Nellie Bly Sets Off: Around the World in Under 80 Days

Nellie Bly boarded the Augusta Victoria steamship in Hoboken, New Jersey, carrying a single small bag and wearing a plaid overcoat she would not change for 72 days. The 25-year-old journalist was attempting to circumnavigate the globe faster than the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, a publicity stunt dreamed up by her editors at the New York World that would make her the most famous woman in America. Bly was already renowned for her daring brand of investigative journalism. Two years earlier, she had feigned insanity to get committed to the notorious Blackwell's Island asylum, then published a devastating expose of the conditions inside. Her writing for Joseph Pulitzer's World combined first-person adventure with genuine social conscience, a style that was revolutionary for women journalists in the 1880s, when most were confined to writing about fashion and society. The around-the-world trip was a logistical feat. Bly traveled alone, without a companion or chaperone, at a time when women rarely traveled without male escort. She crossed the Atlantic to England, then proceeded by train and steamship through France, where she met Jules Verne himself at his home in Amiens, then onward through the Suez Canal, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. She filed dispatches at every stop, and readers across America followed her progress with obsessive interest. The World ran a contest inviting readers to guess her exact arrival time, drawing nearly a million entries. Unknown to most of her audience, a rival newspaper, Cosmopolitan, had dispatched its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, on the same day going in the opposite direction. Bisland traveled in relative comfort and obscurity while Bly became a national sensation.