We have here three book reviews about Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s trips around the world. We started with Around the World in 72 Days since it covered both trips but we found that lacking and so went back to the original sources. You can read a version with more graphics in our December, ’22 Heirloom.
Around the World in 72 Days The Race Between Pulitzer’s Nellie Bly and Cosmopolitan’s Elizabeth Bisland
Jason Marks 1993 260 pages
Then In Seven Stages: A flying Trip Around the World 1891 100 pages Elizabeth Bisland
And finally,
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly 140 pages 1890
In August of ‘22 the Heirloom’s lead article was “Around the World and Over Donner Summit” which followed the 2022 PBS broadcast of a remake of “Around the World in Eighty Days.” In the original 1872 story by Jules Verne, Phileas Fogg went over Donner Summit during his fictional trip around the world. Verne, though, neglected to set any of Fogg’s adventures there, as did PBS, which had a mostly different set of adventures for their Mr. Fogg. That led the Heirloom editorial staff to see who might really have gone over Donner Summit on the way around the world. We did come up with some but it seems that the globe’s 19th Century circumnavigators did not have the exquisite taste that others have had and that’s all part of the August, ’22 Heirloom. It should be said here too, that most of the time the transcontinental railroad heading west crossed Donner Summit at night. That, of course, shows bad planning on the part of railroad personnel.
The investigation of non-fiction circumnavigators did find Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland (both in the August, ’22 Heirloom). We thought their race was an interesting story and it turns out that there is actually a book about both adventuresses, Around the World in 72 Days The Race Between Pulitzer’s Nellie Bly and Cosmopolitan’s Elizabeth Bisland. The sources for that book were books by Elizabeth Bisland, A flying Trip Around the World, and Nellie Bly, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings. Both of those were written right after their adventures.
It might seem to the casual reader that none of this has anything to do with Donner Summit and that the Heirloom editorial staff is getting pretty far afield. Here we are at issue #172 and we’ve covered those subjects exclusively about or on Donner Summit. So we have to go a bit afield. Elizabeth did go over Donner Summit though and Nellie wanted to go over Donner Summit. If that’s not enough of a connection, keep reading because we stumbled across another.
First a little background. Nellie Bly was a pioneering investigative female reporter for the Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. In 1888, at the age of twenty-one, she presented her editor with the idea of taking a trip around the world and beating the record set by Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg. Her editor didn’t like the idea because a woman alone would need a protector, a woman would carry too much baggage and so lose time, and Bly only spoke English. Nellie won the argument a year later partly because of her previous reporting and the idea fit with Pulitzer’s desire to tell stories rather than straight news, and so build circulation.
John Walker was the publisher of Cosmopolitan Magazine and he was also looking to increase circulation. So he thought to capitalize on Nellie Bly’s adventure by sending his own reporter, twenty-eight year-old Elizabeth Bisland, on her own trip to beat Nellie.
No expense would be spared by either periodical. Both women started on the same day with Bly going east and Bisland going west. Both were aiming to beat Fogg’s “record” eighty day journey.
Around the World in 72 days… could have been a fun book comparing the two real and the one fictional trips around the world, providing historical and social context, and dropping other bits of information. Marks does to that to some extent, particularly at the beginning, exploring Bisland’s fan mail, what the newspapers printed, quotes from opposition newspapers, a letter that went around the world, and an admirer of Ms Bisland’s.
The author had other plans though. He divided up both trips like a deck of cards and then shuffled the cards of both trips together so that each subsequent chapter went from Elizabeth to Nellie and back. Then he added commentary some of which is ridiculous, irrelevant, and even nasty.
For example, “Miss Bisland would doubtless have been deeply offended to be informed of her sensuality, which breathes through every line of that passage. It would not have been proper for her as a model Southern gentlewoman to admit to her healthy sexual urges. But she had them, and they made her seem to smolder with passion…” This was commentary about Elizabeth’s description of the Singapore dock workers. In another example about Elizabeth’s apparently deep thoughts on having seen a good-looking Sikh policeman, “In Elizabeth Bisland’s rich and vivid fancy, if she was going to conduct a clandestine tryst it would be with a potentate, not with a policeman.” Then there is Elizabeth seeing a Scottish soldier in a kilt, “Elizabeth Bisland’s Scottish blood tingled at the sight of those six inches of rosy male thigh peeping above the Scottish knee.” Finally there is more of Elizabeth’s deep thinking on seeing the beggars at Port Said, “the beggars were using her the way they used all the tourists who passed through Port Said. She saw through their peculiar form of blackmail, which was if she would give them money they would go away.” Is there anyone who would not have understood?
There is the possibility that someone could have had prurient thoughts about the dock workers, the Scottish soldier, and the Sikh policeman, but if one takes the totality of what Elizabeth wrote, one sees someone with a genius for description.
