The very different views of Great Britain had been put on vivid display in New York two years before Bly’s and Bisland’s trips, on June 21, 1887, on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. That morning at the Metropolitan Opera House, its stage bedecked with British and American flags, a large crowd described by The New York Times as “prolific in enthusiasm” enjoyed a program of patriotic songs and tributes to the queen by political and religious leaders, among them the former mayor of New York, Seth Low, who proclaimed that “the tangled threads of Anglo-Saxon greatness have become the warp and woof of human progress over a large portion of the globe” and promised Great Britain that “the American people, grateful for her constant friendship, join with you to-day from ocean to ocean in your own prayer, ‘God Save the Queen,’ ” a conclusion that was reportedly met with “prolonged applause and cheers.” It was a far more somber scene later that evening, when some 2,500 of the city’s Irish immigrants filled Cooper Union Hall for what the event’s organizers called “a memorial demonstration in honor of the victims of Queen Victoria’s 50 years of misrule.” Speaker after speaker catalogued the horrors that English despotism had visited upon the Irish people; the stage was draped in the black crepe of mourning, and from the front of the podium there swung a hangman’s noose.
The segment of Americans most resolutely hostile to Great Britain—working-class Northerners, and especially Irish Catholic immigrants—were the very people among whom Nellie Bly had long lived and worked; her own paternal grandparents, Robert and Catherine Risher Cochran, had left Ireland’s County Derry and settled in western Pennsylvania in 1804. Elizabeth Bisland, on the other hand, came from Scottish stock, her great-great-grandfather, John Bisland, having been a dry-goods merchant in Glasgow who emigrated to North Carolina shortly before the American Revolution. “It fills my soul with a passion of pride that I, too, am an Anglo-Saxon,” Bisland once wrote. She was, moreover, a Southerner and an Episcopalian, and, though not wealthy herself, she was by disposition entirely comfortable among aristocrats. (In Ceylon, for instance, she would begin a close friendship with Lady Broome, who wrote travel books under the name “Lady Barker.”) Perhaps most important of all, Bisland was someone who had fallen in love with books as a young girl, for whom the most beloved literature would always have a distinctively English flavor—or, as she herself preferred, flavour.
EVERY HOUR NOW brought Elizabeth Bisland closer to the equator. The Thames was sailing south from Hong Kong to Singapore, where it was scheduled to arrive on December 23. At the same time the Thames’s sister P&O steamship, the Oriental, continued on its path north from Singapore to Hong Kong; it, too, would make port on December 23, Nellie Bly’s thirty-ninth day out of New York.
Somewhere on the South China Sea, in the third week of December 1889, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland passed each other unawares as they made their way around the world.
DECEMBER 13–16, 1889
Straits of Malacca
Nellie Bly was pleased by almost everything about the Oriental, by the politeness of the crew, the spaciousness of the cabins, the quality of the food, but most especially by the length of each day’s run: when the Oriental reached the Straits of Malacca, after crossing the Bay of Bengal, it had already made up much of the time lost in Ceylon. Bly, however, could not say much for the weather, which was so hot and damp that mirrors fogged and cabin keys began to rust. The sultry air brought a laziness to life aboard the ship; little distinguished the passing of the hours, other than an occasional sighting of a sea turtle as it poked its head up to bask in the sun, or a school of flying fish skimming like dragonflies over the surface of the water, or jellyfish drifting slowly around the ship like moons. Unhurriedly the sailors hoisted and pulled sails as they laughed and chatted among themselves, while the passengers lounged on deck watching beautiful green islands slide slowly past, idly speculating about whether they might be inhabited. Some of the passengers told stories about how the straits had once been infested with pirates, and Nellie Bly found herself silently wishing that a few erstwhile buccaneers might reappear and provide a bit of excitement to break up the long uneventful days of travel, much as earlier, while riding the mail train in Italy, she had hoped for bandits.
On the morning of December 16 the Oriental anchored for refueling on the island of Penang (or, as the British preferred to call it, Prince of Wales Island), the northernmost seaport on the Malay peninsula; the thirteen hundred miles from Colombo had been covered, remarkably, in only three days. Still, given the long delay in Ceylon, the captain was anxious to make up even more time, and he advised the passengers that the Oriental would set sail again in six hours. Pairs of Chinese laborers were already padding up the gangway between ship and shore, hauling baskets of coal suspended from a pole between them. Bly and one of the men from the ship took a sampan ashore, where they hired a jinrikisha to take them into the nearby hills. Here the air was still cool, the woods wreathed in white mist. They rode beneath canopies of coconut palms, past the cozy red-roofed bungalows where the English residents lived nestled into the rocks and foliage, above cascades where clear streams emptied into granite basins. They were headed toward the immense waterfall that supplied the island with its fresh water; Penang’s waterfall was a favorite attraction for visitors to the island, but the ennui that Bly had felt during her last days in Colombo seemed to have traveled with her across the Bay of Bengal. “The picturesque waterfall is nothing marvelous,” she later remarked. “It only made me wonder from whence it procured its water supply, but after walking until I was much heated, and finding myself apparently just as far from the fount, I concluded that the waterfall’s secret was not worth the fatigue it would cost.”
