Bly discussed the issue with Chief Allen, who strongly advised her not to surrender the monkey. Just then someone nearby reminded Bly that there were two ministers aboard the Oceanic. Bly thought about this for a moment and then declared, in a quiet but firm voice, that if the ministers were thrown overboard she would say nothing about the monkey.
Thus, Nellie Bly reported later, her monkey’s life was saved.
WHEN, IN NOVEMBER 1889, the Oceanic set the record for the fastest crossing from Yokohama to San Francisco—thirteen days, fourteen hours—it surpassed the record previously held by the White Star steamship Arabic, which in 1882 had made the run in thirteen days and twenty-one hours; and in turn the Oceanic’s mark would be overtaken the following year by the Pacific Mail steamship China, which arrived in San Francisco only twelve days and eleven hours after setting sail from Yokohama. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, accounts were carefully kept of the fastest crossings between all major ports; record-breaking times were printed in newspapers and almanacs and were well known among the traveling public. Passengers liked the prestige that came with traveling on the fastest ships, and they wanted the shortest possible ocean voyage, despite the fact that the greater speed produced by the engines also produced greater noise and vibration throughout the ship. “It is better to be comfortable for seven days than to be miserable for six,” a devotee of the older ships grumbled in 1890, but in this opinion he was decidedly in the minority.
On the North Atlantic, where most of the business was, the competition was especially intense, and a ship that made the fastest crossing was awarded the “Blue Ribbon of the Atlantic,” purely an honorary title but one much coveted by steamship lines. When a particular line took the Blue Ribbon, notice was taken in the boardrooms of its rivals and plans quickly drawn up for new and even faster ships. Hulls were streamlined, boilers expanded, engine velocity increased. “To-day,” a writer for Scribner’s Magazine noted in 1891, the naval architect “is faced with a competition that did not exist in the past, and his ears are constantly assailed by the cry for higher speed; and whereas a few years ago it was a common impression that the maximum limit had been reached, we have witnessed, during the past three or four years, performances by ships, both large and small, of speeds then undreamed of.” Only two decades earlier, a speed of fourteen knots was considered exceptional; by the late 1880s seventeen and eighteen were standard, and plans were being made for ships with speeds of twenty knots and higher. Modern technology was producing power that would have boggled the minds of earlier generations of sea-farers: the 19,500 horsepower of a typical large steamship of the day was equivalent to an ancient galley with 117,000 men working the oars.
The Oceanic had been designed to burn 58 tons of coal per day at regular cruising speed; when steaming at full power it required 70. This was by any standard a huge amount, but in fact was highly economical compared to newer ships like the Augusta Victoria, which burned an average of 220 tons of coal per day. A New York Times editorial called this amount “almost appalling,” but even it was modest in comparison to the latest class of ships that regularly consumed 300 tons of coal every twenty-four hours—“and if they could burn more,” a correspondent for The Cosmopolitan wrote in 1892, “it would be gladly supplied for the sake of an extra knot or two in the day’s run.” On these ships, as on the railroads, speed was a product of steam, and steam was a product of fire, and fire was a product of coal. Before setting out on its voyage a passenger steamship would be loaded with hundreds of tons of coal, all of it brought aboard by means that had barely progressed since the time of the pyramids. A small coal barge pulled up alongside the steamship; a bucket was lowered from the ship, and men aboard the barge shoveled the coal into the bucket. The bucket was unloaded into the ship’s hold, where trimmers delivered the coal in wheelbarrows to bunkers distributed around the ship, and then, when it was needed for burning, brought it from the bunkers to the fire room, in the lowest depths of the ship.
