Around the World on Two Wheels Read online

  The French consul at Yokohama, a model of politeness and a thorough gentleman, immediately interested himself in mademoiselle. And it was through his courtly generosity and timely assistance that 250 yen were raised in short order for La Petite Mademoiselle and she went on her way rejoicing.

  Miss Londonderry found another superfoine riprisintative of a jimieratic administrashun at Hangchow who wouldn’t help her at all because he said she had no business in thim parts, and ought ter have staid at home; and the same interesting state of affairs obtained at Nagasaki…

  At Yokohama the ratty old buzzard who acts, or rather misacts as American consul there, wanted to charge Miss Londonderry $3 for a passport and at other places she was given to clearly understand that the American consul was not out there for his health, but for something else.

  Without the help of American consul John McLean, on March 9, 1895, Annie boarded the Belgic in Yokohama for the voyage home to America. Four hundred twenty feet in length and 2,212 tons, the ship was equipped to sail or to steam, its deck punctuated by three towering masts and a single smokestack. Unlike La Touraine, this vessel was a workhorse with a top speed of fourteen knots, one that often carried legions of Chinese and Japanese immigrants looking for work in America.

  As she sailed for home, Annie continued to hone the stories of her extraordinary escapades, tales she would soon relate to audiences thirsty for a taste of her adventures. For people in small towns and cities in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado, her vivid descriptions of adventures in places they could only imagine, literally illuminated with her slides of the extraordinary and the exotic, promised an evening of grand entertainment. “I found out what they liked and gave them plenty of it,” Annie had said of her popularity with the French. She was about to do the same for her countrymen back in the United States.

  Chapter Six

  Annie Is Back

  HAS TRAVELED THE WORLD ON A STERLING FINISHED IN IVORY AND GOLD NEARLY KILLED BY A ROAD-HOG IN STOCKTON, CAL.

  If there’s any symbol for the transformation that had occurred in the lives of American women as they approached the twentieth century, it ought to be the bicycle.

  —Gail Collins, America’s Women:

  400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

  On March 23, 1895, the day after Libbie Kopchovsky turned four, the Belgic completed its transpacific voyage. With the cannon battery at Fort Point off its starboard, and the Marin Headlands off to port, the ship passed through the Golden Gate and, much to Annie’s relief, arrived in California. “[W]hen I reached San Francisco I felt as if my journey had ended,” she wrote. “I was glad enough to get away from the land of rats and rice, and into a country where one could get a decent bed.”

  Nine months after leaving Boston, Annie was back in America. But she was no longer a lone adventurer with a personal agenda; in the course of her journey, she had become a symbol of an entire generation of women, and a pioneer in the struggle for women’s equality. The day after Annie landed, a major feature in the San Francisco Examiner headlined Annie as “The New Woman on a Tour.”

  “Annie Londonderry has proved that a woman can make her way three-quarters around the globe riding a bicycle wherever that was possible, and making money as she went,” said the Examiner somewhat generously. But the newspaper also noted, relying no doubt on Annie’s say-so, that the wager allowed “considerable latitude to the conditions [of travel]. [It allowed] the woman to make a great deal of the trip by steamer…The remainder of the trip has to be taken entirely on her bicycle.”

  But Annie wasn’t entirely disingenuous about her journey thus far. She was well aware that questions might surface about her fast passage through Asia and, to the Examiner, at least, she didn’t claim to have ridden across India or overland to the China coast. Rather, she explained that in Alexandria, Port Said, Jerusalem, and Aden she made only “short tours near each of those places and then started for Singapore on the same steamer.” Though the wager required her “to report at Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama,” it “did not matter how I reached those places, so long as I made the circuit and secured the signatures of the Consuls at each of the cities as proof that I had accomplished the purpose of the trip,” a rather odd statement given that the purpose of the trip was, ostensibly, to ride around the world on a bicycle. “If she succeeds she is to receive the purse that prompted the journey,” continued the Examiner, “and another victory will be scored for the new woman.” (emphasis added to these three extracts)

  However ambiguous her descriptions of her means of travel, in San Francisco Annie was staking her claim as the first woman to go around the world by wheel. The “buxom young woman” who arrived on the Belgic, “claims the distinction of being the first bike rider of her sex to attempt to circle the sphere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “She shook the dust of the classic Massachusetts metropolis off her tires several months ago, and with a degree of self-assurance somewhat unusual to her sex, ventured to ‘beat her way’ around the world.”

  The Chronicle was not much taken with Annie’s appearance, in any sense of the word. “Miss Londonderry is short and stout and takes pride in the fact that she sacrificed personal appearances for comfort during her journey. She looks it. She was not mistaken for an Oriental princess when she stepped down the gangplank of the Belgic, and she professed to be somewhat disappointed that the populace, headed by several brass bands, had not turned out to welcome her as had been the case, according to her diary, in other great cities.” In regard to the latter, the newspaper pointed out that Annie’s arrival in San Francisco was unexpected. Given her skill as her own publicity agent, however, that seems unlikely. Though in France she had achieved media coverage and adoration, her tepid welcome in San Francisco demonstrated that she still had a lot of work to do to achieve similar notoriety at home. Although newspapers often shared stories (the major story in the Examiner on her arrival, for example, also appeared in full in the Washington Post some three weeks later), this wasn’t an age of mass communication and instant celebrity. And the vast territory of the United States was not as easy to conquer, figuratively speaking, as a small country such as France. In America, Annie would have to start building her fame all over again and the considerable newspaper coverage she received in San Francisco was an excellent start.

