Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  During that storm one of the men on deck became seasick. As it happens, this particular man had been, in Bly’s words, “quite attentive to me,” and even in the midst of the storm, his face drawn and pale, he lay on his traveling rug at her feet, gazing miserably up at her and pleading for sympathy. Bly said little to him; she knew that she was being heartless, but she could not bring herself to sympathize with a seasick man, and especially not this one.

  “You don’t know how nice I can look,” the man said to her later, adding that if she would only stay over in Hong Kong for a week she could see for herself.

  “Indeed,” Bly said drily, “such a phenomenon might induce me to remain there six weeks.”

  For days her hapless suitor followed her plaintively about the ship, until at last one of the other passengers had the idea to tell him that Nellie Bly was engaged to the ship’s chief officer Sleeman and that the chief officer did not approve of her talking to other men; this information, though, seemed only to fuel his devotion. One evening, finding Nellie Bly alone on deck, he sat down at her feet and asked her, “Do you think life is worth living?”

  “Yes, life is very sweet,” Bly replied. “The thought of death is the only thing that causes me unhappiness.”

  “You cannot understand it or you would feel differently. I could take you in my arms and jump overboard, and before they know it we would be at rest.”

  “You can’t tell. It might not be rest,” she began to say, but he exclaimed with sudden passion, “I know, I know. I can show you. I will prove it to you. Death by drowning is a peaceful slumber, a quiet drifting away.”

  A chill began to creep over her as she realized that she was alone on deck with a madman. “It is?” she said, adopting the soothing tones of a policeman coaxing a would-be jumper from the rail of a bridge. “You know, tell me about it. Explain it to me.”

  Just as the man began to answer, Bly saw Chief Officer Sleeman come up on deck. She dared not call out to him, dared not even smile lest her companion notice and fling them together overboard into an everlasting slumber. The chief officer approached them; he clapped the man on the back and said in amusement, “What a very pretty love scene.”

  “Come!” Bly shouted at once, grabbing the officer’s hand and rushing away before the startled man could react.

  Down below, with the chief officer and the ship’s captain, she related what had happened. The captain wanted to put the man in irons, but Bly, who felt more sorry for him than anything else, requested that he be left free. Afterward, though, she was very careful not to spend a single moment alone and unprotected on deck.

  The Oriental, it seemed, had more than its share of the odd characters Bly thought of as “cranks.” One morning, for instance, the captain asked one of the passengers, a minister, to lead the Sunday service. The minister agreed to do so, but when the ship reached Hong Kong he handed the captain a bill for two pounds. He had been enjoying a vacation, he explained, and did not propose to work during that time unless he was paid for it. (The P&O paid the bill, Bly reported, but warned the company’s officers that in the future ministers could not perform the service unless a price had been agreed upon beforehand.) Another passenger, an Englishman with a strong taste for whisky and soda, prefaced nearly all of his comments with the phrase, “Dear me.” (Englishmen always say “Dear me,” Bly teased him once, because they think so highly of themselves.) One of the Oriental’s female passengers told the chief officer that she wanted a cabin located directly over the ship’s screw so that she could always be sure that the ship was moving. She received that cabin, and Bly noted, with evident satisfaction, that this passenger soon developed the worst case of seasickness she had ever seen in a woman.

  One day in the dining room, some passengers were discussing the amenities on the ship and Bly said, “Everything is such an improvement on the Oriental. The food is good, the passengers are refined, the officers are polite, and the ship is comfortable and pleasant.”

  Among the other people sitting at the table was a shy young newly-wed, who looked up from her meal and said in a quiet voice, “Yes, everything is very nice. But the life preservers are not comfortable to sleep in.”

  The other passengers gazed at one another for a moment in shocked amazement before bursting into laughter. The young woman explained that ever since she and her husband had left home on their bridal tour they had been sleeping in their life preservers; they thought it was the thing to do aboard a ship.

