Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Carefully, hardly daring to move, Bisland reached for the box of matches on her bedside table. She struck a match and lit the candle, and found herself staring into the face of a huge gray rat. In New York rats were tossed into pits and killed by fox terriers as a spectator sport, but this creature would surely hold its own against any terrier. It had glossy fur and a big belly and a pointed snout, and its eyes were small and black and unnervingly calm. For a terrifying moment Bisland and the rat stared motionless at each other, each appraising the other’s intentions; then the rat turned its attention back to her shoes and stockings, running its snout over each in turn, flicking its long scaly tail behind it like a riding crop. Its examination completed, the rat scurried up her dressing table and began sniffing through her hat and gloves. Bisland watched in mixed horror and relief; the rat presented no mortal danger, she knew, but there was something unspeakably terrible about seeing it paw through her clothes like that. Still, she had no intention of attacking the rat, and the rat, for its part, seemed entirely uninterested in her; so, she finally decided, the best response to an unwelcome guest was simply to ignore him. She blew out the candle and fell asleep to the sound of rustling silk.

  THE NEXT DAY ELIZABETH BISLAND and the other three passengers from the Thames hired a carriage to take them to the bungalow of the local chief of police, a personal friend of the blond from Oxford. They drove through the hills beyond the town, passing the governor’s residence, an immense white palace built by Indian convict laborers on the site of a former nutmeg plantation. The earth along the roadside was a deep red, the trees above it a bright green, and overhead was a sky like blue lacquer; far below them the beaches were frilled with white foam, and palm trees leaned over the water, Narcissus-like, to see their own reflections. Everything around her radiated a brilliance and intensity that she had only ever seen before in precious stones. It was in Singapore that Bisland noticed for the first time how in the tropics the nervous system seemed to become heightened, like a substance expanded by heat: the eyes able to perceive undreamed-of possibilities of hue, the skin sensitive to the faintest movements of the air, the sense of smell so acute that the fragrance of even distant flowers seemed as strong as if they were held in the hand.

  The chief of police was dressed in white and was himself as lean and brown as all of the longtime British officers in Singapore; he gave his personal waiter instructions for the tea service in fluent Malay. It was said that no other Englishman in Singapore could equal the police chief in his knowledge of the Malay language, and as a result part of his mandate was to conduct negotiations with the sultan of Jahore whenever the potentate was unhappy about something. None of the chief’s subordinates could understand what he said while he was in consultation with the sultan, but he always returned with the desired concessions and was thus presumed to speak the language convincingly and with eloquence. “He has learned in his score of years in the East great gentleness of voice and manner,” Bisland would later write, “but underneath it is felt at once the iron texture of this man whom the natives regard with undisguised respect and fear.” He was, after all, the man to whom the power of colonial discipline had been entrusted on this island, who possessed the keys to the prisons, who had at his disposal the bamboo canes used for flogging those thought to have disobeyed the Crown’s rule.

  After a pleasant tea with the police chief, Bisland and the others visited the nearby botanical gardens and then spent a few hours wandering through the town’s shops and museums before returning to the ship. In the harbor, a flotilla of native canoes clustered around the Thames, their owners offering passengers deals on shells, pineapples, parakeets, monkeys, and other native species; the shell boats were packed with specimens as carefully arranged and attractively displayed as those in a museum case. Some of the smaller canoes contained Malay children dressed in breechcloths, who called up to the ship for coins. “Massa, massa, massa!” they cried in their broken English. “Now, massa! I dive very good, massa!” Some of the Thames’s passengers, Elizabeth Bisland among them, had earlier changed a few shillings into native currency, which they now flung by the handful into the waters of the harbor. Bisland delighted in watching the native children “plunge over after these with little splashings like frogs, and wiggle down swiftly to the bottom, growing strange and wavering of outline and ghostly green as they sink. They are wonderfully quick to seize the glinting coin before it touches the sands below, and come up wet, shining, and showing their white teeth. We play this game until the whistle blows, and then sail away.”

