Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World

If one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling,” Bly liked to say, “and not for the purpose of impressing fellow travelers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.

A free American girl can accommodate herself to circumstances without the aid of a man.” -Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland were not only racing around the world; they were also racing through the very heart of the Victorian age.

but all were shot through with Bly’s unmistakable passion for a good story and her uncanny ability to capture the public’s imagination, the sheer force of her personality demanding that attention be paid to the plight of the unfortunate, and, not incidentally, to herself.

The writer Mary Cadwalader Jones felt obliged to begin her book European Travel for Women: Notes and Suggestions by remarking that “unless travellers are willing to leave national prejudices behind them, and ready to see whatever is characteristic and excellent in a foreign country, without finding fault because it is unfamiliar, they had better remain at home. “Americans,” she pointedly added, “are among the worst offenders in this regard.

By the 1890s Americans had also begun to travel to Europe in much larger numbers—though often, in imperial fashion, they seemed to want to bring their own country with them. In Liverpool they could stay at the Hotel Washington, in Florence at the Hôtel du New York, and in Paris at the Hôtel États-Unis and Hôtel de l’Oncle Tom. Everywhere concierges, waiters, and carriage drivers learned English in order to communicate with American tourists who insisted on speaking only their own language. Throughout Europe, hotels installed extra baths and elevators in the American fashion, and restaurants began offering such American favorites as ice cream and soda; still, it was reported, American travelers often complained when they could not find fried ham or pork and beans on the menu. These were the tourists Henry James dismissed as “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,” who could easily be recognized by their enormous bags, bad French, and demands for pale ale. Henry Adams decried the typical American traveler, “bored, patient, helpless, indulgent to an extreme,” who was to be found “in every railway station in Europe carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his life would be the day he should land on the pier in New York.

This was an astonishing—and entirely unsubstantiated—accusation, made against not only Elizabeth Bisland but also the officers of the Oceanic, who had by Bly’s own account done everything possible to deliver her to San Francisco as quickly as possible and whom she elsewhere characterized as “perfect, from the captain down.” In that regard, it might also be noted that in fact the Oceanic arrived in San Francisco one day early, not one day late; the steamship was late only in relation to Chief Engineer William Allen’s prediction that Nellie Bly would be brought across the Pacific in record-breaking time—a prediction that he believed so strongly that he had it painted on the ship’s engines. All in all it was, the Tribune observed, “a pretty piece of feminine revenge.

From the very beginning of her career Bly had placed herself at the center of her reportage: her exposé of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, for instance, had focused in large part on how she managed to get inside the asylum—the women inmates did not even appear until midway through the story.

(To the shocked tourists among his parties Ah Cum quietly but firmly defended traditional Chinese practices; when asked, for instance, why Chinese women bound their feet he replied simply that European women pinched their waists, which was far more injurious.)

With that thought came to me a shamed feeling that there I was, a free-born American girl, the native of the grandest country on earth, forced to be silent because I could not in honesty speak proudly of the rulers of my land, unless I went back to those two kings of manhood, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

As she traveled among the English, Nellie Bly was becoming increasingly conscious of the peculiar privilege that imperial power conferred upon its citizens: the privilege of insensitivity.

The idea for the novel seems to have been born in the summer of 1871, when Jules Verne, sitting in a Paris café, noticed a newspaper advertisement for a tourist trip around the world being organized by the British travel agent Thomas Cook. That previously unthinkable notion—that not just a single country or continent but the entire globe might be the subject of a tourist excursion—was itself traceable to the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, which established for the first time a direct water route between Europe and Asia.

In October 1883, representatives of the largest railroad companies met at a General Time Convention in Chicago, at which it was decided to divide the country into four time zones, corresponding to the mean sun time at the meridians near Philadelphia, Memphis, Denver, and Fresno. This action had been taken without the consent of the president, the Congress, or the courts, but almost immediately it became the de facto law of the land. On Sunday, November 18, 1883, clocks across the country were changed to the new railroad standard; that Sunday became known as “the day of two noons.” Local mean time was gone; now everyone was living by railroad time.

The locomotive, its plume of smoke trailing behind it like a war pennant, now seemed to be a natural feature of the landscape, and to most Americans it represented progress, modernity, even beauty.

FIFTY-THREE MILES west of Ogden stood the railroad station at Promontory Summit, Utah, where only two decades earlier, in 1869, the final spike in the transcontinental railroad, the legendary “Golden Spike,” had been hammered into a ceremonial tie of polished California laurel. There the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific, and the nation, only a few years earlier torn apart in civil war, had been joined together by the railroads.

the fast mail train arrived at Ogden on schedule. The final seventy-six miles had been covered in sixty-five minutes—the shortest time ever recorded on that stretch of track. Having made good on his promise, Cyclone Bill Downing dismounted from his cab; casually remarking that these night rides were prone to give a man a cold, he passed through the swinging doors of a bar on the corner and was not seen again.

Nellie Bly first came to the World offices two years before to seek work as a reporter, the story idea she had suggested was to sail back from England in steerage so that she might allow The World’s readers to learn about the appalling conditions endured by those below on their journey across the ocean. Now, as a celebrated World reporter, she was only a few steps away, but during her time on the Augusta Victoria she seems never to have set foot into steerage, and she never wrote a word about it.

For those traveling in steerage, an oceangoing steamship was not a floating palace but a floating tenement: the class system did not stop at the water’s edge but was instead perfectly replicated, in miniature, aboard ship.

The writer Mary Cadwalder Jones felt obliged to begin her book European Travel for Women: Notes and Suggestions by remarking that "unless travellers are willing to leave national prejudices behind them, and ready to see whatever is characteristic and excellent in a foreign country, without finding fault because it is unfamiliar, they had better remain at home." "Americans," she pointedly added, "are among the worst offenders in this regard.

The wretchedness of the condition was perhaps best conveyed by the old saying that those suffering from seasickness believe they will die on the first day, are sure they will on the second, and hope they will on the third.

Travel, she had discovered, was a delightful means of gratifying the intelligent curiosity that Dr. Johnson had called the root of all wisdom and culture. “I go to bed exhaustedly happy,” she wrote in her notebook, “and wake up expectantly smiling.

The state of Illinois contained twenty-seven different time zones, Wisconsin thirty-eight. In Pittsburgh the train station had six clocks, and each one showed a different time. When a clock struck noon in Washington, D.C., the time was 12:08 in Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York, and 12:24 in Boston.

Her official name was Liberty Enlightening the World, but she was most often referred to simply as “Bartholdi’s statue.” The Alsatian sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi had originally meant for her to stand at the entrance to the Suez Canal, where, in the veil and dress of an Egyptian peasant woman, she would have held up a lantern that symbolized the light of Egypt bringing progress to Asia. That plan, however, had been rejected by Egypt’s ruler Khedive Isma’il Pasha as too expensive, and so Bartholdi went back to the drawing board, where he converted progress into liberty.

After the period of sex-attraction has passed, women have no power in America.” -Elizabeth Bisland