Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Though their personalities were entirely dissimilar (one scholarly and anxious, the other fun-loving and gregarious), Joseph Pulitzer was in his professional life much like an earlier master of sensation, P. T. Barnum; as Barnum had stuffed the rooms of his American Museum with oddities and wonders from the world over, inspiring shock and horror and joy in his visitors, so too did Pulitzer’s World give readers stories that made them laugh and cry and shiver and shake their fists. And like P. T. Barnum, who had also arrived in New York as a penniless young man, Joseph Pulitzer achieved success of a kind never before seen in his field. When Pulitzer bought The World in May of 1883, the paper’s Sunday circulation stood at 15,770; by September it had nearly doubled, to 29,140. The World’s growth was so dramatic and so impossible to ignore that the Times cut its price from four cents to two, and the Herald from three cents to two. Still The World’s circulation kept rising; by 1885 it had increased tenfold, to 153,213. To his rivals, Pulitzer’s huge and ever-growing readership must have seemed at times like a massed army besieging their citadels on Park Row, a feeling that could only have intensified when in the fall of 1889 the new World Building began to go up, rising to a height of sixteen stories and made even more impressive by the gilded copper dome where Pulitzer had his office, with frescoed ceilings and leather-covered walls and three windows through which he could look down on the rest of the city. The story is told of the Sun’s Charles Dana standing at his second story window with his publisher, William L. Laffan, watching Pulitzer’s workmen put up the enormous girders for the World Building next door. Dana turned to him and said, “Laffan, that begins to look serious.” “A mere episode,” the publisher replied, as if trying to convince himself, “a mere episode.”

  Yet even as its new office tower began to rise over Park Row, The World’s remarkable growth had already begun to stall. In fact, the paper’s weekly circulation figures for November of 1889 were down by more than 51,000 from September, the first downturn since Pulitzer had taken over The World. It was this alarming trend (especially when the paper was footing the bill for a building that would ultimately cost $2 million, twice the original budget) that led to John Cockerill’s message to Nellie Bly instructing her to begin immediate preparations for a trip around the world.

  Right away the race against Phileas Fogg seemed to be having the desired effect. Just before Bly set out on November 14, The World’s weekly circulation was 2,163,210 copies; by December 1 the weekly circulation was up to 2,297,600. There was, however, one problem: the paper’s editors were having trouble finding enough news copy to maintain the public’s interest in the trip. From Nellie Bly herself there had been only a single brief message via telegraph, reporting her on-time arrival in Brindisi; additional information would have to await the arrival of the international mails by steamship. Bly’s first dispatch to The World, describing her voyage across the Atlantic on the Augusta Victoria, would not appear until December 8, three weeks into her trip. As a result, The World’s coverage leaned heavily on laudatory articles reprinted from newspapers around the country, as well as its own editorials touting the significance of Bly’s trip. So the days passed in a more desultory fashion than the paper’s editors would have preferred, as they anxiously awaited more information from the world traveler herself. How, they must have wondered, could they keep this up for seventy-five days? It was not until November 30, more than two weeks into her trip, that The World finally hit on a scheme that would decisively capture the attention of the public and transform Bly’s trip from a newspaper publicity stunt into a national sensation.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1889

  Suez Canal

  Although Nellie Bly counted herself among those people “who think that night is the best part of the day and that morning was made for sleep,” on the morning of November 28 she got up very early, so eager was she to see the Suez Canal. She rushed up on deck, but the famous canal turned out to look like nothing more than an immense ditch. On both sides the desert stretched away endlessly like a vast tideless sea, the sand glowing a pale pink beneath the violet haze of the sky. Even at this hour the day was already very hot, and to make things worse the Victoria seemed to be barely moving; ships on the Suez Canal were not permitted to sail faster than six knots, because greater speed created waves that might erode the sand banks. As a result, the canal, though not even one hundred miles long, required a full day to navigate.