  DECEMBER 23, 1889

  Hong Kong

  The Oriental entered Hong Kong Bay at seven o’clock in the morning on December 23. Not only had Nellie Bly made up the three days lost in Ceylon, she had arrived in Hong Kong two days ahead of schedule. It was the Oriental’s maiden voyage to China, and despite the monsoon on the South China Sea, the ship had broken all records for the fastest passage from Colombo to Hong Kong. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of the Oriental’s passengers sued the P&O for bringing him to Hong Kong two days early. He claimed that he had purchased his tickets to cover a certain span of time, and if the company got him in before that time expired, then they were responsible for his expenses and had to pay his hotel bill. Bly did not report how that suit turned out.)

  With her Welsh friend Dr. Brown, Nellie Bly walked down the Oriental’s gangway and to the end of the pier, where the two hired sedan chairs for the ride into town. Bly stepped backward into the chair, as she was instructed, and in an instant the two drivers had hoisted the poles onto their shoulders and she was in the air. They set off at a steady trot that reminded her of the saddle horses she had ridden as a girl back in Pennsylvania. It was a pleasantly lulling motion, and the town drifted by in a comfortable haze. Bly had not gotten much sleep—she had stayed up late the night before, one of two women amid a group of male passengers singing songs and telling stories—but even so she felt elated that morning, thanks to the Oriental’s record-breaking run: she was only thirty-nine days out of New York, and she was in China.

  The sedan drivers followed the road that ran along the shore, passing tall narrow houses crowded with Chinese families. Everything Bly saw from the window of the sedan chair—the road, the houses, the people—seemed to her unclean; even the drivers themselves looked to her like “dirty fellows, their untidy pigtails twisted around their half-shaven heads.” She did not, though, pay much attention to the passing scenery; her single desire in Hong Kong was to leave it as quickly as possible.

  The sedan drivers turned off the main road onto one of the narrower roads that wound along the hillside; before long they had stopped in front of the offices of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company. Hurrying inside, Bly asked the man behind the counter, “Will you tell me the date of the first sailing for Japan?”

  “One moment,” he said after a small but discernible pause, and then disappeared into an inner office. Soon he had re-emerged with another O&O agent, who introduced himself as Mr. Harmon. Bly repeated her question to him.

  “What is your name?” Harmon asked.

  “Nellie Bly,” she answered in some surprise, wondering why he needed that information to answer her question.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, ushering Bly and Dr. Brown into his office. The agent, she thought, seemed strangely nervous. Everyone settled into chairs, the men hitching up their trousers, Nellie Bly arranging her skirt. Harmon said, “You’re going to be beaten.”

  “What?” said Bly, her confusion deepening. “I think not. I have made up my delay.”

  Harmon shook his head. “You are going to lose it.”

  “Lose it? I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t you having a race around the world?”

  “Yes, quite right,” Bly said. “I am running a race with time.”

  “Time? I don’t think that’s her name.”

  “Her?” Bly had begun to think that this Mr. Harmon might perhaps be unbalanced; she briefly wondered if she dared wink at the doctor to suggest the advisability o
f making good their escape.

  “Yes, the other woman,” Harmon said. “She is going to win. She left here three days ago.”

  Bly stared at him. She said, “The other woman?”

  “Yes, did you not know? The day you left New York another woman started out to beat your time, and she’s going to do it.” Her editor, he said, had offered $2,000 to officials of the Occidental and Oriental line to have the Oceanic leave San Francisco two days early. The officials had not done so, but they had agreed to do whatever they could to ensure that their steamship reached Hong Kong on time so that she could catch the English mail ship bound for Ceylon. If she had not made that ship she would have been delayed ten days in Hong Kong. “But she caught the boat and left three days ago,” Harmon said, “and you will be delayed here five days.”

  Bly could feel a panic beginning to rise inside her. With great effort she forced herself to smile. She said quietly, “That is rather hard, isn’t it?”

  “I’m astonished you did not know anything about it,” the agent said. “She led us to suppose it was an arranged race.”

  “I do not believe my editor would arrange a race without advising me. Have you no cables or messages for me from New York?”

  “Nothing.”

  There was a silence in the room; the sounds of commerce drifted in from the outer office. Bly murmured, “I do not understand it.” She thought over what the agent had told her. “You say I cannot leave here for five days?”

