“And I could not believe you were the right girl, you were so unlike what I had been led to believe,” he said with a laugh. “I was told that you were an old maid with a dreadful temper. Such horrible things were said about you that I was hoping you would miss our ship.”
Later in the evening everyone repaired to the dining hall, where the purser had punch and champagne and oysters waiting for them. At midnight—eight bells aboard a ship—everyone rose and sang “Auld Lang Syne” with champagne glass in hand, and as the last notes died out they shook hands all around and toasted the start of a new year and a new decade. Not long after midnight the female passengers retired, and Bly went to sleep happily lulled by the sounds of the men singing “familiar negro melodies” in the smoking room beneath her cabin—among those familiar melodies, perhaps, “Nelly Bly” by Stephen Foster, the song that a Pittsburgh office boy happened once to be humming to himself as a girl waited downstairs for a newspaper editor to give her a new name: a girl with few prospects, who had spent years helping her widowed mother support her family, and one day, unexpectedly, had impressed that editor with a letter she wrote, and who could scarcely have dreamed that half a decade later she would be traveling on a steamship on the East China Sea in a dress made just for her, with countless thousands eagerly awaiting her return.
JANUARY 1–8, 1890
Colombo, Ceylon, to Aden, Yemen
IN CEYLON, ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE NEW YEAR, ELIZABETH BISLAND boarded the Peninsular and Oriental steamship Britannia, bound for Brindisi, Italy. Like the Victoria, on which Nellie Bly had sailed east from Brindisi to Ceylon, the Britannia was one of the P&O’s “Jubilee” steamships, launched by the company in 1887 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation. It was a single-screw steamship with two funnels and four masts, large enough to accommodate 410 passengers and four thousand tons of cargo. Each of the passengers was provided with his or her own bamboo lounging chair, little table, and tea service for the indispensable ceremony of five o’clock tea. Three times a week, Bisland learned, the ship’s band played for dancing on deck; the other evenings were filled with tableaux vivants and private theatricals and fancy balls. The days on the water were long and, other than the occasional cricket match on the afterdeck, uneventful. The sea rose and fell not in waves, but in steady, almost imperceptible exhalations. Sometimes, toward the end of the day, rosy clouds floated up from the horizon. They were sailing now in the regions that early mapmakers had believed were inhabited by dragons; as far as she could tell, none lurked in these waters, though sometimes a whale surfaced to send up a jet of shining spray, leaving a long green ribbon of wake behind it. Occasionally schools of fish with wings of film rose into the path of the ship, then flitted away like flocks of sparrows. But day after day, little marked the passing of the hours but the coming and going of the light.
Eventually the air became drier, the hills dotting the distant shoreline not as green. This was the Gulf of Aden, along the southern coast of Yemen. Late in the afternoon of January 8, the Britannia entered Aden harbor and cast anchor to await recoaling. The harbor was surrounded by jagged masses of black rock. Aden might be a barren volcanic outcropping, but as a coaling station and harbor from which warships could guard the entrance to the Red Sea it was immensely valuable and therefore, Bisland observed, “like Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Ceylon—like everything much worth having in this part of the world—it is an English possession.” From across the water came the rhythmic clink of sledge and drill and the chants of native laborers endlessly strengthening the town’s fortifications; they worked, a visitor to Aden had noted the previous year, “with the persistent industry of coral insects building a reef that shall endure for ever.” A white-hulled man-of-war slowly steamed out of the harbor on its way down the African coast to the Transvaal, where the Portuguese were threatening British trade at Delagoa Bay. Near the shore local boys dived for coins tossed by tourists, darting beneath the surface like minnows in search of the slowly sinking money. With their piping broken English and their playful gyrations in the water, they reminded her of the divers she had seen in Singapore just two weeks before. The skin of these boys was darker, and glistened with thick oil meant to ward off sharks, but otherwise they seemed exactly the same.
