Nellie Bly, it seemed, had the essential quality of celebrity: people she did not know felt that they were her friends.
The crowd shook Bly’s hands so vigorously that Julius Chambers began to fear that they would pull her off the car, and for several minutes a World reporter held Bly from behind as she leaned down from the platform of the train. Then they heard a shout from inside the car to clear a passage for the Reception Committee—the large group that had arrived that morning from New York and which included, in addition to Julius Chambers and Mary Jane Cochrane, Bly’s close friend the writer and feminist Cora Linn Daniels, several reporters (among them James Metcalfe, the violet-eyed journalist from Life magazine who had often squired Nellie Bly around town the year before), civic leaders, and prominent business executives. Also in the group was John Montgomery Ward, the popular shortstop for the New York Giants. Like Bly, Ward had grown up in western Pennsylvania, and he had recently completed a barnstorming tour of the world with an all-star baseball team; he had asked that a place be reserved for him on the train, a request that The World was happy to grant. The group had come in from New York in the Pullman car Beatrice, which had now been attached to the Ilion along with a new engine for the final stage of the trip. From the rear platform Bly gave a last wave goodbye and went in to greet her distinguished guests, and within moments the train was moving again, the massed brick spires of Broad Street Station growing smaller and the noise of the crowd replaced by the rumble of steel wheels on steel tracks.
On the way to the junction at Germantown, where the Philadelphia contingent would leave the train, the city’s recorder of deeds gathered everyone together and presented Nellie Bly with a huge bouquet of La France roses. “We admire your courage, pluck and endurance,” he declared, “and in presenting these flowers I desire to express the wish that your journey through life may be as bright and beautiful and successful as this wonderful one which is just drawing to a close.” Bly asked the recorder to tell the people of Philadelphia that she appreciated their kindness and to thank them on her behalf, and he assured her he would. The delegation from Philadelphia came up to shake hands with her and offer their best wishes, and Bly distributed roses to the assembled reporters, joking and answering their questions and signing autographs for them. One of the autographs she signed on copy paper, and a facsimile of it appeared the next day in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
After Germantown the train rode through a crest of hills into New Jersey. The trees on the hillside were bare now; at Princeton the clustered blue and gray slate roofs of the College of New Jersey rolled across the window like a moving diorama. The train passed New Brunswick, Rahway, Trenton, suburban towns with wide streets and handsome houses. From the dining car, where lunch was being served, Nellie Bly looked out at the people waiting at each of the stations. The train, they must have known, would not even be stopping; they just wanted to wave hello and call a welcome and perhaps catch a glimpse of the young globe-trotter about whom they had heard so much. “I feel a little like a presidential candidate,” Bly had remarked back in New Mexico, when her cross-country trip, with all the bouquets and brass bands, was starting to take on the festive trappings of a whistle-stop tour. Now, though, she was actually drawing crowds as large and enthusiastic as the ones that turned out for presidential candidates, and even for sitting presidents: “Poor Nellie’s hand was worked harder than President Harrison’s limb was ever pumped,” one Philadelphia newspaper had noted. As she sat with her mother and Cora Linn Daniels in the dining car, Bly sipped her champagne and picked at her salad, too excited and exhausted to eat. She had barely slept since setting foot on the western edge of the United States, and now the eastern edge was just ahead. The conversation at the table was desultory; there was so much to say it was difficult to know how to begin. Of course she was delighted to be returning home again—and ahead of time—but this train ride had been so enjoyable she almost hated for it to end. It was approaching three o’clock in the afternoon. She wondered where she would be at this time the next day, and the day after that. For the last two and a half months her only concern had been to keep moving forward; now she had arrived at the bottom of the itinerary, and she wasn’t sure what came next.