  Though Annie told the Examiner she had taken the steamer to Singapore, on the very same day she told the San Francisco Call and the San Francisco Chronicle entirely different stories. She informed the Call she had ridden across India, and she boasted to the Chronicle that she had made “a long, fatiguing journey over land to the Chinese coast.” Whether these claims were simply meant to add drama and intrigue to her story, or were a response to skepticism expressed by the reporters about her claim to be cycling the world, cannot be determined. More likely, Annie didn’t care. Often very impulsive in conversation, there is nothing in the record that suggests any defensiveness on her part at any time, or any attempt at any time to set the record straight on a point where there might have been confusion. She made no effort to stick to a single, consistent, intact story.

  In San Francisco, the first of several remarkably precise but questionably accurate accounts appeared of how many miles the cyclist had traveled. In terms of the world’s surface, she had transversed close to 20,000 miles by this point. However, Annie’s Sterling, unlike the Columbia she rode from Boston to Chicago, had a cyclometer, an odometer-like device, which was difficult but not impossible to tamper with. She, or rather, “her bike [had] traveled, in all, 7,280 miles,” according to the Call. This clearly refers to the mileage supposedly covered by the actual vehicle in motion; anyone standing near it could have read the cyclometer easily. Seven thousand miles at San Francisco is reasonably consistent with Annie’s later claim, in the New York World, to have ridden precisely 9,604 miles by bicycle during her entire journey, for the indirect route she would take back to Chicago f
rom San Francisco was approximately 3,000 miles. But even adding in the approximately 1,000 miles Annie rode on her Columbia, she certainly had covered less than 7,000 miles by bicycle when she reached San Francisco. The trip from Boston to Chicago and back to New York had been about 2,200 miles, and the journey from Paris to Marseilles about 400, some 170 of which she covered by train. She had been at sea for most of the time since leaving France. As she continued from San Francisco across America, the mathematics of Annie’s cyclometer and various news reports about it would become even more conflicted.

  The miles she had traveled were not the only currency by which Annie’s trip was being measured, however. She was still bent on establishing that she was fulfilling the other important requirement of the wager—that she earn $5,000 en route. In San Francisco, she also described how she decided to earn money lecturing about the war, stating that to that point she had sent only $1,500 “to Boston to be placed to my credit. I was looking toward earning the money between San Francisco and the Atlantic coast and to do it I must have some means of entertaining the public.”

  That Annie was in earnest about making money by lecturing about her experiences, the captain of the Belgic learned firsthand on the voyage from Yokohama. “She is fully capable of taking care of herself as Pilot Newton Jordan discovered when he began quizzing her on the Belgic,” said the San Francisco Call. “She recited to him some of her adventures and then told him if he wanted to hear more he would have to pay for it.” But, like the mathematics of her mileage, the various figures of Annie’s earnings are also impossible to reconcile. Well before she reached San Francisco, there were reports that she had earned considerably more than $1,500. In Buffalo in November 1894, for example, it was announced she had already earned $3,500, principally in advertising contracts. These inconsistencies of her reported earnings would also become of increasing interest to the press as Annie entered the home stretch of her journey and sought to lay claim to winning her purported wager.

  It was during her time in San Francisco that she tested the war stories she would use throughout her travels. She told the press she took a steamer to Nagasaki, where she met two correspondents bound for the front and landed near Port Arthur with the second Japanese army. “The two men rode on ponies while I used the bicycle. The roads were very poor and it was hard work, but I managed to keep up with the rest, and was in at the fight at Gasan…I like the two correspondents, was not allowed very close to the actual line of battle, but I saw enough of it to know what the horrors of war are…It took us a week before we reached Che Foo, and I thought we would never accomplish the journey. The cold was intense, and the food we could scare up was not sufficient for one person, let alone three.” But, as noted, there is simply no way Annie spent a week reaching Chefoo (modern-day Yantai, across Korea Bay from Port Arthur); at best she was in the vicinity of Port Arthur for no more than three days, and most likely aboard the steamship Sydney the entire time.

  ANNIE SPENT about two and a half weeks in San Francisco, staying at least part of that time at the Palace Hotel, where she prepared to continue her journey. At Taber Studios on Polk Street she had a formal portrait of her Sterling taken; and somewhere in the surrounding hills, stage-managed a photo of bandits accosting her at gunpoint, a slide she would use, along with others she had purchased along the route, to illustrate the lectures she would give as she made her way east. The photograph with the bandits was pure Annie—a fanciful but dramatic backdrop against which to spin her tales of high adventure. During her time in San Francisco, she began organizing and labeling the lantern slides she had collected and carried with her, in two lacquered boxes acquired in Asia. She also answered mail waiting for her in San Francisco, some 4,200 letters by one account, 147 of them “proposals of marriage from men of wealth and nobility,” a number she could have made up, of course, but not implausible given her growing fame.