In the early evening Elizabeth Bisland and some of the other passengers from the Britannia hired a boatman to row them to shore. The landing area was separated from the beach by a long black paling; behind the fence stood a crescent of ramshackle two- and three-story stucco houses and the much larger, newly built Bank of Aden. Everything was covered by a layer of coal dust. At the landing, under a corrugated iron roof, sat a group of turbaned carriage drivers, the gharry-wallahs. The passengers hired one to take them to the Tanks, a remarkable system of ancient stone cisterns; it was, they had been told, the only sight in Aden worth seeing. The gharry was a rickety four-wheeled carriage drawn by a sleepy-looking Somali pony. They climbed up into the back of the carriage, the gharry-wallah took his seat just in front of them, and they set out on a sandy road into an astonishingly arid landscape. In three years not a drop of rain had fallen. Nothing green could live in this place; the earth was a dull gray powder that no roots could grasp. Even the rocks were cracked and faded as though withered; they were, Bisland thought, the dust and bones of a dead land.
The road wound upward from the sea to a barrier of rocks; two hundred feet above them was the British army station, a heavily fortified compound of barracks, officers’ bungalows, and a telegraph office with lines to Suez, Bombay, and Durban. The carriage rattled through a black echoing pass. On the other side of the hills Aden lay on a plain at the center of a huge volcanic crater. They could see rows of low flat-topped houses made of stone and mud, lime-washed to the whiteness of snow. In the center of town the gharry-wallah stopped the carriage and they got out. On the street, piles of elephant tusks and animal hides waited to be loaded onto camels; there were sacks of coffee beans, tins of frankincense and myrrh. Indians in scarlet and gold robes hurried past, and Parsee shopkeepers wearing the coal-scuttle hats Bisland remembered from Hong Kong. Bearded Arabs gathered at tables in front of cafés, drinking coffee and smoking the water pipes called hubble-bubbles, passing the mouthpiece back and forth. At the cafés, draped in white robes like Shakespearean actors, groups of Africans sat playing dominoes. They came from countries with names that sounded to her like the lands in a children’s storybook: Sudan, Zanzibar, Abyssinia. Long trains of camels sauntered by, the creatures’ heavy-lidded eyes and wryly smiling mouths giving them, Bisland thought, an air of evangelical superiority. Women drew well water into tall jugs, as if posing for one of the illustrated catechisms she had been made to read as a young girl.
Her carriage passed out of the town and back into the hills. Night was coming on; the disappearing sun turned the air faintly golden-green. Soon the Tanks came into view. Peoples of antiquity had carved immense cisterns out of the tall rock wall to collect rainfall; there were perhaps fifty in all, together able to hold more than thirty million gallons of water but now as dry as a bone. Though the Tanks were the product of unimaginable labor, knowledge of their builders had been lost long ago; the idea for their creation was variously attributed to King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, the Himyarites, the Phoenicians, the Persians. A broad stone aqueduct conducted rainwater from the surrounding hills down to the cisterns, which were built as a system of terraces so that the overflow from the upper level would fall and be collected by a lower one, and then another, and another; set into the clefts at the foot of the rocks, irregularly shaped masonry bowls stretched enormous thirsty mouths up to the rainless sky. The immense rock wall extended in a sinuous curve, like the belly of some ancient fertility goddess. Unlike the tropics, there was no evening mistiness of vision: the little flat white town in the distance, the turbaned figures in the streets, the sailboats moored on the glassy sea beyond could all be clearly made out through the deepening twilight. The sun’s rim dips; the sta
rs rush out: of late she often found herself thinking of the Ancient Mariner, telling his unbidden travel stories to indifferent party guests. At one stride comes the dark. In an instant, it seemed, the sky had turned black and the stars appeared. She had never seen a sky so thickly studded with stars; there were unimaginable myriads, stars beyond number, so plentiful that in places they became a wash of light, as from an artist’s brush. Beyond these high rocks stretched the immense, lonely desert. There was nowhere on earth more distant than this, she knew, no place that could possibly be less like New York.
