On the Bly

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back. We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Today on the show, stories about speed.

BRIAN: In 1873, French writer Jules Verne published the massively popular novel, Around the World in 80 Days. It’s about a guy named Phileas Fogg, who wins a bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in, you guessed it, 80 days.

It may not seem very impressive today, but in the 19th century, moving that distance in that span of time would have been almost unthinkable. The novel captivated readers here and abroad. They wondered, could that kind of speed actually be possible?

ED: The young journalist Nellie Bly certainly thought so. And she thought she was the person to do it. She first pitched her idea for an around the globe adventure to her bosses in 1888. But the editors of the New York World thought that only a man could accomplish such a feat.

Bly, who had already made a name for herself as an investigative journalist, felt otherwise. And her editors finally agreed to back her expedition a year later, guessing that the public’s fascination with the trip would help them sell papers. BackStory producer Nina Earnest has the story.

NINA EARNEST: November 14, 1889 was a big day for Nellie Bly. She was about to embark on a trip around the world, and do it faster than anyone had ever done it before. Her route would take her 21,000 miles east, across the Atlantic in Europe, through the Suez Canal, through British Asia, across the Pacific to San Francisco, and back to New York City on America’s own transcontinental railroad.

The 25-year-old set off for her record-breaking voyage from New Jersey, aboard the steamship Augusta Victoria. Wearing the one dress she would wear throughout her entire voyage, Bly looked ready for anything. Well, almost anything.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: This is where she discovers that she doesn’t have sea legs.

NINA EARNEST: This is Joyce Chaplin, who has written about Bly’s voyage.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: So even during the departure, she starts feeling this. And she stands it as long as she can, and then she vomits right over the ship’s rail.

NINA EARNEST: The New York World announced the reporter’s expedition in the morning paper. One person who read the world’s coverage with keen interest was John Brisbane Walker, the publisher of the Cosmopolitan magazine. Yes, Walker’s Cosmopolitan would eventually morph into today’s Cosmo. But it was a little bit different back then.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: No sex tips for women in 1889. It was a kind of high-toned magazine with essays and poetry and so forth.

NINA EARNEST: This is Matthew Goodman, author of a book about Bly’s voyage. He says that Walker knew his highfalutin’ monthly magazine certainly didn’t have the reach of Joseph Pulitzer’s world. But he still wondered if there could be something in this idea for his magazine.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: And he immediately thought, I should send my own girl reporter, as they were called back then, to challenge Nellie Bly. But what I’m going to do is to send her in the opposite direction, because I think that because of the prevailing winds, it will be quicker to go west rather than east. But who am I going to get? Well, his mind immediately turned to the literary editor of the magazine, who was a 28-year-old woman by the name of Elizabeth Bisland.

NINA EARNEST: Elizabeth Bisland– in personality and style, she was Nellie Bly’s polar opposite. Bisland he was a genteel, soft-spoken southerner. Bly, harkening from Pennsylvania coal country, was scrappier. Bisland was a poet who hosted a literary salon in her apartment. Bly preferred to hang out at saloons.

And Bly, well, she lived for publicity. Bisland most certainly did not. But Walker knew that if he was going to send a woman, Bisland was his best bet. So the same day that Bly set off for New Jersey, Walker called his top woman writer into his office and told her to pack your bags for a trip around the world.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: She was not at all amused by this. In fact, she thought he was kidding at first. And then when she realized that he was serious, she said, no, I absolutely will not do that.

NINA EARNEST: We don’t really know what Walker said to convince her.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: But that evening, eight hours later, she was on a New York Central line, bound for San Francisco.

NINA EARNEST: Americans were soon enthralled by the unusual story. Speculation ran rampant– which route was better, Bly’s east to west or Bisland’s west to east? And, which girl reporter could break Fogg’s record?

MATTHEW GOODMAN: It was considered something very modern about the idea of doing things faster than they had never been done before. We think of today as an age of speed. Everything is fast. And of course it is, but much the same was true of the late 19th century.

NINA EARNEST: The world was getting smaller. Transcontinental railroads were up and running. Steamship companies routinely crossed the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These kinds of advances had inspired Jules Verne’s adventure story in the first place. But perhaps the most important innovation for these women was the telegraph, which was quickly making the farthest reaches of the globe accessible.

