Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  Riding in a sedan chair from Shameen into Canton (Illustration Credit 13.1)

  “That is the most beautiful flag in the world, and I am ready to whip anyone who says it isn’t.”

  No one said a word. With some satisfaction she noticed that one of them, an Englishman, glanced at the Union Jack flying over the nearby British consulate, but furtively, as if he was afraid to let her see.

  AH CUM LED THE GROUP back into the center of Canton. It was a city of more than a million inhabitants, where the main streets were no more than twelve feet wide, the side streets barely allowed the passage of sedan chairs, and the alleys were so narrow that when two people met one of them had to step into a doorway to let the other go by. Horses were unknown on these streets; everything that had to be moved was carried on human shoulders. Thin vertical signs of crimson and gold hung in front of the storefronts, while overhead, awnings stretched along both sides of the street, blocking out the sun; Bly thought at first that she was being carried through the aisles of some great indoor market and was astonished to realize that they were actually outdoors. There was a powerful smell of standing water and rotting fish and decaying vegetables and garbage swept by shopkeepers into the street. Some of the streets were devoted to a single industry, full of jade merchants, silk manufacturers, coffin makers one after another; others were a medley of food stalls selling candy and peanuts and little yellow bean cakes, fishmongers with tubs of live fish in front, butchers’ shops that displayed not only pigs and chickens and ducks but also storks and snakes and rats preserved in brine, and, most disturbing to Western eyes, skinned dogs trussed up like roast pigs. (To the shocked tourists among his parties Ah Cum quietly but firmly defended traditional Chinese practices; when asked, for instance, why Chinese women bound their feet he replied simply that European women pinched their waists, which was far more injurious.) Some of the larger and more well-kept curio shops catered exclusively to foreign visitors and were overseen by proprietors with the tact and persuasive powers of diplomats. Still, foreigners were something of a rarity on the streets of Canton, women especially, and often men rushed out of the shops to look at Bly as she passed by; unexpectedly, the Cantonese women seemed very taken with her gloves, some of them bold enough actually to reach out and touch them, gazing in wonder at clothing meant to be worn on the hands.

  Soon the group had arrived at a pottery where two women were arranging half-dried pots into rows. Ah Cum instructed the group to dismount from their sedan chairs, and he led them behind the pottery and through a crooked back alleyway that opened into another yard, no more than seventy-five feet long by twenty-five feet wide. This, Ah Cum told them, was Canton’s execution ground. Here those condemned to death knelt before the executioner with arms folded and neck extended, much as they might have, under other circumstances, kowtowed before the emperor. Bly noticed that the earth in one section of the yard was colored red.

  “It’s blood,” Ah Cum said, scuffing at the ground with his beaded black shoe. “Eleven men were beheaded here yesterday.” Ordinarily, he explained, ten or more criminals were executed at a time; each year some four hundred prisoners were killed. In a single year of the Taiping Rebellion, 1855, more than fifty thousand rebels had been beheaded on that narrow strip of earth; the smell of death was said to have been discernible from half a mile away.

  While Ah Cum was talking, Bly noticed some wooden crosses leaning up against a high stone wall; imagining that the crosses were used in religious ceremonies before the executions, she asked Ah Cum about them. When women were condemned to death, he told her, they were bound to those crosses before being cut into pieces. This form of execution was called ling-chi, in which the body was sliced apart with a sword, starting with fleshy parts like thighs and breasts, then proceeding to nose and ears, fingers and toes, on and on until only the bleeding trunk remained; in the hands of a skilled executioner the procedure was performed so quickly and deftly that the victim was dismembered and disemboweled while still alive. Male prisoners, said Ah Cum, were beheaded unless they had been convicted of especially serious crimes such as multiple murder or patricide, in which case they were subjected to ling-chi, given the death of a woman, to bring them greater dishonor. He asked, “Would you like to see some heads?”