LATER THAT NIGHT, having returned to the ship for dinner, they hired a gharry to visit the Tanks by moonlight. The moon had risen full and white, bright enough for one to read and even see colors, bright enough to blot out the stars in the sky. In the high thin air it was possible to make out the various figures that had long been read into the shadows on the moon: a frog, a rabbit, a hunchback sitting under a tree, a woman bent over a kettle, a peasant carrying a bundle of sticks on his back. It was banished Cain, some said, made to circle the world forever for his sin, near enough to see his home but never to reach it. Near the Tanks they passed a train of camels lurching away into the desert, driven by lean Arab men draped in white—such a caravan, Bisland thought, as might have gone down into Egypt to buy grain from Pharaoh four thousand years before, with nothing changed in any way. The solemn procession moved silently on. Behind them the town was as white as a pearl in the moonlight. Slowly the Tanks rose against the sky. The group dismounted from the carriage. Their footsteps and voices echoed from the empty cisterns to the surrounding hills, though they walked lightly and spoke in awed whispers. The night was utterly still, with no leaf to rustle nor insect to cry. In the silence the world grew dreamlike and unreal. Bisland thought she would feel no surprise to come suddenly among the rocks upon a gaunt, wild-eyed Hebrew prophet clothed in skins, wrestling with the unsolvable riddles of existence. It was a night and a place for such things as that.
She walked along the Tanks in the moonlight, running her hand along the deep grooves made by some anonymous ancient carver. In her whole life she had never touched anything as old as this. Traveling by locomotive and steamship, she had been brought to the past. Here in the hills she could see for miles, past the town and all the way down to the sea. In the distance the full moon made a rippling band of light on the water; it stretched to the horizon like a silver road, and in imagination it joined with the golden road across the water that had been made by the setting sun back in San Francisco. Her new friends there had called it a sign of good fortune for her trip, and that was what she had received. She could still hear those sea lions barking at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, still see them frolicking on the rocks like playful black piglets. She had tucked that scene away inside her memory, laid it up as her family had once laid up stores of grain against an uncertain future. If she desired, she could close her eyes and see it again, just as she could see the fairy robes of the sampan boatmen, or a patch of blue prairie cornflowers, or a Chinese prayer fluttering in the air, or these ghostly Tanks. It was possible, as with a child’s grab bag, to reach in anywhere and pull out a treasure; and to do so with the same sensation of wondrous delight. That was what this trip had given her—the vividness of a new world, where one was for the first time, as Tennyson had written, Lord of the senses five, where the light of night and day had a new meaning, where years of indifference could fall away like a dried-up husk and every sense respond with the keenness of faculties newborn. Even much later, she felt sure, not a line would have faded or grown dim; she would be able to recall every impression, every sensation, as though not an hour divided her from it.
It was well, she told herself, to have thus once really lived.
JANUARY 7–14, 1890
Pacific Ocean
The steamship Oceanic left Yokohama on a bright sunny Tuesday morning, with all boding well for a pleasant and, most important, rapid voyage. The chief engineer, William Allen, quickly became Nellie Bly’s strongest supporter aboard the ship. Back in November the Oceanic had broken the record for the fastest eastbound Pacific crossing, having sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco in only thirteen days and fourteen hours, and Allen was confident that the Oceanic could match its record-setting time and arrive in San Francisco on January 20, two days ahead of schedule. Indeed, Allen was so confident, and so committed to Bly’s successful return, that he ordered a rhyming couplet to be written on the ship’s engines and throughout the engine room:
For Nellie Bly,
We’ll win or die.
January 20, 1890.
