Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  “THE GORGEOUS BUDDHIST temples of the Singhalean will astonish her and fill her with admiration,” The World predicted in an article about Nellie Bly’s stay in Ceylon, and Bly did visit the local temples—but found there “little of interest,” she remarked, “and always having to pay liberally for the privilege of looking about.” She also stopped into the offices of the two Colombo newspapers, about which she said only that the young Englishmen who ran them were “very clever” and “very kind to strangers.” She did not “join in an elephant hunt,” as The World had suggested she might, nor did she “go berrying in the coffee fields.”

  Coffee had once been Ceylon’s most important export crop, but in recent years a fungus had blighted the fields and increasingly the larger colonial planters were switching over to tea. The families who worked as tea pluckers were not native Singhalese but rather Tamils from the southern part of India, who were thought to be stronger and more willing to work. “The coolie,” the director of Ceylon’s Royal Botanic Gardens remarked admiringly of the Tamils, “is a very docile and obedient labourer.” About the imported workers one of the local guidebooks observed, “Both men and women, to say nothing of the children, may make good wages for work which after all is by no means exhausting, though they work from 6 A.M. to 4 P.M. at a stretch,” and additionally noted that while “the rate of wages, being only 30 to 50 cents a day of Ceylon money, or 5d. to 8d. English, may seem to the newcomer mere starvation … when one considers that at home the same people would not be able to earn more than about one-third of that, it assumes the guise of actual wealth.” (And furthermore, though that same newcomer might blanch at the tiny huts in which the tea-plucker families were forced to live, it was helpful to keep in mind that these huts were “almost palatial compared to their own homes, and that they do not like large and airy quarters.”) W. S. Caine, a British member of Parliament who had visited the island two years before Bly, stoutly declared, “To these Tamils Ceylon is a heaven upon earth.”

  Theological metaphors aside, an investigation into the actual working conditions of the Tamil tea pluckers would seem to be the sort of story Nellie Bly might have been interested to undertake while she waited for the Nepaul to arrive, of a piece with her earlier reports about Pittsburgh’s factory workers, or Mexico’s tortilla makers, or the paper-box girls of New York. Bly, though, did not visit any tea plantations while she was in Ceylon, nor any of the immense cinnamon plantations, nor any of the island’s rice paddies, nor any of the other places in which native people lived and worked; and indeed the only subject to which she devoted more than a few sentences in her various accounts of Ceylon was the plot of a show she saw one night at a local theater. On Ceylon, Bly’s renowned reportorial instincts deserted her; she found it difficult to concentrate, so focused was she on the need to get moving again. She seemed aware of this, variously describing herself as being in an “ill humor” and a “bad temper.” Bly and two shipmates from the Victoria took a train one morning to the nearby city of Kandy, an ancient highland city set like a gemstone into the surrounding mountains. With its Hindu and Buddhist temples, palaces, artificial lake, hilltop walks, and botanic gardens surrounded by a lush tropical forest, Kandy was commonly cited by travelers as the most beautiful city in the world; it was “pretty,” Bly said dismissively, “but far from what it is claimed to be.” After the trip to Kandy she came down with one of her sick headaches, the first she had gotten since she left New York, and went to bed that night without dinner. Bly ascribed the headache to the heat of Ceylon, but Aden and the Suez Canal had been hotter; surely it was due, at least in part, to the anxiety she felt in waiting for a ship that seemed never to come.

  The hours went by, the days went by, and still there was no sign of the Nepaul. A land often compared to the Garden of Eden was not the most disagreeable place to be held over, but Nellie Bly passed the time in an agony of waiting. At last, on the fourth day, the blackboard in the hotel lobby brought the welcome news that the Oriental would be leaving the following morning at eight. Bly was awakened promptly at five o’clock, and she was so anxious to be on her way that she set off for the dock that morning without even stopping to eat the toast and tea that a waiter brought to her room. She was the very first passenger aboard the ship. The only other people on deck were an elderly man with striking blue eyes, who turned out to be the chief engineer of the Oriental, and a younger blond man wearing a white linen suit, who was the ship’s doctor. The two men strolled along the deck, looking out to sea as they chatted.