  Bly assumed that Ah Cum’s question was rhetorical, that he was exaggerating for effect; New York tour guides were renowned for the highly colored tales they told to out-of-town tourists. “Certainly,” she replied, affecting a casual tone, “bring on your heads.”

  Ah Cum indicated that she should give a bit of money to a man standing nearby. Bly did so, and without a word he went over to a large earthen jar and reached in and pulled out a human head. It was an unexpected and gruesome sight, but Bly did not record her reaction to it, noting only, “Chinamen are very indifferent about death; it seems to have no terror for them.”

  Not far from the execution ground was the jail, where Bly was surprised to see the cell doors left open. Inside, the prisoners had thick, heavy wooden boards fastened around their necks like collars; the boards prevented them from ever lying down or resting their heads on the floor, which inevitably led to exhaustion and, in most cases, death, and they stared at the visitors with glassy, uncomprehending eyes. Bly no longer felt surprised at the unbarred doors; there was no need, she understood now, for locking them. By the jail was the courthouse, an imposing stone building where the group was shown various instruments of punishment and torture, lengths of split bamboo for caning, thumbscrews, pulleys on which prisoners were hanged by their thumbs, each device seemingly more brutal and ingenious than the next. In a small sitting room she was introduced to some judges who appeared to be gambling at fan-tan, while in another room several more judges lounged about smoking opium. Bly made no secret of her shock at what she was seeing, and though she did not mention his response, Ah Cum might well have noted that the opium being smoked by the judges had likely been transported to China on a Peninsular and Oriental ship, much like the one on which Bly herself had arrived in Hong Kong.

  The P&O’s history, in fact, was intimately bound up with the opium trade, and indeed the company’s early expansion into the Far East had been subsidized by a British government looking for efficient means of bringing to China the opium produced in colonial India. At the time China was almost entirely self-sufficient, having—as the Englishman in charge of the Chinese customs service once remarked—“the best food in the world, rice; the best drink, tea; and the best clothing, cotton, silk, fur,” not to mention world-class porcelain, silk, lacquer ware, wallpaper, objets d’art, and handwoven cloth said to rival anything produced by the new mechanized looms of Lancashire. Opium was about the only product that the Chinese wanted and could not provide for themselves, and Great Britain needed it to make up the country’s balance-of-payment deficit with China: the opium smoked in Canton would pay for the tea drunk in London. In 1838 the viceroy of Hunan estimated the number of opium smokers in China to be four million (some estimates put the number at twice that), and that year, under the leadership of an aggressive new high commissioner, Chinese authorities began arresting thousands of opium smugglers, brokers, pushers, and addicts. When in 1839 China confiscated and burned chests of opium worth more than £2 million, Great Britain declared war.

  It was a war, lamented the educator and historian Thomas Arnold, “so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude,” and he beseeched his countrymen, “Cannot anything be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring?” The answer, apparently, was no. Not long after the declaration of war a remarkable flotilla appeared on the Chinese coast, consisting of three 74-gun warships, two 46-gun frigates, five 28-gun frigates, eight corvettes with ten to eighteen guns apiece, and four armed steamers provided by the East India Company, plus twenty-seven transport ships carrying 3,600 soldiers. Against them the Chinese sent out a makeshift army recruited in large part from unemployed tea porters and a fleet consisting o
f Chinese junks and rented fisherman’s boats. The outcome was inevitable, and when the Opium War was concluded in 1842, the Treaty of Nanking gave Great Britain ownership of Hong Kong in perpetuity and opened up five Chinese ports—Canton among them—to British trade.

  Though opium remained officially prohibited, after its military defeat the Chinese government could no longer enforce its own drug laws. Traveling in China in 1869, the American William Perry Fogg (the namesake, it was sometimes claimed, of Jules Verne’s own Phileas Fogg) noted that Great Britain had “forced the accursed drug upon the Chinese at the cannon’s mouth. The Emperor of China, when asked to license its sale, replied in words that should mantle the cheek of every Englishman with shame. ‘It is true,’ said he, ‘that I cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison. Gain-seeking and corrupt men will, for profit and sensuality, defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive a revenue for the vice and misery of my people.’ ” Fogg concluded disgustedly, “So Christian England deals with heathen China!”

