Nellie Bly
1864–1922
My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.… They put me, dripping wet, into a short canton flannel slip, labeled across the extreme end in large black letters, “Lunatic Asylum, B. I H. 6.” The letters meant Blackwell’s Island, Hall 6.
This description of bath time in the asylum turned Nellie Bly into a national celebrity. She had set out to prove to the newspaper world that a woman could be a serious journalist. She went several steps further with the publication of this article exposing the treatment of mentally ill patients in New York City. Nellie, often described as the first undercover reporter, became a brilliant overnight sensation.
Nellie’s real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. Legend has it that she was nicknamed “Pink” after being christened in a bright pink gown. She was born in Pittsburg, in 1864, before the city added an “h” to the end of its name.
Pink’s father was a judge, but he died when she was six. Her mother, Mary Jane, chose the usual route for widows in those days: she got married again in order to provide a home for her children. Horribly, Mary Jane’s second husband drank too much and was abusive to his new wife. Mary Jane summoned up her courage and filed for divorce. In those days, divorce was uncommon and carried a heavy burden of shame. Pink was then fourteen, the second of five siblings. She and her older brother Albert testified at the divorce trial, describing aloud the painful scenes they’d witnessed.
Was this when Pink first realized that well-used words could get results? She certainly understood the importance of being employed and self-reliant, especially for a woman. She swore never to depend on a man’s support instead of making her own living.
Although Pink was still young by today’s standards, she shed her childhood nickname and went excitedly to study at a teachers’ college, then called a “normal school.” But after one term there were no funds to continue; she came home to face the reality of being an impoverished woman.
Mary Jane moved her family frequently during Elizabeth’s teen years. As the money ran out, the lodgings became bleaker and shabbier. Their fellow tenants were often divorced women, struggling to pay their way in a world that did not yet value females as part of the work force.
In 1885, when Elizabeth was eighteen, she read a newspaper column in the Pittsburg Dispatch written by someone whose pen name was the “Quiet Observer.” One piece was titled What Girls Are Good For. The writer was dismayed at the number of “restless, dissatisfied females” applying for jobs in stores and businesses. He claimed that women should work at making the “home a little paradise.” His opinion in another column was that “there is no greater abnormality than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats.”
Infuriated, Elizabeth sat down and wrote an emphatic protest to the editor, speaking up on behalf of the young ladies she knew who were striving to improve their circumstances. She signed her letter “Lonely Orphan Girl.”
The editor, a man named George A. Madden, was impressed with her self-assured voice—in spite of her sloppy grammar—but did not publish the letter. Who was this brash and opinionated writer? Assuming that the “Lonely Orphan Girl” was a man, George printed a request that the fellow contact the newspaper.
Elizabeth snatched the opportunity and showed up at the Dispatch office in person. Newspaper rooms back then were dominated by men, noisy from the printing presses rumbling on the floor below, and often filled with tobacco smoke. When Elizabeth stepped in, with her petite figure, sweet face, and bright brown eyes, the entire staff must have stopped to stare. George was flabbergasted at her self-assurance and decided to give her a chance.
He hired her to write a story about “the woman’s sphere.” Elizabeth was paid five dollars, and George personally edited the piece, probably to make sure all the grammar got corrected. Her first appearance in print, with a piece called “The Girl Puzzle,” foreshadowed her interests for years to come. She chastised men and privileged women for not recognizing the obstacles faced by ordinary working girls, those “without talent, without beauty, without money.” She suggested that wealthy readers consider how the amount of money they spent on their dogs might, in a poorer household, have “paid father’s doctor bill, bought mother a new dress, shoes for the little ones, and imagine how nice it would be could baby have the beef tea that is made for your favorite pug, or the care and kindness that is bestowed upon it.”
Elizabeth also wondered why clever and industrious girls could not be employed as young men were, starting as messengers in a company, and working their way up? “Just as smart and a great deal quicker to learn; why, then, can they not do the same?” She thought girls would make good train conductors, too. Why not?
