To get to the top of the mountain, she first rode the Peak Tram, a funicular railway only a year old when she visited. One seems to be suspended between two heavens. Every one of the several thousand boats and sampans carries a light after dark. This, with the lights on the roads and in the houses, seems to be a sky more filled with stars than the one above.
I promised to do the trip in seventy-five days, and I will do it. While Nellie Bly waited for her ship to leave for Japan, she sought out new experiences. In reality, though located in Chinese territory, Canton had become one of the largest centers of European activity in China, especially before the British seized Hong Kong.
She set off to tour, first visiting the island of Shamian, home to European and American commercial and government buildings. The city was crowded and dirty, and the places she visited were depressing.
She traveled through narrow streets to the execution ground, where her guide told her about the punishments that criminals faced if they were caught; most were swiftly beheaded, but many met more elaborate and gruesome fates. After leaving the execution ground, she visited several temples the city had hundreds , including the Hualin Temple Temple of the Five Hundred Gods and the Chenghuang Temple called the Temple of Horrors by some European visitors, including Bly, for its graphic depictions of demons being punished.
Bly became curious to see a famous leper colony outside of the city. Inside the village, there was such a strong smell that her guide advised everyone in their group to smoke to overpower the stench. The people afflicted with leprosy lived in grinding poverty, even worse than the population at large.
Although some of them operated a small farm in the village, most were beggars. Bly came away feeling upset and more homesick than ever. Her guide led her and her companions into a temple to eat lunch. As she listened to faint, eerie, chanting from somewhere in the distance, someone mentioned that it was about midnight in New York.
Nellie Bly did not leave Hong Kong until the afternoon of December The ship that took her to Yokohama, the RMS Oceanic, proved comfortable and its crew kind and skillful, to her delight. She got along well with her fellow passengers. The race around the world would come down to the next few weeks. Unfortunately for Nellie Bly, she would have to spend the next week in Japan waiting for her ship to leave, waiting just as she had in Hong Kong.
Fortunately, she was instantly charmed by Japan. The winter climate was pleasantly cool and sunny. One evening, Bly went with some of her companions from the Oceanic to a geisha house. With a grace, simply enchanting, they twirl their little fans, sway their dainty bodies in a hundred different poses, each one more intoxicating than the other, all the while looking so childish and shy, with an innocent smile lurking about their lips, dimpling their soft cheeks, and their black eyes twinkling with the pleasure of the dance.
The statue, built in , stands almost 45 feet tall and, according to Bly, is 98 feet in circumference at the waist. When she visited Tokyo, Bly was able to see the grand castle that housed the imperial palace, rebuilt the previous year after a fire destroyed the old structure. When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived at the mouth of Tokyo Bay with a fleet of American warships in determined to open the country to American trade, Japanese technology and society were still rooted in tradition.
Having seen the growth of European imperialism in China and seeking to escape the same fate, some Japanese leaders sought the aggressive modernization of their country.
The feudal lords daimyos were stripped of their lands, which became centralized under the emperor. Nellie Bly noted that rapid advances in technology followed this political transformation.
It revolutionized transportation: Tokyo had a streetcar line, bicycles were in use, and the country developed an extensive rail network. Electric street lights also became increasingly common. The adoption of Western movable type expanded the circulation of Japanese newspapers; Japan became one of the few places in the world, outside of the United States, where Bly received significant media attention during her journey. In many ways, while Japan still retained its traditional culture, it was rapidly becoming part of the wider world.
As Nellie Bly got closer to her destination, it became increasingly obvious how famous she had become in the United States. Aboard the Oceanic , she learned that the officers had written the following couplet all over the engine room:. Compared to the ships that Bly had taken before, the RMS Oceanic was relatively old, entering service in She was also slower, with a service speed of only about The Oceanic had room for first-class passengers, while anywhere from to passengers were crammed together in the lower decks, frequently called steerage.
Third-class or steerage passengers sailed on every ship that Bly took, and yet they never featured in her accounts of her journey. However, her competitor Elizabeth Bisland did describe the conditions in steerage on the Oceanic.
Like the Atlantic steamers, steerage consisted of one large room with many rows of bunks. As Bisland saw travelling west, many of these people returned to China with the money that they earned. Some came back penniless. Others suffered from diseases such as tuberculosis and wished to be buried in their homeland.
He seems afraid to breath sic or move, lest he should waste the failing oil or snuff out the dying flame ere he reaches his yearned-for home. Though surrounded on her journey by ordinary people seeking a better life, Nellie Bly never wrote about them. Noticed or not, however, the immigrants in steerage who came to the United States in search of opportunity helped to shape a nation.
Although Bisland went west rather than east, she saw many of the same things. She crossed the Pacific on the Oceanic. She summited Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, suffered in the equatorial heat in Singapore, enjoyed Christmas at sea off Sumatra, and watched a funeral procession on Penang. The disease, eventually known as the Russian or Asiatic flu was first identified in May in the remote Central Asian city of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan.
