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Eighty Days

Page 26

by Matthew Goodman


  Nor was it only New York that had become transfixed by the race. The astonishing success of the guessing match, The World noted, had “set the whole country to talking,” including the nation’s capital, where, presumably, matters of weightier import were available to occupy residents’ attention. The paper’s distinguished correspondent Frank G. Carpenter reported that “Nellie Bly’s trip around the world excites great interest in Washington. It is one of the common subjects of conversation in the cloak rooms of the House and Senate, in the hotels and at dinners. Miss Bly’s course is commented upon, and not a few prominent men try to figure out where she is from day to day.”

  “The entire press of the country is discussing the trip,” agreed The Journalist. Accounts of the race appeared seemingly everywhere, in every town large enough to support a newspaper. Many of the articles focused on the competition between two young female reporters, but some mentioned only Nellie Bly, such as the Free Press of Waverly, New Jersey, which called Bly “one of the New York World’s most brilliant and successful reporters.” The Star of Wilmington, North Carolina, admired the speed with which Bly was circumnavigating the globe, while cautioning readers that “it does not necessarily follow from this that she is a ‘fast’ young lady. On the contrary she is a good, well-behaved girl, who crosses her t’s and dots her i’s.”

  In the second week of December a New York clothing company announced the production of a new model of ladies’ dressing gown. It was to be called “The Nellie Bly.”

  DECEMBER 8, 1889

  Colombo, Ceylon

  Nellie Bly herself, of course, had no idea that American women would soon be wrapping themselves in a robe named after her; nor did she know yet that another young woman was racing her around the world; nor had she heard anything of the guessing match that tens of thousands of people had already joined. (“She will hear of it, though,” The World assured its readers, “and the vastness of the contest which is being waged on her account will fill her soul with wonder.”) She was simply traveling eastward, and thus far, having traversed the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and the Middle East, she had managed to keep to her schedule. Bly may not have liked the crew or the accommodations provided by the Victoria, but she could not complain about its speed, for the ship made excellent time across the Arabian Sea and around the southern tip of India, arriving in Colombo, the largest port in Ceylon (later renamed Sri Lanka) on December 8, two days ahead of schedule.

  Ringed by coral reefs and covered in waving palm trees, Ceylon was a tropical island so lushly beautiful that Muslim and Christian accounts alike suggested it might be the site of the Garden of Eden; indeed, the tallest mountain on the island—its tip could just be made out above the treeline, glowing purple in the late morning sun—was known as Adam’s Peak. Early December was among the best times of year to visit, the island then being free of the monsoons that often arrived in April and October, or the heat of May, or the damp January winds that the older British expatriates called the longshore winds, which they complained brought rheumatism and other ailments but must also have conjured up wistful thoughts of England. Now the breezes that ruffled the ship’s flags were warm and fragrant; Bly had never been to a place where the air smelled like a kind of perfume, sweet and musky like powdered cocoa, made spicy with hints of cinnamon and vanilla. Inland, Ceylon’s jungles were as crowded as those of the Peaceable Kingdom paintings, full of leopards and deer and monkeys and mongoose and little black bears and innumerable other flying and creeping creatures; the trees themselves were rich with mangoes and bananas and breadfruit and figs. Its waters offered up oysters bearing pearls; its earth gave rubies and sapphires. To the Chinese, Ceylon was known as “the island of jewels,” and Hindu poets had dubbed it the “pearl-drop on the brow of Ind,” while a nineteenth-century British poem praised Ceylon as “the best and brightest gem / in Britain’s orient diadem.”

  Great Britain had taken Colombo in 1796, ousting the Dutch, who had themselves ousted the Portuguese a century earlier. About seven thousand Britons were living in Ceylon, plus another thousand or so of the empire’s soldiers, among an island population of nearly three million. They lived in plantation estates and in tidy bungalows that overlooked the water; they drove their carriages on smooth red roads and took their afternoon promenades on a concrete breakwater that extended a mile and a half into the sea, the first stone of which had been laid by the Prince of Wales himself. Nothing that might interfere with the pleasant, orderly progress of life had been left unaccounted for. The island’s elephants, who once ran in herds, had been tamed and put to work carrying stones and uprooting trees, while bullocks pulled carts and water buffalo plowed rice paddies. To protect against the sun there was light flannel clothing (“now made in all sorts of tweed-like patterns,” one of the local guidebooks noted brightly) and the pith helmets called topees; against the leopards, there were deadfall traps baited with live goats; against the mosquitoes, the mixture of citronella, coconut, and kerosene oils called “Bamber-Green oil,” available at all the local chemists’ shops. Even the venomous snakes, it was said, showed the proper respect for their colonial masters—they never bit Europeans.