Elizabeth told her editor that next she’d like to write about divorce. George reluctantly agreed, and she set to work on the article called “Mad Marriages,” calling for changes to the Pennsylvania divorce laws. She had her mother’s situation in mind when she suggested, among other things, that drunkards should not be permitted to marry without full disclosure of their wretched lifestyle.
Whether or not Madden believed in women working, he was smart enough to know that a whiff of scandal was good business. His business was to sell newspapers, and this girl’s stories were going to do just that.
George wanted to find a better pen name for his new writer than “Lonely Orphan Girl,” but of course “Elizabeth Cochrane” wouldn’t do, either; no lady would willingly let her real name be seen in print. There was a popular song at the time about a girl named Nelly Bly. That was the name they chose to go down in history.
Although he was a little worried about hiring an eighteen- year-old girl to cover gritty subjects, George offered Nellie a regular job for five dollars a week. She accepted at once. She wanted to write about the factories of her own city. George told her to go ahead, and out spilled a colorful eight-part series titled “Our Workshop Girls: Women’s Labor in Pittsburg.”
These articles were not, as some reports have claimed, a scorching exposé of the appalling conditions in Pittsburg’s manufacturing world, but they represent the first discussion of a subject that mattered to Nellie all of her life. As a young reporter, she did not yet dig deep, but she visited the factories, and interviewed the employed girls and women about their lives after work as well as on the assembly line, covering in detail a slice of life not usually mentioned in print.
George raised Nellie’s pay to ten dollars a week and made her the “Society Editor,” covering so-called “women’s topics” like gardening advice and fashion updates. She was bored silly, and begged her boss to give her something with more substance.
It took a year before she convinced George to let her write again about serious issues. She finished an article about the prison system, and then had the idea to masquerade as a factory girl, to learn “from the inside” what that life was like. Dressed in shabby clothing, Nellie went out looking for a job. Despite having no training or useful skills, she was hired at the first place she applied, a dimly lit factory where the workers hitched cables together under the supervision of a threatening, foul-mouthed foreman. The girls suffered from headaches and bleeding hands, and could be fined for talking. Nellie was fired when she left the assembly line to get a drink of water.
When the articles about the jails and the cable factory were published, the newspaper’s circulation went up, but so did the number of furious complaints. George raised Nellie’s pay again, and sent her back to look after the ladies’ pages.
Frustrated and bored, Nellie decided to go to Mexico and write reports from there. George didn’t like the idea one bit. She was a woman, after all, and Mexico was dangerous. Nellie said she’d take her mother and call it a vacation. She would send her stories as she wrote them and George could publish them or not. She claimed she didn’t care.
Nellie and her mother took the train all the way to Mexico. And though Nellie did not speak any Spanish, and often found the food “detestable,” her notepad was full of scribbled material. She looked at Mexican factories and poverty, but also at fashions, festivals, funerals, horses, sombreros, museums, bullfights, tortilla sellers, sculptors, tombs, ruins, and the customs for courtship and marriage. She got herself in trouble when she began to poke her nose into politics, and she was encouraged to leave the country.
Back home after five months, Pittsburg felt too small. One day, she simply did not show up for work. No one knew where she was until her colleague, Erasmus Wilson, who was the “Quiet Observer” found her note:
DEAR Q.O.—I am off for New York. Look out for me. BLY
When Nellie arrived in New York City in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was one year old, the Brooklyn Bridge was three, and Nellie was twenty-one. She had traveled a little, her writing voice had gained confidence, and she was never afraid to ask questions. But in the big city, she had trouble finding work. No one was interested in hiring a woman. She lost her purse one afternoon in Central Park and lost all her savings. Nearly penniless, she was getting desperate.
Her next bright idea came when she received a letter from a fan—though perhaps that was a made-up excuse. A young woman asked whether she thought New York was the best place to start out as a reporter. Nellie pitched the concept to the Pittsburg Dispatch. How did the top newspaper editors in New York City feel about women journalists? In the name of research, Nellie approached the very men she hoped would hire her. Their responses were disheartening; most of them claimed that women either couldn’t or shouldn’t take on the kind of news that made the front page. It was also said that “women have a problem with accuracy.” The story received a tiny ripple of interest, but she still didn’t have a job or any money.