  It was impossible to tour Canton without visiting some Buddhist temples; the city had more than eight hundred, the most popular being the Temple of Horrors, located on the Street of Benevolence and Love. Old, sick, palsied beggars cried for alms as the group ascended its stone steps; inside, a courtyard was crowded with peddlers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers, and, oddly, with dentists who advertised their experience by displaying long strings of extracted molars, looking like strange tribal necklaces or the vertebrae of some immense reptile. Inside the temple, a row of brick sheds with wire netting in front displayed carvings representing the punishments of the Buddhist hell that awaited sinners: one man was being sawed in half lengthwise, from his head to his feet; another was strapped to the ground with his feet in the air while a demon bastinadoed him; others were being stabbed with knives, hacked to pieces with swords, boiled in oil.

  Later Ah Cum took the tour group to a park with a few feeble, stunted trees in it, where thin black pigs rooted energetically in the ground. They walked through the Gate of Equity into a large quadrangle that looked something like a railroad cattleyard, with long rows of low whitewashed buildings. The buildings were divided into 11,616 cells, each about five and a half feet long by three and a half feet wide and containing one low board for a bed and a slightly higher one for a desk. This was the Examination Hall, where every three years more than eleven thousand students (“all male,” Bly noted tartly) underwent the demanding three-day examination in Confucian texts that earned a few of them—sometimes no more than 150—a highly coveted job in the civil service; the many thousands who failed would face another three years of study. Afterward they ate lunch in a nearby temple, to the beat of a tom-tom and the shrill of a pipe; it was, Ah Cum told them, the Temple of the Dead. Not far from the temple he ushered the group past a high wall, where an unexpectedly bucolic sight lay on the other side: a sheet of black water undisturbed by even a breath of wind, in the distance low overhanging trees and a small phalanx of long-legged white storks. It was a pretty scene but also somehow mournful, and as they headed back to the Powan, Bly was conscious of what she described as “an inward feeling of emptiness.” She supposed that the feeling arose from her regret about not being in New York for Christmas dinner, but there was no denying that it had been a long, difficult day; Ah Cum had led her through a world of beheadings, torture, addiction, destitution, and damnation, her Virgil on a guided journey through a kind of hell, though this journey, unlike Dante’s, took place not during Easter Week but on Christmas Day, and this hell was aboveground and all too real.

  NELLIE BLY’S CHRISTMAS, The World informed its readers, “will be pleasantly spent in Hong Kong.” She might even find some turkey and plum pudding, as “there are enough Europeans and Americans to give the good old Yule festival a friendly introduction into the land of the tea chests and red-tongued dragon.” A cablegram had been sent to her care of the American consul in Hong Kong, conveying best wishes from the entire World staff for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. As for the readers of The World, they “may devote their Christmas to figuring out Nellie Bly’s time.”

  The readers seemed to need no such encouragement, as thousands of guesses continued to pour into the World offices each day, some with accompanying letters explaining the methods used to arrive at them. On Staten Island, a reader who signed herself simply “Mrs. C.” submitted her guess according to a personal numerology that Joseph Pulitzer himself might have appreciated. “I have been waiting for the 8th of December before guessing on the Nellie Bly tour,” wrote Mrs. C., “that date being the anniversary of my wedding day, and No. 88 being the number of the house in New York City where I spent many happy days after the wedding. I have ever since that time called the figure 8 my lucky number, and will try and see how near it will bring me luck in this contest.” John J. Blair, a teacher in Winston, North Carolina, reported that forty-three of the eighth- and ninth-grade students in his school were “deeply interested in Miss Bly’s trip around the world”; each had made a guess about the exact time in which she would complete her journey, and from those forty-three guesses the average time had been calculated and turned into a single guess. “It was their wish that I, their teacher, should use the guess,” Mr. Blair wrote, “and it is needless to say, so great is my confidence in their guessing abilities, that I am looking forward with great pleasure to my trip to Europe next summer.”