  With one of her shipmates, Nellie Bly declined the steam launch provided for the Victoria’s passengers and instead came ashore on one of the native outrigger boats called catamarans. The surf crashing against the beach was the pale green of topaz; the earth was an astonishing red, the sky a brilliant blue. After the grim black crags of Aden and the Suez Canal in its various shades of sand and mud, the colors of Ceylon seemed heightened, almost unreal. The local Singhalese men wore loose sashed gowns, or were bare-chested with gaily patterned sarongs wrapped around their waists; they had earrings and long, sleek black hair twisted into a chignon in the back and held in place with a tortoiseshell comb. The women wore their hair in the same style, but fastened with a hairpin rather than a comb; golden rings adorned their toes, ankles, wrists, arms, necks, lips, ears, noses. Almost everyone, it seemed, chewed betel leaves, which discolored their teeth and stained their mouths a vampirish red.

  Street scene in Colombo, Ceylon (Illustration Credit 11.2)

  Bly gathered up her leather gripsack and set off to her hotel, only a few blocks from the jetty. She passed an open-air marketplace draped in red and gold, the honeycombed stalls offering hand-woven baskets, silk shawls, carvings of ivory, ebony, and tortoiseshell, the simple exotica for which tourists would gladly part with their rupees and pounds without a second thought. Across the street stood the Grand Oriental Hotel, where she would be staying during her two days in Colombo. It was an imposing-looking white building with long rows of handsome windows and the tiled arcades of a Roman bath; the outside shone in the sun but the inside turned out to be shadowy and cool. In an airy, comfortable inner courtyard, guests relaxed in easy chairs with a lime squash or a cup of one of the native teas. Some of the men drank whisky with soda as they perused the daily papers, while the women chatted and read novels and inspected the wares of the turbaned merchants who circulated through the courtyard, snapping open little velvet boxes containing the gems for which Colombo was known the world over, sapphires in blue and in white and in the purple variety known as “Oriental amethyst,” orange cat’s-eyes, blood-red rubies, the stones having been mined from nearby gravel pits and cut on corundum wheels, then polished to such an alluring sheen that even the men who had waved the merchants away ended up putting down their newspapers and going off with one of the dealers to a dim secluded corridor to see a sapphire gleam in the light of a match and bargain a twenty-pound price down to two or three.

  Bly had arrived in time for lunch, which at the Grand Oriental, as in the other hotels of the East, was known by the Indian word tiffin. The dining room was a stark, clean white; the small tables were decorated with bowls of brightly colored flowers, the utensils laid out on large green leaves delicately fringed at the edges like lace doilies. Ceiling fans made from strips of embroidered gold cloth attached to bamboo poles revolved above
the diners as they ate, kept in motion by silent young men pulling long ropes. The food was served by Singhalese waiters in crisp white jackets and flowing skirts, tall and slender and dignified as bronze statues. Bly soon discovered that the waiters answered to only a single term of address: “We can call ‘steward!’ ‘waiter!’ ‘garçon!’ until we are weary, without any result,” she wrote, “but the moment we whisper ‘boy!’ a pleasant black fellow says, ‘Yes, sir,’ at our side, and is ready to do our bidding.” One of the waiters placed in front of her a large platter of white rice and a strikingly yellow dish called curry, divided into varieties of meat, chicken, and shrimp. Bly was no stranger to exotic food—she knew the sausages and blood puddings of the German rathskellers tucked in amid the newspaper buildings of Park Row, the bagels dangling from metal rods sold by gaunt, bearded vendors on the Lower East Side, the boiled spaghetti served up in the Italian kitchens of Greenwich Village, the chop suey available at all hours of the night in any of the city’s eight Chinese restaurants—but curry was a dish entirely unfamiliar to her. Still, she had always prided herself on her adventurousness (whatever she had gotten in life had come from taking risks), and she spooned a mound of rice onto her plate and some shrimp curry over it; she added a dollop of the glistening sweet-and-spicy condiment called chutney, then sprinkled on top a bit of the salted and dried Maldivian fish that smelled like a garbage scow on a hot day but went by the grandly deceptive name of “Bombay duck.” As instructed, she mixed everything together and took a bite. The flavor was not like anything she had ever tasted before, it was like pepper and garlic and, somehow, flowers, the heat of the dish subtle at first but stronger with each bite, until it seemed to warm her entire body. Curry, Bly decided, was unsightly but delicious, and during her time in the East she ate it whenever she could, stopping only when, after a particularly hearty meal, its spiciness threatened to give her “palpitation of the heart.”

  After lunch some of the hotel guests decided to take a ride through the town. It was there, in Colombo, that Nellie Bly first confronted the prospect of the jinrikisha. Like Elizabeth Bisland, Bly was initially reluctant to use one, but soon overcame her hesitation. “I had a shamed feeling about going around the town drawn by a man,” she admitted, before adding more facetiously,

  but after I had gone a short way, I decided it was a great improvement on modern means of travel; it was so comforting to have a horse that was able to take care of itself! When we went into the shops it was so agreeable not to have the worry of fearing the horses were not blanketed, and when we made them run we did not have to fear we might urge them into a damaging speed. It is a great relief to have a horse whose tongue can protest.