She wanted most to work for The World, published by Joseph Pulitzer. Colonel John Cockerill, whom she had met with for her article, was the editor there. According to her version, Nellie borrowed car fare from her landlady and rode to the newspaper building in Park Row. She claims that she convinced the guards to let her up to Cockerill’s office, bringing along her clippings and several bold ideas for new stories. Cockerill did not hire her at once, but he was intrigued enough to pay her twenty-five dollars not to go to another paper while he thought about it—and probably discussed the matter with his publisher, the renowned Mr. Pulitzer.
A couple of male reporters had pulled off occasional episodes of “stunt” or “detective” reporting, but no woman had tried it yet. One of Nellie’s proposals was to go to Europe and to sail back in steerage, pretending to be an immigrant, to give readers a real feeling of the experience. The World decided that was too big an assignment for a newcomer, but there had been recent rumblings about the treatment of mental patients at the local asylum. Could Nellie pretend to be insane? Perhaps she could get herself committed to the institution on Blackwell’s Island off the edge of Manhattan?
Nellie jumped on the idea. There was nothing she liked better than a crusade. “I said I could and I would. And I did … I took upon myself to enact the part of a poor, unfortunate crazy girl, and felt it my duty not to shirk any of the disagreeable results that should follow.”
The World requested that she use the name Nellie Brown so they could identify her when the time came to have her released, but until then the plan was up to Nellie. She devised how to get herself committed and how she would convince the doctors of her insanity.
On the morning of her departure, “tenderly I put my tooth-brush aside, and, when taking a final rub of the soap, I murmured, ‘It may be for days, and it may be for longer.’ Then I donned the old clothing I had selected for the occasion.”
Her first stop was a boarding house. “From a directory I selected the Temporary Home for Females, No. 84 Second Avenue.” There were several other girls with rooms in this place, and they all ate together under the eye of the matron. Nellie wrote a detailed account of how she acted crazy at mealtimes, pretending to be disoriented and staging occasional outbursts. After two nights, the police were called and she was taken to the Essex Market Police Courtroom, whence she was sent on to Bellevue Hospital. At Bellevue she had her first glimpse of the treatment she could expect for the rest of her experiment. At suppertime she was given “a small tin plate on which was a piece of boiled meat and a potato. It could not have been colder had it been cooked the week before, and it had no chance to make acquaintance with salt or pepper.”
She did not have misgivings exactly, but, “In spite of the knowledge of my sanity and the assurance that I would be released in a few days, my heart gave a sharp twinge. Pronounced insane by four expert doctors and shut up behind the unmerciful bolts and bars of a madhouse! Not to be confined alone, but to be a companion, day and night, of senseless, chattering lunatics; to sleep with them, to eat with them, to be considered one of them, was an uncomfortable position.”
Nellie was committed to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island and taken there by boat with several other women.
“But here let me say one thing: From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet, strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be …” Not quite as she talked in real life, actually. She pretended that she was from Cuba and spoke erratic English, but otherwise behaved normally.
The first supper on the island was five prunes, a saucer of pale tea, and a slice of bread with rancid butter. Then, after the frightening and humiliating ice-bath, it was time for bed. Nellie noticed that the long minutes it took to lock or unlock all the cells would be quite dangerous in case of a fire. When she suggested to a doctor that all the locked rooms be opened with the turn of a single crank at the end of a hallway, he assumed at once that she must have been in a prison where such locks existed.
According to Nellie, breakfast was disgusting:
I was hungry, but the food would not down. I asked for unbuttered bread and was given it. I cannot tell you of anything that is the same dirty, black color. It was hard, and in places nothing more than dried dough. I found a spider in my slice, so I did not eat it. I tried the oatmeal and molasses, but it was wretched, and so I endeavored, but without much show of success, to choke down the tea.