  Bly passed much of the morning discussing the history of the Suez Canal with one of her fellow passengers, an older gentleman who had been traveling all his life. Begun in 1859, the canal took ten years to build; it was said that more than one hundred thousand workers had died in the process. The sun blazed in a cloudless sky. By the afternoon the water shone a radiant blue and the sand had turned from a pinkish yellow to a stark white, as if bleached by the sun’s rays. The monotony of the landscape was relieved only by the passing stations (called by the French word gares) that the Suez Canal Company had built along the banks of the canal, tidy little houses surrounded by trees and flower gardens: man-made oases grafted onto the desert sands. Bly sat in her steamer chair, the happiness she had felt on the Mediterranean draining away. The heavy, sluggish air provided an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes; she wished that she had thought to bring a supply of insect repellent in her bag. She worried that the extreme heat would bring on one of her sick headaches. It had been, she realized, only six days since she was freezing in a railroad car headed to Amiens. She felt very far from home—at times she almost trembled when she thought of how many miles still lay ahead of her—and lonesome as well. Her cabinmate, a young Australian woman traveling with her brother, was pleasant, as was the young man who sat next to her at table, who had, as she put it, “large dreamy blue eyes” and the racking cough of a consumptive; he spoke well (she had always liked that in a man) and seemed to have been everywhere. They were the first passengers on the Victoria to whom Bly revealed the real purpose of her trip. In general, though, as she would write in a letter to The World, “Our passengers are mostly English people and are not the jolliest lot in the world.”

  The ship’s surgeon, fair and fat with a thin ginger mustache over thick lips, had taken a shine to Bly; after every remark of hers he would laughingly reply that she was “pulling his leg,” a coarse-sounding expression that she had not heard before. The self-appointed arbiter of all social matters on board the ship was a Mr. Weston-Edwards, who dyed his mustache and spoke through his nose and professed to be fluent in ten languages. Nellie Bly detested him at once. Weston-Edwards solemnly claimed to have a vast knowledge of America and Americans—as, for instance, in his assertion that when an American became famous, he hyphenated his Christian and family names and used the composite as his name, and his children, in turn, adopted the hyphenated name as their own. Thus, he illustrated, Jay Gould was now known in America as Mr. Jay-Gould, and his son as George Jay-Gould. Bly did what she could to contradict him, but he was adamant and at a certain point she decided that there was no use in arguing. Finally it occurred to her to ask, “How much time have you spent in studying the United States?”

  Weston-Edwards hemmed and hawed, but Bly, a veteran reporter, insisted on a precise answer. “Well,” he said at last, “I stayed an hour in New York, then rode at night to Buffalo, and crossed over the next day into Canada.”

  That was the maddening thing about the English, Bly thought: they could spend only a day or two in a place and then claim to be an expert on it.

  It seemed to be one of the perquisites of empire, like high wages or cheap tea.

  All day the Victoria maintained its frustratingly slow pace. Often beggars ran along the canal calling to the ship. Their voices carried through the still air: baksheesh, baksheesh, baksheesh. Some of the passengers tossed money, but the distance to shore was too great and most of the coins fell uselessly into the water; the Suez Canal had become like an enormous wishing well. Still the natives kept running in pace with the ship, crying baksheesh, until finally they
were exhausted and had to give up.

  Near nightfall the Victoria dropped anchor at Suez, by the entrance to the Red Sea. Instantly the ship was surrounded by small sailboats carrying men who came aboard the Victoria to offer fruit, shells and coral, and picture photographs for sale. Though the passengers paid little attention to the vendors, they were very interested in a native conjurer who performed tricks for money. He wore a turban and a sashed robe with a baggy pocket in which he carried two lizards and a rabbit; the rabbit and the lizards would soon appear in his performance, he declaimed to the crowd, but first he wanted to demonstrate what he could do with a simple handkerchief. The conjurer selected Nellie Bly to assist him. First he showed the crowd a small brass bangle, which he deposited inside the handkerchief; then he placed the handkerchief in Bly’s hand, telling her to hold it tightly. Bly did as she was instructed, acknowledging that she could feel the bangle very plainly. The conjurer blew on her hand, and then pulled the handkerchief from her grasp and shook it out. To everyone’s astonishment the bangle had vanished. Happily the conjurer passed among the crowd collecting the coins offered to him, but while his attention was occupied, some of the passengers managed to steal his rabbit, and in the meantime one of the lizards had also escaped from the pocket of the robe. When the conjurer discovered the loss of his animals he was predictably irate, and he refused to perform any more tricks until they were returned to him. Finally a young man produced the rabbit from his coat pocket; the lizard, though, was not to be found, and as the Victoria was about to set sail the conjurer had no choice but to return to his boat without it.

