In 1872, the Daily Telegraph calculated that, by way of steamboats and railroads, the world could be traversed in 80 days. The idea was tempting enough that Phileas Fogg wagered 20,000 pounds he could do it. Fogg was the protagonist in the Jules Verne novel “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and, although Fogg was fictional, the calculation was not.
Verne admitted the idea for his famous novel came from an article he read in the French newspaper Le Siécle. Of course, Fogg wins the wager just before the final seconds tick away. Seventeen years after his 1872 novel was published, Verne stood in the hallway of his home in Amiens holding a candle and peering at the map he had made of Fogg’s journey. Next to Verne stood a young American journalist from the New York World, who had recently begun a journey from Hoboken, New Jersey, with the goal of beating the fictional record and completing the trip in 75 days.
Verne and his wife clinked their wine glasses together as a cheer to the American adventurer. “If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands,” Verne said.
Bly’s Grand Idea
Nellie Bly’s idea to travel the world came on a late Sunday night after tossing and turning trying to come up with a good story pitch for her editor. When she suggested it the following morning, the editor favored the idea, but wanted to run it by the newspaper’s business manager.“It is impossible for you to do it,” the manager said. He gave three reasons: she was a woman and would need a protector, and being a woman, she would have too much luggage to make quick travel feasible, and thirdly, she only knew English. “No one but a man can do this.”
Bly’s response would prove legendary: “Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”
It was decided. If any reporter would undertake this feat for the publication, it would be Bly. A year later, she would be on her way. On Nov. 12, 1889, her editor asked, “Can you start around the world day after tomorrow?”
The Journey Begins
On Nov. 14, Bly, along with as many as 1,100 other passengers, boarded the 475-foot long SS Augusta Victoria, which had broken the transatlantic speed record six months prior. The ship would arrive in England seven days later on Nov. 21.
Disembarking, Bly took a train and then a carriage into London. Stopping by the local office of the New York World, she received several messages, of which one was an invitation from Jules Verne. Her next stop was the American Legation office to obtain her passport. From London, she boarded another train where she had “an easy, happy sleep” until the stopping of the train woke her. Bly then boarded a ferry to cross the English Channel to Boulogne. Now in France, she made her first detour to meet with the Vernes in Amiens.
Though her visit was brief, she feared she had “jeopardized the success of [her] tour,” and therefore made haste to hail a carriage to take her to the train station. She urged the coachman to make all possible speed. She caught the train from Amiens to Calais, where she waited two hours for the mail train to arrive to take her to the port city of Brindisi, Italy.
Along the long route to Brindisi, the train made several stops. The first was a disappointment, as it was nighttime. The next was just as disappointing, as a thick fog blocked her view. Finally, at “some station,” she “went out on the platform, and the fog seemed to lift for an instant, and ... saw on one side a beautiful beach and a smooth bay dotted with boats bearing oddly-shaped and brightly-colored sails, which somehow looked to me like mammoth butterflies.” Her expectations were finally met. The train eventually arrived in Brindisi, though two hours late.
While sending a cable to New York, Bly heard a whistle blow “long and warningly.” Her boat to Port Said in Egypt was leaving!
Egypt and the Suez
Aboard ship, the weary Bly slept through stewardess calls and breakfast. When she finally awoke, she joined a gentlemanly Englishman, who had been part of the Civil Service in Calcutta for 20 years, and who, realizing she was traveling alone, now “devoted most of his time looking out for [her] comfort and pleasure.” Her time aboard covered several days and was met with rude luncheoners, talented second-class passenger musicians, a gossiping captain, men playing “cricket and quoits,” entertaining “Lascars” with their “weird musical chanting,” and the rumor that she “was an eccentric American heiress, traveling about with a hair brush and a bank book.”“Notwithstanding all annoying trifles,” she recalled, “it was a very happy life we spent in those pleasant waters.”
When the Victoria arrived in Port Said, Egypt, Bly saw men carrying canes and women parasols for the stated purpose of keeping beggars at bay. She refused a parasol, but after witnessing the “exhibition of hungry greed for the few pence [the boatmen] expected to earn by taking the passengers ashore ... [and] the captain was compelled to order some sailors to beat the Arabs off,” she acknowledged the passengers had a point. Upon returning to the ship at night, the boatmen, much to the chagrin of the passengers, charged double the daytime rate.
