Around the World on Two Wheels Read online

  As Annie walked the West End’s cobblestone streets, either going to and from work on Washington Street on the other side of Beacon Hill, to shop for necessities, or simply to escape the claustrophobia of a crowded household, she would hear conversations in as many as a dozen languages. The sound of horseshoes hitting cobblestone ricocheted through streets as horses pulled peddler’s wagons past four-and five-story buildings, many with storefronts at street level and apartments above.

  If the conversations in the West End created a veritable Tower of Babel, the odor of ethnic foods wafting from downstairs shops and upstairs apartments were similarly diverse. The smell of barreled pickles outside a Jewish grocery mingled with the aromas of tomato sauces simmering in Italian homes, cooked sausages from the homes of Poles, and borscht from the apartments of Russians.

  Pedestrians ruled the streets. Women in shawls, long-sleeved blouses or bodices, and ankle-length skirts or dresses fondled fruit for sale and cast discerning eyes on cuts of meat and poultry hanging in shop windows. Boys in knickerbockers and caps hawked newspapers and chased one another down busy sidewalks, Men in topcoats and bowlers talked business and baseball; and the Orthodox Jews, identifiable by their long beards, black hats, and payot, long locks of hair near the ears, walked to shul. Kosher butchers abounded in the West End, as did small shops where clothing and shoes were manufactured and sold. The air, already tinged with the aromas of ethnic cooking was scented, too, with leather, fresh meat, and horse sweat. Heavy clothing worn year round, combined with limited facilities for bathing in crowded apartment blocks, meant the streets were filled with human odors as well. The West End was a crowded and smelly place, both for better and for worse.

  Though some Jews became prosperous, tenement families like Annie’s were the norm. Incomes were modest, with most laboring in small factories, retail shops, or, like Annie’s husband, Max, as peddlers of secondhand clothes and other sundries. Consequently, many Jewish women worked as a matter of economic necessity, torn between what most saw as their principal obligation—raising families and instilling a love of Judaism in their children—and the need to feed and clothe those families. Precisely for this reason, material success was greatly admired and revered in much of the Jewish community. Although women especially were expected to devote themselves first and foremost to home and family, their striving for wealth was no sin.

  In this regard, Annie was a shvitser (literally, one who sweats, a hard worker), a type of Jewish immigrant for whom America was seen as the place to make a fortune. She certainly had a shvitser’s mentality. “Shvitsers allowed nothing to stand in the way of their getting ahead,” Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University has written. “They shamelessly abandoned elements of their faith and upbringing, sometimes they abandoned their families…Everything they did focused sharply on the goal of making money and achieving success—that, they believed, was what America was all about.”

  Opportunities for men, even Jewish men, to realize their dreams of wealth were far greater than those for women, of course. With many traditional avenues unavailable to her, Annie hit upon an extraordinarily novel approach to chasing the shvitser’s dream. Nevertheless, her Jewish neighbors may have viewed with some astonishment her decision to leave her family for an adventure on a bicycle, for it is one thing to take a job across town to help support the family, and another entirely to leave a husband and three small children to take a dangerous journey from which one might never return. What possessed Annie to make such a radical choice?

  AS A YOUNG woman, Annie had already had her share of heartbreak and borne considerable responsibility for the care of others. She was eager to free herself from the narrow confines of family life on Spring Street and, at least for a time, to forge a new identity, one that would carry her to a better life.

  On January 17, 1887, when she was just sixteen or seventeen years old, her father, Levi, died. Her mother died only two months later. Her younger brother, Jacob, was then only ten, and her sister Rosa was only eight or nine. With her older sister, Sarah, already married and living in Maine, Annie and her brother Bennett, twenty, became responsible for their younger siblings. Jacob was to die at age seventeen of a lung infection.

  Annie married in 1888, the year following the death of her parents, and her first child, Bertha Malkie (known as Mollie), was born nine months later. In 1891, she had her second daughter, Libbie; and her third child, Simon, was born in 1892.