It didn’t help that “In our short walks we passed the kitchen where food was prepared for the nurses and doctors. There we got glimpses of melons and grapes and all kinds of fruits, beautiful white bread and nice meats, and the hungry feeling would be increased tenfold.”
Despite being better fed, the nurses were not kind: “I came in and saw Miss Grady with my note-book and long lead pencil, bought just for the occasion. ‘I want my book and pencil,’ I said, quite truthfully. ‘It helps me remember things.’ I was very anxious to get it to make notes in and was disappointed when she said: ‘You can’t have it, so shut up.’ ” When Nellie later asked a doctor to have the items returned to her, “I was advised to fight against the imaginations of my brain.”
Even without her pencil and notebook, Nellie managed to recall the entire residence on Blackwell Island in remarkable detail. Her experience with Nurse Grady was mild compared to that of a fellow prisoner, who described her treatment this way:
“For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally, so that I shall never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet, and, throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. At other times they took hold of my ears and beat my head on the floor and against the wall. Then they pulled out my hair by the roots, so that it will never grow in again.”
When it was time to wash their faces in the morning, Nellie realized that all forty-five women in Hall 6 were sharing two towels. “I went to the bathtub and washed my face at the running faucet and my underskirt did duty for a towel.”
Nellie made several friends among the other inmates—women who were also clearly not insane, but imprisoned because they did not speak English well, or perhaps were exhausted and temporarily depressed by difficult lives. She found it hard not to laugh during their first walk, a parade of lunatics in white straw sunbonnets: “Can you imagine the sight? According to one of the physicians there are 1,600 insane women on Blackwell’s Island.”
Nellie was certain that some of those women had not become crazy until they’d got to the asylum. The doctors were quite able, she said, “to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
Most of the miserable patients on Blackwell’s Island had been forgotten by the outside world, but the appearance of the pretty Nellie Brown, a mystery woman with amnesia, had caught the attention of the press. Nellie was alarmed one day to be pushed into a room where a reporter was waiting in the hope of learning her identity. The young man was someone Nellie knew, and he recognized her at once. She begged him not to expose her, knowing it would ruin the story. He agreed and went away.
Finally, after ten days, Nellie was told that someone had arrived to take her home. She was released into the care of a reporter from The World, who pretended to be a concerned friend. Nellie’s articles were published in two parts by the newspaper and later as a book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. Nellie was instantly famous across the country, and the asylum management was mortified.
A committee that had been slowly looking into making improvements at the facility on Blackwell’s Island sped up discussions and agreed to provide substantial funds. Within a month, Nellie was invited to join a tour of public inspectors. Changes had already occurred; the women were being re-evaluated, evil nurses had been fired, the food and bedding were far better, and plans were underway to provide activities and improved general care.
Nellie was twenty-three years old and on top of the world. Her mother moved from Pittsburg to New York to live with her daughter. For a while, her sister Kate came along, too.
Nellie followed up her madhouse story with several more where disguise was necessary. She pretended to be an out-of-work maid, with the aim of criticizing dodgy employment agencies. She posed as an unwed mother looking to place her child, in order to expose a black market that sold newborn babies. She got herself hired as a “white slave” in a paper box factory, revealing the underside of modern manufacturing.
Today, this kind of undercover journalism would be frowned on or even considered illegal, but in those days, it was simply part of the competition between sparring newspapers. Anyone plucky enough to pull off a successful stunt was considered a celebrity. Nellie was a star.
She posed as a sinner seeking redemption, to look into the Magdalen Home for Unfortunate Women. She participated in a sting of businessman Edward Phelps, who was bribing New York politicians to vote or not vote on various bills. She exposed the inexperience of the doctors in the free medical clinics where the poor went for consultation. She also wrote some light-hearted stories, about taking ballet lessons and a stint as a chorus girl, and she published an interview with the Wild West showman Buffalo Bill.
Letters began to arrive at The World with suggestions of stories for their daredevil reporter to tackle. One of these was the rumor that a man in Central Park was attacking young women. Nellie used herself as bait, of course, and her exposé resulted in the arrest of a carriage driver and the dismissal of police officers who had accepted bribes of beer to ignore the women’s complaints.