It allowed Bly and Bisland to wire ahead when they were on their way to a new destination, and to send reports back to their eager readers in the United States.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: It’s as if you were to travel now and keep in touch with your social circle via social media, that you’re posting your location on Twitter, you’re announcing where you are on Facebook. So you may be alone wherever you are, but a lot of people know where you are.

NINA EARNEST: Neither woman stayed in any one place for long. Their lives were full of stop, go, transfer, sleep when you can, repeat. They only had a reprieve when a shipper train was delayed.

Those delays made Bisland very happy, as they gave her a chance to do some sightseeing. She loved seeing other parts of the world. Bly, though she snagged seven marriage proposals and adopted a monkey named McGinty, was entirely focused on her goal.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: You know, if it were up to Nellie Bly, she would not have stopped anywhere along the way. And whenever her ship was delayed, she was sort of silently dying inside.

NINA EARNEST: By day 39, Bly had arrived in Hong Kong. She was actually in a good mood, all because she was two days ahead of schedule. But when she got there, she heard some unfortunate news.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: The steamship official there says to her, you’re going to lose. And Nellie Bly says, what do you mean? I’m ahead of time. And the man says, time? I don’t think her name is time. And Nellie Bly says, what on Earth are you talking about?

And he says, the other woman– the other woman is going to win. She came through here a few days ago. And Nellie Bly says, what other woman? And it’s only then that she discovers that there’s this other journalist racing to beat her, and that she is in fact losing at that point.

NINA EARNEST: That’s right. Nellie Bly was 12,000 miles into her journey before she realized that she had actual competition. She was beside herself. And up until the last two weeks of the race, it looked like Elizabeth Bisland was going to win.

On day 64, she was on her way to catch a steamship that would bring her from France back to New York City. If all went according to plan, she would get there a full day ahead of Bly’s schedule. But something curious happened while en route to her departure point.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: Bisland is awoken by a representative of the Thomas Cook travel agency, who tells her that her ship has been delayed and that she needs to take a different ship instead.

NINA EARNEST: Bisland, alarmed and frantic, lost several days searching for another boat.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: As it turns out, that ship had not in fact been delayed. And there has been a great deal of speculation about whether or not that travel agent was simply misinformed, or whether or not that travel agent was in the pay of Joseph Pulitzer and had been commissioned to misinform Elizabeth Bisland and to send her off on this wild goose chase that would delay her enough that Nellie Bly would be assured of victory. That is a mystery that has never been solved.

NINA EARNEST: Bly arrived in San Francisco on January 21, 1890, where a special train was waiting to bring her back to New York as fast as possible. The New York World’s publicity machine had done its work so well that Bly was greeted by tons of adoring fans across the country.

In Topeka, Kansas, for example, 10,000 people came out to see the daring girl reporter. This public exuberance continued as she made her way back to where it all began. Her total time– 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Crowds are waiting to greet her when she gets back to New York. Cannon are set off. So she wins. She wins within the terms that she had set out. She proves her own publisher wrong, that a woman can indeed do this. And it is a moment of publicly known triumph.

NINA EARNEST: She had smashed Fogg’s fictional record and set a real world record as well. At a time when European empires spanned the globe, Americans loved her for what her triumph represented.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: By 1890, the United States had global ambitions, that they really wanted to control the Pacific and the Pacific world, that they wanted to be rivals to Great Britain. And so having an American private citizen and a woman, not least, go around the world and set a new record was a demonstration that the United States was in on this big planetary venture.

NINA EARNEST: But Goodman says this nationalism may have been a little overblown.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: She was traveling on a German ship. She was stopping in English ports all along the way. She was riding on the transcontinental railroad that had been built, in large part, by Chinese immigrants who were not granted American citizenship. And yet, it was seen somehow is being an American achievement.

NINA EARNEST: As for her competitor, Goodman says that after a grueling 75 days, Bisland returned to New York City to comparatively little fanfare. No cannons for her.

MATTHEW GOODMAN: She did beat Around the World in 80 Days by several days, but is subsequently forgotten about by history.

NINA EARNEST: The same would be true for all those who would soon be setting new circumnavigation records. So why were Americans so captivated by Bly’s adventure? Maybe it was her plucky personality. Maybe it was the New York World’s relentless promotion efforts.

But maybe too, because her trip showed that in this new world of steam engines and telegraphs, a voyage as fantastically fast as Phileas Fogg’s could actually be a reality.

ED: Nina Earnest is one of our producers. We also heard from Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin, author of Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit, and from Matthew Goodman, author of 80 Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World.