Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  I hold here in my hand a lengthy cablegram,

  That came from far across the sea;

  It’s from Miss Nellie Bly, and its contents I will try

  To tell, if you will listen to me.

  She’s trying very hard to beat the world’s record

  To round the world in seventy-five days

  Of the many funny sights in her cablegram she writes,

  Of the people and their very curious ways.

  After describing some imaginary escapades of Bly in Europe (kissing the Blarney stone, telling funny stories to the Prince of Wales, singing “Little Annie Rooney” to Jules Verne), the song concluded:

  When she landed in Hong Kong, she rang the dinner gong,

  And they thought her quite a curiosity.

  To see our Nellie hustle, and she did not wear a bustle,

  A sight which even here we rarely see.

  When she reached Yokohama she met a Jersey farmer,

  And together they sipped too-long boo-long tea;

  She was courted by a Jap—sat in the old King’s lap,

  And he wanted her to marry him, you see.

  But when the Oceanic sailed,

  How that poor fellow wailed,

  Now she’s on the ocean blue.

  She’s a box of chewing tu-lu

  For each one in Honolu’,

  I wish she’d bring some back to me and you.

  “Globe Trotting Nellie Bly” was not sung until the show’s third act, The World reported, “but it was worth waiting for. The joint stars rendered the song effectively, and made such a hit that an encore was vigorously and vociferously demanded.”

  AS THE COUPONS HAD come pouring into its offices in the closing days of the Nellie Bly Guessing Match, The World supplemented its regular staff of fourteen tabulators with six clerks from the New York Post Office (two of them said to be “postmark experts” who could “determine at a glance dates of mailing and reception, where a novice would be hopelessly puzzled”), but even these six proved inadequate, and the number was increased first to ten, and then to fourteen, until eventually nineteen additional men from the Post Office had been brought on. The corps was divided into three squads of eleven men, with each squad working a full eight-hour shift, so that the counting and sorting could go on without cease throughout the day, until all 927,422 coupons had been tabulated.

  By the following Sunday, February 2, The World was finally able to declare a winner: Mr. F. W. Stevens, of 193 Second Avenue in New York City, who had submitted a guess of 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 2/5 seconds, or two-fifths of a second off the actual time. (The next closest guess came from Thomas Halton, of 1345 Third Avenue, who had guessed 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 13 2/5 seconds—just one-fifth of a second away from a claim to the prize.) On the afternoon of the announcement a World reporter visited Frank Stevens at his home near Twelfth Street to ask him about his winning strategy.

  Every evening after reading The World, Stevens explained, he cut out the official coupon and sent in a guess on it; he figured that he had sent in about fifty coupons in all. His earliest guesses had been based on the supposition that Nellie Bly would take the five o’clock train out of Chicago, but when he saw that she would probably reach Chicago in time to take the ten-thirty train on Friday morning, he made a number of guesses based on the scheduled arrival time in Jersey City. “That is about all there was to it,” he said modestly. “I didn’t go into anything like a close study of time tables.”

  The World reporter described Frank Stevens as “a young man of genial manners and a pleasant, easy address.” Stevens worked as the general superintendent at Bill & Caldwell, a manufacturer of hats, furs, and straw goods at 550 Broadway, in the cast-iron district; he had come to the city six years earlier from the upstate town of Dover, and had never been abroad. The reporter asked him, “Will you take the trip yourself or delegate it to some one else?”

  “If I can get away from business I shall go myself,” he replied, “and if I do I will take Mrs. Stevens with me, and pay her expenses out of my own pocket.”

  IN THE SAME ISSUE of The World that announced the winner of the guessing match, an editorial declared, “The year 1890 opens audaciously for The World.” Total circulation for the month of January, the paper reported, was well over ten million copies, with a daily average of 333,058; this was a gain of 35,613 copies per day over the previous January. There seemed no denying that the increase in sales was due in large part to the public’s intense interest in Nellie Bly—particularly as a front-page notice beneath the masthead of that very issue advised readers: “With Every Copy of To-day’s World Will Be Furnished Free a Photo-likeness of Nellie Bly. Be Sure That You Receive the Picture with Your Copy.”

