In 1872, the gifted French novelist, poet and playwright Jules Verne wrote a book of adventure, ‘Around The World in 80 Days’. The book created a sensation. Its protagonist, an English gentleman by the name of Phileas Fogg and his valet took on a bet that they could circumnavigate the globe in no more than 80 days. They did.
The story soon after its publication, fascinated many but it completely possessed an American journalist of uncommon beauty and grit.
Born Elizabeth Cochrane in 1867, the youngest among 15 children, some of them step brothers and step-sisters, she was just 5 when the book was published. At 23, she was to indeed undertake Jules Verne’s fictional journey around the world and complete all 24,889 miles of it in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes, a week less that the time taken in the novel.
In the process she became as the New York World described, as “the most famous woman on Earth” who had completed “the most remarkable of all feats of circumnavigation ever performed by a human being.”
A Career is Chosen
Her story of becoming a journalist is as fascinating. Early in her youth, she read an article in the local newspaper, ‘What Girls Are Good For’. The answer, according to the article, was taking care of the home and children.
Outraged, Elizabeth wrote to the editor castigating the article. The editor was impressed with the passion and conviction of this young girl. He not only published her letter but also offered her a job as a columnist. Thus began a long, distinguished and remarkable journey of Nellie Bly, the name she chose as a journalist.
The New York Asylum: Birth of Investigative Journalism
Looking for more excitement and challenge, she came to New York in 1887 and met Joseph Pulitzer at the New York World. She told him she wanted to write about the experiences of immigrants to the United States.
Pulitzer did not like her idea but offered a counter-challenge, to investigate one of New York’s most notorious mental hospitals where there had been reports of abuse.
Challenge accepted, she feigned mental illness and got admitted to the mental hospital to learn the truth. She spent 10 days there till the newspaper’s lawyers bailed her out.
There she saw for herself a range of hostile and abusive atrocities, from mandatory ice-cold baths to confinement in small, damp, vermin-infested, locked rooms. The motto on the entrance gate of the asylum read, ’While I live, I hope’. Bly later wrote, ‘The absurdity of it struck me forcibly. I would have like to put above the gates that open to the asylum, ‘He who enters here leaveth hope behind.’
The New York World ran Bly’s articles on the harrowing state of asylum in a six-part series which later were published in a book, “Ten Days in a Mad-House.” The expose’ sparked widespread outrage leading to legal action, but more importantly and happily, to significantly improve the conditions of mental asylums. It resulted in an extra $1million a year being appropriated by New York’s aldermen to correct many of the abuses.
The foundations of investigative journalism were thus laid by this courageous, risky and rather impetuous venture. But then she became one of the most famous journalists in the United States and was established as the pioneer of investigative journalism.
Around The World
One fine morning in 1889 she barged into Pulitzer’s room, tentative and timid but determined. The conversation, in her own words, went like this,
“I approached my editor rather timidly on the subject. I was afraid that he would think the idea too wild and visionary.
“Have you any ideas?” he asked, as I sat down by his desk.
“I want to go around the world in eighty days or less. I think I can beat Phileas Fogg’s record. May I try it?”
To my dismay he told me that in the office they had thought of this same idea before and the intention was to send a man . . . We went to talk with the business manager about it.
“It is impossible for you to do it,” was the terrible verdict. “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. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this.”
“Very well,” I said angrily, “Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”
Pulitzer conceded. And Bly packed two caps, three veils, slippers, toiletries, an ink stand, pens, pencils, paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask, a drinking cup, fresh underwear, handkerchiefs, spare fabric and a jar of cold cream in a Gladstone bag and boarded the Augusta Victoria steamer at Hoboken, New Jersey on November 14, 1889. In France, she met Jules Verne. She sailed through the Suez Canal. In China, she stopped to see a leper colony. She acquired a pet monkey in Singapore. On January 21, 1890, she was back in America, docking in San Francisco. She had travelled by ship, train, horse, rickshaw, sampan, burro and other vehicles.
Pulitzer chartered a private train to return her to New York and there, on January 25, she was greeted not only by official timekeepers but by an admiring 15,000-strong crowd.
She wrote about her adventure – and the interview with her editor – in her book Around The World in Seventy-Two Days, published in 1890. About the newspaper’s belief that women would need many suitcases for such a journey, she wrote,’ If anyone is traveling for the sake of traveling, and not for the purpose of impressing fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.’
A life Well Lived
She married millionaire Robert Seaman in 1895. She was 31 and Seaman 73, over two score years older than her at the time and owned the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, which manufactured cans, boilers, tanks and enamelled wares. Nine years later Seaman died leaving behind a huge fortune for her, which she managed with as much panache and energy.
But her soul belonged to journalism, to which she returned writing a series of dispatches
from the Eastern Front during the First World War, as well as articles on women’s suffrage movement.
Pneumonia consumed her while she was still working as a writer. On January 22,1922 she died. She was 57.
scribo ad LX 