The Woman Who Traveled Around The World In 72 Days
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Inspiration, Transportation, Women, History, Books

The Woman Who Traveled Around The World In 72 Days

Nellie Bly isn’t a common name often heard in our history books, but maybe she should be

Nellie Bly — by H.J. Myers, Public Domain

“Impossible, was the terrible verdict,” she recalled. “‘In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes,” Nellie Bly said.

We all know Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic book where the main character, Phileas Fogg of London, flew around the world in 80 days. It was published in 1872. But not much longer after Verne published the book, a woman named Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, known by her pen name as a famous journalist, Nellie Bly, flew around the world in 72 days herself. It would be only 16 years later in 1888.

Who was Nellie Bly?

From corbis — Public Domain

Prior to trying to fly across the world, Nellie Bly would make her name exploring America’s asylums. She posed as a maid with an unsatisfactory salary and faked madness to get into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on New York’s Blackwell’s Island. In the asylum, she sat on hard benches while being roped to another inmate, ate gruel, and suffered ice baths. Apparently, Bly was so good at acting, that in the words of Alice Gregory of the New Yorker,

“She performed insanity so convincingly that her first assigned roommate refused to sleep in the same room with her ‘for all the money of the Vanderbilts.’”

Eventually, she would recount her exchanges with fellow inmates, and tell the truth. A lot of them weren’t even mentally ill — but were just immigrants who didn’t know any English. She began to lose her faith in doctors and confinement in America in general.

Later, she would write a book title Ten Days in a Mad-House that documented her experiences. The book would receive widespread literary acclaim from critics and fame for Bly herself.

But Gregory would have a more nuanced view of Bly, that she was motivated by much more than a mission for justice and progressivism, but a mission, too for fame.

The stunt of journeying across the world

Nellie Bly would later write about her journey in a book titled Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, inspired by Verne’s book.

The journey itself was suggested in 1888 when Bly suggested to her editor in the New York World, run by Joseph Pullitzer, that she hoped to take a journey around the world. She liked Verne’s book and wanted to turn the book into fact. But Pullitzer regretted sending her on the journey because he thought it was impossible, telling her:

“No one but a man can do this.”

Bly decided to pose as a maid struggling with a meager salary, and she knew that newspapers wanted a story that included truth, entertainment, and justice.

She went on a journey where she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line. Her goal was to go almost 25,000 miles around the world with the goal of finishing in 75 days. All she bought was a dress, an overcoat, changes of underwear, and a small travel bag of her toiletry essentials. Most of her money in the form of English banknotes were carried around her neck.

The trip did not start off well. She was violently seasick as a first-time traveler and the sight of food made her nauseated. One day, she would sleep for 22 hours to regain her energy for the rest of the trip.

At the time, she had some competition. Elizabeth Bisland from the Cosmopolitan would try to beat both Bly and Phileas Fogg, trying to travel the opposite direction around the world. Bly would learn that Bisland reached Hong Kong, but she would not be phased.

“I would not race,” she said. “If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern.”

Along the way, however, is where I find the most interesting details of Bly’s journey. She would have not that much empathy for foreigners she discovered across the world, including calling Chinese beggars “so repulsive that instead of appealing to one’s sympathy they only succeed in arousing one’s disgust” and Mexican men as “hungry but well-bred dogs.”

“Bly was a crusader, but she could also be remarkably callous, a failing that’s particularly glaring — and galling — in the context of tourism. There is a sense in which Bly is both the grandmother of the genre and its principal cautionary tale,” Gregory said.

When Bly arrived in Southampton in England, she received notice that Jules Verne gave her an invitation to visit him at his home in Amiens, France. To avoid missing her connection to London, she didn’t sleep for two days and met Vernes and his wife. They communicated via translator, and Bly would learn that Verne’s story was inspired by a news article, which added fuel to Bly’s fire.

The return

Nellie Bly’s homecoming reception to Jersey City in 1890 — Public Domain

When Nellie Bly returned to Jersey City, 72 days after leaving, in 1890, 20 celebratory gunshots at two nearby parks greeted her. A New Jersey crowd of cheering supporters. She would beat Vernes’s story by eight days and her plan by three days. Bisland wouldn’t arrive until four and a half days after. Bly would say that she was glad to be home:

“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.”

Her adventure was the fastest to go around the world, even though Magellan is often credited as the first. Nellie Bly isn’t a common name often heard in our history books, but maybe she should be — in 1998, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.