Though Nellie Bly constantly urged the ship’s engineer to make more speed, she seems never to have actually gone down to the fire room where workers shoveled the coal that produced that speed—just as, for instance, she never went into steerage to investigate the conditions in which the passengers there had to cross the ocean, the very topic about which she had proposed to write for The World when she first sought a job on the paper. By this point in the journey she had essentially stopped functioning as a reporter. Gone were the curiosity, the perceptiveness, the moral sense that had been on such abundant display, for instance, during her months in Mexico, when she used her dispatches to refute all the American clichés about dirty and dangerous peasants and courageously decried official corruption and the press’s complicity in perpetuating it. On her race around the world she had neither the time nor, apparently, the inclination to delve beneath surface appearances. Her most passionate and concerted attention was devoted to her own itinerary; and when that itinerary forced her to remain in a place for long, she did not seek out compelling news stories or interview local people of interest, and only reluctantly did she participate in sightseeing expeditions on which, more often than not, she was repelled by what she saw. The Hindu temples of Penang were filthy (they seemed not to have heard, Bly noted drily, that cleanliness was next to godliness); the beggars of Port Said “thrust their deformities in our faces to compel us to give money”; she was “disgusted with all we found worth seeing” in Kandy; the Chinese of Canton and Hong Kong were, in her description, “the dirtiest and shabbiest” people in the world. “The Japanese are the direct opposite to the Chinese,” Bly later elaborated. “The Japanese are the cleanliest people on earth, the Chinese are the filthiest; the Japanese are always happy and cheerful, the Chinese are always grumpy and morose; the Japanese are the most graceful of people, the Chinese the most awkward; the Japanese have few vices, the Chinese have all the vices in the world; in short, the Japanese are the most delightful of people, the Chinese the most disagreeable.”
Earlier in the trip Nellie Bly had rightfully objected to an Englishman making sweeping generalizations about the United States based on only a single day spent there. This was, it seemed to her, an imperial mind-set, but by the time her trip was over it was one she had claimed for herself.
THOUGH NELLIE BLY never went down to the Oceanic’s fire room to watch the stokers at work, plenty of passengers on other steamships did, carefully making their way down iron ladders smeared with oil to prevent corrosion, the sounds of clanging metal growing ever louder, the vibrations stronger, the air hotter with each descending level. In the fire room—or, as it was colloquially known, the stoke hole—one could see, most dramatically, the human costs of the devotion to speed. It was a vast, murky, shadowy space, the dark intermittently broken by silver cones of light from overhead lamps, the air unbearably hot and foul, swirling with smoke and reeking of sulfur. Standing before long rows of massive furnaces, stripped to the waist, their skin blackened by coal dust, dozens of stokers endlessly shoveled coal. The larger and faster steamships of the day required more boilers to deliver steam to the ship’s engines, which in turn required more furnaces, making the stoke hole even hotter; the temperature inside the room often rose to 130 degrees and higher, and in at least one case was measured at 167 degrees Fahrenheit. When a stoker opened a furnace door there was a great roar and a bright, scalding tongue of flame leaped out, the furnace like a fire-breathing dragon that had to be constantly appeased. Averting his face as best he could, the stoker would toss in several shovelfuls of coal, rake them to a uniform depth for most efficient burning, remove clinkers and ashes, and then slam the door shut again. Over the course of a four-hour shift the iron shovels themselves grew hot, sometimes hot enough to blister skin; even far from a ship, one could recognize a stoker by the black lines that crisscrossed his hands like a road map, where coal dust had gotten into the blisters as they healed. The trimmers trundled in and out with their barrows, dumping the coal in piles on the iron
floor; the stokers called for more coal not by shouting for it—for the shouts would go unheard in the din of the room—but by banging their shovels on the furnace doors. The heat, the fire, the sulfurous smells, the sweating, exhausted men bathed in the flickering light of the flames: it was like a scene from a vision of hell as painted by Brueghel.