  It was nothing short of astonishing that a newspaper for which a reporter had done her most significant work undercover would give out a photograph of her, but, as The World acknowledged elsewhere in the issue, “the public interest in the young lady has become so great that The World to-day relieves the intense public curiosity by publishing her portrait.” This explanation was contained in the introduction to a feature article in the same issue, “The Story of Nellie Bly,” which was touted as “an authentic biography of The World’s globe-girdler.” (As the paper explained, “at the same time that the public learns what Nellie Bly looks like, it seems well to say something about who and what she is.”)

  “Miss Cochrane is a good-looking brunette,” The World informed its readers (this was an upgrade from its earlier assessment of her as “fairly good-looking”), “of medium height, and slight graceful figure, who does not look nearly so old as the records make her. Her appearance is girlish, and while contact with the world in her journalistic capacity has given her thoughts and manners a serious cast, and the far-reaching usefulness of many of her tasks has made her feel that newspaper women have earnest missions in life, still there is a glint of the sunshine of youth in many of her ways and a jolly light-heartedness at times manifests itself, which shows that there is a strong, bright link between her looks and the girlhood that radiates through them.” The article described Bly’s upbringing in the little Pennsylvania town of “Cochrane’s Mills” (The World, like young Pink Cochran herself, had unilaterally added an e to the end of the surname); her father’s sudden death and the struggle over the family estate; her entry into journalism in Pittsburgh; and her “many and brilliant” achievements with The World, including her Blackwell’s Island exposé. The “authentic biography,” though, repeated the canard that Nellie Bly was twenty-three, not twenty-five, years old; moreover, it asserted that as a girl Bly had attended boarding school in Pennsylvania for two full years (in fact it had been only one semester) and that she had withdrawn from the school not because her mother could no longer afford to send her but “on account of threatening heart disease.” Even one more year of study, the family doctor was said to have determined, “would probably cost the girl her life.”

  Probably very few of the paper’s readers recalled that on the day Nellie Bly set out from Hoboken a World reporter had asked her whether she was bringing any medicine in her bag. Bly, he wrote, had given a smile “of derision at such a question” and replied, “I never was very sick in my life and don’t expect to be now.”

  THE PREVIOUS DECEMBER, Walt McDougall had drawn a cartoon for The World entitled “Will It Come to This?” that showed Nellie Bly disembarking from a steamship to an excited crowd waiting to greet her, each person holding up an object for display: a Nellie Bly sewing machine, Nellie Bly hat, Nellie Bly typewriter, Nellie Bly camera, and so forth. Only a few months later McDougall’s cartoon proved to be remarkably prescient. It was an age when American companies were beginning to understand that the image of a famous person could be used to sell products; through advertising, the traits generally associated with the person—in Nellie Bly’s case, these included pluck, vitality, courage, patriotism, and, most important, success—seemed to be transferred to the product and, by ex
tension, to the person using it. So in 1890 women around the country wore Nellie Bly caps and Nellie Bly dresses and Nellie Bly gloves, modeled on the ones she had made famous (and therefore appealing) during her trip. Children used the Nellie Bly tablet notebook—the cover of which featured a large globe with, incongruously, kittens scampering over it—and carried it to school in a Nellie Bly schoolbag, next to, perhaps, the Nellie Bly doll. At home, one could write on Nellie Bly stationery with the Nellie Bly fountain pen in the light of the Nellie Bly lamp, and afterward relax with the Nellie Bly photograph album (it was, said the industry journal The American Stationer, “the biggest seller of the season; two editions have been sold out and still the cry is for more”) and “Nellie Bly Globe Circling Embroideries.” The W. E. Piaget Company offered a Nellie Bly bonbon box. The George L. Ingerson company of Syracuse, New York, even sold “Nellie Bly Horse Feed.”