  “No, and I don’t think you can get to New York in eighty days.” The other woman, Harmon told her, intended to make it there in only seventy. She was carrying letters addressed to steamship officials at every port requesting that they do everything possible to speed her journey. “Have you any letters?” he asked Bly.

  “Only one, from the agent of the P. and O., requesting the captains of their boats to be good to me because I am traveling alone. That is all.”

  Harmon looked at her sympathetically. “Well, it’s too bad,” he said at last. “But I think there is no chance for you. You will lose five days here and five in Yokohama, and you are sure to have a slow trip across at this season.”

  Just then a young man in a white uniform walked into the room. Mr. Harmon introduced him as Mr. Fuhrmann, the purser from the Oceanic, the steamship on which Bly was scheduled to travel to Japan and the United States. Fuhrmann had black eyes and a pale complexion, and he clasped her hand firmly and said, “I went down to the Oriental to meet you. Mr. Harmon thought it was better. We want to take good care of you, now that you are in our charge, but unfortunately I missed you. I returned to your hotel, and as they knew nothing about you there I came here, fearing that you were lost.”

  “I have found kind friends everywhere,” Bly said, gesturing toward Dr. Brown, who had settled back down in his seat; the doctor seemed to have been rendered speechless by the bad luck that had befallen her. “I’m sorry to have been so much trouble to you.”

  “Trouble!” said Fuhrmann. “You are with your own people now, and we are only too happy if we can be of service.” There was, Bly noted, a pleasing softness in his voice. She must not mind, he told her, if someone else got around the world in less time than she did, for everyone knew that the idea had originated with her and that others were simply trying to steal the work of her brain; whether she got in earlier or later, people would still give her the credit for having had the idea in the first place. Bly knew that the purser was trying to be kind, but she could not bear the pity she thought she heard in his words. She had been too proud to reveal to Mr. Harmon her ignorance of a matter of such vital importance; she would not now admit to Mr. Fuhrmann how painful was the thought of losing.

  “I promised my editor that I would go around the world in seventy-five days,” she said stiffly, “and if I accomplish that I shall be satisfied. I am not racing with anyone. I would not race. If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern.”

  Bly arranged for the transfer of her luggage and the monkey from the Oriental to the Oceanic and then left for her hotel. Beyond the window of the sedan chair Hong Kong passed in a blur. Five days in the city would be an eternity; then she would depart again for strange lands, on a strange ship, with no assurance of what the future would bring. Her head whirled with unexpected information. She did not believe that the editors of The World would have arranged a race without telling her, but at that moment she felt she could be certain of only one thing, which was that as a reporter she had never been bested: not by the keepers of the Blackwell’s Island asylum, not by the Lobby King of Albany, not by her headaches, and not by anyone or anything else. Nor would she be now. She would not be turned into that pitiful creature, the also-ran, creeping back too late to New York with a shamed look on her face, afraid to hear her name spoken. The race was only half over, there was an ocean and a continent yet to be crossed, and somehow she would find a way to win.

  DECEMBER 23–24, 1889

  Singapore

  NEARING SINGAPORE THE MERCURY COLUMN IN THE SHIPBOARD THERMOMETER registered temperatures in the nineties, and the air was so heavy that one seemed instead to be breathing water. The Peninsular and Oriental steamship Thames was now less than one hundred miles from the equator; many of the passengers complained loudly about the weather, but Elizabeth Bisland had decided that tropical heat was her ideal climate, producing none of the “creeping chills” that sometimes troubled her in New York. The water was turquoise and so clear that fish of all shapes and sizes could plainly be observed swimming beneath the surface; in the distance the hills were dazzling green, the line of the sky feathery with palm fronds.