Initially it seemed a safe enough prediction, for after three days at sea the Oceanic was 110 miles ahead of the pace it had set in November. On the fourth day, though, the weather turned unexpectedly foul, with torrential rains and fierce winds. Some of the officers tried to reassure Bly, predicting that the storm would last only a day, but the following day the weather was even worse. The ship plunged through the wild, roaring sea, buffeted by mountainous waves, rolling, pitching, the storm never letting up for even a moment. Chief Allen, who had been making the run from Hong Kong to San Francisco for eleven years, admitted to Bly that he had never encountered such adverse weather. Hour after hour, day after day, the rain continued to beat down on the ship. Every day Bly anxiously waited for noon, when the figures for the most recent 24-hour run were posted in the dining room; each time she hoped that the ship would have gained a few miles on the day before, and each time she was disappointed. The Oceanic’s captain, William Smith, had earned the nickname “Typhoon Bill” for the skillful seamanship with which he brought his ships safely through fearsome storms on the China seas—but even Typhoon Bill could not maintain full speed in the face of such unrelenting wind.
As the Oceanic continued to make its way eastward across the Pacific, the image that had arisen during her delay in Ceylon now began to appear to Bly again, as she pictured herself arriving late at the World offices, the famous loser of a famous race, ashamed to show her face in the city or to hear her name spoken. “If I fail, I will never return to New York,” Bly would tell the ship’s officers despondently, looking at the figures for the previous day’s run. “I would rather go in dead and successful than alive and behind time.”
“Don’t talk that way, child,” Chief Allen would always reply. Bly described Allen as “a jolly story-teller, a capital singer and a popular gentleman with both sexes,” and he seemed genuinely grieved by her distress. He assured Bly that he was doing everything in his power to help: he had worked the engines as they had never been worked before; he had sworn at the storm until he had no swear words left; he had even prayed—and he hadn’t prayed in years—that the storm might pass over so that they could get her in to San Francisco on time.
No, it was hopeless, she would lament, just hopeless.
At this point the ship’s doctor might speak up, saying in mock admonition, “Look here, Nellie Bly, if you don’t stop talking so, I’ll make you take some pills for your liver.”
“You mean wretch, you know I can’t help being blue. It’s head winds and low runs—not liver!” And then she would laugh, and so would they, and Chief Allen, who always urged her to give “one glimpse of that old, jolly smile,” would return to his engines content.
In this way Bly was daily coaxed out of her unhappiness.
After four days the storm still showed no signs of relenting. In foul weather everyone on a ship had to work harder, but none more than the ordinary seamen, who had to perform most of their tasks on deck, where the wind hit with the force of a battering ram and the rain stung like bees on every bit of exposed skin and every surface became dangerously slick with spray. A long storm was a kind of siege, against a powerful and implacable enemy attacking from all sides and at every hour of the day and night, and fought with little sleep and no dry clothes. It was enough to try the patience, and the nerves, of even the most experienced sailor, and as the days passed with no break in the weather the idea
began to circulate among the crew that the Oceanic must have a Jonah aboard—nautical parlance for something, or someone, bringing bad luck to a ship. The question was apparently being extensively discussed, and much to Bly’s dismay, it was reported to her that some of the sailors had suggested that the Jonah was in fact her monkey. There was even talk that the best remedy would be to throw it overboard.
Nellie Bly was herself superstitious (she readily admitted that she wore the gold ring on her left thumb as a kind of talisman), but she had never encountered a group as concerned with signs and omens as was a ship’s crew. Ever at the mercy of the wind and the water, through their numerous superstitions—the received wisdom of untold generations—sailors sought to make sense of a life filled with random misfortunes. A voyage should not be begun on a Friday, or a nail driven on a Sunday. Sneezing to the left was unlucky, though sneezing to the right was not; this was apparently a very old superstition, as the Athenian general Themistocles was said to have once delayed his ships from sailing into battle for fear of the bad luck brought about by a wayward sneeze. Whistling, when done correctly, could raise a wind, but when done in a wind could bring a hurricane. Cats and ministers were very bad luck: “Always a head wind,” sailors liked to say, “when a parson’s aboard.”
Eighty Days Page 32