Around the World on Two Wheels

by Peter Zheutlin

  Once again, while in France, Annie changed her story to suit her mood or situation, painting a confusing picture of her background to match the confusing picture of her sexuality being painted by the press. Her repertoire of tall tales was limitless. In various interviews she described herself as “an orphan at a very young age” (not so); a law student (not true); a doctorate of law (not true); a medical student who earned money “dissecting cadavers” (not true); a businesswoman (true; she was an advertising solicitor); an accountant (apparently not); a reporter for several newspapers (unclear); a wealthy heiress who had inherited “a substantial fortune” (untrue); and the founder of a newspaper which she sold just before embarking on her journey (not true). Annie even claimed to have invented a method of stenography and boasted, disingenuously, that she was the cousin of a United States congressman and the niece of a United States senator. It’s impossible to discern her motive in making these varied and, in some cases, outlandish claims. She often seemed to take delight in pulling the legs of reporters, almost all of whom were men at the time, and in testing the limits of their credulity. But the sheer randomness and grandiosity of some of her claims hints at an almost pathological aversion to telling a straight story, though she was never delusional—she knew exactly what she was doing and appears to have enjoyed the game, almost daring reporters to find out who she really was.

  * * *

  LE TOUR DU MONDE

  [A TOUR OF THE WORLD]

  About a month and a half ago, we had a visit from two young English journalists…who, having left their country without a penny in their pocket proposed to go around the world by foot earning their living during the trip. One must admit that the attempt did not lack originality.

  Now here is a young American woman who has undertaken to accomplish the same feat, but who, more practical and more 1900s than her competitors of the ugly gender, wanted the bicycle to be part of the feat. And so she left her native Boston…to pedal courageously forward, to tempt luck and to attempt the unknown.

  On departure she only had a penny and many ordeals were awaiting her but didn’t daunt her. Her adventures? We would need an entire book to describe them. Attacked by a negro in New York whom she shot and nearly killed next to a railroad track where she had fallen off her bicycle onto the rails at the moment a…train was coming with phenomenal speed. It was truly a miracle that she escaped a terrible death and saved her bicycle.

  —an unidentified Paris newspaper, December 1894

  * * *

  Here again was Annie, the master storyteller, at work, creating a larger-than-life portrait of herself: the courageous heroine narrowly escaping death to make her journey around the world. The entire story about being attacked “by a negro,” shooting him, and nearly being run over by a train is almost certainly apocryphal, a piece of pulp fiction used to build her legacy. Annie repeated this story to several French newspapers, saying the incident occurred between Rochester and Syracuse, a stretch, considering at that time she was riding in the company of three wheelmen from Rochester. Nor was the story reported in any of the two dozen or so accounts of her travels in the Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica newspapers.

  Despite the questionable veracity of the stories she was spinning to European journalists, or perhaps because of them, Annie found French soil fertile for making money. By her own account, she was “quite the rage [in Paris] as an advertising medium.” Various bicycle sellers engaged her at the Salon du Cycle, a huge bicycle exhibition held in Paris, to promote their wares, as did the director of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where Annie was to compete in a five day indoor bicycle race against two of France’s best male riders, Tricot and Chevreuil. The race was canceled before it began, however, purportedly because use of the indoor track for five consecutive days would interfere with the training regimen of many racers.

  Annie also lectured in Paris, though she did so in English. “Not one in a hundred could understand,” she wrote. “Every few minutes I would shout ‘Vive la France!’ Then how they did cheer! It was positively inspiring. I found out what they liked and gave them plenty of it.” (emphasis added) This would be Annie’s modus operandi throughout her trip; she knew how to win over both a crowd and a single reporter, and this type of showmanship contributed to her livelihood on the road.

  THOUGH ANNIE later wrote that she stayed in Paris two weeks, it was closer to three and half weeks. Before leaving Paris, the American consul presented her with a silk American flag, one she would deploy as a prop to make her dramatic entrance into Marseilles a few weeks later. “He told me to keep that flag prominently displayed wherever I went and that it would always protect me.”