  Once the conjurer was gone several of the passengers asked Nellie Bly if she had any idea how the trick with the handkerchief had been done. She explained to them that it was really a very old trick involving two brass bangles. One of them the conjurer had secretly pocketed after he pretended to place it in the handkerchief. The other (the one she had felt in her hand) was actually sewn to the handkerchief; when the conjurer displayed the handkerchief he made sure to keep the bangle always on the side facing him, so that it would not be seen by the audience. One of the men listening became indignant at this explanation, and demanded to know why, if she knew how the conjurer did his trick, she had not exposed him. Bly replied simply—much to the Englishman’s disgust—that she had wanted to see the man get his money.

  DECEMBER 2, 1889

  Aden, Yemen

  On the morning of December 2 the Victoria reached the town of Aden, on Yemen’s southern coast. The steamship had traversed thirteen hundred miles of the Red Sea in four and a half days, which meant that Nellie Bly was now one day ahead of schedule. Since leaving Hoboken she had traveled 6,905 miles—slightly less than one-third of the journey—in only eighteen days. After a brief stop at Aden for refueling, the Victoria would sail another two thousand miles across the Arabian Sea to Colombo, on the island of Ceylon, where Bly was scheduled to connect with another P&O steamer, the Oriental, which would take her as far as Hong Kong.

  Aden, a rocky peninsula some five miles wide, was the most forbidding-looking place Bly had ever seen. The adobe houses of the town rose from inside the crater of a huge extinct volcano, surrounded by craggy mountains of lava that shone black in the sun. Atop the highest of the mountains, a Union Jack flew over a massive fort with battlements outlined against the sky. Half a century earlier, in 1839, two British warships, carrying thirty-eight cannons and seven hundred troops between them, had sailed into the harbor and begun bombarding an ancient fortress occupied by a thousand Arabs armed chiefly with matchlock rifles. Within the hour a ground assault was launched; the fighting was brief but intense, and when it was over Aden had become the first colonial acquisition of Queen Victoria’s reign. Since then the port had served as an important coaling station between Suez and Bombay, and as a central link in Great Britain’s chain of island colonies that stretched from Gibraltar to Malta and Cyprus and on to Ceylon, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

  The officers of the Victoria had warned the passengers not to go ashore because of the intense heat, but Bly, along with half a dozen of the more adventurous among them, hired a boat to town. She was awed by the magnificent stone double gate, guarded by sentinels pacing to and fro, that led up to the British fort, and by the white mansion on the hill used by the British sailors as a clubhouse; bewitched by the local women who adorned all parts of the body with hoops and rings and bracelets and chains; impressed by the grace of the native boys who dived for coins tossed from the ships by tourists and who always emerged miraculously unharmed by the sharks that infested the water. (“They claim that a shark will not attack a black man,” Bly observed, “and after I had caught the odor of the grease with which these men anoint their bodies, I did not blame the sharks.”) Later, though, in recalling her time in Aden, what Nellie Bly recalled most strongly was that Union Jack flying at the top of the highest mountain, seventeen hundred feet above the sea.

  Shortly after the Victoria left Aden some of the English women on board performed a series of tableaux vivants, one of which was meant to represent the nations of the world. The women had earlier asked Bly if she would agree to represent the United States, but she refused. In her book about the trip, Bly did not explain why she declined to participate; she did, though, express her surprise that the women, who wanted to include several countries’ flags in the tableau, needed her to tell them what the American flag looked like.