After this adventure, in 1889, Nellie tried her hand at fiction, writing a novel called The Mystery of Central Park, but it did not make much of a splash. Nellie’s strength was as a reporter.
Nellie was too busy to have many friends, and she didn’t trust the new crop of female reporters who were now hot on the trail of her position and fame. She liked being considered a lady and didn’t think much of feminists—or “suffragists,” as they were called then, as they fought for women’s suffrage, the right to vote. But she interviewed a lawyer named Belva Lockwood, who in 1888 was running for President as a candidate for the National Equal Rights Party. Belva believed that women teachers and other professionals should be paid as much as men. She also wanted world peace and strong limits to the use of alcohol. This was Belva’s second try for the White House, but she had little chance of winning: women would not be able to vote in the United States for another forty-two years.
All this was a warm-up for Nellie’s next—and last—ambitious stunt. She claimed the idea was all hers, but even if that’s not true, it was a good one.
It was my custom to think up ideas on Sunday and lay them before my editor for his approval or disapproval on Monday. But ideas did not come that day and three o’clock in the morning found me weary and with an aching head tossing about in my bed. At last tired and provoked at my slowness in finding a subject, something for the week’s work, I thought fretfully:
“I wish I was at the other end of the earth!”
“And why not?” the thought came: “I need a vacation; why not take a trip around the world?”
Around the World in Eighty Days was then a popular novel, written by the Frenchman Jules Verne and published in English about fifteen years earlier. The hero, Phileas Fogg, sets out, on a bet, to encircle the globe in eighty days. Nellie proposed (after spending a morning at a steamship company to make certain it could be done) that she attempt to beat this fictional record and make the journey in seventy-five. This was fourteen years before Orville Wright first flew an airplane in 1903. Long-distance travel was done by steamship or train. The same itinerary today, with the advantage of flight, could probably be accomplished in under four days.
The World publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, argued that, being a woman, Nellie would need to take too much luggage, as well as a chaperon. It would be simpler to send a male reporter instead. Nellie was swift to protest: “ ‘Very well,’ I said angrily, ‘Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.’ ”
Pulitzer considered the idea for about a year until he was suddenly spurred on by news that a young theatrical producer was planning a similar venture. He summoned Nellie and gave her three days to prepare for the assignment of her life.
“I always have a comfortable feeling that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction,” she later said, referring to the effort involved in making the last-minute preparations. She knew that her packing was of the utmost importance. Here is her list, in her own words:
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 … and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter.
In her pocket she carried a watch showing the New York hour, while her wristwatch would be changed to suit whatever local time she was traveling in. She also carried a special passport signed by the Secretary of State, but not the revolver suggested by friends. “I had such a strong belief in the world’s greeting me as I greeted it, that I refused to arm myself.”
She barely had time to get nervous, until the morning of her departure. “Then to encourage myself I thought, as I was on my way to the ship: ‘It’s only a matter of 28,000 miles, and seventy-five days and four hours, until I shall be back again.’ ”
She left American shores on November 14, 1889, from Jersey City on the steamer Augusta Victoria, ten minutes and six seconds later than scheduled. Every minute was going to count, but that was only the first of many delays over the next few weeks. Her mother was there to wave her off, as well as an official timekeeper and a reporter from The World, who would announce the expedition in that day’s paper. Hardly anyone else knew Nellie was leaving, because they wanted the stunt kept a secret until after she’d sailed.
Within minutes she was seasick, and she had to excuse herself three times from the captain’s dinner table that night, but after an extremely long sleep—until four o’clock the following afternoon—Nellie adjusted to shipboard life. “I think it is only natural for travelers to take an innocent pleasure in studying the peculiarities of their fellow companions.” So that’s what she did, for the seven days it took to cross the Atlantic, writing brief character sketches of her shipmates, including a Skye terrier named Home Sweet Home.