  ANNIE LEFT PARIS on December 30 at eight thirty in the morning from the Porte-Dorée Café on avenue Daumesni, riding down the rue Coquillière. Among those now accompanying Annie were Victor Sloan, the Sterling dealer with whom she stayed during her time in Paris, and his brother, James.

  To help her find her way south, Annie sewed a small piece of cloth into her bicycle jacket with a message written in French: “Miss Annie Londonderry from Boston (America) is traveling around the world on her ‘Sterling’ bicycle, built like a watch, with only a penny. Please show her the way to Marseilles.” She wouldn’t need it, however, because the Sloans were just the first in a series of escorts organized by France’s ubiquitous cycling clubs, escorts that traveled with her, in relay fashion, nearly every mile of her journey from Paris to Marseilles.

  The trip out of Paris was an awful one, twenty miles of mud-covered roads in rain to Lieusaint, where Annie and her party arrived at 11:45 A.M. for a forty-five-minute break to rest and dry off. Then the “half-frozen riders hobbled on their course.” By early afternoon they had arrived in Melun, where she posed for photographs before heading off again about 2:30 P.M. Joined by two additional local cyclists from Melun, they then rode through the famed oak and pine forests of Fontainebleau by the Seine. L’Abeille de Fontainbleau, the local newspaper, noted that the woman who had passed through town on her white Sterling was “known under the pseudonym of Miss Annie Londonderry,” one of the few French newspapers to report that Londonderry was not her real name. Annie had given an interview, reportedly in Paris just before her departure from that city, in which she said, “By the bye, you know Miss Londonderry is only my pseudonym; my real name is much prettier and better known, but I can’t let you know it at present. You will know it if I succeed.” Of course, Kopchovsky was neither prettier nor better known than Londonderry, but the statement was pure Annie, designed to be an intriguing tease. Around 5:30 P.M., “spattered with mud and soaked to the bone,” she arrived in Nemours and bid farewell to the Sloan brothers. She spent the evening at l’Hôtel de l’Écu de France, where the proprietor provided a change of warm clothes, no doubt a relief to Annie, who had ridden some fifty cold and rainy miles that day.

  She was on the road again at 9:30 A.M. the next day. A sizable contingent of local townspeople came to see her off, and two employees of a local bike shop rode with her through the bitter cold and falling snow to Souppes, a few miles south. The bad weather made for slow progress, and by New Year’s Eve Annie was in or near Montargis, a mere twenty miles or so south of Nemours and about sixty miles south of Paris.

  The dawn of the new year brought little change in the weather. On New Year’s Day, Annie continued south on the national highway to Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, where she arrived “in a very good state, but covered in mud.” From there, she wrote to Le Vélo, a French cycling journal, of the warm hospitality she received in that town, which included gifts that she accepted in exchange for sharing stories of her journey, per the terms of the purported wager, which prohibited her from accepting anything gratuitously. One in particular, a box of chocolates, she described as “superb.” Annie spent the night at the home of the Hourds, “a hospitable family…who offer[ed] her lodging [and] a meal.”

  Her progress was slow again the next day. After she arrived in the small village of la Charité-sur-Lo
ire, the local consul of the Union Vélocipédique de France (U.V.F., the Velocipedic Union of France), Monsieur Nicart, persuaded Annie to take the train some 170 miles to Lyon “because of the deplorable state of the routes.”

  Annie stayed at l’Hôtel de l’Univers in Lyon, where she regaled a reporter with her story of being attacked by “a negro” in New York State, which she altered slightly from other tellings. In this version of the story, she hadn’t fired any shots, but she was portrayed as heroic nonetheless. “Miss Annie Londonderry, with unusual energy and a vigorous push, rid herself of the negro. She just had enough time to get up and throw herself and her bicycle aside as the train went by at full steam.” She left this city on January 6, in the company of three Lyon wheelmen. Again, the weather was dreadful. It was snowing and the temperature was well below freezing. Just as the group was ready to depart, however, Annie had a mishap and suffered a minor injury to her leg, delaying her party for an hour. The group then pedaled on to Vienne, where the president of the local bicycle club provided a luncheon; then they continued south and spent the night in the village of Saint Rambert.

