Well, of course, the only thing I could do as a starter in Boston was to transform myself into an advertising medium; received $100 from one firm and smaller sums from others, and in a few hours I was enabled to equip myself properly and present myself in front of the State House for the start. Lieut.-Gov. Wolcott made a little speech and wished me success and then I was off. This was June 26, 1894.
I found it altogether different riding on the uneven road than in the academy, and my progress was at first slow and painful. I reached Providence in due time, but it was not a record-breaking ride. After a good rest I made myself known and was engaged as a clerk in a drugstore for a day. I received $5 for my work. From Providence I came to New York. I remained here three weeks. It was necessary for me to earn enough money here to defray me expenses across the ocean. Again I became an advertising medium, and received $600 for carrying four ribbons for as many firms.
Roughing It
That money I sent to the man who had been agreed upon as the holder of whatever money I should be able to earn. After picking up what money I could in New York I went to Chicago via Michigan. I had some very funny experiences en route. It was my first attempt at “roughing it,” and I’m afraid I was a sorry specimen of a tramp. I had to sleep out of doors, under haycocks, in barns—anywhere, in fact, where I could find shelter. I could not beg, but the people en route were very kind, as a rule, and I did not suffer except from the unaccustomed strain of riding the wheel.
Nine weeks from the time I left Boston I rode into Chicago with three cents in my pocket. I had worn a short riding skirt thus far but in Chicago I swallowed my pride and donned bloomers. I quickly saw that this despised garment was the only practical thing to wear, and I will say right here that those bloomers won for me everywhere the respect and consideration which a woman has the right to expect. After the novelty had worn off I felt a certain degree of independence which I had never before experienced.
A Word for Bloomers
I firmly believe that if I had worn skirts I should not have been able to make the trip. It must not be thought that I lost the attention which is supposed to be associated with feminine apparel. I was everywhere treated with courtesy, and for the benefit of my sisters who hesitate about donning bloomers I will confess that I received no less than two hundred proposals of marriage. I will not attempt to guess how many were worthy of serious consideration. Many favored too strongly of dime museums, and as I had no desire to pose as a freak I paid no attention to them. I mention this to prove that bloomers are no handicap to matrimonial aspirations.
In Chicago I exchanged my forty-five pound wheel for one weighing only twenty pounds. Again I decorated myself with advertising ribbons in exchange for $185 in cash and started back to New York. I found this return trip much pleasanter than the first one. The bicycle clubs en route gave me an opportunity to earn money, and when I reached New York again, in eighteen days after leaving Chicago, I had enough money to pay my passage to Havre.
I sailed on La Touraine. I made myself known to the passengers and earned 150 francs lecturing. This was stolen from me the first day of my arrival in Havre. I was in a predicament for I was not permitted to speak in French and I found it difficult to make myself understood in English. The American Consul printed a large placard which explained in French the object of my visit and asking for an opportunity to earn some money.
Earning Money Rapidly
The French people were very quick to catch the spirit of the occasion and I was overwhelmed with offers of one kind and another. I distributed dodgers [small handbills], gave exhibitions of riding, sold my photograph and served as clerk in different stores. In this way I collected $1,500 in five days. The Viscount de Mahia paid me $100 for a photograph. I visited different cities in France before reaching Paris. There I received a handsome silk American flag from the American Consul. He told me to keep that flag prominently displayed wherever I went and that it would always protect me. You may rest assured that I followed his instructions.
I lectured at the Crystal Palace and took in $1,000. I gave an exhibition ride and received a medal and a diamond pin. I must say that the French are the most patriotic people I met in my journey around the world. I have to laugh when I think of myself standing before a big hall full of people jabbering away in English which not one in a hundred could understand. 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. The American or English people, if there were any present, must have thought I was a candidate for a lunatic asylum. But the Frenchmen enjoyed the “Vive la France” part of my lecture, and they were the ones I was trying hardest to please. I was able to forward $1,500 from Paris.
I was quite the rage there as an advertising medium. I remained there two weeks and then started for Marseilles.
Attacked by Highwaymen
One night I had an encounter with highwaymen near Lacone [Laçon, about 30 miles north of Marseilles]. I think they were waiting for me, for they knew I had been earning money in Paris. There were three men in the party, and all wore masks. They sprang at me from behind a clump of trees, and one of them grabbed my bicycle wheel, throwing me heavily. I carried a revolver in my pocket within easy reach, and when I stood up I had that revolver against the head of the man nearest me. He backed off but another seized me from behind and disarmed me. They rifled my pockets and found just three francs. They were magnanimous enough to return that money to me. My shoulder had been badly wrenched by my fall, and my ankle was sprained, but I was able to continue my journey.
Several wheelmen of the Lacone Club rode out to meet me, and when they understood the cause of my injuries they would not let me travel alone while I remained on French soil.
Great preparations had been made for my reception in Marseilles, but I cut a sorry-looking figure when I reached the city. My ankle was so badly swollen that I could not use it, so I was forced to ride into the city with my injured foot in bandages hanging over the handle-bar and pedaling with the other. I was escorted to the hotel by a long procession of cyclists, and the streets were lined with people who were anxious to see the American lady who was riding around the world on a bicycle. My Stars and Stripes were hung from a staff attached to my handle-bar, and it was heartily cheered.