  Bly tried to untie a steamer chair so she could have someplace to sit while she waited, but grew frustrated as she struggled with this normally simple task; her patience had long since given way under the strain of waiting. The older man came up and offered to assist her; in a moment he had the chair untied.

  “When will we sail?” Bly asked him anxiously.

  “As soon as the Nepaul comes in. She was to have been here at daybreak, but she hasn’t been sighted yet. She’s a slow old boat.”

  “May she go to the bottom of the bay when she does get in!” Bly exclaimed. “The old tub! I think it an outrage to be kept waiting five days for a tub like that.”

  The engineer smiled at her. “Colombo is a pleasant place to stay,” he said lightly.

  “It may be, if staying there does not mean more than life to one. Really,” she said again, “it would afford me the most intense delight to see the Nepaul go to the bottom of the sea.”

  Bly’s vehemence surprised the two men, and their surprise in turn amused her, as she thought how little anyone else could understand what this delay meant to her, how she dreaded the thought of being “a forlorn little self creeping back to New York ten days behind time, with a shamed look on her face and afraid to hear her name spoken,” and the picture that appeared in her mind—that forlorn, creeping little self—caused her to laugh out loud, and the men looked at her in astonishment and perhaps some concern as well, which made her laugh even harder, and as she did she began to relax and she could feel her better nature returning, and she found herself able to say, “Everything happens for the best,” and almost believe it to be true.

  In the end, it was Nellie Bly who first spotted the ship. “There is the Nepaul,” she called, pointing to a faint wisp of smoke just above the horizon. The two men doubted that she could be right, but after a few minutes the wisp had lengthened into a plume and a small black dot had appeared beneath it, like an exclamation point.

  The Nepaul did not discharge its passengers to the Oriental until nearly one o’clock in the afternoon. Not long afterward the Oriental was finally able to set sail, and soon Ceylon was receding behind them, the island’s palm trees seeming to wave farewell in the breeze. It was, Bly thought, “a great relief to be again on the sweet, blue sea … free from the tussle and worry and bustle for life which we are daily, hourly even, forced to gaze upon on land.”

  Still, as Bly set out across the Bay of Bengal she could not have been entirely without care. She had been traveling for twenty-nine days and had covered almost exactly nine thousand miles. But for the first time since setting out from New York, she was behind schedule.

  DECEMBER 18–23, 1889

  South China Sea

  ON BOARD THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL STEAMSHIP THAMES BOUND for Singapore, Elizabeth Bisland slept “the languorous, voluptuous sleep of the tropics.” Her stateroom had a comfortable bed with an iron frame, but she preferred the divan that lay beneath the square window that let in warm sea winds and soothing whispers of water as it brushed against the side of the ship. She had never felt quite as happy as she did on board the Thames. It turned out that she loved to travel; she took unexpected pleasure in the daily cataloguing of new sights, understood the exultation of Keats’s “watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” Travel, she had discovered, was a delightful means of gratifying the intelligent curiosity that Dr. Johnson had called the root of all wisdom and culture. “I go to bed exhaustedly happy,” she
wrote in her notebook, “and wake up expectantly smiling.”

  At six-thirty each morning a white-capped stewardess brought tea, fruit, and a biscuit; at first Bisland found it odd to eat at this hour, but she quickly learned that in the tropics it was best to eat small meals at numerous times throughout the day. Later she would write in an essay for female travelers, “If one refuses to adapt one’s self to this custom, and insists upon doing in Rome as the Americans do, the result will be a feeling of great exhaustion after dressing that robs one of appetite for breakfast and spoils the day.” She could spend hours at a time on one of the ship’s bamboo lounging chairs, with perhaps a book or some sewing in her lap, watching the sea quiver under the blinding sky. In the afternoon she bathed in a large marble tub filled with cool salt water, followed by a nap between the hours of three and four. Other than “a charming little old lady from Boston,” Elizabeth Bisland was the only female passenger aboard the Thames; as a result, she wrote, “the atmosphere has a pronounced masculine flavor; but despite even this limitation it is interesting.” All of the passengers traveled first or second class; there were no accommodations for steerage. The ship was yachtlike in its proportions, with a saloon of gold and white that extended the length of the ship and a broad top deck generously shaded by canvas awnings. Cages with canaries in them hung above the deck; the air around the ship was filled with birdsong as it was scented with coal smoke and lavender water.

