Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  All in all it was, the Tribune observed, “a pretty piece of feminine revenge.”

  ON JANUARY 23, The World printed the final coupon for the Nellie Bly Guessing Match, as the paper had already announced that guessing would cease once Bly reached Chicago. The paper now established the rules for the official determination of Bly’s final time: her race around the world would be considered at an end when she stepped from the train at Jersey City. (Earlier the finishing point had been the World offices in New York, but it was decided that this unnecessarily extended her journey, as she had left from Hoboken, New Jersey, and passed through New York Harbor on her voyage east.) At the moment that both of her feet touched the platform, three official timekeepers, provided with synchronized stopwatches, would record the time to a fifth of a second. Two of the timekeepers were from the Manhattan Athletic Club and one was from the New York Athletic Club, and each, The World assured its readers, was “thoroughly experienced in timing all sorts of events.” If two of the three stopwatches marked the same time and the third differed, the time marked by the two watches would be accepted as final; if all three differed, the official finishing time would be the one in the middle. This was “strictly in accordance with the rules laid down by the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States, which are conceded to be eminently just and fair.”

  If Nellie Bly’s final time was not guessed exactly, then the closest entry to it would be declared the winner; in the event of a tie, the prize would be given to the submission that had arrived first. If the guesses had been received on the same day, the prize would be awarded to the one that came from farther away, as it had presumably been mailed earlier; if the guesses came from the same distance away, then the winner would be the one that had been taken from its envelope first. It was by no means inconceivable that such an outcome might occur. By this time The World had already tabulated more than six hundred thousand ballots.

  JANUARY 24–25, 1890

  Chicago to Pittsburgh

  The Atlantic Express set out from Chicago, the broad belt of parallel tracks that had commenced at the station slowly dwindling, the tracks diverging one by one, like a river branching into tributaries, until finally there was only one, running south toward Indiana. The train rode through endless miles of flat terrain unbroken by any house or tree, a vast grass prairie that a writer once described as having a face but no features. The land was, in the phrase of the day, as level as a ballroom floor, but eventually small undulations could be seen at the horizon, and then patches of bare forest began to appear, and near them farms marked off by knobby fence posts, and then, farther on, small manufacturing towns with foundries and tanneries and mills, and rows of sturdy-looking houses made of wood and brick. It was country that seemed impervious to the passing news of the outside world, but when the train stopped for lunch at Logansport, Indiana, several hundred townspeople were waiting for Nellie Bly at the station. When a young man jumped onto the rear platform of one of the cars and waved his hat and shouted “Hurrah for Nellie Bly!” they laughed and clapped and cheered her on as though she was one of their own. When she stepped down from the train platform the crowd fell back to let her pass, and Bly made her way through to the dining room of Johnston’s Hotel, where she was joined by Charles Watts, the local division superintendent for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his young daughter Hortense, who shyly presented her with a bouquet of flowers. Among the many lunch courses set out before her was a salad on which the inscription Success, Nellie had been cut out of beets. Outside, the crowd pressed in front of the windows to watch her eat.

  As it happened, Dr. Frank Ingram, the assistant superintendent of the women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island, was originally from Logansport, Indiana. In her World exposé Bly had praised the young doctor as the only compassionate official she encountered in the asylum, and in New York, where they were sometimes seen together, it was rumored that they had become romantically involved. Now the local reporters pressed Bly about a new rumor: that she and Ingram were engaged to be married. Bly seemed surprised, and amused, by the claim, and though she acknowledged that she knew Dr. Ingram “intimately,” she denied that there was any truth to the rumor. Still, less than a week later, newspapers in both Cincinnati and Philadelphia, quoting “reliable sources” in Logansport, would run an item claiming that Nellie Bly and Dr. Frank Ingram were engaged.