By the time they returned to the harbor the sky had clouded over and the water turned rough. Huge waves tossed their sampan as they sailed back out to the Oriental, the swell intensified by the rolling of the coal barge alongside the ship. Bly had barely climbed up onto the deck when the barge was ordered to cast off; even as this was being done the Oriental was already hoisting anchor and starting on its way. Soon after, several dozen Chinese coal haulers rushed up on deck only to discover that while they were unloading their last sacks of coal in the hold below, the barge had left without them. “There followed,” Bly reported, “dire chattering, wringing of hands, pulling of locks and crying after the receding barge, all to no avail.”
Hearing their cries, the captain of the Oriental told the coal haulers to go off on the pilot boat, the little tug that was escorting the Oriental out of the harbor. Not wanting to lose time before the oncoming storm, the captain ordered the pilot boat to be boarded even as the vessels continued to plow through the waves, but one of the Chinese trying to leap from the steamship plunged terrifyingly into the sea and the captain had no choice but to turn off the engines and wait in the harbor until he had been rescued. By now the wind was howling over the water, churning up spray that dangerously slicked every surface. Droplets glistened on the bare backs of the men; their long hair whipped like flags in the wind. Some of the men slowly worked their way down the long cable that connected the Oriental to the pilot boat, where their comrades pulled them, wet and frightened, to safety. Others descended the ladder on the side of the steamship, but the ladder ended several feet above the tugboat that beat furiously back and forth on the waves; many a coal hauler, reaching the bottom of the ladder, would cling despairingly to its lower rungs, not willing to loosen his grip and perhaps fall into the waves below, as those already in the boat shouted encouragement and reached for his legs, while the Oriental’s officers threatened to knock him off the ladder with poles. To those watching from above, safe on the top deck, the scene looked as amusingly chaotic as a music hall sketch. “We all gathered to see the sight,” Nellie Bly reported of her fellow passengers, “and a funny one it was!”
Loading coal onto a steamship (Illustration Credit 12.1)
At long last all of the coal haulers had managed to get aboard and the line was cas
t off. The Oriental, now fully coaled, steamed out of the harbor, while the fierce tide swept the smaller vessel back toward the shore. The pilot boat, Bly noticed, was so overloaded that the men aboard were afraid to move, even to bail out the water that had collected at the bottom of the boat.
DECEMBER 16–17, 1889
Singapore
Nearing Singapore, less than one hundred miles from the equator, Nellie Bly was at the southernmost point of her journey, and exactly halfway around the world. She had reached the midpoint on only her thirty-third day out of New York, but she knew that she could not maintain that pace—the trip across the South China Sea would be against the wind, and she would likely have a long wait for the connecting steamship in Hong Kong—and she was eager to make port in Singapore before night fell. The Oriental, though, did not reach Singapore’s waters until nearly six o’clock in the evening, and many more long minutes passed before the harbor pilot came aboard the ship to instruct the captain about how to proceed. Anxiously Bly awaited his verdict. The Oriental, the pilot finally decided, would have to anchor outside the harbor until morning, it being too dangerous to try to dock the steamship after dark. Bly could barely contain her frustration and rage; in her mind the delay “was the result of slowing down to leave off the coolies at Penang.” And this delay, in turn, would lead to an even greater one:
The mail contract made it compulsory for the ship to stay in port twenty-four hours, and while we might have been consuming our stay and so helping me on in my race against time I was wasting precious hours lying outside the gates of hope, as it were, merely because some black men had been too slow. Those few hours might mean the loss of my ship at Hong Kong; they might mean days added to my record. What agony of suspense and impatience I suffered that night!
When Bly came up on deck in the morning, the Oriental lay alongside the Singapore wharf and was already being refueled. On the native sampans that clustered about the ship—that flotilla of little boats seemed a fixture of steamship travel in the East—peddlers called up to the passengers on the Oriental, offering deals on silk, fruit, lace, picture photographs, and, oddly, monkeys.
While they waited for the ship to depart, Bly and a companion, a young Welsh doctor named Brown, hired a gharry to take them into the town. The gharry, Singapore’s distinctive vehicle, was a square four-wheeled wagon, something like a New York hansom cab but with Venetian blinds on the windows and pulled by a spotted little horse barely larger than a sheep. The road ran along the sea, skirting the low inland hills; the hills were composed primarily of laterite and many had already been dug up in quarries, the green hillsides turned the rusty red of an old wound.
The gharry driver took Bly and Dr. Brown to the Singapore esplanade, fifteen acres of greensward devoted almost entirely to the pleasures of sport: men dressed in white played vigorous games of cricket and tennis and bowls, cooled by the breezes that swept over the seawall. At the very center of the esplanade stood the imposing bronze statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British statesman often described as “the father of Singapore,” his arms crossed as though in disgruntlement at the frivolity going on all around him. The two visited the newly opened Raffles Museum, its collections already including thousands of specimens of native plants, animals, and insect life, and then had an early dinner at the popular Hôtel de l’Europe, where they ate at a long table draped in white linen on the verandah facing the sea. The food was French and the waiters Chinese, and around them conversations were going on, it seemed, in all the languages of the world.