It spread slowly at first, but once it reached the Caspian Sea in the early fall it spread rapidly through Russia, reaching the capital, St. Petersburg, by the end of October. In December, it hit the rest of Europe and the east coast of the United States almost simultaneously.
An estimated one million people died worldwide by the end of the pandemic, which has generally been attributed to influenza, though recent science has suggested that a strain of coronavirus may have been responsible. At the time, however, the pandemic was not a concern for Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland. Nevertheless, both were focused on the task that lay ahead.
The pandemic that travelled with them became another reminder that the world was smaller than it had ever been — something each became determined to prove. As the steamship Oceanic came in sight of San Francisco early on the morning of January 21st, it seemed like the universe had conspired to prevent Nellie Bly from making it to New York in time to win her race around the world.
The Oceanic had been rocked by storms for much of its Pacific crossing. Rumors of smallpox aboard the ship circulated, but were proven false just hours before the Oceanic reached San Francisco. When a tugboat took Bly ashore at Oakland Harbor, she heard the news that most of the mountain passes were blocked by snow, meaning that she would need to detour through the deserts of the Southwest.
Two editors the World sent to meet her found themselves trapped in the snow, although one crossed Emigrant Gap in the Sierra Nevada on snowshoes to make it in time to intercept Bly. Nearly everyone she met on her journey across the United States shared this dedication.
She left Oakland in a privately chartered train that consisted of only one sleeping car and one engine. For months, Bly had travelled through countries where hardly anyone knew her name; it now seemed that everyone in America knew Nellie Bly.
In every town, big or small, throngs of people stopped their work and came out in their best clothes to greet Nellie as her train whizzed through. Lathrop, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield: the names flew by until they became meaningless. The train crossed the Mojave Desert by night and spent the next day traversing northern Arizona. Around p. Nellie emerged unscathed. It seemed as if nothing could stop her from making it to New York in time to win the race.
The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin published the following poem as an ode to her determination:. On entering port she heard, alack! Her escort, far away, On snowshoes broad, or on his back Was slicing down the railroad track To meet her on her way. Every station became a blur of excited faces, grasping hands, and adoring cheers. Telegrams arrived from around the country congratulating Bly on her seeming imminent success.
Local leaders rushed to be the first to greet her. Bly believed that 10, people had come out to cheer her in Topeka; if this was true, around one third of the population of the city had stopped what they were doing and came to the train station to catch a glimpse of Nellie Bly.
She was whisked downtown to the Chicago Press Club across from City Hall on Clark Street , where she had a short reception with the gathered reporters. Before Bly left town, she stopped at the Chicago Board of Trade, where the shouts of frantic trading were suddenly replaced by wild applause when the brokers realized that Nellie Bly had arrived.
With a brief wave of her cap, Bly was gone as quickly as she came, headed to Pennsylvania Station, and from there to Indiana and beyond. The train that Bly now rode was an ordinary train, slower than the one she had boarded in California. Nevertheless, she made good time across the hills of Indiana and Ohio, crossing the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia before entering Pennsylvania. She stayed up most of the night to greet a crowd of newspapermen at Union Station in her home city of Pittsburgh.
At in the afternoon, with anticipation building, Bly met a special welcoming party which included her mother in Philadelphia, less than miles from her destination.
Completed in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, it shattered the previous record for circumnavigation of the globe. Cannons were fired from the Battery the moment that Bly landed on the platform. The World reported that 15, people were at the station alone. The mayor of Jersey City gave a speech, but his words were nearly drowned out by the cheering throng. After only a few minutes, Bly crossed the Hudson River to Manhattan, where she went to the offices of The World in Park Row, and from there, north to her home uptown.
In November of , Nellie Bly embarked on a journey that she had been told she could never complete. Now 72 days and nearly 25, miles after setting out, she had succeeded—and was finally home. When Nellie Bly finished her journey around the world in January , she did so as a newly minted celebrity. Her race against Elizabeth Bisland became one of the greatest press spectacles of the era. So shortly after returning, Bly left her position at the newspaper that had funded and publicized her journey.
She made money from a series of lecture tours and her account of her journey, but her financial situation remained unstable and she returned to journalism to support herself. In , at the age of 31, she married a Robert Seaman, a wealthy year-old industrialist. Though often unhappy in the marriage, Bly remained with Seaman until his death in By that time, she was running his business, Iron Clad Manufacturing Company.
Over the following years, she registered patents for steel barrels and garbage cans of her own invention. The company did well for a time, but eventually fell into prolonged and bitter bankruptcy negotiations and lawsuits.
In , as Bly was about to leave for Austria to look for funding to save the business, the First World War broke out and she quickly reentered journalism to fulfill a longtime dream of reporting from the warfront. She got her wish writing with horror about the tattered and filthy condition of the Austrian armies in Poland, Galicia, and Serbia.