  A series of delicately tinted advertising trade cards, extolling the virtues of numerous products, showed Nellie Bly in her iconic traveling outfit, ubiquitous gripsack in hand, in various whimsical settings—sitting on the crescent moon, standing atop a dragonfly, walking a tightrope between the earth and the moon—each one accompanied by a laudatory verse. (“If Nellie Bly is in the sky / Observing Luna’s phases,” read the card that showed her perched atop the moon, “It is because the World’s applause / Makes light of those it praises.”) In one of the most striking images, Bly clutches an American flag with which she waves farewell to Phileas Fogg receding into the distance.

  “O Fogg, goodbye,” said Nellie Bly,

  “It takes a maiden to be spry.

  To span the space ’twixt thought and act,

  And turn a fiction to a fact.”

  The cards sold everything from coffee to tobacco to spices, from baking soda to Dr. Morse’s India Root Pills, which promised fast relief for “biliousness, headache, and constipation.”

  Probably the most popular product associated with Bly’s trip was the board game Round the World with Nellie Bly, advertised as “A Novel and Fascinating Game with Plenty of Excitement on Land and Sea”; indeed, the game proved so popular that its manufacturer, McLoughlin Brothers, would issue a second edition before the end of the year. Based in New York, McLoughlin Brothers was at the time the leading manufacturer of board games in the country, due in large part to its pioneering use of chromolithography, a printing process that produced richly colored images at low cost. The technology was put to glorious use in Round the World with Nellie Bly, in which players moved along a brightly colored spiral path on which each space represented a day of Nellie Bly’s trip. (To add variety, some liberties were taken with the actual events: Bly, for instance, was “on a raft” on the sixty-fourth day and “rescued” on the sixty-fifth.) The game came with a spinner and a set of markers; after each spin the player moved his or her marker forward the corresponding number of spaces, with fate determined by the luck of the spin. Thus, on the fifth day one encountered an iceberg and had to go back to port; on the ninth day one met Jules Verne and was granted an additional spin; brigands in Brindisi on the eleventh day sent one back two days; fair weather on the Pacific sent one ahead two days; a steamship collision on the sixty-third day sent one back fifteen days. Catastrophically, becoming snowbound in the Sierra on the sixty-ninth day (a fate Bly herself had avoided by use of a chartered train) forced the player to lose five spins. Having traveled successfully through the seventy-second day, the player landed at the center of the spiral, where a trumpet blared ALL RECORDS BROKEN, moving past the Statue of Liberty onto a Manhattan Island on which the only recognizable structure is the World Building.

  A typical example of a Nellie Bly advertising card, this one selling cream of tartar and baking soda (Illustration Credit 17.1)

  IN THE FINAL DAYS of Bly and Bisland’s race around the world, John Brisben Walker of The Cosmopolitan insisted that he had sent three messages to Elizabeth Bisland while she was aboard the India mail train, instructing her to take the steamship La Champagne at Le Havre; those messages, he claimed, had never been delivered. In an article in the Washington Post, unnamed friends of Walker attributed Bisland’s loss to “the bad faith of the steamship people,” who had purposely delayed delivery of the three messages. The Post reported, “There will probably be some lively litigation over this matter should Miss Bisland arrive here late and behind time.” When the race was over, and Bisland had indeed arrived behind time, another news story reported that “a fair race was spoiled by a foul” and “a suit against the steamship company will follow.”

  Two years later Allan Forman of The Journalist would claim, “It is a fact—which I can prove as I am somewhat intimately connected with the whole affair—that had it not been for a trick which would have disqualified The World among sporting men but which, under the very loose code of ethics which governs the conduct of a ‘great’ newspaper, is perhaps allowable to save the paper from ignominious defeat—had it not been for this trick, I say, Miss Bisland would have beaten Miss Bly by three days.”