Anxious to see the “famous Suez Canal,” Bly awoke early the next morning. Upon reaching Ismailia, the ship awaited more passengers, which enabled Bly and others to rush ashore and visit “the Khedive’s palace.”
Aden, Ceylon, and Singapore
The Victoria resumed down the gulf through the Red Sea and into the British port of Aden (modern-day Yemen). A brief seven-hour stay ended with throwing silver coins into the water for the local “Somali boys” to dive underwater “for a time that seemed dangerously long to us,” resurface, and display the coin between their teeth.From Aden, the Victoria sailed to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). “As we moved in among the beautiful ships laying at anchor, we could see the green island dotted with low arcaded buildings which looked, in the glare of the sun, like marble palaces,” Bly recalled. Her accommodations were at Colombo’s Grand Oriental Hotel with its “tiled arcades, corridors airy and comfortable, furnished with easy chairs and small marble topped tables,” “very good food,” English-speaking Singalese waiters, and ever-present snake charmers.
While delayed in Colombo for five days awaiting the ship that would sail to China, she saw, and rode in, her first jinricksha. The ride through the city iterated how smooth all the roads had been since the start of her journey outside America. She comically wrote that she “could not decide … whether the smoothness of the road was due to the … absence of beer wagons, or to the absence of the New York street commissioners.”
The delay, however, worried Bly significantly. “I thought how little anyone could realize what this delay meant to me,” she noted. She pictured herself “creeping back to New York ten days behind time, with a shamed look on her face and afraid to hear her name spoken.”
Hong Kong, Canton, and a Competitor
The journey to Hong Kong was met with a monsoon, which, while many of the men suffered seasickness, Bly thought it “the most beautiful thing [she] ever saw.” She had no fear on deck from massive swells. It was only when a “mad man” joined her, confessed his love for her, and that they should be buried in the sea together, that she decided to not be on deck without company.The Oriental, arriving on Dec. 23, “made up the five days I had lost in Colombo … [and] reached Hong Kong two days” ahead of schedule. Her first objective was to reach “the office of the Oriental and Occidental Steamship Company to learn the earliest possible time I could leave for Japan, to continue my race against time around the world.” It was there she learned that she wasn’t just racing a fictional character, but another journalist: Elizabeth Bisland, of Cosmopolitan magazine. Bisland had left for Japan three days ahead of Bly and Bly would not leave for another five. Nonetheless, she was adamant that she was only racing time and Fogg.
While in Hong Kong and Canton, it had slipped her mind that it was the Christmas season until her guide in Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) greeted her with “Merry Christmas!” She incidentally also received a gift: her first sighting of the American flag since leaving New York. “It was floating over the gateway to the American Consulate. … The moment I saw it floating there in the soft, lazy breeze I took off my cap and said: ‘That is the most beautiful flag in the world, and I am ready to whip anyone who says it isn’t.’”
Finding Eden and Coming Home
Back aboard the Oceanic, Bly celebrated the New Year sailing to Japan, a country that so impressed her that she called it “the land of love–beauty–poetry–cleanliness.”Interestingly, her fame had reached Japan before she did, because her story of meeting Jules Verne had been printed in the newspapers. She fell in love with Japan, was enamored with the grace and beauty of the geishas, and awed by the large Diabutsu (Buddha) statue in Kamakura. After five days, she believed she had found Eden, but was forced to leave paradise to stay on schedule.
‘For Nellie Bly, We'll win or die. January 20, 1890.’”
The ship raced to San Francisco. There was a scare that the “bill of health” had been left in Japan, which would have delayed disembarking two weeks. There was also a smallpox scare. The bill was found; the smallpox was not.A special train awaited Bly in San Francisco with the promise that she would arrive back in New York on time. Bly said she remembered her journey across the continent as “one maze of happy greetings” where she rode in a car “attached to a swift engine that was tearing like mad through flower-dotted valley and over snow-tipped mountain, on–on–on!”
It was during this week in history, on Jan. 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m., that Nellie Bly completed her trip around the world in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, beating Phileas Fogg by more than a week, and Elizabeth Bisland by four days.
“The station was packed with thousands of people, and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them, and the cannons at the Battery and Fort Greene boomed out the news of my arrival,” Bly recalled. “I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in seventy-two days, but because I was home again.”
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