  That evening everyone went for a moonlight ride to the Galle Face, a hilltop promenade overlooking the ocean. They passed beautiful homes set amid cliffside gardens, a scene that reminded Bly of a tropical version of Newport, Rhode Island. Many of the roads were embowered by palm trees, the branches forming an arch of foliage above their heads. At the Galle Face Hotel, Nellie Bly and some of the others relaxed on chaise longues on the tiled verandah. Crickets murmured in the trees; the waves beat rhythmically against the shore like music. From somewhere far away came the melancholy howl of a jackal. Silent couples walked arm in arm along the beach, the moonlight brilliant on the water. The man next to her was saying something, but she was only half-listening. On that picturesque verandah, Bly observed, one could “drift out on dreams that bring what life has failed to give, soothing pictures of the imagination that blot out for a moment the stern disappointment of reality.” And when those dreams faded away, she thought, one could drown out the sigh with a sip of lime squash brought by a silent, barefooted waiter. The moon had alchemized the red surface of the road to silver; in the distance the foamy breakers seemed like snowdrifts from a December on the other side of the world. How very far she had come, not just from New York City but from her origins in western Pennsylvania, where no sapphires or rubies were pulled from the ground but only hard anthracite coal. Through the moonlight Bly could make out a native fisherman standing waist-deep in the roaring surf. The fishing was better at night, she knew, but she couldn’t help but contemplate how an especially strong wave might wash him away into the black soundless depths, never to be seen again by his loved ones; it was so easy to lose one’s footing and disappear forever. She could feel the happiness of earlier in the day draining out of her, the lonesomeness she had felt so acutely on the Victoria returning again. Soon, at least, she would be at the halfway point of her trip, and each day thereafter a little closer to home.

  Bly watched the jinrikishas come in and out of the gaslit gate of the hotel. Her attention was drawn to an arch of the verandah, where two dark figures, a man and a woman, stood close together, outlined by the lamp of the gate. The woman’s face was upturned to the man’s; he clasped her hands in his and held them close to his chest. As Bly later recalled, “I felt a little sympathy for them as wrapped in that delusion that makes life heaven or hell, that forms the foundation for every novel, play or story, they stood, until a noisy new arrival wakened her from blissful oblivion, and she rushed, scarcely waiting for him to kiss the hand he held, away into the darkness.”

  In her account of the trip, that single sentence was Nellie Bly’s only allusion, direct or otherwise, to romantic feelings. The “delusion” of love, she tartly noted, formed the foundation of every novel; in her own novel, The Mystery of Central Park, one of the minor characters is an editor by the name of John Stetson Maxwell, an obvious reference to James Stetson Metcalfe, the handsome violet-eyed writer often seen squiring Bly around town beginning in the winter of 1888. In the novel, published in October 1889, Maxwell is characterized by the female protagonist as “brutal and unkind.” By November of that year Bly and Metcalfe’s relationship must have been over, for Bly felt not the slightest hesitation about leaving town for a trip of some seventy-five days, nor was James Metcalfe among the friends and colleagues who had gathered at the Hoboken pier to see her off. “Have you any reason for feeling depressed, any love affair?” one of the doctors she consulted for her headaches had asked shortly before she left New York. “No,” she replied, “I have no love affair.”

  Bly sighed again and took another sip of her lime squash, and then turned to answer her companion.

  DECEMBER 10–13, 1889

  Colombo, Ceylon

  According to Nellie Bly’s itinerary, the stopover in Ceylon was supposed to last only two days, at which point she would set off on another Peninsular and Oriental steamship, the Oriental, bound for Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The Oriental could not depart, however, until it had received mail and passengers from the steamship Nepaul arriving from Calcutta, and to all indications the Nepaul was the slowest ship on the ocean. By December 10, the scheduled departure date, it was still nowhere in sight. Soon the bad news had been posted on the blackboard in the lobby of the Grand Oriental Hotel; at once Bly set off to the nearest telegraph office. A telegram from Colombo to New York cost twenty-five cents for eight words, and five cents for each additional word; for urgent messages, however, the price was seventy-five cents for eight words, and ten cents for each word beyond that. For this message, presumably, Nellie Bly spent the extra money.

  On Thursday, December 12, a capitalized headline in The World announced: NELLIE BLY DELAYED. The newspaper had received a telegram from Bly reporting that she would have to spend five days in Ceylon, three more than had been allotted in her schedule. Bly had offered no explanation for the unexpected delay, saying only that she would be sailing from Ceylon on December 13 rather than December 10.

  Nellie Bly was still 3,500 miles from Hong Kong, where the Occidental and Oriental steamship Oceanic was due to depart on December 28, in fifteen days’ time. As a result of the three-day delay in Ceylon she now had no margin to spare: to lose even a single day anywhere between Colombo and Hong Kong would mean missing the Oceanic, a catastrophic outcome, as she would then likely arrive in New York
no earlier than February 3—a trip of eighty-one days. “The monsoons and typhoons of Indian and Chinese waters will have to be agreeable to make the trip come out all right from this point,” The World noted soberly, adding, “Miss Bly can yet, with fortune favoring her, complete her tour in less than seventy-five days, but it is only fair to everybody to state that the elements are against her in that part of the journey where it is most essential that they should be propitious.”

 

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