  The Thames left Singapore at four-thirty in the afternoon. An hour later the ship was steaming along the palm-fringed coast when up on deck Elizabeth Bisland heard a sudden cry and the sounds of a struggle. She caught a glimpse of the naked back of a young Chinese man with hands manacled behind him; the man tried to wrest himself from a sailor’s grip, and then suddenly, shockingly, he darted to the side of the ship and threw himself overboard. He was a Chinese prisoner, Bisland learned, convicted of forgery, who was being transported to Penang to face the punishment of the native authorities. (In Penang’s prisons inmates received no food, and had to depend on the charity of loved ones to keep from starving to death. “If I feed them,” the local sultan was said to have remarked, “my whole country will want to go to jail.”) Almost as soon as the prisoner plunged into the sea the ship’s engines were reversed and a life buoy thrown overboard, but he did not reappear. Long seconds ticked by, the Thames’s crew scanning the horizon like seamen on a whaler watching for the telltale plume of spray. Finally a cry went up: in the distance one of the sailors had seen the faint outline of a head bobbing up from the surface and moving rapidly toward the shoreline some four miles in the distance. Evidently the prisoner was a very strong swimmer, and something of a magician besides, for he had managed, while in the water, to slip his handcuffs. A lifeboat full of cheering Lascar sailors, under the command of a “calm and dominant” third officer, was lowered into the water and sent out in pursuit. The sailors rowed in unison, their oars cutting through the placid sea; from the deck of the Thames, Bisland watched the dash of the lifeboat slowly converge with the dot of the swimmer. In the distance she could make out some doubling back and forth by the lifeboat, presumably as the officer shouted commands at the man in the water, and then an oar raised menacingly overhead, until at last the fugitive submitted to being pulled into the boat. The trip back to the Thames took a good deal longer than the trip out, lacking, as it did, the thrill of the chase.

  Elizabeth Bisland was among those standing by the gangway when the Chinese prisoner was brought onto the ship. One of the Lascars gripped him by his pigtail as they mounted the stairs, displaying the beaming self-satisfaction of a fisherman holding up a prize catch for a crowd’s approval. The prisoner was naked and shivering, Bisland observed, and wore an expression of stolid despair. He was taken somewhere below, and she never saw him again.

  The Thames sailed on through clear blue waters toward Penang. Sailors began to drape festive bunting around the ship; down in the galley the cooks were preparing plum cake. It was Christmas Eve.

  DECEMBER 23–25, 1889

  Hong Kong to Canton

  Nellie Bly had five days to spend in Hong Kong while she waited for the steamship Oceanic to depart, and though she wanted nothing more than to be setting off for Yokohama, she resigned herself to a few more rounds of sightseeing. The captain of the Oceanic, William Smith, came to her hotel to introduce himself; he was a youthful-looking forty-year-old Canadian, tall, slim, and handsome with deep blue eyes and a light brown mustache, and Bly laughed to herself, thinking of the heavyset, gray-bearded man she had envisioned. Captain Smith took her on a jinrikisha ride into the hills outside of town to see “Happy Valley,” the beautifully wooded hillside cemetery open to people of all faiths—Presbyterians and Episcopalians lying next to Fire Worshipers, Muslims by Methodists—the shaded walks and beautifully planted shrubs and flowers giving a feel less of a cemetery than a public
park; they rode back to town through some of the most densely crowded sections of Hong Kong, where the inhabitants reminded Bly of ants swarming over a lump of sugar.

  By her second day in Hong Kong, Bly was already tired of the usual tourist whirl and looking for something more substantive. She was well aware that the Chinese Exclusion Act had sharply restricted Chinese immigration to the United States, and she wanted, she said, “to see all of them I could while in their land. Pay them a farewell visit, as it were!” She returned to the offices of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, where she booked passage to the nearby city of Canton on the Powan, a river steamer of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam-boat Company. The O&O travel agent escorted Bly to the ship (surely not a courtesy extended to many patrons) and placed her in the charge of the Powan’s commander, Captain Goggin, a very large, red-faced American with a surprisingly soft voice, who greeted her and welcomed her aboard. Bly looked at the captain’s immense round body, his red face embedded in his shoulders and chest apparently without benefit of a neck, and decided that she had never met a fatter man; for a moment she was taken with a wild, unkind inclination to laugh, but then she thought about how pleasant and appealingly bashful Captain Goggin seemed to be, and she thought, too, about herself, and how sensitive she was about her personal appearance:

  I have always said to critics who mercilessly write about the shape of my chin, or the cut of my nose or the size of my mouth, and such personal attributes that can no more be changed than death can be escaped: “Criticize the style of my hat or my gown, I can change them, but spare my nose, it was born on me.” Remembering this, and how nonsensical it is to blame or criticize people for what they are powerless to change, I pocketed my merriment, letting a kindly feeling of sympathy take its place.

  Captain Goggin politely excused himself and left to prepare for the ship’s departure. At six o’clock that evening—Christmas Eve—the Powan set sail for Canton, some ninety miles up the Pearl River, where it would make port the following morning. The Powan was a broad white-painted ship with the multiple arcaded decks of an American riverboat, flying the Union Jack and the white St. Andrew’s cross of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao house flag. Bly visited below decks, where hundreds of Chinese passengers shared a single cabin. The room was large and noisy and reeked of the distinctive smell of opium, something like gunpowder and flowers and the sweaty musk of a horse after a run. Thick clouds of gray smoke hung above the passengers who sat cross-legged and crouching on the floor, reading, talking, playing fan-tan, cooking rice, and brewing tea; some of them even managed to stretch out and sleep amid the clamor. Like immigrants in the steerage of transatlantic steamships, the Chinese passengers had to supply their own beds (really little more than bits of straw matting) and their own food as well. An English traveler on the Powan would later write: “These ships carry, each trip, from five hundred to two thousand Chinamen, and the monthly circulation between Hongkong and Canton amounts to over one hundred thousand pigtails. This enables the Company, who practically have a monopoly of the business, to pay a very handsome dividend.”

  Upstairs, the first-class passengers were served dinner, which was delicious but memorable less for the food than for the swords and rifles that hung from all the walls of the saloon; a sword hung in each cabin as well, and Bly was informed that the captain had a pistol in his bunk. Several years earlier, a band of Chinese pirates had come aboard the Powan as passengers, and at a prearranged signal had murdered the crew—thirteen in all—and taken possession of the ship. Still, Bly and the others were assured, there had been no trouble since the company took the precaution of providing weapons for the crew and the first-class passengers; moreover, after nightfall the Chinese cabin would be sealed off from the rest of the ship behind an iron gate guarded by an armed sentry.

  After dinner Bly went up and sat by herself on the top deck. Almost imperceptibly the Powan made its way up the Pearl River. There was no moon; beyond the water, unseen rice paddies slid by in the darkness. The only sound was the lapping of the waves against the hull; to her that was the most soothing and restful sound in the world, and listening to it she was able to set aside, if only temporarily, thoughts about rivals and itineraries and time clocks and allow herself a rare moment of lyrical reflection:

  To sit on a quiet deck, to have a star-lit sky the only light above or about, to hear the water kissing the prow of the ship, is, to me, paradise. They can talk of the companionship of men, the splendor of the sun, the softness of moonlight, the beauty of music, but give me a willow chair on a quiet deck, the world with its worries and noise and prejudices lost in distance, the glare of the sun, the cold light of the moon blotted out by the dense blackness of night. Let me rest, rocked gently by the rolling sea, in a nest of velvety darkness, my only light the soft twinkling of the myriads of stars in the quiet sky above; my music, the sound of the kissing waters, cooling the brain and easing the pulse; my companionship, dreaming my own dreams. Give me that and I have happiness in its perfection.

  But away with dreams. This is a work-a-day world and I am racing Time around it.

