The Square Pegs (9 page)

Jules Verne was fascinated. In 1871 the idea of circling the world at great speed was almost as dramatic as the science fiction he had created earlier about an underwater boat that could travel fifty miles an hour on an exploration beneath the oceans and beneath the Isthmus of Suez (by use of a tunnel). Inspired by George Francis Train’s adventures, as well as by the postwar advertisements of Cook’s Tours in shopwindows, Verne began to draft his hero, Phileas Fogg, and his story,
Around the World in Eighty Days
.

He finished writing the novel in November 1872. But before permitting his friend Pierre Jule Hetzel to publish it as one of the “
Voyages Extraordinaires
” he agreed to its serialization in the popular press. It appeared in Le Temps, a chapter a day in
feuilleton
that is, in the literary supplement during the early part of 1873.

It was not literature, but it was high adventure of the most thrilling sort, and it delighted Verne fans then, even as it continues to delight them to this day. By the alchemy of fiction Verne transformed the emotional and erratic American, George Francis Train, into the emotionless and precise Englishman, Phileas Fogg, Esq., enigmatic and respected member of the London Reform Club. Using Train’s actual escapades as the basis of his story, Verne had Phileas Fogg wager 40,000 pounds that he could circle the globe in eighty days, and then forced Fogg to traverse a portion of India on an elephant, rescue a Parsi girl named Aouda from a flaming pyre, outwit a detective in China who thought him a thief, reach Omaha on a sledge bearing sails, cross the Atlantic by burning the superstructure of his steamer for fuel, and finally arrive in London one day late only to learn, at the last moment, that he had gained a day by traveling eastward around the world.

The sensation created by the publication of this story was enormous. No Gallic armchair adventurer was without his
Temps
. English and American foreign correspondents cabled entire chapters daily to their papers in England and the United States, treating Phileas Fogg’s progress as straight news. The citizenry of three nations breathlessly, and simultaneously, followed each installment, and many wagered on the success or failure of Phileas Fogg’s race against time.

“Seldom has any piece of fiction excited such a furor,” wrote Charles F. Home, who edited an American edition of Verne’s collected works. “Liberal offers were made to the author by various transportation companies, if he would advertise their routes by having his hero travel by them. And when the final passage of the Atlantic from America to England was to be accomplished, the bids for notice by the various transatlantic lines are said to have reached fabulous sums.”

Verne did not have to compromise or commercialize his story to obtain “fabulous sums.” With the publication of
Around the World in Eighty Days
as a novel, and its adaptation into a play which ran in Paris for three years, and after that in Vienna, Brussels, London, and New York, Verne’s fortune was made. It is known that he bought a yacht, and it is said that he acquired a mistress. Until his death in 1905 his villa in Amiens was a Mecca for travelers.

Inspired by Fogg, a Hungarian army officer named Lubowitz rode from Vienna to Paris in fifteen days to win a bet, and was received as a guest by Verne for two days. In 1889 an aggressive brunette from the
New York World
, Nellie Ely, carrying gripsack and shoulder bag, paused on her journey into fame to burst upon the surprised Verne in his tower room at Amiens and inform him that she would beat Phileas Fogg’s record. Verne was politely doubtful, but wished her luck. Miss Ely lowered Fogg’s record by eight days.

In 1901 a journalist representing the
Echo de Paris
, Stiegler by name, interrupted his sixty-three-day tour of the world to shake hands with Verne in the Amiens depot. In the best of humor, Verne glanced over his visitor’s shoulder and said: “But I don’t see Miss Aouda.” Stiegler smiled. “Reality is inferior to the imagination, Monsieur Verne. I didn’t even meet her.”

They all paid homage to Verne, except the one who was really Phileas Fogg. George Francis Train and Verne never met. And Train would not condescend to visit the man he felt owed him so much.

Around the World in Eighty Days
was filled with incidents and activities that closely paralleled the life and travels of George Francis Train. There were differences, of course: Verne had Fogg travel east around the world, whereas Train had actually traveled west. Verne made Fogg a mechanical man, whereas Train was an impulsive, explosive human being. But the handsome, bewhiskered Fogg had in common with the handsome, mustached Train a reputation for eccentricity, a compulsion to read newspapers excessively, a lack of interest in sightseeing when on the road, a predilection for squalls and typhoons, and an utter disregard for the extravagances involved in chartering special transportation.

In his 100,000-word autobiography, dictated in thirty-five working hours and published the year before his death, Train made constant claim to being the prototype for Phileas Fogg. In recording his account of the trip, he stated: “I went around the world in eighty days in the year 1870, two years before Jules Verne wrote his famous romance,
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
, which was founded upon my voyage.” Speaking again of the eighty days, he wrote: “Jules Verne, two years later, wrote fiction of my fact.” And in summarizing his four trips around the world, Train said: “One of these voyages, the one in which I put a girdle round the earth in eighty days, has the honor of having given the suggestion for one of the most interesting romances in literature.”

Once, in London, on a second and faster journey around the globe, shortly after he had been declared insane by a Boston judge (though, actually, few ever seriously thought him insane), Train exploded to English reporters: “Remember Jules Verne’s ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’? He stole my thunder. I’m Phileas Fogg. But I have beaten Fogg out of sight. What put the notion into my head? Well, Fin possessed of great psychic force.”

As a matter of fact, the author Verne and the merchant Train had much in common. Both were interested in the growing technology, in mechanical progress, in speed. Both ranged far ahead of their time. It was only their methods that differed. Verne confined his dreams of progress to paper, where they were acceptable; Train tried to make his real, and was often rebuffed.

Train was Phileas Fogg for eighty days, but he was much more for almost eighty years. Beside him, the fictional Fogg was a one-dimensional dullard. For no author could have invented Train or transferred all of him to manuscript, and made him half believable.

George Francis Train was born in Boston on March 24, 1829. As an infant he was taken by his family to New Orleans, where his father opened a general store. In 1833, when Train was four, the great yellow-fever epidemic hit New Orleans. Families hammered together their own pine coffins, and deposited them on passing “dead wagons.” Train lost his mother and three sisters in the dreadful plague. At last a letter came from his maternal grandmother in Waltham, Massachusetts, begging his father to a send on some one of the family, before they are all dead. Send George.”

Train’s father, before meeting his own death by the fever, sent the boy aboard the ship Henry with an identity card pinned to his coat. After twenty-three days at sea without a change of clothes, the four-year-old boy reached Waltham. From the day he entered the Pickering farm, he was in revolt. The members of his family were strict Methodists. Their only topical reading was a weekly periodical called
Zion’s Herald
. When his great-grandfather, who wore a fez and tippled, and his grandmother, who smoked a pipe, insisted that he learn to pray, Train complied but he would not kneel. “I could not see the necessity of God, and no one could ever explain to me the reason why there should be, or is, a God,” he said later. “Morality and ethics I could see the necessity of, and the high and authoritative reason for; but religion never appealed to my intelligence or to my emotions.”

He helped to sell the family’s farm produce. He attended school. But when there was talk of preparing him for the clergy, or at least for the profession of blacksmith, he walked out. He was fourteen when he left the farm for a job in a Cambridgeport grocery. It was hard work. He labored from four o’clock daybreak until ten in the evening for fifty dollars a year. This went on for two years, and might have gone on longer but for the fact that one day he had a visitor who changed his entire life.

His father’s cousin, a wealthy, conservative gentleman, Colonel Enoch Train, came calling in a splendid carriage. He made polite inquiries, then returned to the granite building at 37 Lewis Wharf, Boston, which housed the shipping enterprises of Train and Company.

The following day, Train quit the grocery and appeared in Colonel Enoch’s office. “Where do I come in?” he bluntly asked. The Colonel was shocked. “Come in? Why, people don’t come into a big shipping house like this in that way. You are too young.” Train stood his ground, “I am growing older every day. That is the reason I am here. I want to make my way in the world.” It was a day when audacity was still respected. Train was put to work with the bookkeeper.

The Colonel’s shipping house was never quite the same after that. In two years the tall, darkly attractive Train had become manager of the firm, and within four years he was receiving $10,000 annually as a partner. Completely uninhibited, Train modernized the business. The Colonel’s aged clippers were receiving stiff competition from the Black Ball Line and from Cunard’s new steamships. When the gold rush began in California, Train made his employer divert forty packets from the English run to the race around the Cape. Dismayed that their largest vessel was only 800 tons, Train prodded the dazed old man into contracting for larger, faster ships. As a result, Donald McKay was commissioned to build a radically new kind of boat, one with a sharp bow that sliced through or clipped the water. His most spectacular product for Train and Company was the 2,000-ton Flying Cloud, whose canvas soared ninety feet into the air and carried her around Cape Horn to California in a record-smashing eighty-nine days. She was followed by the 2,200-ton
Monarch Of The Seas
. The former was sold to the Swallow-Tail Line for $90,000, twice her cost, and the latter to a company in Germany for $110,000.

But though he helped the Colonel, Train did not ignore himself. He decided to try a little exporting and importing on his own. He inveigled a company captain into smuggling three tins of opium into China in return for silks and curios. His share of the subsequent profits was an eye opener.

Besides filling his pockets, Train also fed his ego. He liked to meet renowned personalities. One of his first contacts with celebrity occurred quite by accident. In October 1847, Train remembered later, “a gentleman, looking like a farmer, came into the office” and requested passage to England on a boat sailing in an hour. Train told him there was one seventy-five-dollar stateroom left, and then asked his name. “‘Ralph Waldo Emerson,’ he replied. Then he took out of his pocket an old wallet, with twine wrapped around it four or five times, opened it carefully, and counted out seventy-five dollars… . Mr. Emerson was then starting on his famous visit to England, during which he was to visit Carlyle.”

In line of duty, Train met Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Boston customhouse. “He seemed very unassuming, and not in very affluent circumstances. I suppose his salary from the Government at the time Was not more than $1,000 a year.” When a company ship sank off Boston Light, and it was thought that the captain had sunk it for the insurance, Train hurried to the office of Daniel Webster, the hard-drinking, hard-eating future secretary of State. “I remember now the roar of his great deep voice as he responded to my knock… . He sat at his flat desk, a magnificent example of manhood, his massive head set squarely and solidly upon his shoulders.”

Webster was grateful for a $1,000 retainer, and later repaid Train by getting him into the White House to meet President Zachary Taylor. Train, then twenty-one, spent an awed half hour with “Old Rough and Ready,” a man who had never cast a vote in his life. “He wore a shirt that was formerly white, but which then looked like the map of Mexico after the battle of Buena Vista. It was spotted and spattered with tobacco juice. Directly behind me, as I was soon made aware, was a cuspidor, toward which the President turned the flow of tobacco juice. I was in mortal terror, but I soon saw there was no danger … he never missed the cuspidor once, or put my person in jeopardy.”

In the years that followed, Train met Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie and was impressed, saw the elderly Duke of Wellington at a party in London and was not impressed, guided Secretary of State William H. Seward about Paris and decided he knew little “of European thought and power,” and paid the stranded Edwin Booth’s passage home from Australia, though he “never received a word of thanks or appreciation from Booth.”

By 1850 Tram’s value to the Colonel was so great that he was awarded a one-sixth partnership in the firm and promoted to the position of European manager. In Liverpool he had twenty-five clerks working under him and four ships ferrying steel, crockery, and dry goods across the Atlantic.

Back in the United States on a visit, Train was waiting for transportation on the Syracuse railroad platform, when his gaze fell upon an attractive, brown-eyed Southern girl. It was love at first sight. Impulsively, he sat opposite her and the family doctor who was chaperoning her. He struck up a conversation, learned that she was Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis, a relation of Jefferson Davis and the daughter of a former Army Colonel who was editor of the
Louisville Courier
. Doggedly, Train followed her on a sightseeing excursion to Niagara Falls, and there, he said, “our love was mutually discovered and confessed amid the roaring accompaniment of the great cataract.” Though a Northerner, he was acceptable to Wilhelmina’s family. They were married in the Louisville Episcopal Church in October 1851. She was seventeen; he was twenty-two.