  If Annie was at all conflicted about leaving her husband and children behind in 1894, there is no evidence of it; nor did she, later in her life, express regret about her decision to journey far from home on a bike. Indeed, later events would suggest she was not troubled in the least by her impending separation. “I didn’t want to spend my life at home with a baby under my apron every year,” she would often say.

  With the cycling craze at its height in the mid-1890s and women, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, challenging the established social order, the bicycle represented to Annie a literal vehicle to the fame, freedom, and material wealth she so craved; her proposed journey could provide the opportunity to refashion her identity and create a new life for herself. But it was the sheer force of her irrepressible, flamboyant personality and her gift for drama that would transform Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, Jewish housewife and mother, into the globetrotter Mlle. Annie Londonderry, the most famous lady cyclist of her day, a woman celebrated around the world. For many immigrants, the chance to forge a new identity was part of America’s promise: a chance to leave one life behind and create another. Annie was hardly alone in this regard, though she was wholly unique in how she went about it. Indeed, throughout the course of her trip, she would prove to be, among other things, a master of self invention.

  THOUGH SHE MADE her “official” start from the Massachusetts State House on June 25, Annie remained for two additional days in Boston. She had formal photographs taken at the Towne portrait studio, photographs she would sell en route, and handbills printed explaining her venture. She made her final good-byes to her friends and young family and then, on June 27, left Boston at last.

  For Max, who worshipped her, it must have been an excruciatingly painful time. The children, except perhaps the oldest, five-year-old Mollie, couldn’t possibly have comprehended what was about to happen. However, Annie’s ambitions came first. She had decided in February to make the trip, intending to leave in May. The death of her teenaged brother, Jacob, on the twelfth of that month, may have caused the delay. But her mind was set. The journey was on.

  New York was Annie’s first objective, and from there it was on to Chicago. She did not yet know that, by riding west, she would nearly doom her trip from the beginning.

  TO NEW YORK and Chicago, Annie hewed to the cycling routes described in pocket-size tour books published by the League of American Wheelmen (L.A.W.), a national cycling organization founded in 1880. Cumulative distances, landmarks, road surfaces, terrain, and directions were laid out clearly. Thus, a cyclist would know whether she had miles of flat, paved road or impassable sandy hills, or, perhaps, a water crossing, ahead. Places to eat and hotels offering discounts to cyclists were noted. Furthermore, Annie sought the company of other cyclists, whom she was more likely to encounter on the L.A.W. routes.

  When Annie left Boston on June 27, she rode out of the city through the area known as the Fens (from which Boston’s Fenway Park derives its name) and the Jamaica Plain, Forest Hills, and West Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. Here all the roads were macadamized, making for a smooth run on a bicycle, but they turned to gravel at Dedham a few miles further south. Gravel roads offered relatively good riding through Norwood, Walpole, and Wrentham. Annie rode through Attleboro and into Providence, where she stopped for the night, on paved roads.

  The trip took her nine hours, an impressive day’s work for a woman who had never ridden a bicycle, save for two or three brief cycling lessons in the days just before her departure. This was fairly typical of the days ahead. On her
weighty forty-two-pound Columbia bicycle, dressed in long skirts and riding over roads that ranged from smooth asphalt to grainy sand, Annie averaged between eight and ten miles an hour on smooth roads, and a good deal less on poor roads, very slow by modern cycling standards. Nevertheless, “[b]icycling seems to have been a heaven-born talent with her,” declared the Atlanta Constitution.

  Annie spent the night of June 27 at a Providence hotel, earning the cost of her lodging plus “$50 extra by selling candy and lecturing.” “My expenses will be met by clerking in a store as a drawing card, by selling photographs and autographs, and by lecturing on physical culture,” she told the New York Herald when she arrived in the city a few days later. “I have studied medicine for two years, and have paid particular attention to the cultivation of physical beauty.”