Hunting Big Game
In five days at Marseilles I earned enough money to pay my passage on a steamer to Alexandria. I visited Jerusalem, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Ceylon and Singapore. In India I fell in with a party of ten, consisting of Prince Leland of Germany, and his guests. They were on a tiger hunt and rode elephants. I accepted their invitation to join the hunt, and saw a tiger shot. Prince Leland made me a present of the skin. All through that region I aroused the greatest curiosity of the natives, but the missionaries were not very cordial. They did not approve of women riding bicycles. I earned only $200 from the time I left Paris until I reached China.
I registered at all the places stipulated in the agreement, and when I reached Shanghai I heard of the danger of traveling through that country. I had unwittingly approached the very seat of hostilities. I was warned to get out of the country as quickly as possible, but my American spirit was up, and I was determined to see the fun. I knew that here was a glorious opportunity for me to collect material that would yield a good financial return when I reached my own country, for that was my only hope of raising the stipulated $5,000.
So I determined to go to the front, and I went. I knew that I could fill any hall in the United States with the announcement that I was an eye-witness of battles in China. The result proved that I was right, for I easily completed the amount as soon as I reached this country.
At the Great Massacre
From Shanghai I went to Nagasaki and met two war correspondents bound for the front. I received passports from the Japanese Government and accompanied them. We landed near Port Arthur with the second Japanese Army. Wei-heiwei was their objective point
. We followed. I shall never forget the horrible scenes I witnessed at Port Arthur. We arrived there after the butchery, but the dead remained unburied. I saw the bodies of women nailed to the houses, the bodies of little children torn limb from limb. Everywhere there was evidence of the most horrible butchery and mutilation of the dead. At Wei-heiwei the slaughter had been worse than at Port Arthur. When we passed through Chefoo the streets were filled with the dead.
I was an eye-witness of the battle of Gasan. It was the first I had seen, and I don’t want to see another. The fighting continued from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The Chinese had laid some mines for the destruction of the Japanese Army, and then by some mistake the Chinese Army occupied that identical position. The stupid men in charge of the mines exploded them at that moment and caused a frightful slaughter of their own people. Fifteen hundred Chinamen were killed and only twenty-two Japanese. Great chasms fifty feet in depth were formed by the explosion. They proved to be burial places for the dead. It was a horrible experience.
Shot in the Arm
I crossed the Pontoon River accompanied by a Japanese guide and a British missionary named F. A. Moffatt. The river was frozen over, but when near the shore the ice broke and we all fell in. While in that predicament a party of Chinamen appeared on the opposite bank and fired at us, killing the Japanese guide, and wounding both Mr. Moffatt and myself. I was shot in the shoulder. Both of us reached the shore alive, but Mr. Moffatt died from the effects of his wound a few days later.
That same day we were captured by the Japanese and were thrown into a cell, and left without food for three days. Mr. Moffatt would have lived if he could have received proper medical attention. The cell was merely a hut with lattice-work sides. There was no protection from the bitter cold and I suffered keenly. While thus imprisoned a Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese prisoner up to my cell and killed him before my eyes, drinking his blood while the muscles were yet quivering.
I appealed to the American Consul, but he paid no attention to my call. Then I requested the French official to secure my release, and he sent a troop of forty soldiers. I was released in a hurry. Before leaving for Japan I took a run up to Siberia, and saw the prisoners working in the mines. I saw one string of forty prisoners arrive. They had walked 1,400 Russian miles.
Again in America
When I reached Yokohama I needed just 86 yen to secure my passage across the Pacific. The American Consul refused to interest himself in my trip. He said: “You’ve been receiving so much attention from the French that you’d better let them see you through.” I took him at his word and appealed to the French Consul. He introduced me to friends, who gave me the chance to earn 250 yen.
I sailed for San Francisco on the steamer Belgic, arriving there March 23 of the present year, forty-eight days ahead of schedule. I was glad enough to get away from the land of rats and rice and into a country where one could get a decent bed. The furnace beds of Corea are peculiar institutions. A fire is built underneath and the occupant is obliged to keep turning in order to avoid roasting to death. One side will freeze while the other is being roasted.
Well, when I reached San Francisco I felt as if my journey was ended. I never made a greater mistake in my life. The hardest part of the entire trip was through Southern California and the desert in Arizona. At Stockton I was nearly killed by a runaway, and was laid up five weeks. My experience in China had undermined my nervous system, and I collapsed under what would have been a trifle at another time. The enforced rest did me a lot of good, though. Otherwise I would not have been able to have made my way through the desert. I succeeded in acquiring the trick of jumping my wheel from railroad tie to railroad tie, a really not difficult thing to learn, and I traveled along the railroad quite comfortably.