After dinner they rejoined their driver, who drove them back toward the center of town. In the distance they heard a clamorous, vaguely musical sound, reminiscent, to Bly, of a political procession on the night of an election.
“That’s a funeral,” the driver called back to them.
“Indeed!” said Bly. “If that’s the way you have funerals here, I’ll see one.” The driver pulled the gharry to the side of the road, and they waited eagerly for the funeral to pass. First into view was a row of men flourishing black-and-white satin flags, followed by a band of musicians atop small Malay ponies, blowing trumpets, beating tom-toms, striking cymbals, and hammering gongs. Men dressed in white trousers and blue tunics marched by brandishing roasted pigs impaled on spits, while others held aloft Chinese lanterns. Next came the casket draped in scarlet cloth, resting on long poles suspended on the shoulders of some forty pallbearers dressed in black, the rear brought up by mourners in a long line of gharries. The mourners were dressed in white satin from head to toe and were, Bly observed, “the happiest looking people at the funeral.” She and Dr. Brown watched intently to the very end, as delighted as if they had seen a circus parade.
“I would not have missed that for anything,” said Dr. Brown when it was all over.
“You could not have,” Bly replied laughingly. “I know they got it up for our special benefit.”
And so they rode back to town, still captivated by a funeral that had for them not the slightest suggestion of death. The gharry driver took them to a small Hindu temple used by the local dhobies, or laundrymen; the dhobies were a common sight in the nearby Stamford Canal, bent over their work, rinsing soiled linens in the water and then beating them against a flat stone. At the temple door a priest informed the doctor and the gharry driver that they could come inside if they removed their shoes, but that the lady would not be permitted to enter.
“Why?” Bly demanded at once. She was intent on finding out “why my sex in heathen lands should exclude me from a temple, as in America it confines me to the side entrances of hotels and other strange and incommodious things.”
“No, señora, no mudder,” said the priest, emphatically shaking his head.
“I’m not a mother!” Bly cried so indignantly that her companions burst into laughter. The priest, though, was insistent, and so the three left the temple and walked back down the front path to the waiting gharry.
On their way back to the ship, Bly and Dr. Brown stopped at the home of the gharry driver. His wife, a beautiful young Malay woman, was dressed in several yards of colorful cloth wrapped around her waist and over her right shoulder; she had a large gold ring in her nose and several more on her ears and toes, and bracelets around her ankles. Standing by the door was a macaque monkey, stoutly built and not much more than two feet tall. Nellie Bly had thus far resisted making any large purchases, not wanting the burden of additional baggage, but seeing the monkey’s eager, expressive face she felt her willpower begin to melt away. She had, after all, only a few more transfers remaining on the trip, and at each station there would be porters on hand to assist her; the monkey himself would no doubt be an amusing companion and a memorable souvenir of her travel around the world, and if he proved too much trouble she could always donate him to the menagerie in Central Park. After some negotiation, she and the gharry driver agreed on a price of three dollars. Some of the monkeys for sale in the harbor were being offered for as little as fifty cents, but to Bly they looked like puny creatures that would likely die of consumption on the voyage; this particular monkey, on the other hand, seemed “as strong as a man”—an observation subsequently borne out when the monkey grappled with a ship’s coxswain one day on the Pacific Ocean and threw him flat on the deck.
Nellie Bly carried the monkey with her in a cage the rest of the way back to New York; he would become, like the ghillie cap and the traveling bag, one of the symbols of her trip, with numerous accounts portraying him as sitting contentedly on her shoulder, an incident that never actually took place, for the monkey had a tendency to scratch and bite and seemed to reserve his fiercest temper for Bly herself, as though blaming her—reasonably enough—for being the one who had uprooted him from his native land. (“It is a savage little fellow,” Bly was heard once to remark of the monkey, “but takes to most everybody but me.”) She had some trouble deciding what to call him, and during her Pacific voyage she tried out the names Solaris, Tajmahal, and Jocko; eventually, back in the United S
tates, she settled on McGinty, a name suggested to her by a reporter, after a character in a popular song of the time. By that time Bly was telling people that the monkey had been given to her by a rajah in Singapore.
DECEMBER 17–23, 1889
South China Sea
Entering the South China Sea from the Straits of Malacca, the Oriental ran into a monsoon. Despite the danger—and the slowing of the day’s run—Nellie Bly could not help but think the billowing sea the most magnificent sight she had ever seen. In the afternoon she sat breathless up on deck watching as the bow of the ship lifted upright like a horse rearing on its hind legs, paused at the top of a wave for a queasying moment, and then plunged down again as if heading straight for the bottom of the sea. Despite the spray of the waves, the air was heavy and close, and at times Bly felt almost as if she would smother; most of the passengers preferred to stay below in their cabins, but some of the men lay stretched out on chairs on deck, gasping for air. Once, suddenly, the ship dropped to one side like a wagon that had lost a wheel, tossing Bly from her chair clear across the deck. As she slid, Bly had the presence of mind to grab hold of an iron bar that protruded from the deck; that bar, she realized later, was all that had prevented her from crashing through the skylight into the dining room below.
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