  Annie left for Valence in the company of a new group of cyclists. The roads on the way to Valence were poor, the weather was still cold, and her ankle was sore from the accident in Lyon. She arrived in Valence at eleven o’clock in the morning, completely fatigued, though one of her riding companions told a local newspaper he was “stunned by her valiant enthusiasm.”

  “Her endurance is remarkable,” said the Journal de Valence. Apparently unaware that she had taken the train from Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire to Lyon, the Journal continued: “She took only four days to go from Paris to Lyon never sleeping more than two hours a night. Her routine is such, that from Saint Rambert to Valence, where, by the way, she was only pedaling with one foot, the cyclist accompanying her had a hard time keeping up.”

  Had she read the story in the Journal, Annie would not have rushed to correct the misimpression she had ridden all the way from Paris to Lyon. She seemed to have an intuitive understanding that people’s assumptions about her and her journey would often play to her favor. Like any good illusionist, she encouraged people to see what they wanted to see, or thought they saw; and the French, in particular, wanted to see a heroine of the wheel.

  Just as Annie never disabused people of the assumption she was single (a logical assumption about a woman circling the world on a bicycle in those times), she would never have come forward to say that she had taken the train to Lyon if people assumed she had ridden, even though there were many, including Monsieur Nicart of the U.V.F., who knew differently. If the Journal had asked her directly, she likely would have told the truth, but with a creative explanation. Later in her journey, she sometimes explained away stints by train by stating that the wager had a rail allowance of a fixed number of miles, or permitted train travel with the advance permission of the bettors if conditions made riding impossible, which permission she would obtain by telegraph. Since Annie almost certainly concocted the wager story, there was no one back in Boston to contradict her creative variations of the wager terms.

  Annie registered at l’Hôtel de la Tête d’Or in Valence and a Dr. Magnanon was summoned to see her. He diagnosed the injury to her leg as an inflammation of the Achilles tendon. As a result of her injury and the bitterly cold weather, Annie delayed her departure from Valence. Her Sterling was put on display at a local bicycle shop, to be admired by the curious public. “It is a man’s bicycle,” reported the Journal. “Seeing this specimen, we see to what degree of perfection the builders of the New World have attained.” While at the hotel, Annie received a note, certainly one of many such notes received over the course of her journey: “A lady great admirer of your courageous travel will come and see you tomorrow between twelve and half past one. Pray do wait for her.” Her celebrity was, by now, secure.

  While she recuperated, Annie held court at the hotel and met with local journalists. “In general Miss Londonderry likes French men but couldn’t say as much for French women,” said the Journal de Valence. “In Paris she was very shocked to see that women smoked. During her stay in the capital people proposed to her to have a contest against cyclists of her own sex, but she declined having judged them not worthy of competing with her. She competed well against the finest of Parisian male cyclists and did not appear to be struggling to compete with any of the racers.”

  Because there are no reports in the Paris newspapers of Annie’s having competed with male cyclists, let alone Paris’s finest, the Journal reporter may have been especially credulous, for she was the likely source for the story. Indeed, as noted, her scheduled five-day race against two male racers in Paris had been canceled so as not to interfere with the training schedules of the French cyclists.

  Typical of Annie’s impulsive conversation were her comments about Frenchmen and women. What slights, real or perceived, she may have suffered at the hands of Frenchwomen she never said but, by hinting that she liked Frenchmen but not the women, she may have been coyly trying to disabuse people of some of the perceptions that flowed from the many reports about her masculine appearance and her uncertain sexuality, while at the same time boasting of her skills on the bike. (Modesty was not in her repertoire.) As for being “shocked” that Frenchwomen smoked, it’s hard to imagine that Annie, who had few qualms about dressing in men’s cycling clothes and making a general spectacle of herself, would find smoking a shocking affront to femininity.