Upon arriving at Southampton, England, the pace of Nellie’s journey picked up. A tugboat chugged out to meet the steamer, to carry Nellie to an awaiting mail train to London. The English correspondent for The World greeted her with the news that Jules Verne himself had invited Nellie to visit his home in Amiens, France. It would mean going without sleep for two nights to get there and still make her ongoing connection, but Nellie was happily willing. She paused in London to send a cable back to the New York office. “I’m alright,” it said. “Letter follows.” Then she let them know that she was altering the planned itinerary just a little.
The main difficulty in keeping Nellie’s exploits on the front page was going to be that of communication. There were no television cameras to follow her from place to place. There were no trans-Atlantic telephones, and the Internet would not exist for another century. So Nellie’s news would be sent by telegraph in a few expensive words, or, irregularly, by letter. Her first story was printed seventeen days after her departure. The World had to devise other ploys to keep readers interested. They announced a Nellie Bly Guessing Game, offering a free trip to Europe for whoever came closest to guessing the exact time of Nellie’s arrival home. Throughout her travels, the number of papers sold increased daily.
Nellie’s detour to visit the Verne house was a highlight of the trip: “Jules Verne’s bright eyes beamed on me with interest and kindliness, and Mme. Verne greeted me with the cordiality of a cherished friend.” Nellie was given a tour of the great man’s tidy study and a peek at his current manuscript. She was amazed by the neat erasures and lack of scribbled additions, “which gave me the idea that M. Verne always improved his work by taking out superfluous things and never by adding. One bottle of ink and one penholder was all that shared the desk with the manuscript.”
Differing slightly from the route taken by Phileas Fogg, as Nellie told M. Verne:
“My line of travel is from New York to London, then Calais, Brindisi, Port Said, Ismailia, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York.”
“If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands,” Jules Verne said … as his glass tipped mine: “Good luck, Nellie Bly.”
She had to hurry to catch her train, but she made it, and journeyed on through France and foggy Italy to meet another steamer that would carry her to Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka). Nellie continued her commentary with complaints about her cabin and the food, as well as vivid specifics about other aspects of the voyage: “Occasionally we would have a dance on deck to the worst music it has ever been my misfortune to hear. The members of the band also washed the dishes.”
They paused at Port Said in Egypt, where “before the boat anchored the men armed themselves with canes, to keep off the beggars they said; and the women carried parasols for the same purpose.” And, sure enough, “hardly had the anchor dropped than the ship was surrounded with a fleet of small boats, steered by half-clad Arabs, fighting, grabbing, pulling, yelling in their mad haste to be first.”
Nellie tended to see the sights from a distinctly American vantage point, comparing everything to what she knew from home. Her attitude toward the native people of other lands was often condescending, and her judgments today seem insensitive. But she was racing against time and did not have the luxury of experiencing other cultures in any depth.
The steamer Victoria proceeded down the Suez Canal, a man-made waterway that had opened twenty years earlier to connect the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; 120 miles (192 kilometers) long, it was a massive engineering project that Nellie had been keen to see for herself. It seems to have been a little disappointing: “what looked like an enormous ditch, enclosed on either side with high sand banks.”
Next stop was Aden, part of what is now called Yemen, where Nellie swore that the “black fellows have the finest teeth of any mortals.” Upon enquiry, she learned that their secret was particular “tree branches of a soft, fibrous wood which they cut into pieces three and four inches in length. With one end of this stick, scraped free of the bark, they rub and polish their teeth until they are perfect in their whiteness.” Nellie purchased several sticks for her own use and found them much superior to “the tooth-destroying brush used in America.”
These same fellows dyed their hair by bleaching it with a cap of lime, which they wore for several days. This fashion did not extend to the women, who were quite plain by comparison.
In Colombo, the port of Ceylon, Nellie had a two-day delay while awaiting transport to Singapore. She distracted herself by shopping, sending cables to New York, and experimenting with various modes of local transport. She later wrote that, along with steamer and train, she had tried mule, rickshaw, bullock cart, catamaran, sampan, and “half a dozen other conveyances peculiar to Eastern countries.”