  As she traveled among the English, Nellie Bly was becoming increasingly conscious of the peculiar privilege that imperial power conferred upon its citizens: the privilege of insensitivity. They could, if they chose to, carry the empire along with them on their travels, as they sailed on English ships, slept in English hotels, ate English meals, taking little notice of the specific characteristics of the countries through which they passed, much as a rich man, who had all of his daily needs attended to, might know nothing of the personal habits or the likes and dislikes of his servants. From Europe and across the Middle East and Asia, English travelers could use their own currency everywhere they went—Bly had not yet found an establishment that refused English banknotes, nor one that accepted American money—and could get by perfectly well speaking only their own language. The waiters back in Calais had spoken English, as had the telegraph operator in Brindisi, and the boatmen in Port Said, and the vendors in Suez; their livelihoods, after all, depended on it. Even the donkey boys of Port Said knew that Gladstone was prime minister. And while Bly’s personal feelings about the English were by no means warmer than before—that hostility would persist to the very end of her life—she was beginning to understand the sense of pride they felt as Britons, citizens of an island nation that ruled an empire many times its size, their money desired everywhere, their flag flying over the most desirable properties, their warships ensuring safe passage from port to port. “As I traveled on and realized more than ever before how the English have stolen almost all, if not all, desirable sea-ports,” Bly wrote, “I felt an increased respect for the level-headedness of the English government, and I ceased to marvel at the pride with which Englishmen view their flag floating in so many different climes and over so many different nationalities.” Nellie Bly did not like the English, but she had, surprising herself, begun to envy them. As far as she was concerned the United States was the greatest of all nations, but for as long as she could remember it had been led by small men unworthy of their citizens’ trust or affection. Of the voyage on the Victoria, Bly would later write:

  Though born and bred a staunch American, with the belief that a man is what he makes of himself, not what he was born, still I could not help admiring the undying respect the English have for their royal family. During the lantern slide exhibition, the Queen’s picture was thrown on the white sheet, and it evoked warmer applause than anything else that evening. We never had an evening’s amusement that did not end by everybody rising to their feet and singing “God Save the Queen.” I could not help but think how devoted that woman, for sh
e is only a woman after all, should be to the interests of such faithful subjects.

  With that thought came to me a shamed feeling that there I was, a free-born American girl, the native of the grandest country on earth, forced to be silent because I could not in honesty speak proudly of the rulers of my land, unless I went back to those two kings of manhood, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

  ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 14, 1889, JUST HOURS AFTER ELIZABETH Bisland set out from New York, The Cosmopolitan’s business manager, A. D. Wilson, gave an interview to a reporter from Bisland’s hometown newspaper, the New Orleans Daily Picayune. In the story, headlined “Woman Against Woman: The World to Be Embraced in a Quick Trip,” Wilson laid out the magazine’s plan to win the race around the world. Bisland was then crossing the continent on a fast train; on November 21 she would set sail from San Francisco on the steamship Oceanic, arriving in Yokohama, Japan, on December 11. According to Wilson, The Cosmopolitan had already arranged for a “government boat” (he did not specify which government) to transport Bisland from Yokohama to Hong Kong, at a cost of $8,000; The Cosmopolitan expected to make up crucial time against Nellie Bly on this leg of the race, as Bly’s schedule required her to wait four days in Hong Kong for the Oceanic’s return voyage to San Francisco. (Bly was scheduled to sail east across the Pacific on the very same ship that Bisland took heading west.) “The rest of the journey,” Wilson told the Daily Picayune, “is comparatively simple for Miss Bisland.” Arriving in Hong Kong on December 16, she would set sail the following day on a Peninsular and Oriental steamship bound for Brindisi, Italy. At Brindisi she would board another ship for Marseilles, scheduled to arrive on January 21, 1890. If there was sufficient time, Bisland would that same day catch a steamship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique—the French Line—from Le Havre, due to arrive in New York on January 28; if not, she would take a train to Southampton, England, and set sail from there for New York. In either case, The Cosmopolitan foresaw an around-the-world trip for Elizabeth Bisland requiring no more than seventy-four days—one better than Nellie Bly’s proposed seventy-five-day trip—and very possibly even less.