  The popular board game Round the World with Nellie Bly, as it first appeared in the pages of The World (Illustration Credit 17.2)

  Allan Forman never did “prove” his allegations against The World—presumably he was suggesting that the paper had induced the Cook’s agent at Villeneuve to provide misinformation to Bisland—nor did John Brisben Walker ever initiate any litigation relating to the race, against the steamship companies or anyone else. Probably he understood that Bisland would have lost the race regardless. In any case, he had received his publicity and the additional revenue that came with it. An article about Walker in The Review of Reviews noted of Bisland’s trip, “The venture turned out to be one of the most successful strokes of business in the history of the magazine. Mr. Walker estimates its money value to his establishment at a figure which seems incredible.”

  Elizabeth Bisland herself never addressed any of the rumors surrounding the mysterious travel agent. She did not comment publicly on the trip after the day of her return, other than in the seven articles she wrote about it for The Cosmopolitan, where she had resumed work as literary editor. Her account began:

  If, on the thirteenth of November, 1889, some amateur prophet had foretold that I should spend Christmas Day of that year on the Indian Ocean, I hope I should not by any open and insulting incredulity have added new burdens to the trials of a hard-working soothsayer—I hope I should, with the gentleness due a severe case of aberrated predictiveness, have merely called his attention to that passage in the Koran in which it is written, “The Lord loveth a cheerful liar”—and bid him go in peace. Yet I did spend the 25th day of December steaming through the waters that wash the shores of the Indian Empire, and did do other things equally preposterous, of which I would not have believed myself capable if forewarned of them. I can only claim in excuse that these vagaries were unpremeditated, for the prophets neglected their opportunity and I received no augury.

  In the articles Bisland always described her seventy-six-day undertaking for The Cosmopolitan as a “trip” or a “journey,” and never, not even once, as a “race.”

  In the spring, Lady Broome—whom Elizabeth Bisland had befriended when they stayed at the same hotel in Colombo—sent a letter from England inviting Bisland to spend the upcoming London season with her and her husband, Sir Frederick Broome; the invitation was happily accepted. Quickly Bisland got her work affairs into order: while she was away, it was agreed, she would continue writing the “In the Library” column for The Cosmopolitan, and the editors of Harper’s Bazaar also commissioned her to write a series of five articles entitled “An American Woman’s First Season in London.” On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 14, Elizabeth Bisland gave a farewell reception at her apartment on Fourth Avenue, where the guest list included the poet and magazine editor R. W. Gilder; former Union Army general Fitz John Porter; and Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of the former president, who only four years earlier, at the age of twenty-one, had become the youn
gest First Lady in history. Three days later she boarded the Cunard steamship Servia (as it happened, the sister ship of the Bothnia, on which she had endured such a miserable Atlantic crossing the previous January), bound for Liverpool. Elizabeth Bisland would spend the following year—the time when the American public’s interest in her was at its height—in England.

  DURING HER TRIUMPHANT railroad trip across the country, a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer had asked Nellie Bly what she planned to do next. Bly immediately responded, “I expect to go back to work again. You know I must do something for a living. And I expect to work until I fall in love and get married.”

  Nellie Bly, however, did not go right back to work, at least not at The World. In those first hectic days after her return (made more hectic by the monkey, who, whenever he was let out of his cage, ran around the apartment smashing all the china he could find), Bly received visitors, accepted flowers sent by well-wishers, posed for photos, and fielded offers from theatrical promoters. At this point she was probably the most famous woman in the United States—perhaps even, in The World’s estimation, “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today”—and as such, it seemed inevitable that she would undertake a lecture tour. The lecture tour was how nineteenth-century Americans got to see and hear famous people, be they scientists, inventors, philosophers, or retired generals, or simply those deemed to have a sufficiently unusual talent or compelling enough personal story. After some deliberation, Bly chose J. M. Hill to represent her, having decided that he presented “the best opportunities.” It seemed an obvious choice: Hill was the most prominent theatrical promoter in the country, who owned theaters, produced plays, and managed actors and actresses. In a matter of days he had arranged a forty-city lecture tour for Bly, stretching from New York to California; her first appearance was slated for February 9.