Around the world in 76 days

In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World, Elizabeth Bisland

One of my favorite books from last year was Matthew Goodman's Eighty Days, an account of the race around the world between Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland in 1889.  I was only a few pages into it when I learned from the notes that both women later wrote their own books about the race.  I quickly downloaded an e-book edition of each, but I also found that they are in print and ordered copies as well.  Since I finished Goodman's book sympathizing with Elizabeth Bisland, who [spoiler alert] lost the race, I decided to read her account first.

Bisland published her book in 1891, a year after Nellie Bly's (thus coming second again).  It is a short book, only 101 pages, divided into eight sections, the "stages" of the title.  (I don't know why she didn't count the last stage, perhaps because that's when she lost the race.)  It opens on a peaceful November morning in New York City, in 1889.  Bisland had breakfast in bed, reading her mail, which included acceptances for a tea party she was holding in two days, and a notice from her tailor about a fitting for a new gown.  She was surprised to receive a summons to the office of her boss, the editor of The Cosmopolitan, where she was the literary editor.  When she arrived, she was stunned at his proposal that she leave that day, to travel literally around the world, "endeavoring to complete the journey in some absurdly inadequate space of time."  It took him an hour to convince her to make the attempt, and by 6 PM she was on a train.  Nellie Bly had sailed that morning, heading east.  Bisland took the opposite direction, west across the United States to San Francisco. From there she sailed across the Pacific and then the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean to Italy, crossing Europe by train and then the Channel by boat, finally taking ship from Ireland for New York.

For such a short book, this left me with very contradictory feelings.  On the positive side, Elizabeth Bisland seems to have really enjoyed most of her travels.  Once she was launched on her trip, she never mentioned the race again until almost the end.  Of course her contemporary readers would have known all the circumstances, including the outcome of the race.  But Bisland might almost have been traveling just for pleasure. There is no sense of hurry or urgency, except in the last stage.  She frequently had to wait for ships to arrive or depart, and she spent the time happily wandering around, exploring and observing, and shopping whenever she got the chance.  She fell in love with Japan, returning later in life to live there.  She seems to have gotten along well with her fellow travelers, often setting off on excursions with them, but she also had an eye for their absurdities.  At a New Year's Eve ball in Ceylon, she noted an American woman from Texas, "in a fearful and wonderful costume, that casts a slight but comprehensive glance at the modes of three centuries and muddles them all," who "is tossing her powdered head and flirting shrilly..."

In the final stage of the journey, Bisland arrived in Paris by train.  There she was met by an agent of Thomas Cook's, who told her that the ship she was hoping to catch at Le Havre had sailed without her.  Later she discovered that the ship had in fact waited for her, delaying as long as possible.  Had she caught the ship, she might have won the race.  "The cause of this false information was never satisfactorily ascertained," she wrote. "It, however, succeeded in lengthening the voyage four days" - and those four days were crucial.  I did admire how Bisland simply carried on, crossing the Channel to Britain and across to Ireland, to catch a ship out of Cork.  The voyage to New York was a nightmare of storms and mountainous seas, which Bisland stoically endured.

I enjoyed the later stages of the book more than the early ones.  Each stage is fairly brief, since despite the leisurely air Bisland was traveling as quickly as possible.  She took pains to describe the places and the people she encountered, but she was writing from at most two or three days of observation.  Particularly in her scenic descriptions, her prose tended toward the purple (the ellipses are hers):

As I passed in my swift circle about the great ball plunging along its planetary paths, many mighty and glorious visions of the coming and passing of light were revealed to me; but none more fair than this with that radiance of youth, whose vast, sweet nature-shadow and simulacrum the dawning is . . . Eternally renewed, though all ages .. still, with the white peace of innocence .. rosy with promise and potentialities, gilding all the commmonplaceness of the landscape with golden glamours and fantasies...