  The sky stayed always the same clear blue, but the sea was ever-changing. One day it was speckled like the breast of a peacock, another it was divided, curiously, into distinct bands of green, blue, and violet. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, where Bisland had spent whole days clutching the sides of her berth inside a storm-tossed cabin, the sea here was as flat as the western prairie; it occurred to her that the ship could carry a full glass of water the entire way and never spill a drop. The evenings brought no spectacular sunsets, as the sky held no clouds to reflect the light; the sun simply turned red and fell swiftly toward the horizon, where it was doused by the ocean like a heated wheel in a blacksmith’s trough. Then just as swiftly the powerful tide of light vanished, and the ship sailed in phosphorescent water. Overhead, myriad constellations hung in the boundless black vault of the sky: Cassiopeia, Perseus, Orion, the last of the old gods who still watched from above. The warm, moist nights, so reminiscent of those on the bayou, gave heavy, relaxed sleep, and she awoke refreshed at dawn to a pale lilac sky still glimmering with stars.

  “Everything pleases, everything amuses me,” Elizabeth Bisland wrote while at sea; “most of all perhaps the strong British atmosphere in which one finds one’s self on board a P. and O. steamer.” On the Thames Bisland delighted in eating the foods she had only ever read about in English novels. She came to know the difference between the Bath bun and the Scottish scone; she sampled for the first time veal-and-ham pie (the “weal and hammer,” as Dickens called it in Our Mutual Friend) and an array of sweets royally christened: Alexandra wafers, Beatrice tarts, Victoria jelly roll. She was endlessly fascinated by the variety of English accents on the ship; no two of the men sounded quite alike. The bearded giant who sat by her at table spoke with a broad Scottish burr; the handsome fourth officer with the black eyes and shy ruddy face revealed traces of a Yorkshire accent, a d replacing a th on the tip of his tongue; the tall young blond arrayed in snowy silk and linen had the superciliously rounded vowels learned at Eton and Oxford. Bisland herself spoke with a gentle Southern drawl, even more unusual here than it was in New York; and though she did not write about this, one can imagine the level of attention that must have been paid, on a ship populated almost entirely by men, to a beautiful young woman traveling unaccompanied around the world.

  Nor was she in turn immune to their charms. From captain to cook, she observed admiringly, the men on the ship were “fine creatures”: tautly muscled, with curly hair and white teeth and eyes the turquoise of the sea. (Bisland seems to have been especially taken with the ship’s doctor. The following year she would write in an article for Harper’s Bazaar, “There is a sea rumor that candidates for the medical advisorship to the sea-sick undergo a competitive examination, sending in sealed photographs, judged by a committee of young women. But perhaps this rumor is not verifiable. Nevertheless it is a fact that all ships’ doctors are beautiful. It is demonstrated on the Atlantic liners, and on the P. & O. ships of the East it is still more supernally true.”) Aboard the Thames the men were “flat-backed and lean-loined; they carry their huge shoulders with a lordly swagger; they possess a divine faith in themselves and in England.” They had a vigor and virility that came from being the stewards of the world’s most powerful empire, so markedly different from the Southern men around whom she had grown up, hard and bitter, long marinated in the vinegar of defeat. In an interview with the New Orleans Daily Picayune, Bisland marveled at the Englishmen she had met on Peninsular and Oriental ships. “I never saw such splendid figures,” she recalled. “Way out there in the east their faces are as rosy as if they had just come from London. They have such superb confidence in themselves, too. I never met anything like it in my life. They own everything. Anything they have not got you will hear them say in the most careless fashion: ‘Oh, we’ll be taking that in a few years.’ ”

