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Date Posted

2007-11-14

On November 14, 1889, 118 years ago today, Nellie Bly, an intrepid reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, set off to circle the world faster than Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. No one had ever tried such a thing. “’I wish I was at the other end of the earth!’” she later recalled thinking. “’And why not?’ the thought came: ‘I need a vacation; why not take a trip around the world?’”

She headed off as one woman alone, taking nothing but a carry-on-size bag, determined to move at lightning speed. Her dispatches to the World from the trip would cement her status as America’s most famous female journalist—if not America’s most famous journalist, period. She had done groundbreaking reporting before the journey, but this would be the zenith of stunt journalism, a genre she had single-handedly invented.

Stunt journalism was the reality television of its time. It meant writing about strange activities and ways of life from an engrossing first-person perspective. It could be goofy, like the time Bly worked as an elephant trainer, or serious, like her piece done as an insane-asylum inmate. Her snappy, intimate writing brought to life unknown worlds for millions of readers of the World.

Around the World in Eighty Days had been published 16 years earlier, but until Bly, no one had actually tried to make the trip. The book, though fiction, had been inspired by a series of very real developments, including the openings of the Suez Canal and America’s transcontinental railroad, both in 1869. Nellie Bly would prove that its portrayal of the new possibilities for speed was genuinely realistic.

At the time, she was just 25 and was passing, even on her passport, for 22. Born Elizabeth Cochran, she had taken her pen name from a Stephen Foster song and had talked her way into a New York newspaper career, gamely spending 10 days in the Blackwell’s Island asylum for her first World assignment. She refused to be shuffled off to the women’s pages to review fashion and society doings, always accepting and suggesting participatory stunts to keep her on the front pages. At a time when women couldn’t vote in most places, her career was almost impossible, but her stories sold papers. No editor, then or now, would have ignored the growth in circulation that she generated, and her ambition and charm overcame any prejudice that might have stopped her. In fact, the World had originally planned to send a man around the world, to avoid needing an escort or a large wardrobe, but Bly threatened, “Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.” Her editors gave her the assignment.

Setting out with just two days’ notice, clad in the single dress she would wear throughout the trip, she took with her a few changes of underwear and 200 pounds in English gold and banknotes as she departed cheerfully on the steamer Augusta Victoria. Her dispatches showed an eye for detail, and they were, at a time before TV and the Internet, live reports from places where few white men, let alone women, went. She didn’t shy from eating new foods, and she left her opinions unvarnished: “The Japanese are the direct opposite to the Chinese. The Japanese are the cleanliest people on earth, the Chinese are the filthiest.”

She had a sense of humor and an eye for the absurd, observing in Hong Kong that it was “laughable . . . to hear men swear in ‘pigeon English,’ at an unkind or unruly servant. Picture a man with an expression of frenzied rage upon his countenance, saying: ‘Go to hellee, savey?’” And before she departed for Canton, she noted, “I knew we were trying to keep the Chinamen out of America”—a reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—“so I decided to see all of them I could while in their land. Pay them a farewell visit, as it were!”

For a woman traveling alone—something that remains unusual enough to continue spawning travel books today—Bly had very few problems. She was not particularly harassed or beset with illness, and she traveled with a jar of cold cream, and a monkey acquired in Singapore, with ease. The development of the transatlantic cable meant that she could wire news to New York from Europe in a matter of minutes, while handwritten reports would take two weeks by boat. Her pieces and her trip were excerpted and covered by newspapers around the world, albeit grudgingly by the World’s competitors, and a game board was printed in her paper so readers could follow along as she hopped from country to country. The effect on the World’s circulation was considerable. She returned Saturday, January 25, 1890, and the day after her return, the paper’s circulation hit 280,340, more than 10,000 higher than the previous Sunday record, confirming the journey’s resounding success.

“My trip was so pleasant I dreaded the finish of it,” she wrote, but she added that when she arrived in Jersey City, “The station was packed with thousands of people, and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them. . . . 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.”

American journalism