  The closer the train got to New York, it seemed, the louder and more demonstrative the crowds became. Though it was after eight o’clock when the train arrived in Columbus, Ohio, more than five hundred men and women were waiting at the station to greet Nellie Bly. It was an outpouring with no precedent in recent memory. The Columbus station-master told a reporter from Pittsburgh, “When ex-President Cleveland passed through here in ’87, and in ’88 when President Harrison utilized the same railway portals, I thought I had seen crowds and heard noise that came near the limit of pandemonium, but this ovation to Nellie Bly tonight tops the record.” The people were lined many deep along the entire length of the train platform and into the station itself, and as the train stopped they called to her to come out so they could see her; and when she appeared at the rear of the train they surged toward her with such speed and force that a phalanx of blue-suited policemen formed themselves into a wall in front of the car, and so they had to content themselves with giving three cheers several times as Bly smiled and waved her cap and bowed at them. Noted the Cincinnati Commercial, “Miss Bly is about twenty years old, of medium build, with dark hair, piercing eyes, and a bewitching smile. She captured the crowd as soon as she appeared.”

  The train remained in the station for only a few minutes, just long enough to change engines, and then set off east again. Only three stops remained before Pittsburgh, in Newark, Dennison, and Steubenville. In Steubenville a crowd of two hundred was waiting for her in the cold and dark. It was then 12:34 A.M., the beginning of the last day of her journey. Inside the Ilion, a sense of anticipation hung in the air; the talk was carried on in low tones. In the distance, the orange glow from open furnaces and coke ovens seemed to turn the dark river into molten lava. “There is the Ohio,” Bly observed at one point, glancing out the window. “I’m nearing dear old Pittsburgh.” Before long she excused herself to rest for a couple of hours. It had been an especially long, eventful day—the meeting with the men of the Chicago Press Club already seemed ages ago—and she had gotten almost no sleep the night before. She wanted to be alert for the friends and colleagues she expected would be there to greet her in Pittsburgh.

  With that she disappeared into her sleeping compartment, leaving the stateroom to the journalists, railroad officials, and other invited guests along for this part of the journey. She could hear their voices through the curtain. One of them, a manufacturer from Pittsburgh, was saying that her achievement of circling the globe was not merely, as some contended, “a clever play for personal notoriety and the advertising of two metropolitan journals” but was in fact “of incalculable value to the civilized world.” To illustrate his point, he explained, he needed only to call to mind his fellow Pittsburgher, Andrew Carnegie, who had recently taken his own around-the-world trip, though of course not against time but simply for pleasure and recreation; supposing Mr. Carnegie were, say, in Hong Kong and had received word by telegram that the Edgar Thomson steel plant in Bessemer had been destroyed by fire and that his presence was needed back in Pittsburgh at the earliest possible moment—would he, in planning his return trip, give even a trifling thought to Jules Verne’s imaginary schedule, or would he instead turn to the standard schedule now established by Miss Bly? Eventually the men’s voices faded away, replaced by the rhythmic clacking of the wheels beneath her, as unmistakably industrial a sound as the threshing of an automated loom, but somehow musical, too, like the rat-a-tat of a snare drum in one of those bands that had serenaded her all the way across the country. It had been a welcoming party unlike anything she had ever expected, surely the grandest any American woman had ever received
.

  Years before, she had told Erasmus Wilson, her old friend from the Dispatch, that she had four goals in life: to work for a New York newspaper, to reform the world, to fall in love, and to marry a millionaire. The first she had manifestly accomplished; perhaps now she might add the second as well. The world went on little changed from before, of course, but perhaps it had been drawn together just a bit more tightly by the girdle she had thrown around it. And she had shown for all time that a woman with pluck, energy, and independence could find her way to the ends of the earth and back just as well as a man. Later that day, she knew, she would see her mother at last, her mother who had always dressed her in pink as a child so that she would learn how to attract attention and who had struggled so desperately after her husband’s death. The family had had a business, real estate, a large house, and then without warning Judge Cochran had taken ill and died and it all suddenly disappeared. Later on there was another husband, for a while at least, and somehow things got even worse. A woman should not depend on a man for her money: that was the lesson Pink Cochrane had repeated to herself every time she had to wash someone else’s dishes or pick up after someone else’s children, the refrain she sang in her head as she tramped up and down the streets of Pittsburgh in search of work. Now, as Nellie Bly, she was returning in a private railroad carriage bedecked with flowers.