In Singapore, more precious time ticked by while Nellie waited for the Oriental steamer to show up from its previous tour. She hopped over to China during the pause, and bought a short-tailed monkey whom she named McGinty.
When the Oriental finally sailed, Nellie was in good spirits, and, despite their late arrival, the steamship Oceanic was waiting in the port at Hong Kong to take her back to America. But there, in the steamship company offices, she heard bad news.
“You are going to be beaten,” she was told. She’d been challenged to a race, without knowing it. The editors of Cosmopolitan Magazine in New York had sent out their own female reporter on the evening of Nellie’s departure from New Jersey. Elizabeth Bisland was circling the globe in the opposite direction, and as of that hour was two days ahead, having arrived on the Oceanic from America after a record Pacific crossing.
But the crew was determined to give Nellie a fair chance. They sailed from Hong Kong on December 28. They left Japan on January 7 and chugged toward Nellie’s deadline, knowing they had to reach the American west coast within ten days so that she’d have time to cross the country by train. Someone wrote a vow on the engine room wall:
For Nellie Bly
We’ll do or die.
January 20, 1890
Two days out, the Oceanic faced a ferocious monsoon, but made up some speed after the storm and arrived in San Francisco on Day 68, only twenty-four hours behind schedule. A band played on the dock at 7:30 in the morning, among hundreds of well-wishing fans. Also awaiting was more bad news. A blizzard had obliterated the tracks of Nellie’s intended rail route, as well as delaying the trainload of reporters who were meant to be covering her arrival back on American soil. But the train company eagerly offered to arrange a special train on an alternate itinerary.
At nine o’clock, Nellie waved good-bye to San Francisco, accompanied by John Jennings, the reporter whom Pulitzer had proposed sending on this world tour instead of her. John had hiked on snowshoes for eight hours from the snowbound train just to catch up with her!
The train sped across the country, passing Albuquerque and on to Chicago. In Chicago, Nellie was honored with a quick breakfast at the Chicago Press Club. She was the first woman to walk through its door. In Pittsburg, there was an enormous crowd on the platform, cheering their hometown heroine. Nellie’s mother and a couple of friends boarded the train in Philadelphia to join her for the final triumphant ride. At 3:51 p.m. on January 25, 1890, Nellie Bly arrived in Jersey City where she had started out. She had traveled 24,899 miles in seventy-two days, six hours. and eleven minutes, a record that would remain unbroken for thirty-nine years.
Nellie did not linger in New Jersey but rushed on to New York City, where she was honored with a champagne celebration. Home at last!
Elizabeth Bisland, her competitor, also circled the globe in fewer than eighty days. She arrived back in New York four days after Nellie—to a much quieter reception.
Nellie was immediately caught up in her moment of celebrity. She completed her articles for The World and quickly expanded them into book form. She appeared in advertisements for Pears Soap, although her skin now had an unladylike tan. The monkey, McGinty, did not take well to apartment life and reportedly broke every dish in the kitchen. Some accounts say that Nellie donated him to the Central Park Zoo, but others dispute this.
Soon after her historic trip, Nellie had a falling out with her employers at The World, for reasons that have never been explained. She left her position there and went on a lecture tour, earning hefty sums of money for discussing her travels. She continued to write, often about serious issues, but she withdrew from public scrutiny, and eventually from reporting.
Her life continued with plenty of ups and downs, including marriage to a man forty-four years older than she was, a successful new career as the manufacturer of steel barrels, and being cheated of two million dollars, forcing her into years of fruitless court cases.
Later in life, needing money, Nellie returned to journalism, and to the topics that had always made her burn: corruption, child abuse, and the prejudice against women in business. She was always tenacious in going after the heart of a story, but she did not revisit the sensational impact of her youth.
When Nellie died in 1922, the obituary in The World pronounced her “the best reporter in America.”
Well, yes. And why not?
Nellie Bly was perhaps everything that Daisy Ashford was not—an adult, a traveler, and perhaps not quite genteel.
But Daisy achieved one thing that Nellie would have liked—her novel is still in print more than one hundred and twenty years after she wrote it.