What does Nellie Bly have to do with Sailing?
With the Jules Verne trophy carrying the name of the author of Around the World in 80 days, Mr. Verne is suitably honored by sailing.
A recent listed to news on the radio introduced me to Nellie Bly which was a pen name for Elizabeth Jane Cochran. Bly was a journalist who enacted Verne’s proposition of a world circling voyage in under 80 days.
In 1888, it was suggested that the New York World should send a reporter on a trip around the world, mimicking Jules Verne’s book Around the World in Eighty Days. It was decided that Nellie Bly should be that reporter, and on November 14, 1889 she left New York on her 24,899-mile journey. “Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure” (January 25, 1890) Nellie arrived in New York. This was a world record for circling the earth, which would stand until 1929, when the Graf Zeppelin did it in “20 days, four hours and fourteen minutes”.
Bly wrote of these adventures in Around the World in 72 days
Today Andy Green a British sailor writing in the Daily Sail had this comment about Ellen Macarthur’s Around the world Record Bid “Ellen on the other hand needs to break the record for all of us: her blinding determination and guts can only be a good reflection on sailing as a whole.” This comment shows how top of mind and popular Ellen really is.
It’s interesting that while Vernes book was fiction, Bly’s trip actually occurred. I don’t know how popular Bly was, but indications are she was a determined under cover journalist. We know that Macarthur is a determined and very public sailor.
Currently she seems to be right on the edge of breaking Francis Joyon’s solo around the world record of 72 days 22 hours. Perhaps an additional goal might be for her to break Bly’s time of 72 days 6 hours. In fact maybe there should be a Nellie Bly trophy for the 1st to post a time under 72 days 6 hours….
During her trip Bly met Jules Verne. Bly wrote this of their meeting, “”If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands,” Jules Verne said, and then I knew he doubted the possibility of my doing it in seventy-five, as I had promised. In compliment to me, he endeavored to speak to me in English, and did succeed in saying, as his glass tipped mine: “Good luck, Nellie Bly.”
Finally one of Verne’s less known works is ‘An Antarctic Mystery’ as a sequel to Poe’s ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.’ The 1st page of this story mentions: Desolation Islands (see Desolation Peak), Captain Cook and the Kerguelen Islands….delicious
P.S. The Rowing Reporter plans to produce Book Scout Look out pieces on both Bly’s trip and Verne’s Antarctic Mystery in the near future.
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