  The Powan anchored in Canton before daybreak. The Chinese passengers, their cabin unbarred, disembarked at first light, but the first-class passengers stayed behind to have breakfast and await the arrival of their tour guide. He turned out to be a stout and prosperous-looking older man who introduced himself as Ah Cum and wished them all a merry Christmas. Ah Cum had founded the tour business in Canton more than twenty years earlier, and now he was one of the most well-known men in the city, sought out as a guide, as a British military officer in Bombay once noted, by “princes and statesmen” and “most of the names which are household words in Europe.” He wore beaded black shoes and dark blue leggings, and a short quilted silk jacket over a stiffly starched blue tunic. Beneath a round black cap his pigtail, or queue, stretched down his back. He spoke fluent English, having been educated in an American mission in Canton until the age of fourteen, and his manner was stately and dignified. But despite his prosperity, his proficiency in English, his acquaintance with distinguished men from all over the world, he himself had never set foot outside his own city: like Henry David Thoreau and Concord, Ah Cum had traveled widely in Canton.

  Ah Cum had arranged for sedan chairs to await their arrival on the pier. The chairs to be used by the members of the tour group were made of plain willow and rested on raw wooden poles; Ah Cum’s chair, on the other hand, was all black, the cover draped with black silk with tassels at the bottom and the poles made of black wood finished with brass knobs. The difference in appearance was striking, like a row of hackney cabs lined up behind a millionaire’s gleaming black-lacquered private carriage, and all the more so because the tour group’s chair bearers wore dark blue shirts and trousers while Ah Cum’s had outfits of crisp white linen gaily trimmed in red. Three men carried each sedan chair, two to hold the poles in the front and one in the back. Over time Bly began to notice that one of the bearers at the front of her chair was having trouble with the strap that helped to keep the pole on his shoulder. The strap wrapped around the base of his neck, and the skin there had been inflamed by the constant rubbing; it worried her and she watched the spot all day, wondering if it would blister. Many times during the day coolie number two (as she came to think of him) stopped to shift the position of the strap, each time turning around to indicate with agitated hand gestures that Bly was sitting too far to one side or the other. “As a result,” she wrote, “I made such an effort to sit straight and not to move that when we alighted at the shops I would be cramped almost into a paralytic state. Before the day was over I had a sick headache, all from thinking too much about the comfort of the Chinamen.”

  From the pier the tour group plunged into the narrow streets of Canton, with Ah Cum leading the way. The streets twisted and turned with no discernible regularity or pattern, and following them visitors to the city inevitably felt themselves entering a labyrinth in which every turn seemed to lead away
from the exit. There was Longevity Street, Bright Cloud Street, Street of the Ascending Dragon, Street of One Hundred Grandsons, Street of Nine Fold Blessings, Street of One Thousand Fold Peace. The group rode over a bridge across a dull, muddy stream to a little island called Shameen, where the foreign residents of Canton lived, through an entryway guarded by policemen. No Chinese were allowed on Shameen without a pass; at nine o’clock each night a trumpet sounded, a cannon was fired, all of the island’s gates were closed, and, in the words of the United States Consul General in Hong Kong, “the foreigner lies down to sleep as safe as though he were in Hong Kong or New York.”

  Unlike the rest of Canton, Shameen was green and quiet, the paved roadway, shaded by banyan trees, winding past handsome brick houses with small, well-kept gardens. “Having it entirely under their own control,” a British missionary in China wrote of the island, “the residents have made roads and planted trees, and made it look as much like a piece of England as they possibly could.” They passed an Anglican church, a boathouse, a bicycle track, an athletic club with several tennis courts behind it. Soon Ah Cum had brought them to an official-looking two-story building of brick and stucco, and seeing it, Bly caught her breath for a moment: there, over the gateway in front of the American consulate, the American flag was flying. This was the first time she had seen the flag since leaving New York, and it felt like unexpectedly running into an old friend among a crowd of strangers in a distant city; a sense of pride welled up in her, and also anger at the many slights and insults she had felt from the British among whom she had traveled, anger at how easily they claimed the right to rule the world, and especially at how they looked at the United States as an embarrassing younger brother, overgrown and clumsy and with little education or culture, who too often had to be brought into line. It was strange, she thought, but the farther she went from home the more loyal to her own country she felt. She would hear nothing more against it. Removing her cap, Bly announced to the rest of the group: