no desire to cultivate the notoriety that she was sure would come with such a race. But her editor corralled her into going on the trip.

Bisland's account of her journey was filled with "highly lyrical, impressionistic" writing. "Sapphires would be pale and cold beside this sea," she wrote of the Pacific Ocean, "palpitating with wave shadows deep as violets, yet not purple, and with no touch of any color to mar its perfect hue."

If it seems unlikely today that there were two female reporters embarking on such a trip during the turn of the 20th century, that's because the story of intrepid daredevil "girl reporters" has faded from history books. During the heyday of yellow journalism, papers and magazines hired number of such reporters, writes Jayne Garrison fora 1994 story in the Los Angeles Times. They were "stunt girls," intended to boost circulation numbers, as Tom Leonard, a professor of journalism history at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Garrison. Bly's own considerable pedigree still may have had an outsized-influence in making the story happen. "I can't imagine the editors of her day were excited about the idea of throwing a woman onto the front page as often as she got there," journalist Brooke Kroeger, who wrote a biography on Bly, says. "But she got there nearly every time she wrote, which in itself is astounding. It's hard to understand today what that really meant in its context."

During the journey, Bly sent brief dispatches to her paper by cable, writes Roma Panganiban for Mental Floss.