A little of that went a long way.  But I found her descriptions of people more troubling.  Crossing into California, she noted "the first outer edges of that yellow wave from China which has broken upon the Pacific coasts."  She didn't actually use the term "Yellow Peril," but she might just as well have.  I had to keep reminding myself that her anti-Chinese attitude was completely (in Barb's marvelous term) "era acceptable."  Reading this, I was struck again by Louisa May Alcott's audacity in including a Chinese character in her "Campbell" books, the young merchant Fun See, who may be rather a figure of fun, but at the end of Rose in Bloom he is about to marry into a blue-blooded Boston family.  Bisland did approve of the Japanese, however, though she labeled them "still children" and "hopelessly immodest, with the unconscious shamelessness of babies...."  She also admired the Sikhs that she met first in Hong Kong, though she was more impressed with the British, who had brought them to serve the Empire.

As I said, this book left me with very mixed feelings.  I admired Elizabeth Bisland's courage in agreeing to the race, and her stoic endurance of defeat under the worst of conditions.  But I felt there was no depth to her account.  She was recording impressions and observations from only the briefest of encounters, so it feels of little value as a travelogue.  On the other hand, it doesn't really work as an account of the race, because she hardly seems to be in the race at all.  I don't quite know what to make of it, and having read it I'm not sure I need to keep it.  Though I generally prefer the original source, in this case I think Matthew Goodman's is the better book.

A race around the world

Eighty Days, Matthew Goodman

The subtitle of this book is "Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World."  It went on my reading list as soon as I saw it on Audrey's blog.  As a student of American history, and of women in America, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I only recently learned about Nellie Bly (from an episode of The West Wing, of all things), and her attempt in 1889 to become not just the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, but to do so in less than eighty days.  Had the book just been about her famous trip, it would have been enough to pique my interest.  But I had never heard of Elizabeth Bisland; I thought that Bly was simply racing the clock.  When I realized that there was another competitor, like Bly a journalist, a Victorian-era woman traveling alone, I was even more anxious to read it.  I waited out the long slow queue at the library and finally picked up a copy last Saturday.  By Sunday afternoon, I had my own.  This book will definitely be on my "best of 2013" list.

The magic number of 80 days comes of course from Jules Verne's novel, Around the World in Eighty Days.  The English hero, Phileas Fogg, accepts a wager that he can complete such a trip in that time.  The story of his adventures was serialized first in newspapers and then published in book form in 1873.  Almost immediately speculation arose over whether such a trip really was possible. Lots of people - men - talked about trying it.  No one expected a women would actually do it.

Matthew Goodman opens his story on November 14, 1889 - the day that Nellie Bly sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the first leg of her journey.  The paper she worked for, the New York World, was counting on her trip to boost circulation, so this start was covered in a big article on the front page.  One of the many who read it was John Brisben Walker, the editor of a monthly magazine called The Cosmopolitan.  He immediately decided that the magazine should sponsor its own competitor, who would circumnavigate the globe from the opposite direction, heading west first.  He chose Elizabeth Bisland, the literary editor of the magazine.  Responding to an urgent summons, she arrived in the office at 11 AM to hear Walker's suggestion that she join the race, leaving that evening by train for San Francisco to catch a ship across the Pacific Ocean.  She tried to get out of going: she told him she had a tea party scheduled for the next day, she told him that she had nothing to wear for a trip around the world.  He refused to take no for an answer.  "At six o'clock that evening, Elizabeth Bisland was on a New York Central Railroad train bound for Chicago.  She was eight and a half hours behind Nellie Bly."  And I was completely hooked!

Goodman takes us through the following weeks, alternating between Bly and Bisland.  But first he goes back to introduce us to them in more detail, telling us how they came to journalism, a profession considered unsuitable for women (and one women were considered unsuited for as well).  Both experienced poverty as children, Bly in Pennsylvania and Bisland in Louisiana, and both supported their families by their work.  The few women hired by newspapers were usually confined to the "women's pages," covering fashion and social events.  Bly wasn't content with that narrow focus.  She made a name for herself with undercover investigative reporting, most famously by getting herself committed to the Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum, where female patients were reportedly abused (she later wrote a book about her experiences).  Bisland began her career in New Orleans, on the usual women's page, but after a few years she moved to New York, where she found work writing book reviews for newspapers and magazines.  Though she lacked Bly's rough and tumble experience, and her notoriety, she was well-established in her career when she was hired at The Cosmopolitan (the name alone suggests the gap between her work and Bly's).