When lunch was over and the plates were taken away they could hear Julius Chambers, the chairman of the Reception Committee, calling for order in the stateroom next door. Nellie Bly came into the car, smiling almost shyly in the gaze of the crowd; her mother and Cora Linn Daniels took a seat, but Bly herself remained standing. Julius Chambers had kind, dark eyes and a thick mustache beginning to gray; he wore a dark suit and tie with the high shirt collar of the day. As the managing editor of The World—where he had just been given a new three-year contract by Joseph Pulitzer—he felt comfortable commanding attention in a large group of men. He thanked everyone for being present on this extraordinary occasion. “Nobody since the sands of time began to run,” he said, “has ever had the pleasant and remarkable task of introducing a young lady who has made a tour of the world in seventy-two days.” Truly that was a remarkable travel time, but there was nothing more remarkable about the young lady than the great seriousness with which she had accepted and fulfilled her assignment; it had been, for her, always business. “And now,” he continued expansively, “she has returned to us again and tens of thousands of people welcome her back. She has sailed over three oceans, traversed two continents. She is here, ladies and gentlemen, here, as ever, the same happy, earnest, faithful Nellie Bly.”
The room burst into loud applause, and when it finally subsided Bly said, “I don’t know how to thank you for so kind a welcome, except to say that there is one land on this earth and that is America.” She spoke in the distinctive Pennsylvania hill town lilt that many in the room had not heard before. “This attention that I am receiving is very much of a surprise to me. I thought there would be just a finishing of the trip at New York and that would be the end of it all, but ever since I arrived at San Francisco I have been delightfully received, and I thank you for this kind attention.”
When she finished there was more applause, and three cheers and a tiger. Julius Chambers then gave the floor to Leicester Holme, the private secretary for Mayor Hugh J. Grant of New York, who read a statement from the mayor offering his congratulations and welcoming Nellie Bly most heartily. Afterward they listened to the president of the Mutual Reserve Life Insurance Association, who presented Bly with a miniature inkstand in the shape of the world, followed by the president of the New York Medico-Legal Society, representatives of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Press News Association, and finally John Montgomery Ward, tall and handsome, who stood up to pay tribute to Nellie Bly as “a representative of the highest type of American Womanhood.”
With the speechmaking completed and the outskirts of Jersey City coming into view, John Jennings began to organize Bly’s possessions for delivery to her home. He was, she confided in one of the reporters, a “modest little man who doesn’t say much but does great work.” In the final minutes those in the carriage with Nellie Bly settled into a thoughtful silence. Up ahead was the finish line; something was about to occur, something considerable, but she did not know exactly what it would be. It had been cold in Philadelphia that morning, but the day had grown steadily warmer. The sky was low and gray, with the dramatic dark clouds of a Winslow Homer seascape. Moving dots appeared on the low horizon that, as the train drew closer, turned into gulls circling over the water. The Pennsylvania Railroad depot was right over the horizon, just past the vanishing point of the tracks.
THOSE ON THE TRAIN could sense it before they could see it: a vast dark presence, many thousands of people, ten thousand certainly, perhaps as many as fifteen; it gave off a hum that rose and fell like the swell of cicadas, but deeper-voiced, and more insistent as the train came around the long, gentle curve that led to the western end of the depot. The train appeared and at once all of the wooden barriers that had been erected to keep the crowd organized came down; from afar it
looked as though a tidal wave was sweeping across the railroad yard from the ocean behind, drowning everything in its black waters. Inside, the crowd poured in through the baggage room, through the men’s and ladies’ waiting rooms and the gentlemen’s smoking room; the balcony was lined several rows deep. It was the largest gathering in which any of them had ever taken part—any but the Civil War veterans among them. There were men wearing bowlers and derbies and top hats, women in boaters and bonnets, children bareheaded and in caps; they had come on foot and by carriage and ferry and some of them, like Nellie Bly herself, by train, because they wanted to see for themselves the black-and-white checked overcoat and the fore-and-aft cap and the leather gripsack, and to welcome home the daring American girl who had raced around the world speaking only English and taking little more than the clothes on her back and had beaten in reality what an Englishman had done only in a Frenchman’s imagination.
