From all around came a hubbub of unfamiliar languages; inevitably the first-time visitor to Port Said was put in mind of ancient Babel. There were men in turbans and fezzes and planters’ hats and pith helmets, in muslin and linen and the coarse blue cloth the sailors called by the Hindi word dungaree, all of them walking quickly, speaking in the chummy, confidential tones in which everything sounds like a negotiation. Shadowy figures huddled together in narrow alleyways; painted women looked down languidly from upstairs balconies. White-plastered hotels, their windows curtained against the outside, stood alongside two-story wooden bungalows, billiards parlors, tobacconists, bars, dance halls, cafés chantants (one of which, the Eldorado, featured an orchestra composed entirely of young Hungarian women): the sort of establishments, as the wealthy Bostonian Thomas Gold Appleton once observed, not disapprovingly, “indicating a colony from Europe’s far West victoriously planted on desert sand.” In the town there was a feeling of high spirits mixed with depression. Packs of skinny dogs, many nearly hairless and surrounded by a nimbus of flies, lay in the warm sand of the street waiting for scraps tossed out fro
m the cafés. Outside the cafés men sat at tables drinking little cups of black coffee and smoking foul-smelling cigarettes, playing gambling games that Bly did not recognize. The sounds of a string orchestra floated out from the open doorways of the casinos, the music intended as a kind of siren call luring potential gamblers inside. Bly joined a small group in a visit to one of the casinos, where she put down some of her English gold on the roulette wheel that chirped happily as it spun. “I do not think that any one of us knew anything about the game,” she would later write, “but we recklessly put our money on the table and laughed to see it taken in by the man who gave the turn to the wheel.”

  Soon night had begun to fall; most visitors considered it foolhardy to wander the streets of Port Said after dark, and the group set off back to their ship. The coaling of the Victoria was just being finished as Nellie Bly came aboard, and her last memory of Port Said was of the barge in the fading light: sweating men stripped to the waist, shouting and groaning as they hauled heavy baskets on their shoulders up a steep gangplank. The ship’s open hatchway glowed like the mouth of an iron mill; the coal dust that rose from it turned the men’s skin from brown to near black. Those who had reached the top of the plank pitched the coal forward, and it clattered loudly down the chute. When a stray piece fell into the water, divers plunged in to retrieve it; some bits of coal might bring them a coin later.