  The roads south of Providence were poor, and the gravel gradually gave way to sand for many miles. In some spots the roads were barely passable by bicycle and she had to dismount and push her wheel along. But, when Annie did find a reasonable patch of road and was able to coast down some of the modest hills in southwest Rhode Island, she probably experienced a physical freedom unlike any she had known before—untethered, defying gravity. For a freethinking woman who had been chaffing for years under the burdens of marriage, work, and motherhood, it must have been exhilarating to glide down gentle hills on a bicycle built for one.

  Annie crossed the state line into Connecticut at Stonington. At Darien, she picked up the historic Boston Post Road to Greenwich and crossed the Byram River Bridge to Main Street in Port Chester. On July 2, as temperatures climbed into the high eighties, Annie reached New York City.

  * * *

  WHEELING ’ROUND THE WORLD

  MISS LONDONDERRY MUST EARN $5,000 BEFORE BOSTON SEES HER AGAIN

  Mlle. Londonderry…arrived in New York early yesterday morning and went to the house of some friends at No. 208 East Broadway.

  Mlle. Londonderry set out from Boston last Monday [June 25]…She says she has met the most polite and kindest treatment on the way to this city. Male and female bicyclers escorted her along stretches of her journey, and even the tramps she encountered treated her with the most distinguished consideration.

  Mlle. Londonderry was a solicitor of advertisements in Boston. Her maiden name was Annie Cohen and she is married to a man named Kapchowsky [sic], who is in business in the city. She has three children. Her husband, she said yesterday, is perfectly willing that she should make the journey, otherwise she would not have undertaken it. It was suggested to mademoiselle that she might carry her children along with her on a bicycle built for four, but she answered that she had enough troubles of her own. The bicyclist’s features are of the Slav cast, but her face is lit up by beautiful brown eyes.

  —The World (New York), July 3, 1894

  * * *

  Annie knew the public was enamored with novel around-the-world adventures and the people who made them, and that once she had proven her mettle her efforts would likely be followed with great interest by the press and the public. She was also aware that publicity would be essential to her success.

  “I think after I have been on the road for five or six weeks I can make more money,” Annie told the New York Herald, “for then the world will see that I am really in earnest about this trip I have carefully planned for the past three months.”

  The word globalization, which typically describes the process of international economic integration largely wrought by the revolution in information technology, came into vogue late in the twentieth century. But the later decades of the nineteenth century were also a time of globalization, when advances in communications and transportation technology gave people the means to satisfy their curiosity about their world as never before, and made the world a more interconnected place than it had been just a few decades earlier. International travel was no longer available only to princes and aristocrats; it was becoming accessible to the middle class. Annie understood, as did almost every modern American and European, that at the end of the 1800s the world was, figuratively speaking, growing smaller.

  The dramatic spread of the railroads connected once remote cities and towns. Great ocean liners shrank the distance between nations. When Krakatoa, the volcano in the strait between Java and Sumatra, exploded with cataclysmic force in August 1883, the electric telegraph and submarine cables carried the news worldwide within hours, long before the volcanic dust finally settled many months later. It was the first truly global news story that people all over the world learned about almost simultaneously. Though not built until the early part of the twentieth century, it had been conceived in the 1870s that the excavation of a canal across Central America, would literally shrink the world for ships. The Avenue of Nations at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 featured representations of life in Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Java, and Lapland, with an enormous international supporting cast, a veritable human zoo. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show starring sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a fixture at the exposition, toured Europe in the mid-1890s, giving Europeans a taste and a vision of the American West.

  The nineteenth century, which began with Lewis and Clark’s expedition in 1803–1805, ended with a series of around-the-world adventures that held the public in thrall. Thomas Stevens became the first man—the first person—to pedal around the world, leaving California in 1884 and returning almost three years later, having covered some 13,500 miles by bicycle. Josiah Slocum, originally from Nova Scotia, would become the first person to sail solo around the world, leaving Boston in 1895 on a thirty-seven-foot sloop he made himself, and returning three years and forty-six thousand miles later.