  DECEMBER 26–28, 1889

  Hong Kong

  After returning from Canton, Nellie Bly still had three days to spend in Hong Kong, and she occupied her time as best she could. One day she went up Victoria Peak, the highest mountain on the island; visitors took a newly opened elevated tramway part of the way up the mountain and then rode in sedan chairs to the top. At a distance of nearly two thousand feet the hundreds of junks and sampans that dotted the bay looked like toy ships in a child’s bathtub. The view, though, was said to be even better at night: after dark each of the ships set out its lantern and the black water of the bay glimmered like a sky filled with stars, so that looking down from above, one seemed to be suspended between two heavens.

  In town Bly visited the Chinese shops of the Queen’s Road; entering each one she felt a little thrill of pleasure at the gold and silver jewelry, the ivory carvings, the painted fans and sandalwood boxes displayed on the shelves. She couldn’t help but feel greedy, but she confined herself to only a few purchases. In one of the jewelry shops she had a pin specially made for her, a narrow rectangle—it looked to her something like a slip from a Chinese laundry—imprinted with Chinese ideograms that translated as Success to your novel enterprise. Elsewhere she found a huge-legged Chinese temple chair, finished in brass and brilliant red lacquer, that she would carry with her all the way back to New York; by this time, with few connections remaining on her trip, she had clearly given up her intention of traveling with only a single bag. In another shop she was surprised and delighted to find packs of chewing gum for sale, and she bought enough to last for the remainder of her journey. (The World’s Excursion Editor had assured Nellie Bly’s young admirers in Mount Vernon, “girls, she does not chew gum,” but in fact she was an inveterate gum chewer and sought it out wherever she could on her travels.)

  At last December 28 arrived and Bly was able to board the Occidental and Oriental steamship Oceanic—the very same ship on which Elizabeth Bisland had sailed west from San Francisco—scheduled to arrive in Yokohama, Japan, on January 2, the forty-ninth day of her trip. She would have, maddeningly, five days to wait in Yokohama before the Oceanic set sail again for San Francisco. On board Bly was relieved to hear that her monkey had been safely transferred to the Oceanic from the P&O ship Oriental. Finding the stewardess, Bly asked her about the monkey. The stewardess replied drily, “We have met.”

  Bly was now alarmed to see that the stewardess’s arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I did nothing but scream,” the stewardess replied; “the m
onkey did the rest.”

  DECEMBER 31, 1889

  East China Sea

  Before the Oceanic was launched in 1871, the partners of the White Star line had sent a letter to the ship’s first captain, Digby Murray, containing this stern instruction: “The most rigid discipline on the part of your officers should be observed, whom you will exhort to avoid at all times convivial intercourse with passengers, or with each other, and only such an amount of communication with the former as is demanded by a necessary and businesslike courtesy.” Four years later, though, the White Star chartered the Oceanic to a new steamship line, the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, and by the late 1880s its captain and crew were renowned for the conviviality and good humor they brought to their ship, qualities that were never more in evidence than on New Year’s Eve. Early that evening, Nellie Bly and the other first-class passengers sat with several of the Oceanic’s officers in the Social Hall, talking and laughing and telling stories. Captain Smith brought a tabletop organette down to the Social Hall, and he and the ship’s doctor took turns cranking out tunes on it. A passenger from Yokohama taught everyone an amusing song with the simplest of lyrics: “Sweetly sings the donkey when he goes to grass, sweetly sings the donkey when he goes to grass, Ee-ho! Ee-ho! Ee-ho!” Bly confided to Captain Smith that before he had arrived at her hotel in Hong Kong she had pictured him as a short, stout old man with an iron-gray beard. “You were so different from what I imagined you would be,” she told him.