On the platform, just where the train’s rear car was expected to stop, Mayor Orestes Cleveland of Jersey City stood with a large basket of cut flowers for the guest of honor; he held them high above his head so that they would not get crushed by the crowd that pressed around him. Next to the mayor the timekeepers from the athletic clubs kept their synchronized stopwatches at the ready. Nellie Bly had been instructed by telegram to emerge onto the top step of the carriage as the train came near the station, and with the speed slackening on the last stretch of track she did so. As the train rolled into the depot she grasped the handrail a bit more tightly. The train stopped and she stepped down, lightly, quickly, first one foot, then the other. The moment her second foot hit the ground, the three timekeepers clicked their stopwatches in unison. The race was over.
The time was fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds past three o’clock in the afternoon. Nellie Bly had completed her trip exactly 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds after she began it. No one had ever gone around the world as fast.
Instantly the scene dissolved into pandemonium; in the words of one young New Jerseyite, the crowd “ripped the atmosphere up the back.” Those inside the depot cheered as loudly as they possibly could, the din reverberating off the walls and back onto itself, a physical force, it seemed, strong enough to rattle the tin roof. A World man raised a handkerchief atop an umbrella and someone watching in the station’s Western Union office shouted “Now!” A telegraph switch was flipped, sending a signal across the harbor to Battery Park at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, where Captain Hubert Wycherly of the John Pain & Sons Pyrotechnics Company had set up a line of mortars. Moments later the roar of a ten-cannon salute split the air, and then, from farther away, in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, where the signal had been transmitted to a telegraph pole on Myrtle Avenue, there was another cannon report, followed by another, and another, and several more in close succession. The call was immediately taken up by the boats in the harbor, the tugs and barges and ferries all sounding their steam whistles; on and on it went, the shrill of the whistles and the deep percussive booms of the cannon, a celebration both thrilling and slightly frightening, like the extended final salvo of a Fourth of July fireworks show, when the pyrotechnicians empty their stocks into the air and the crowd rises to its feet cheering and the explosions seem as if they will never end. “No chieftain returning from a tour of conquest,” wrote one of the reporters, “ever received a more royal welcome.”
As Nellie Bly stepped off the train, Mayor Cleveland rushed forward to greet her and with a courteous bow handed her the basket of flowers; she in turn nodded and bowed and smiled her thanks. The noise in the depot was too great for any words to be exchanged, and so the ceremony of presentation and acceptance had to be performed in the broad gestures of Kabuki. Someone took the basket from Nellie Bly, and the mayor and a retinue of city officials standing behind him motioned the crowd to quiet so that he might deliver his welcome address. Orestes Cleveland was a large man with a broad pate and mournful bulldog eyes, and he drew himself up to his full height and began to speak. “The American Girl will no longer be misunderstood,” he declaimed, his voice pitched somewhere between an oration and a shout. “She will be recognized as pushing, determined, independent, able to take care of herself wherever she may go.” He turned to address Nellie Bly directly. “You have added another spark to the great beacon light of American liberty that is leading the people of other nations in the grand march of civilization and progress. Passing rapidly by them, you have cried out in a language they could all understand, ‘Forward!’ and you have made it the watchword of 1890. The American people from every part of this great and glorious country shouted back to you, ‘Forward! And God speed you on your wonderful march!’ ”
There was a good deal more, enough that the printed transcript of the speech in the next day’s newspaper would run to ten paragraphs. But no one could hear Mayor Cleveland, or in any case wanted to listen to him, and eventually he gave up trying to speak and introduced Nellie Bly.
Beneath her cap, Bly’s hair was attractively disheveled, and when she smiled, her sun-browned skin set off the brilliant white of her teeth. She looked radiant, triumphant. “From Jersey to Jersey is around the world,” she called, “and I am in Jersey now.”