  The Thames would dock in Singapore overnight to refuel and receive mail and passengers bound for Penang and Colombo. In the harbor, Bisland came ashore on a steam launch with three other passengers: a Ceylon tea planter, the old lady from Boston, and the tall blond from Oxford, flawlessly arrayed in white silk and linen, with a wide-brimmed slouch hat and a floating scarf. At the end of the pier the group hired a gharry to take them to their hotel; the carriage was pulled by a disconsolate-looking pony, and silently Bisland offered “an elaborate apology to this wretched little beast” before she could “reconcile it to my conscience to climb into the gharry, or let him drag me about at a gallop.” The road that ran along the water was crowded with people: tall Sikh policemen in khaki uniforms and red turbans, farmers walking alongside heavy-shouldered white bullocks hitched to carts filled with coconuts and pineapples and mangoes, barefoot Chinese laborers dressed only in short blue breeches, wealthy native merchants riding in jinrikishas, and English officials in gharries. The Malays had silken black hair and very white teeth and skin that gleamed in the sun. Men and women alike had long hair twisted up at the nape of the neck; most wore clothing that consisted of only a few yards of red cotton fabric artistically draped about the body, as though intended more to adorn than to conceal. Emerging from a side street Bisland was startled by the passing sight of a fat old woman just out of a bath, gray hair knotted up carelessly and wearing only a towel; after a moment she was relieved to see that it was in fact an elderly Malay man in conventional businessman’s attire.

  In town, most of the houses were made of lime-washed brick, and most had been built without windows, to keep out as much as possible of the sun’s heat and glare. The inside of Bisland’s hotel offered cool, pleasing dimness, with cloistered arcades and a loftily vaulted dining hall where potted palms swayed in the breeze made by huge fans revolving overhead. The guests were dressed all in white, like brides or debutantes: tall men in linen suits and pith helmets; slim girls in muslin frocks, their cheeks pink from the heat and their blond hair curled in damp ringlets about their brows and necks; imposing British matrons with the haughtiness of old Rome in their bearing, who carried themselves as the mothers and wives of conquerors. Bisland arrived during the midday meal called tiffin; young Indian waiters in tunics and turbans brought out rolls on banana leaves and platters of rice and curry that th
ey served with spoons made from large pink shells. She sat with three soldiers, two of them young subalterns with “the sappy red of English beef still in their cheeks” on their first tour of service in the East. Rather than curry they ordered beef with beer; they mopped their faces from time to time with handkerchiefs and listened to the talk of their superior officer, who was dressed much like them but for the gold epaulets on his shoulders. The tropical sun had long ago burned the red English beef out of him, leaving him as dark and lean and dry as jerky; he drank a little iced brandy and soda, ate a bit of curry and a few pieces of fruit, and seemed to pay no attention to the heat. “He has no enthusiasms,” Bisland tartly noted, “he has no interests except duty and the service, and he does not think any brown or yellow person in the least pretty or pleasant.” His tone was gloomy, full of the disillusionment brought by years of colonial rule, and she could tell that the subalterns listened with respect but not enthusiasm, not wanting anything to dampen the pleasure they took in their own youthful fervor.

  Bisland’s room in the hotel, at it turned out, was right next to the dining hall. It was a very large but austere room, with a stone floor and the simplest of furnishings; the high iron-framed bed offered only a thin hard mattress, no top sheet, and a pillow filled with straw. One of the two doors opened directly onto the dining hall, the other onto the lawn. The doors were jalousies with wooden blinds and no locks; still, she assured herself, no one would intrude.

  But that night, when Elizabeth Bisland got into bed and blew out the candle, she almost immediately thought she heard something moving inside the room. She caught her breath and listened. There was unmistakably a sound, and it was coming from somewhere below her, near the floor; it was a heavy, stealthy, animal rustling. The realization ran through her like an electric current: there must be a tiger in her room. A tiger could simply push open that unlocked door and come in from the lawn; beyond that carefully tended patch of green stretched untold expanses of jungle. It was an axiom often repeated among the British in Singapore that the local tigers killed, on average, one Chinaman per day. The sound was now moving closer to the bed. Her skin felt icy cold; she could barely breathe. Tigers, she knew, did their hunting after dark. She understood that she should not call out or make any sudden moves, but it seemed just as foolhardy to lie defenseless in bed; she did not even have a top sheet to draw over herself. The room was hot and black and perfectly still, other than that ominous scratching on the stone floor and the thudding of her heart against her ribs. Beyond the blinds of her door the hotel was just as dark and silent; for a wild moment Bisland imagined that the tiger had already eaten everyone else in the hotel. The darkness was only to the tiger’s advantage, for he could see through it while she could not. She would strike a match, and that way, at least, perish in the light.