  The train pulled in to Pittsburgh’s Union Station at ten minutes past three in the morning. Bly stepped onto the rear platform of her car, and with tears in her eyes she waved to all those who had come in the middle of the night to welcome her; below her was a sea of men in heavy coats and black derby hats. Inside the Ilion, she was warmly embraced by relatives and friends, and a delegation of local newspapermen offered hearty congratulations to their former colleague. The reporter from the Pittsburg Press gave her his silver press badge to wear; delighted, Bly pinned it to her dress and promised to return it when she got to New York. That was the dress in which she had raced around the world; that dress, the reporter noted silently, was now historical.

  JANUARY 19–29, 1890

  Atlantic Ocean

  “THE WEATHER ALONG THE TRANSATLANTIC STEAMSHIP ROUTES,” THE U. S. Signal Service noted in its monthly review for January 1890, “was exceptionally severe.” The assessment was, if anything, understated. News reports of ocean crossings that month have the eerie, majestic quality of gothic tales: stories of ships sailing into port with decks encased in ice six inches thick, their riggings hung with icicles like immense crystal chandeliers; glittering ice fields the size of small cities; hurricane-force winds blowing for days on end; hailstones rattling against decks like shotgun pellets; mountainous black waves that appeared without warning, smashing masts and flooding cabins and washing overboard everything that wasn’t tied or bolted down. To subdue the ocean’s force some of the larger ships hung from their bows large canvas bags filled with an especially heavy, thick oil known as “wave quelling oil”; the oil seeped out of small holes punched in the bags, blanketing the churning water and reducing the crest of the waves. By the judicious use of oil bags one steamer managed to sail safely through a storm for twelve hours, though outside the charmed ring of oil, noted one awestruck correspondent, “the ocean was like a boiling caldron.”

  Day after day ships straggled into port with cracked shafts, broken masts, split sails, decks swept clear from stem to stern. Nearly every ship had its own frightening tale of wind and water. Two crew members of the bark Janet Crown had been washed overboard and drowned; the steamer Yorkshire had three seamen blown from its rigging into the sea, only one of whom managed to survive. The Cunard steamship Catalonia, sailing to Queenstown from Boston, ran into a hurricane; according to one news report, the ship lost four lifeboats, its bulwarks and deckhouses were badly battered, and its “davits were twisted like wires.” Water flooded the funnels, putting out the fires in seven furnaces; and a steam pipe exploded, killing three stokers as they slept.

  Another Cunard steamship, the Gallia, lost five lifeboats; the ship’s staterooms were flooded several feet deep (a London news service reported that “the consternation of the passengers, suddenly aroused from sleep, was awful”); the engine room skylight was smashed; the mainmast and foreyard were sprung loose; part of the starboard rail was broken off and the port rail entirely carried away. The greatest damage to the ship had been caused by a single cataclysmic wave that, in the captain’s estimation, was more than one hundred feet high. “He had never seen one like it in thirty-five years’ seafaring,” a newspaper reported upon his return, “and doesn’t want to see another.”

  The British ship Loch Moidart, bound for Hamburg, came ashore instead in Holland, its sturdy hull leaking like a cracked vase; those on board reported that thirty members of the crew had been washed overboard and all but two had drowned.