Goodman's story draws on the books that Bly and Bisland later published about their trips.  As his story moves back and forth between them, he weaves in a wealth of information about the two women, their modes of transportation, where they were stopping, what they were seeing.  He neatly balances their individual experiences within the larger context that he provides.  We learn for example about the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the United States, and its impact on trade and travel, as well as the Chinese workers who built the western section, and the rabid prejudice against them that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The ship that Bisland took from San Francisco carried Chinese emigrants returning home.  Both she and Bly had stopovers in Hong Kong. Their experiences, and their very different reactions, are fascinating, repeated on each leg of their parallel journeys.

One of the main arguments made against women even completing a trip like this is that they would be weighed down by too much luggage.  Nellie Bly countered those arguments by setting off with one single bag, a grip the size of an old-fashioned doctor's bag.  She wore a sturdy traveling dress, but she didn't even take a second. Elizabeth Bisland managed it with a steamer trunk and a valise - which allowed her to bring three dresses in addition to the one she wore.  Bisland also took books (always the first thing I pack), but Bly didn't have room.  Both packed underwear, stockings and toiletries.  The "toiletries" must have included supplies for their monthly cycles, though there is naturally no mention of this. It may not have occurred to Matthew Goodman, but of all the inconveniences they faced on such a trip, the usual rags secured with pins, which had to be washed and reused, had to have been high on the list.

I have to admit that I started this book rooting for Nellie Bly on her quest to set a record and prove women's capabilities.  Elizabeth Bisland seemed like a dilettante, a cynical attempt on her editor's part to horn in on Bly's trip.  While Bly was committed to taking only the existing means of transportation, Walker did not hesitate to pull strings and to offer financial incentives to speed Bisland's trip, for example trying to arrange ships' itineraries (including the sacrosanct mail packets) around her schedule, and that felt like cheating. (In the end, Bly's paper did some string-pulling of its own.)  I did sympathize with Bisland though, in the face of such an outlandish demand, to turn her life upside down and set out on a journey around the world, with only a few hours' notice.  As I followed her westward, I came to appreciate her more and to enjoy her company.  She was technically engaged in the race, but while Bly rushed, Bisland snatched time to savor, to observe, to appreciate.  Bly, on the other hand, developed into the worst kind of "ugly American."  She had a strongly-rooted prejudice against the British and complained constantly about them, as Goodman notes while riding on their ships and trains, traveling across their empire.  She also saw only the worst particularly in the Asian countries she visited.  Perhaps this was due to the pressure she felt to win the race, which doesn't seem to have affected Bisland as strongly.

The end of the race is not the end of Goodman's story, and the chapters that follow as just as fascinating.  He takes us through the two women's lives in the aftermath of the contest, as they went their separate ways.  I was particularly interested in the year that Bisland spent in England, living with friends she made on her voyage.  There she met Rhoda Broughton, and the two later collaborated on a novel (which was not well-received).  I love these kinds of historical and literary overlaps!

This book has already added to my TBR lists.  I've downloaded Elizabeth Bisland's account of her trip, A Flying Trip Around the World, which I found through Google Books.  I'm also looking forward to exploring her other writing. In addition, I've ordered a copy of Nellie Bly's account, though I'm less excited about reading it now.  And I decided that I need to read the book that inspired these trips in the first place, the adventures of Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days.  This seems to be my year for circumnavigating the globe, at least by book, first with the historical Ulysses Grant and then the fictional Miss Cayley, who I think would have got on very well with Elizabeth Bisland at least.