  In 1872, Jules Verne captured the spirit of the age in Around the World in Eighty Days, a novel in which Verne’s hero, the wealthy eccentric, Phileas Fogg, puts his fortune and life at risk in a wager that he can circumnavigate the globe in a mere eighty days. Seventeen years later, as a publicity stunt for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the journalist Nellie Bly, who would later come to figure in Annie’s story in unexpected ways, set out to break Fogg’s record. A contest sponsored by the World to see who could come closest to guessing the time it would take Bly to make the circuit drew more than 1 million entries at a time when the population of the United States was only 63 million people. Bly, traveling mostly by train and ship, made the trip in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds, arriving back in New York to a hero’s welcome on January 25,1890. Almost certainly, when she was in her late teens, Annie had read of Nellie Bly’s adventures, for it was hard not to be aware of Nellie’s spectacular and much-heralded dash around the world, the defining story of her career.

  Bly’s trip so captivated the public that the famous game makers, McLoughlin Brothers, reissued and renamed their 1890 board game originally titled Race Around the World. It was now called Around the World with Nellie Bly, and the object was to see which player’s game piece would be the first to traverse a map of the world. Such board games of geography and travel adventure were extremely popular with American consumers of the 1880s and ’90s, another indication of how globalization was fueling interest in the world at large and in around-the-world journeys such as Annie’s. Indeed, Bly, Thomas Stevens, and soon Annie Londonderry were the pop stars of their day, delighting armchair adventurers with published accounts of their adventures. For those who could not travel, these globetrotters offered vicarious thrills as they navigated through exotic locales, faced danger, and mingled with exotic peoples.

  With the cycling craze and the women’s movement for social equality in full swing in the mid-1890s, the public was ripe for an around-the-world cycling trip with a woman heroine of the wheel. All Annie had to do was prove that she was a serious contender, and not just a lady with large ambitions.

  THOUGH SHE TOLD the New York Herald on July 3, 1894, she would be leaving New York within days for Washington, perhaps hoping for an audience with President Grover Cleveland, “then on to Honolulu and China,” Annie
spent nearly the entire month of July in New York, a strangely leisurely attitude considering the time limit imposed by the wager. She stayed with friends at 208 East Broadway and spent time devising a more practical riding costume: bloomers under a “short skirt coming to my shoetops. Then when the wind blows I won’t have to stop to hold down my skirts. I find that my blue serge skirt kept getting in the way whenever I tried to make any speed and I would be obliged to stop and fix it, so I decided I must have something different.” Annie’s new suit was made of “dark blue henrietta cloth” with “a comfortable blouse waist.” “She wears rubber sole shoes, no corsets and a jaunty cap to match her suit,” described the Atlanta Constitution. “When the riding is hard and the skirt seems in the way it is easily pinned up.”

  As she tinkered with her cycling outfit, Annie also displayed a towering self-confidence. “In her opinion there is no reason in the world she should not go around the world in fifteen months, support herself and bring back $5,000 besides,” reported the New York Herald. This was pure Annie, full of bravado and, seemingly, devoid of doubt. Asked by the Herald if she was afraid of tramps, she replied, “No, I do not think anyone would harm me, but when I leave New York I shall carry a revolver to protect myself in case of danger.” As an urban housewife and mother, Annie had as much experience with a gun as she had with a bicycle, but if she had any doubts about her ability to defend herself, or to make a trip around the world by wheel, she never voiced them.

  BY THE END of July, Annie was ready to continue her journey. July had been a month of blistering heat in New York City, and she departed on July 28, the hottest the city had seen in thirteen years. “Not a breath of cool air was to be had,” declared the New York Daily Tribune the next day. “The fitful breeze came laden with humidity and hot as the blast from a furnace. The rays of the sun were almost insupportable and the sky had a coppery look, which was accentuated by the heat as it rose in waves from baked sidewalks.” The temperature at midday soared to ninety-five degrees, and the humidity was a miserable 86 percent. Nevertheless, a crowd estimated at “several hundred persons, many of them street Arabs,” gathered at New York’s city hall to bid Annie farewell. She was attired in “[a] Nellie Bly hat…a linen waist and a blue skirt of conventional length.” Then, at 12:35 P.M., “a deafening shout went up from the multitude,” and Annie was on the road again.