Nellie Bly’s tumultuous reception in Jersey City (Illustration Credit 16.1)
That was all she said, but no more was needed. “Hurrah for Nellie Bly!” the crowd shouted back again and again. Women fluttered their handkerchiefs and men waved their canes; bouquets were tossed down to her from the balcony. Then the march to the ferry terminal began. The police formed a circle around Bly and Mayor Cleveland—Bly’s mother and Cora Linn Daniels had already gone on ahead—and by pushing and shouting and waving their batons they tried to navigate the five hundred feet of passageway down to the landau that waited by the terminal. Standing among the policemen Bly was nearly lost from sight; the crowd strained on tiptoes to catch a glimpse as she passed by. Every inch of ground was contested; the farther the group struggled along the passageway the more tightly packed the crowd became, and after no more than one hundred feet progress had ground to a total halt, at which point two of the larger policemen lifted Nellie Bly bodily and, using their shoulders as a kind of battering ram, carried her the rest of the way to the terminal. There she was helped up into the carriage, Mayor Cleveland scrambling onto the seat beside her; the driver took hold of the reins, and the horse—surely spooked by the swirling, noisy crowd—made its way haltingly down the pier. “When the carriage started for the ferryboat the stampede of people in the same direction was something terrible,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, “men, women and children being pushed down and fairly trod upon.”
The carriage was driven down the gangplank directly onto the ferry, which a thousand people had already boarded. They had been waiting for a long time, and they were disappointed that they could not see Nellie Bly as she sat inside the landau. As the ferry set off across the harbor someone began a chant; it was modeled on the one from President Cleveland’s re-election campaign in 1888, “Four—four—four years more!” except that now it went, “Open—open—open the coach! Open—open—open the coach!” Soon the chant had spread across the top deck of the ferry, becoming so loud and insistent that the driver was ordered to comply, and he stepped down from his seat in the front and threw back the top of the landau—“and when he took the roof off the carriage,” a World reporter observed, “the crowd nearly took the roof off the ferry-boat.” All the way across to New York, Nellie Bly stood in the carriage and waved to the crowd around her, the air filled with happy cheering and the whistles of all the ships in the harbor.
At the Cortlandt Street pier in New York another large crowd had gathered, as loud and enthusiastic as the one that had seen her off in Jersey City. West Street, along the river, was almost impassable, and Cortlandt Street itself was choked with people. The carriage took several minutes to navigate the four blocks to Broadway; there it turned left for the short drive uptown to the World office on Park Row. As she
had on the ferry, Bly stood all the way, smiling and waving her cap and bowing right and left to the immense throngs on the sidewalks, sometimes handing out flowers to the men and boys who walked or ran alongside. One man, Bly recalled later in some amazement, kept asking her to touch his hand. She called to him that he shouldn’t get so close to the wheels or he might be run over. “God bless you, Nellie,” he said again and again, “you are kind and thoughtful.”
In the tall buildings that lined Broadway, the windows were filled with faces. Traffic had slowed nearly to a standstill; carriages and streetcars were blocked in by the streaming crowds, and the shouts of conductors and clanging of car bells only added to the clamor. Seemingly by general acclamation the rules of the road had been dispensed with, Broadway now less an avenue than a broad pedestrian promenade. The carriage had to push its way through the street like a snowplow, making progress little by little, carefully clearing a path all the way to the newspaper district. Delivery trucks that had made the mistake of attempting to go through Park Row were now completely hemmed in, and some in the crowd had climbed atop them to use their roofs as impromptu viewing platforms. Finally Nellie Bly’s carriage arrived in front of the World Building at number 31-32. The police chief of the nearby Oak Street station house had placed twenty-five men in front of the building; the sergeant in charge organized a passage for Bly from the carriage to the doorway, flanking it with police officers on both sides. Stepping down from the landau, Bly called to the crowd, “I am so glad to be home again!” and then gave a last wave of her cap and disappeared inside.
Upstairs, Bly was escorted to an informal reception in the main editorial room, where her colleagues had gathered to welcome her back; the room was piled high with flowers and congratulatory letters and telegrams.
Eighty Days Page 39