  At 9:00 A.M. on the morning of January 10, a crowd gathered at l’Hôtel de la Tête d’Or as Annie left Valence with eight other cyclists, including a gentleman by the name of Paul Seigneuret. Because of her injury, she and Seigneuret shared a tandem, while another rider rode Annie’s Sterling. Seigneuret intended to escort her to the village of Montélimar, but soon found himself twice as far down the road in Orange, having fallen under Annie’s spell. She was a woman of enormous charisma, charm, persuasiveness, and self-assurance, and repeatedly demonstrated, both during her bicycle trip and later in her life, an uncanny ability to hold people in thrall. Seigneuret was hardly alone in succumbing to her vivacious and captivating personality.

  “To explain to you how, having departed to accompany Miss Annie to Montélimar, I went to Orange, will be difficult because I am not aware myself,” wrote Seigneuret two days later in an account of his trip with Annie written for the Messager de Valence. “[B]ut, what is certain, is that I saw myself almost en route to Marseilles and that I had the promise of a trip to Bombay using my bicycle, from this city to Calcutta. Do not believe this is a tall tale…I say this in all seriousness.”

  By the time the riding party reached the village of Paillasse, en route to Orange, the entire group save for Annie and Seigneuret, had had enough of the cold weather and snow-covered roads and “steered their handlebars toward the station.” Three of the riders met up with Annie and Seigneuret a bit further south, in Loriol. She and Seigneuret continued on together, with two others, to Montélimar. The roads improved, but “the wind create[d] heaps of snow, especially on the descent of Saulce,” wrote Seigneuret.

  Though her Achilles tendon continued to bother her, so much so that she was pedaling with only one foot, Annie managed the large hills near Montélimar quite well. Indeed, she and Seigneuret kept up a brisk pace of about twelve miles per hour. Her injury notwithstanding, Annie’s enthusiasm, joy, and joie de vivre were undiminished. “She possesses an unheard of energy, laughs continuously and does not stop singing,” Seigneuret wrote. “On the hills, she pushes her pedal leg with her hand and breaks out in laughter once she has ascended the slope. She is always gay and we arrive at Montélimar without even noticing the route.”

  After lunch at l’Hôtel de la Poste in Montélimar, the group, now four strong, departed for Orange. Despite rough conditions, Annie’s buoyant personality kept the group’s spirits afloat. As the party ascended a steep two-mile slope at Bel-Air, they were forced to dismount and walk to the top before beginning a fast descent into th
e village of Donzère. On the way down, one of the riders lost control and was pitched into a snowbank. “[W]e [saw] a snow-covered head poking out of a hole in such an amusing way that we didn’t even notice his legs which were desperately kicking in the air,” wrote Seigneuret. Even a near collision didn’t dampen Annie’s spirits: “[W]e avoid[ed] the accident and, with a burst of laughter from Miss Londonderry we [got] back on our route.”

  Beyond Pierrelatte, a village south of Donzère, the roads were smooth and clear of snow, and the party continued to Orange. Over their final dinner that evening, Annie playfully implored her companions to accompany her to America via Bombay, Calcutta, and Yokohama, but finally settled on a promise, never fulfilled, to return to Valence in 1896 for a reunion. After dinner, the Valence cyclists boarded the train for the trip back north, leaving Annie to begin the next leg of her trip on her Sterling—and to entertain a new group of escorts.

  Annie spent the night of January 10 in Orange, just north of Avignon. The next morning, two members of the Avignon cycling club met her there and the Cercle Musicale, most of whose members were cyclists, played for her enjoyment, no doubt making her short journey to Avignon a festive one.

  When Annie reached Avignon just before 11:00 A.M., with her two new companions, the city was well primed for her brief visit. Two days before, a local newspaper had already trumpeted, “Miss Londonderry will pass through Avignon on her bicycle tour of the world!!” and the organizers of Annie’s visit were “redoubling their zeal so that nothing is overlooked.” “Hip! Hip! For the courageous bicyclist,” proclaimed L’Echo du Jour, another Avignon paper, one of many that served as a chorus of cheerleaders as the American cyclist made her way south. She was, by now, a bona fide hero in France.