Around the world with Nellie Bly

11-26-2006

 

Pittsburgh's crusading journalist Nellie Bly

Early on the morning of Nov. 14, 1889, a 25-year-old woman from Pennsylvania boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria in the harbor of Jersey City, N.J. She was embarking on a journey that would capture the world's attention in a way no traveler had ever done.

Born in the Armstrong County village of Cochran's Mills 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, her given name was Elizabeth Cochrane, but her friends and family nicknamed the feisty girl, Pink, for her favorite color.

When she was 16, Ms. Cochrane moved with her family to Pittsburgh. Impressed by a fiery letter she wrote to the Pittsburgh Dispatch in response to what she believed was a sexist column, the paper's managing editor, George Madden, offered her an assignment.

It was Mr. Madden who gave her the nom de plume of Nellie Bly, after a character in a Stephen Foster song. Her sharp and daring ambition, coupled with her writing skills made her an instant success with Dispatch readers. At first, she focused her attention on women's rights issues, posing as a sweatshop worker to expose appalling conditions under which women toiled. When offended companies threatened to pull their advertising out of the Dispatch, Ms. Bly was put on the fashion beat. Quickly bored, she took a six-month working vacation in Mexico, where she wrote articles and a book focusing on acute poverty and political corruption there.

Her reporting got her kicked out of Mexico, but instead of returning to Pittsburgh, Nellie went to New York City, where she landed a job at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. There she wrote an insider expose of an insane asylum and a book on the experience that won her national attention.

Ms. Bly clearly had a nose for headline-grabbing stories, but the journey she was now embarking on was a stroke of pure promotional genius. Fifteen years earlier, Jules Verne had published his fictional account of a journey around the world in 80 days. Although the trip was technically feasible, no one had actually attempted it. Ms. Bly approached Pulitzer and convinced him she could do it, and even faster than Verne's character, Phileas Fogg.

The steamer Augusta Victoria took her to England in a week, where she had planned to depart on a sailing trip to Brindisi, Italy. But when she received an invitation to visit Verne, she made a detour to France. Verne asked her about her ambitious itinerary.

"My line of travel," she said, "is from New York to London, then Calais, Brindisi, Port Said, Ismailia, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York."

"Why do you not go to Bombay as my hero Phileas Fogg did?"

"Because I am more anxious to save time than a young widow," she replied.

Taking quick leave of Verne, she hurried to catch the night train to Calais, so she could re-join her steamer.

While steaming through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and across the Indian Ocean, Nellie sent back home captivating accounts of her adventures.

Pulitzer made the most of them, and by the time Ms. Bly reached Hong Kong, her reports had won the attention of the nation and the world. She was five days behind schedule but made that up by the time she reached Yokohama, Japan on Jan. 5 and left two days later on the final oceanic leg of her trip, right on time.

But fierce winter head winds slowed the ship's progress across the Pacific, and she arrived in San Francisco on Jan. 12, two days behind schedule.

Realizing he had a phenomenon on his staff, Pulitzer chartered a private train for Ms. Bly, consisting of the Union Pacific's fastest engine and a single rail car, the Queen. As her train sped across the western plains, Ms. Bly drew cheering track-side crowds, and the 69-hour journey set a new land-speed record.

She arrived in New York City on Jan. 25, just 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds after leaving Hoboken, three days ahead of her original itinerary. She traveled 24,899 miles around the planet faster than anyone else in history, and she was the first woman to circumnavigate the planet unaccompanied by a man.

At the time, the young reporter from Cochran's Mills was widely regarded as the planet's most famous female, an international heroine who had a hotel, a race horse and a train named in her honor.

And of course, Ms. Bly had changed the world of travel writing, not to mention the world's view of what a woman could accomplish.

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