Each stoker routinely shoveled two tons of coal a day, stopping every few minutes to gasp for breath under one of the gratings that carried a thin stream of fresh air down from the deck. This luxury was dispensed, though, only when the arrow on the steam gauge allowed it; when steam pressure dropped below a certain level there was no time for rest. The steam must always be kept up, for the sake of the engines and the day’s run; and much of the time a member of the crew was behind the stoker shouting at him to work harder: “Shove it back! Shove it back, damn you! You mutton-headed son of a sea cook, shove it back!” The ship’s engines needed more coal when operating at full power, and so conditions in the stoke hole were at their worst when the desire for speed was most intense—as when a Blue Ribbon was in sight, or, for example, when the ship’s chief engineer had committed himself to bringing one of the passengers into port ahead of schedule. “These are horrible suggestions of ours,” The Engineer magazine declared in 1890, “but, if every man connected with the management of a steamship had to work one voyage below in the fire-room or the engine-room, they would tell people who shouted for quick passage to go to Davy Jones.… Flesh and blood cannot stand it, and this is a solemn fact.” Often, when more speed was needed, the stokers worked literally until they dropped. After a record-setting voyage by the new steamship Majestic, a New York Times article noted, “It was interesting to learn that on the trip not a single fireman had been carried out of the fire room overcome by heat,” and further pointed out, “This is an altogether different state of affairs from that usual on board the greyhounds.”
Typically stokers worked for four hours and then rested for eight, for the duration of the voyage. At the end of their shift, they would go up on deck for some fresh air, where, amid the passengers in crisp linen and white muslin, they stood by themselves in their dungarees, dark flannel shirts, and heavy boots: exhausted, silent, sullen creatures squinting in the daylight. Nowhere else on earth was the contrast between rich and poor so great, or so sharply delineated, as on the deck of a luxury steamer. Writing about the stokers clustered together at the end of a shift, a steamship passenger observed, “They were tough-looking characters. Their faces, blackened with coal dust, and streaked with sweat, had a dulled, animal-like look, and they seldom smiled. It was killing work.” The stokers looked, in fact, very much like the men who had mined the coal they now fed to the furnaces. From digging to burning, coal—the life-blood of the nineteenth century—joined miners and stokers in a desperate cycle of misery and disease. In 1886, Dr. Hobart Amory Hare of the University of Pennsylvania published a book with the provocative title New and Altered Forms of Disease, Due to the Advance of Civilization in the Last Half Century. About the stokers on “the large ocean steamships” Dr. Hare noted:
Working, as these men do, in the hold of a ship and surrounded by fires on all sides, the only ventilation coming from above, it cannot be wondered at that they strip to the waist and fairly drip with sweat, and when relieved go to the deck, there to get a whiff of fresh air, and perhaps a fatal chilling of their bodies. The mortality among these men is frightful, and the writer has been informed by ship’s surgeons that few “stokers” live more than two years after entering upon their duties, provided they stay at work with fair regularity.
As early as 1860 the medical journal The Lancet was calling the stoke hole “a cavern of torture and a hot-bed of disease.” Stokers suffered from heat stroke, muscle cramps (known at the time as “stokers’ disease”), rheumatism, pneumonia, pleuritis, catarrh, and a host of other ailments. The stokers lived in a world of coal dust, and the fine gray powder that covered the houses and streets of Aden and Port Said inevitably settled into their lungs as well. Over time many stokers, like miners, developed a continuous hacking cough; those so afflicted, a medical report of the time concluded, were “dyspneic and short lived.” Autopsies would find that their lungs were a mottled black and had the texture of old leather. Later the disease would be called black lung, but this was a term that had not yet been invented.
Lung disease was a slow, lingering death; another death well known among stokers was much shorter and less painful, though also of a character that medical authorities might term “occupational.” The extreme heat of the furnaces caused some stokers to collapse, but others were instead driven temporarily insane, and when this occurred it was not uncommon for the delirious stoker to rush up on deck and throw himself overboard, his mind filled only with the overpowering desire to relieve the terrible heat of his body. Down he would plunge, from the top deck past the passenger decks and into the cooling sea. Sometimes, if the cry of “Man overboard!” had gone up promptly enough, the captain would order lifeboats to be sent out after the drowning man, but they were rarely able to reach him in time, for the stoker was weak and the steamship moving too fast.