  The French Line steamship La Champagne, which Elizabeth Bisland had hoped to meet at Le Havre, ran into the same North Atlantic storms that assailed so many other ships that January. Like the others its decks were swept, its riggings ice-coated, its railings damaged, but the steamer managed to sail through a maddening week of calms and squalls with no loss other than a few lifeboats. On the eighth day at sea, Harper’s Weekly reported later, “her people were treated to a display of nature’s handiwork which they are not likely to forget as long as they live”: south of Greenland near the Newfoundland coast, La Champagne encountered three massive icebergs amid a vast field of heaving ice. The icebergs were tinted the bluish-green of a tropical sea; the tallest rose some two hundred feet above the waterline, its sides as intricately faceted as a square-cut diamond. On board the passengers marveled at the shifting effects of light and shade as the ship slowly plowed its way through the ice field until the icebergs were out of sight. The weather was fine for the rest of the voyage, and La Champagne arrived at Sandy Hook—the spit of land that set the outer limit of New York’s waters—at 6:32 P.M. on January 27. The normally fast and reliable steamer was two days overdue; if Elizabeth Bisland had taken La Champagne, as planned, her trip would have been completed in seventy-four days and thirty-two minutes.

  Instead, Bisland was on board the Cunard steamer Bothnia. The ship was still out on the Atlantic Ocean, but no one knew exactly where; it had left Queenstown on January 19 and had not been seen since.

  JANUARY 25, 1890

  Philadelphia to Jersey City

  At 1:24 in the afternoon the crowd inside Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station caught the first glimpse of the Atlantic Express No. 20 as it rolled over the Schuylkill River. The news ran like a shiver of electricity through the five thousand people waiting there, who watched in growing excitement as the train came up the raised roadbed beside the massive stone viaduct. It stopped before the Seventeenth Street signal tower, where a shifter engine nimbly detached the rear car of the train and backed it up fifty feet; the Atlantic then rolled in under the iron-roofed train shed to Track 3, coming to a halt with a great wheeze and last puff of white smoke as the shifter pushed the Ilion onto a special track. The entire operation took only thirty-six seconds, and Nellie Bly was in the depot just as the electric clocks were indicating 1:25, precisely on time.

  Those fortunate enough to have been permitted past the gates of the depot and onto the platform itself immediately surged toward the carriage like river water rushing around a stone, engulfing it on all sides. “The Pennsylvania Railroad Company has never had a train mobbed,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported the next day, “but the Nellie Bly special was attacked and captured by an eager crowd as soon as it stopped in the station.” There was laughing, shouting, jostling for position. A charge of anticipation had entered the air, and a slight undercurrent of danger; in such close quarters, crowds this size, even the happy ones, could quickly turn ragged and mean. At one edge of the crowd a group of black-helmeted policemen brandishing tasseled batons struggled to clear a path for a man in a silk top hat. When at last the man got to the front platform of the railroad car he jumped aboard and rea
ched back to help up the woman who followed him, a bespectacled older woman wearing a simple black dress with a black velvet wrap. The man was Julius Chambers, managing editor of The World, who had been at the pier in Hoboken to see Nellie Bly off and had traveled now to Philadelphia to accompany her on the triumphant last leg of her journey. The woman, who passed through the crowd entirely unrecognized, was Nellie Bly’s mother.

  Inside, the car was an opulence of brass and leather and polished wood, the air scented with flowers and loud with conversation. Mary Jane Cochrane edged her way through the car, past all the well-dressed men she did not know, until she saw her daughter: wearing the same blue dress as the last time she had seen her, but sun-darkened now and with a splash of pink across her nose, just as when they were traveling together in Mexico. “Oh, Nellie,” she said, taking her daughter into her arms.

  “Mother!” Bly murmured, in a voice thick with emotion. “I’m so glad!”

  The two held each other for long seconds, the men in the car quieting and stepping back from the embrace as a sacred thing. Outside, though, the assembled thousands were calling her name, and soon Nellie Bly appeared, her eyes still filled with tears, and stood at the rear platform of her car smiling and waving as she silently took in the crowd’s acclaim; there was, in the din, little else she could do. Then, as always happened, those in the front raised their hands up to her. Immediately below was a man named Harry Heston, who was the cashier of the restaurant in the Broad Street Station, and he beamed and warmly clasped Bly’s hand, a reporter observed, “as if they had been friends for years.”