  Elsewhere Bisland wrote, “Only those who travel to these Eastern ports can form any adequate conception of the ability which has directed English conquest in the Orient.” In fact at least one American traveler to Eastern ports would have disagreed with Elizabeth Bisland’s interpretation of English conquest—that traveler being, of course, Nellie Bly, who, sailing from Aden, acidly noted that the British had “stolen” the region’s best ports. It was just one of the many offenses, large and small, of which Bly found Great Britain guilty during her travels, along with impudent servants and poorly heated railroad carriages. Bly was hardly alone among Americans in her dislike of all things English, and indeed only a few years later the Yale University history professor George Burton Adams would publish a short book with the title Why Americans Dislike England, which contained at the very outset this assertion:

  It must be regarded as proved beyond all doubt that there is in the minds of a large proportion of our people, very probably a majority of them, a peculiar feeling of dislike towards England, which they cherish towards no other country, and a peculiar quickness to flame up into open opposition to her whenever she seems to be threatening the slightest encroachment upon our interests.… The fact is undeniable that the mass of Americans look upon England alone among all the nations of the world as the one which is naturally unfriendly to us, and which we must always regard with suspicion.

  Some of this dislike, Adams continued, arose from the “air of superiority which England has so often assumed towards America, and certain classes of Englishmen towards Americans.” One distinguished British observer, the historian and member of Parliament James Bryce, had recently acknowledged that “English travellers and writers used no doubt formerly to assume airs of supercilious condescension which must have been offensive to Americans”; however, Bryce immediately added, “these airs were dropped twenty or thirty years ago.” To this George Burton Adams responded simply, “Mr. Bryce is hardly correct in this statement, if numerous stories afloat in this country are to be trusted.” (Nellie Bly herself would have concurred with Adams’s assessment, and she made her own small contribution to the trove of stories about the smugness and insularity of English travelers.) Still more damaging to transatlantic relations was the widespread belief among Americans that the British government was selfish, unscrupulous, greedy, and bellicose. In its brief history the United States had already gone to war twice with Great Britain, in the American Revolution and the War of 1812—the first time to win its liberty and the second time, in the popular view, to protect it—and further inflaming the tempers of many Americans, during the Civil War, Great Britain had spurned its own antislavery rhetoric and remained neutral as the South seceded and the United States was torn
apart. The indictment of Great Britain was succinctly delivered by Senator Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut: “In every emergency with which the United States has been confronted, the British government has been our enemy.”

  Though anti-British sentiment could be found everywhere among Americans, it was more widely and passionately held at each descending step on the economic ladder, culminating with the poorer Irish Catholic immigrants, who saw the British government as nothing more nor less than an agent of tyranny and oppression. Upper-class Americans, on the other hand, were by ethnicity overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, by religion Episcopalian, and by political outlook congenial to the idea of a traditional aristocratic society sitting atop a relatively immobile class structure. For many of these Americans, Great Britain was not a foe or a despot, but rather the beloved ancestor from which the United States had inherited the “seed of civilization” (to use the highly charged phrase employed by imperialists of the period), the country with which the United States shared a race, a religion, and a language: less a threat than a model for America’s own future of imperial expansion. In this view the United States might at times resent Great Britain’s superior confidence and strength, as a younger brother might resent an older one and strive to outdo him, but at moments of crisis they inevitably recognized that they were blood relations and closed ranks against any threats from outside.

  Andrew Carnegie himself adopted this view in an 1890 magazine article emphatically entitled “Do Americans Hate England? No!” in which he declared, “The Briton and the American are too much alike and too much to each other not to have feelings of rivalry excited as between themselves; but now that all feeling of condescension on one hand and assertion on the other has ceased, and they are recognised equals, every hour taken from the passage between them, every visit paid, draws the two branches closer together, and leads both to feel deep down in their hearts that they are branches of the same great family.” By this time, as Carnegie suggested, advances in maritime technology had made the Atlantic crossing far easier than ever before, and for many of those Americans who could afford it Great Britain became a regular travel destination, from which they returned home with a renewed appreciation for English education, English culture, English hereditary titles, and even English-style spelling (such as honour, centre, fulfil, or memorise), a style that would eventually come to be adopted by, among others, Elizabeth Bisland.