Another issue is that Marks completely misreads sometimes. Elizabeth was caught by surprise by her assignment. At the beginning of Bisland’s trip Marks says many times how angry Elizabeth was,
“it all happened so fast… the heated argument, the pressure of getting ready… the coffin like smell of the sleeping car. For her this was no adventure; this was a chore, and one that she accepted with extreme reluctance. She felt lonely, confused, depleted by the day’s events. As the train pulled out with her on it, Elizabeth Bisland thought, What am I doing on this ridiculous wild goose chase?”
I went back to look at Elizabeth’s book. There was “argument” in terms of trying to convince the editor that she should not go and he convincing to go. Elizabeth does not mention a heated argument. She talks about being “practically stupefied with astonishment” about the speed of things but she doesn’t talk about a “wild goose chase.”
From reading her many descriptions we get an opposite impression. In Council Bluffs she had slept away her “stupefaction of amazement,” and awoke at daybreak, something she seldom did. She found the sun almost ready to rise. She had never “permitted a vulgar familiarity to dull [her] keen delight in the ever-varying pageant of the breaking of day; so that, consequently, on the rare occasions when I assist as this function, my pleasure has all the enthusiasm of novelty.
Now the lifted curtain showed me a New Jerusalem…. At the moment when God gave his great daily fiat of ‘Let there be light’…”
Although the book is mostly the quotes of both around the world racers, that is sometimes a strength which bely Elizabeth’s reluctance. Here are some descriptions by Elizabeth Bisland,
In describing an ocean storm,
“I lay and listened to the loud combat of the thundering squadrons outside, whose white plumes flashed into sight again with the first gray gleam of days the battle still raging. Every plank in the ship creaked and groaned and shrieked without once pausing to take a breath., and I regarded with contemptuous indifference the frantic tobogganing of all my most treasured possessions all over the stateroom. What were the fleeting things of this world to one whose unexampled suffering, death must soon put a period?”
In another passage Bisland describes the morning light, “As the light grew, nacreous tints of milky blue and rose flushed the argent pallor of the land, and when the yellow disk rolled up over the horizon’s edge, I traveled for some brief space in a world of intolerable splendor, where innumerable billions of frost crystals flashed back to the sun...”
That’s wonderfully descriptive and evocative and if we put her descriptions of the dock workers and others in that context we have beautiful descriptions not examples of the “healthy sexual urges” of a “Southern gentlewoman.”
The descriptions and quotes both by Bisland and Bly are interesting in themselves and tell us something of the ladies’ personalities. There in is also a problem. Most of Marks’ book is predominantly the women’s words. The stories could have been so much richer with more elaboration and relevant commentary. Here is the first recommendation to read the Bisland and Bly books and forget Mr. Marks’.
One interesting part of Around the World in 72 Days by Marks… is the end where Marks describes Bly’s and Bisland’s lives after their race.
------
In Seven Stages: A flying Trip Around the World 1891 100 pages Elizabeth Bisland
We should never let it be said, and regular readers must agree, that the Heirloom doesn’t stop at the basics. After reading 72 Days by Marks with some disappointment, we pulled Elizabeth Bislands’ book, In Seven Stages: A flying Trip Around the World out for comparison (the Heirloom book shelves are full of good things). What did Elizabeth really say about her trip without the commentary of Mr. Marks?
It’s really quite enjoyable, especially if you like vocabulary of which Elizabeth had a good handle. Elizabeth’s book is only one hundred pages long and is available as a reprint on the internet for a few dollars. Here we get some sense of Elizabeth’s personality and details of her story.
In describing Hong Kong Elizabeth says, “Yea, verily, life is good in this magnificent equatorial world! Again I am a great sponge, absorbing beauty and delight with every pore. Every day brings new marvels and new joys. I go to bed exhaustedly happy and wake up expectantly smiling. Everything pleases, everything amuses me;…” The joy is palpable and her personality shines.
Just before that she described Japan for pages, “I am fain to declare that I forgive fate in advance for any future trick, because of this one day of unmarred delight.”
Before all that is the story of her assignment to go around the world. She woke up on November morning in 1889 at 8 AM as usual. Her maid brought in her breakfast tray along with the morning papers and “a neat pile of notes and letters.” The letters were mostly acceptances of invitations to tea the next day and “the usual communication from one’s friends on casual subjects” like invitations to dinner. There was as yet no email or messaging I guess. One note from her tailor asked her to come by for a gown fitting. By 10:30 AM she’d finished the newspapers and was rising. She made “a calm and uneventful toilet” (as getting ready was called in those days). Then came a “thunderbolt out of the serene sky of my existence” asking her to come to her publisher’s office. Elizabeth got there by 11AM. You can see she had a tough life. It’s also a fun window into the life of a 19th Century gentlewoman as Elizabeth called herself.
