Start the man, she told him. She would start the same day for another paper and beat him. She got the assignment.

On the fourteenth of November she boarded a steamer at Hoboken with one small bag, a dress she had ordered made in two days, and an ulster coat. No chaperone. No trunks. She was twenty-five years old, and two years earlier she had gotten herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island for ten days to report on the treatment of the patients, so nobody at the World was inclined to bet against her.

She crossed the Atlantic, detoured through Amiens to shake hands with Verne himself, and went on by rail and steamer through Italy, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. She cabled dispatches when she could and mailed them when she could not. A rival magazine put its own correspondent on the route in the opposite direction the same day, hoping to beat her home. Bly did not learn of the race until she was halfway around the world. She did not alter her plans.

A storm in the Pacific put her steamer days behind. When she landed at San Francisco the World chartered a train to run her across the continent without a stop. She stepped onto the platform in Jersey City on the twenty-fifth of January, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes after she left. The crowd was so large the police could not hold it. The rival correspondent arrived four days later.

Bly did not have the fastest ship or the best route. She had a refusal to wait for permission, one bag, and the nerve to start before anyone had agreed that she should. That is most of the trick. Pack light. Start now.