JANUARY 16, 1890
Brindisi, Italy
On January 16, after eight days at sea, the Peninsula and Oriental steamship Britannia anchored in Brindisi, Italy. The air here had a crispness that Elizabeth Bisland recalled from autumns in New York, a bracing chill that tingled on the skin without penetrating the bones. Brindisi—the ancient Brundisium of the Romans—was a town more than twenty-five centuries old, but the buildings visible from the wharf seemed merely worn and shabby, with none of the nobility that came with great age. Seeing them, Bisland decided that she couldn’t agree with the provincial official in Plutarch’s Lives, who insisted that he would rather be first in Brundisium than second in Rome. In any case, her efforts were now directed at being the first out of Brundisium, as her train was scheduled to depart within the hour. Although the Britannia would eventually continue on from Brindisi to Portsmouth, in the south of England, the India mail train (the same train Nellie Bly had taken from Calais to Brindisi after her meeting with Jules Verne) ran straight through Italy and France, in so doing gaining five days in the delivery of the mails. With room for only twenty passengers, space on the train was always at a premium, but it was possible to reserve a berth by cabling ahead. Elizabeth Bisland had done this before boarding the Britannia back in Ceylon, and she did not anticipate any problems—provided, that was, that she could get her luggage off the Britannia and through customs on time.
This was much easier said than done. The ship was in an uproar that morning, full of noise and activity as might attend the preparations for a small infantry assault. On the top deck, steamship officers were shouting out orders to the crew, directing passengers to the appropriate ship or train or local hotel; a long line of anxious, fidgeting passengers waited with their luggage for the customs officials who had just come aboard and were beginning the process of inspecting the bags and registering them to their final destinations. Porters gathered up the checked and registered bags, hurrying them down the ship’s gangway. For those passengers, like Elizabeth Bisland, traveling on the India mail train, their steamer trunks would be sealed and registered through to London. The tickets for the India mail carried these decisively worded instructions: “All baggage by this service must be registered in London through to Brindisi, and vice versa; no luggage whatever will be admitted into the cars, except a small handbag and a bundle of rugs. It has been found necessary to rigidly enforce this rule.” Once her trunk had been registered, Bisland rushed off to the train station to pick up her tickets and send a telegram back to New York.
JOHN BRISBEN WALKER received the telegram that evening. It said that Bisland would be leaving at 1:45 in the afternoon on the India mail train from Brindisi. The news was cheering, for it meant that she should be able to connect with the steamship La Champagne sailing from Le Havre, scheduled to arrive in New York on January 26. The Cosmopolitan�
��s business manager, A. D. Wilson, told a reporter from the St. Louis Republic, “The steamer is due in this city the following Sunday and the company has promised us that every effort will be made to secure a quick passage.” Wilson said that he now felt confident that Bisland would win the race around the world.
“Nellie Bly, however,” the reporter reminded the paper’s readers, “is due in San Francisco on the 22nd of this month. It is a four days’ ride to New York, which will bring her here on the same day on which Miss Bisland arrives. A few hours either way will, therefore, probably decide the race.”
JANUARY 16–18, 1890
Brindisi, Italy, to Villeneuve–St. Georges, France
At the Brindisi train station Elizabeth Bisland bought her tickets and she sent her cable, and she returned to the mail train ten minutes before the scheduled departure—only to discover that her luggage was not there. Rushing back to the ship, she found the missing bags still on deck with an Italian customs official who insisted that they had not yet been properly inspected and demanded the keys from her. She protested that there was no need to examine her steamer trunk, as it was under seal to be sent straight through to England, but the customs man was adamant and she had no choice but to relent.
By now Elizabeth Bisland had been traveling for sixty-three days, and over that time various additions to her wardrobe had so enlarged the contents of her trunk that only by very careful packing, and the ship’s stewardess sitting down on the lid, had she managed to shut it at all. Now she needed to unpack it all again, and out it came, the inkstand and the sewing kit and everything else, her dresses and nightdresses and underwear and slippers and shoes, the shirtwaists she had bought in San Francisco and the silk gowns she had bought in Yokohama (the “Garments of the Dawn” did not look quite as lustrous when strewn about the deck of a ship), all of it subject to the scrutiny of the customs officer. “I hope I did not forget the dignity a gentlewoman should preserve under the most trying circumstances,” Bisland would later remark, “but I fancy that my tones, while low, were concentrated.”
Eighty Days Page 33