“To wake up in the morning to one’s usual daily duties and find one’s self at night voyaging round the world is an experience calculated to surprise even a mind as composed as that of Pet Marjorie’s historically placid fowl; ” [here we have a literary allusion that goes right past the twenty-first Century reader]. Elizabeth received her assignment to race Nellie Bly around the world in seventy-two days. “I was practically stupefied with astonishment for at least two days.”
Elizabeth apparently canceled her next day’s tea party, packed, and headed for her ship.
The following pages track Elizabeth around the world. We read her thoughts, for example musing about why the British Empire was so powerful, “What is the secret?... Is it more beef and mutton perhaps – or more of submission to orders and power of self-discipline?”
We read her marvelous descriptions of Japan, Ceylon, Hong Kong, Aden, Port Said, Greece, and Europe.
In describing Ceylon she said,
“The soil is red – bright red - the color of ground cinnabar. Not “liver-colored,” as the earth seemed to the ancient Northmen, but deep-tinted as if soaked with dragon’s blood, of which antiquity believed cinnabar to be made. A broad street, fringed with grass and tulip—trees, goes inland, and on either side are massive white buildings with arched and pillared arcades… The vividness of color here is astounding – brilliant, intense, like the colors of precious stones. We doubt the evidence of our senses – doubt the earth can be so red, the sea and ski so blue… it is a miracle wrought by the ineffable luminosity of the Eastern day! Ones’ very flesh tingles with an ecstasy of pleasure in this giant t effulgence of color…”
We learn about more ordinary things too: 19th Century ship travel for first class passengers, 19th Century tourism, and then train travel. Each description as vivid as the last.
Elizabeth ran into some troubles, storm at sea, a late train, and miscommunication. She made it around the world in seventy-five days.
So, read Elizabeth’s book instead of Mr. Marks’.
------
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly 140 pages 1
890
Naturally we couldn’t leave the story at that. We also pulled Nellie Bly’s book off the shelf. It’s titled, Around the World in Seventy-Two Day and Other Writing. She did make the around the world trip in seventy-two days and so won the race. Her book is only about one hundred forty pages and is also available on the web for a few dollars in used condition.
Nellie was only twenty-two but already had years of reportage “under her belt” before coming up with the idea to go around the world and beat Phileas Fogg’s “record.” She does not have the vocabulary or eye of Elizabeth Bisland, but she has a good story.
Nellie wrote about her trip in four installments in New York’s World newspaper. Like Elizabeth she reports on all kinds of things giving us a nice view of 19th Century tourism, ship and train travel, and cultures in lots of detail. Like Elizabeth she was fascinated by Japan. Unlike Elizabeth, Nellie’s reporting is about her itinerary and prosaic. In talking about her small traveling bag she says that in hers, “I was able to pack 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…” Elizabeth left out details like that, focusing instead, on what was around her,
“The fourth day out was Sunday. The afternoon was spent on deck looking at the most beautiful green island which we slowly passed. Sometimes we would lazily conjecture as to whether they were inhabited or not.” Imagine what Elizabeth would have done with that.
There is interesting commentary such as about American vs. English trains, the English trains dividing people up into compartments, “But talk about privacy! If it is privacy the English desire so much, they should adopt our American trains, for there is no privacy like that to be found in a large car filled with strangers. Everybody has, and keeps his own place. There is no sitting for hours, as is often the case in English trains, face to face and knees to knees with a stranger, offensive or otherwise, as he may chance to be.” This made her understand why English girls needed chaperones. “American women would shudder to think of sending their daughters alone on a trip locked in a compartment with a stranger.”
Another interesting aside was about America’s place in the world in the late 19th Century. Bly took along American money but most of her money was English. She wanted to see if people would take American money. They wouldn’t except for one port of call where the use of American money was exclusively in jewelry.
Nellie had some flights of fancy. She was watching the boys diving for money in Aden. They made purses “out of their cheeks,” with as much ease as a cow. She envied the cow the splendid gift of storing grass in its cheeks “to chew at her leisure.” “One wastes so much time eating, especially when traveling, and I could not help picturing the comfort it would be sometimes to dispose of our food wholesale and consume it at our leisure afterwards. I am certain there would be fewer dyspeptics then.”
There were sharks in the water at Aden but they did not bother the divers who claimed sharks didn’t attack black men. Then Nellie caught a whiff of the grease “with which these men anoint their bodies. I did not blame the sharks.”
This book’s version of Nellie Bly’s trip around the world includes some other of her exploits in World War I and her reporting on conditions in an asylum for example. It also includes many headlines and articles from the New York World about her journey which add to the telling.
Nellie had an advantage working for the World. Although she couldn’t send regular accounts of her travels, the World played up every part of her trip supposing where she might be. They did this so much so that when Nellie arrived back in American there were crowds all along her transcontinental route welcoming her back. There was almost no one awaiting Elizabeth who worked for a magazine that only published monthly.