The Worst Part of the Trip
I had a journey of 165 miles through the sand. Engineer Zeigler, of the through express, stopped when he saw me and offered me a ride, but I explained why I could not accept his offer. He gave me some iced milk. At Yuma, Ari., a woman refused to give me a drink of water. It was the first act of inhospitality I had experienced and in my own country, too. Her excuse later, when questioned by the local newspaper men was: “I didn’t know her. I thought she was a tramp.”
At another place I was given some stale bread and then forced to saw wood in payment. I explained that I had never before tackled a woodpile and told her of my journey. I had to chop wood, nevertheless.
In another place I could find no shelter and spent the night in a graveyard. I slept comfortably with a grave for my pillow and was awakened by a shrill voice exclaiming: “Hi, there! Get off my old man’s grave!” Inasmuch as the command was backed by an uplifted broom, I obeyed in a hurry.
Finished on Time
An amateur photographer “caught” us just as the old lady caught me. In all the different countries I visited the only affront I received was from my own sex. I was treated with uniform courtesy by the men.
Well, I reached Chicago safely on Thursday, Sept. 12, fourteen days ahead of the time allowed by the agreement. This completed my journey, for I had already touched Chicago and I had thus completed the girdle around the world. The gentleman who had won the wager presented me with the stake—$10,000—and in addition I had the $5,318.75 which I had earned. My expenses for the entire time had been $1,200. I rode 9,604 miles on the wheel, and the ocean travel and walking in addition made a grand total of 26,000 miles travesed in the fourteen and one-half months.
—NELLIE BLY, JR.
* * *
A Note on Sources
In reconstructing Annie’s story, I faced an obstacle familiar to others who have undertaken similar endeavors: primary sources that have gone missing over the years. Family members don’t always preserve the artifacts of the lives of ordinary people, even of those who do extraordinary things. They may not recognize that the artifacts are worth saving. The stories of women in particular, especially those who lived their lives more than a century ago, may be especially underappreciated by family members. Anger, resentment, or even shame may lead to the destruction of documents, diaries, and memoirs. It is clear that Annie’s journey had some serious adverse consequences on members of her immediate family, but why more remnants of her journey did not survive is impossible to know. Annie’s first business, in the Bronx, was destroyed by fire and it is possible she kept her personal papers there. In cases like hers, we are left to pull together a picture with whatever bits and pieces of her life can be gathered.
Linda Lawrence Hunt, the author of Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, calls this the “rag-rug” approach to history. It is akin to making a quilt from the remnants of cast-off bits of fabric. This is not to say that I didn’t uncover a lot of material, especially newspaper accounts. Indeed, I was able to find hundreds of newspaper accounts from the United States, Europe, and even Vietnam, Singapore, and other places that provide a colorful picture of the entire arc of Annie’s journey.
Despite what I do know, my knowledge of Annie is necessarily incomplete. For example, other than what she shared with newspaper reporters—and she was quite a talker—we don’t have the benefit of her day-to-day observations of her circumstances or access to her inner thoughts about, say, leaving her children or the import of her own journey. We don’t know how her family fared back in Boston during her absence. But without the “rag-rug” approach to the stories of women such as Annie, many valuable stories that illuminate important parts of our history will forever be left untold. Indeed, as Ellen Smith, curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, told me, “if we only told the stories of women who left diaries and letters behind, we wouldn’t have women’s history.”
There is, of course, no way to know the boundaries of one’s own ignorance. No matter how much material I have unearthed, I have no way of knowing what else might be out there. Annie crossed paths with thousands of people during her journey. How many of them kept a pho
tograph, or recorded a memory in a diary, now gathering dust in a Paris attic, a Yokohama library, or a Yuma, Arizona, ranch house? Whose descendants might have a letter penned by Annie more than a hundred years ago, postmarked Marseilles, Saigon, or Trinidad, Colorado?
Despite my efforts to learn everything I could about Annie’s around-the-world tour, it is possible evidence will later come to light that will prove some of my assumptions and conclusions to be off the mark. But I don’t think they will detract from Annie’s singular accomplishment nor dim this remarkable chapter in her life.
Bibliography
Bryson, Conrey. Down Went McGinty: El Paso in the Wonderful Nineties. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1977.
Collins, Gail. America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. New York: William Morrow, 2003.
Dodge, Pryor. The Bicycle. Paris-New York: Flammarion, 1996.
Gibb, Evelyn McDaniel. Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West Coast in 1909. Cornwallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.
Goddard, Stephen B. Colonel Albert Pope and His American Dream Machines: The Life and Times of a Bicycle Tycoon Turned Automotive Pioneer. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000.
Gordon, Sarah A. “‘Any Desired Length’: Negotiating Gender Through Sports Clothing, 1870–1925,” in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America, edited by Philip Scranton. New York and London: Routledge, 2001, 24–51.
Herlihy, David V. Bicycle: The History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Jamieson, Duncan R. On Your Left: A History of Bicycle Journeying. Unpublished manuscript.
Leete, Harley M., ed. The Best of Bicycling! New York: Pocket Books, 1970.
Leonard, Irving A. When Bikehood was in Flower: Sketches of Early Cycling. Tucson: Seven Palms Press, 1983.
Around the World on Two Wheels Page 21