Bly became one of the most prominent advocates of the Austrian cause, raising American money for orphans and widows. Even after the United States declared war on Germany in April and on Austria-Hungary in December, Bly remained in Vienna as a favored guest until the end of the war.
In , Bly, a longtime supporter of the suffrage movement, lived to see the passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Eccentric businessman George Francis Train traveled around the world in just 67 days, starting and ending in Tacoma, Washington. Today, the trip can be completed by airplane in less than 36 hours, and the International Space Station takes only 90 minutes to completely orbit Earth. Nellie Bly was neither the first nor the fastest to travel around the world, and yet she remains an enduring source of fascination to the present day.
The most likely reason for this is Nellie herself. Her sharp wit, courage, and sincerity shine through in her writing and the writing of those that knew her. Nellie Bly, a journalist, traveler, industrialist, inventor, and philanthropist, left a mark on Western Pennsylvanian and American history that has stretched far beyond the day when she stepped off that train in Jersey City years ago.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Day 1 — Nov. Nellie Bly posing for a publicity shot for The World, wearing her travelling gown and holding her handbag, Feb. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. According to her account, she packed: …two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter.
Photograph of Elizabeth Bisland dressed as she would have been on her travels. Day 3 — Nov. Photograph of Elizabeth Bisland, c. Day 6 — Nov. A menu from the Augusta Victoria, Aug. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. The dining room on the Augusta Victoria depicted on a menu, Jan. Day 9 — Nov. Print of Jules Verne, Map of the British Empire, Day 14 — Nov.
Nellie Bly , c. McLoughlin Bros. Collection of the New-York Historical Society. The town was founded by her father, Judge Michael Cochran. Elizabeth had fourteen siblings. Elizabeth knew that she would need to support herself financially. Her plan was to graduate and find a position as a teacher. However, after only a year and a half, Elizabeth ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition.
She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boarding house. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Elizabeth positioned herself as an investigative reporter. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours. She lived there as an international correspondent for the Dispatch for six months.
When she returned, she was again assigned to the society page and promptly quit in protest. Elizabeth hoped the massive newspaper industry of New York City would be more open-minded to a female journalist and left Pittsburgh.
For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients. She published her articles in a book titled 10 Days in A Mad House.
In it, she explained that New York City invested more money into care for the mentally ill after her articles were published. She was satisfied to know that her work led to change. Activist journalists like Elizabeth—commonly known as muckrakers—were an important part of reform movements.
She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. After leaving the school, she moved with her mother to the nearby city of Pittsburgh, where they ran a boarding house together. Bly's future began to look brighter in the early s, when, at the age of 18, she submitted a racy response to an editorial piece that had been published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch.
Taking on the pen name by which she's best known, after a Stephen Foster song, she sought to highlight the negative consequences of sexist ideologies and the importance of women's rights issues. She also became renowned for her investigative and undercover reporting, including posing as a sweatshop worker to expose poor working conditions faced by women.
However, Bly became increasingly limited in her work at the Pittsburgh Dispatch after her editors moved her to its women's page, and she aspired to find a more meaningful career. In , Bly relocated to New York City and began working for the New York World , the publication that later became famously known for spearheading "yellow journalism. In an effort to accurately expose the conditions at the asylum, she pretended to be a mental patient in order to be committed to the facility, where she lived for 10 days.
The piece shed light on a number of disturbing conditions at the facility, including neglect and physical abuse, and, along with spawning her book on the subject, ultimately spurred a large-scale investigation of the institution.
Davis, with Bly assisting, the asylum investigation resulted in significant changes in New York City's Department of Public Charities and Corrections later split into separate agencies. These changes included a larger appropriation of funds for the care of mentally ill patients, additional physician appointments for stronger supervision of nurses and other healthcare workers, and regulations to prevent overcrowding and fire hazards at the city's medical facilities.
She also interviewed and wrote pieces on several prominent figures of the time, including Emma Goldman and Susan B.
Bly went on to gain more fame in , when she traveled around the world in an attempt to break the faux record of Phileas Fogg, the fictional title character of Jules Verne 's novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Given the green light to try the feat by the New York World , Bly embarked on her journey from Hoboken, New Jersey, in November , traveling first by ship and later also via horse, rickshaw, sampan, burro and other vehicles.
She completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds—setting a real-world record, despite her fictional inspiration for the undertaking. Bly's record was beaten in by George Francis Train, who finished the trip in 67 days. Bolstered by continuous coverage in the World , Bly earned international stardom for her months-long stunt, and her fame continued to grow after she safely returned to her native state and her record-setting achievement was announced.
In , Bly married millionaire industrialist Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior, and she became legally known as Elizabeth Jane Cochrane Seaman.
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