  While Annie prepared for the rest of her journey, some in the European cycling community who had feared she had been killed somewhere between France and Asia, were just learning that she had reached Saigon safely. On March 29, 1895, four days after her arrival in San Francisco, a Paris newspaper reported, “Miss Londonderry, whose fate we have been very much worried about, has been located. It seems that she left Saigon to continue her tour of the world.” And a few days later, a German cycling journal reported, with some relief, that “a postal message from Saigon” brought news that “Miss Londonderry, about whose fate the worst was feared, left this town by bike and continued her trip around the world bravely.” Perhaps her fellow Americans were not yet following her every step, but others abroad were.

  BEFORE SHE RESUMED her journey, Annie met Mark Johnson, a cyclist from San Francisco’s Olympic Club, and they decided to ride south together. Though her cycling companions typically rode with her for a few days, Johnson was the exception. He rode with her the entire four-hundred-mile stretch to Los Angeles. It took them more than five weeks to make the trip—quite a long time for such a short distance. Had they walked, they could have made it to Los Angeles in half the time it took them to get there by bicycle. Though this was not the first time Annie had ridden in the company of a lone male rider, Johnson was clearly no ordinary escort. When the pair reached Santa Maria on May 10, a month after leaving San Francisco, the Santa Maria Times reported that Johnson was going down the coast with Annie “just to learn the road.” Perhaps. But if so, he appears to have been a very slow learner. The point doesn’t need to be belabored, but these were two young, athletic people cycling through some of the world’s most spectacular scenery at the height of the lush and sensuous California spring. For a woman racing the clock around the world, Annie certainly lacked a sense of urgency during this leg of her trip. Perhaps it was Johnson’s company that caused her to “[pass] through Morgan Hill…a whooping.”

  Annie and Johnson left San Francisco on their bicycles on April 9 or 10, reached the east side of San Francisco Bay, and spent the night in Tracy, some fifty-five miles east. She was expected in Stockton the next day to deliver a lecture.

  But the very next morning, near tragedy struck. While riding downhill on the narrow Niles Canyon road, a runaway horse and wagon rounded a bend and ran Annie and Johnson off the road and into a barbed wire fence. “The couple were going at a four-minute clip [a four-minute mile, or fifteen miles per hour] down grade along the canyon road, when, just around a curve in the narrow road, they saw a runaway team coming towards them,” reported the Stockton Evening Mail. “There was little time for thought, but Johnson, who was in the lead, called out to his companion to follow him. This she did, and as the team went whizzing past, the bicyclists were crowded against the side hill and both struck the same obstruction at the same time. Johnson relaxed his muscles and landed limp, so that he was not as badly shaken up as Miss Londonderry, who put her arm out to try and break the fall. In doing this she was badly shaken up and injured internally. Her face suffered severely and is now black and blue.”

  Annie, in typical dramatic fashion, would later say the accident had knocked her unconscious and kept her bedridden for five weeks, coughing up blood. But, according to the Stockton Evening Mail, “Her bicycle was damaged but it was patched up and she proceeded to Livermore where a physician was consulted. He took from her lip several small pieces of rock that had been pressed through the skin. The plucky little woman refused to stay over at that point and have her injuries attended to, as she was anxious to be on hand in Stockton tonight to deliver her lecture.”

  True to her word, despite “[a] black eye, a scarred face and a badly bruised body,” Annie delivered her lecture in Stockton on the night of the eleventh against the advice of Dr. Lilla Miller Lomax, a thirty-seven-year-old physician in Stockton.

  * * *

  MISS LONDONDERRY’S LECTURE

  “Annie Londonderry,” the clever young bicyclist who is touring the world, lectured to a large crowd at Mozart hall last night. There was not one vacant seat. The audience was composed almost e
ntirely of men and the majority of them seemed to take more interest in Miss Londonderry—who is a shapely young woman—in her abbreviated cycling habit than they did in the stereopticon views that were thrown on the canvas.

  —Stockton Daily Independent, April 12, 1895

  * * *

  By the next day, Annie was feeling the ill effects of her accident. She was taken to Dr. Lomax’s home, which doubled as a clinic, and placed in her care. A reporter for the Stockton Evening Mail visited Annie there and reported she was suffering “a high fever and was in great pain.” Nevertheless, Annie held forth, quite expansively, on cycling, its benefits for women, and proper riding attire, once again illustrating her very advanced views for a woman of the 1890s.

  “You want to know what I think about the bicycle for the physical development of women?” she asked the reporter. “Well, I know from experience that there is nothing better than a wheel to build a woman up. When I started out on this trip I weighed 105 pounds, and now my weight is 140. [Like her mileage and her earnings, Annie’s reports of her weight are suspect as she had, purportedly, lost a good deal of weight en route from Boston to Chicago. Perhaps she gained it back, this time in muscle.] The exercise has not made hard, bunchy muscles, such as you often see on athletes among men, but has made good, pliable muscles that have developed me all over and have rounded out every curve.