Chasing Icarus (13 page)

Someone asked Moisant if he’d been hurt. He shook his head and, laughing, replied, “Why, nobody ever gets hurt flying!”

*
In an article on October 25 the
St. Louis Republic
said it was unlikely to have been a bison, and “probably his assailant was a big bull moose.”

*
Following Barrie’s divorce in 1909, much speculation appeared in the American press that he intended to marry Chase, despite the fact that he had been Chase’s godfather since 1906. Barrie eventually quashed the rumors by saying he felt only “paternal affection” for Chase.

CHAPTER SIX

Progress Slow and Exhausting

Thursday, October 20, 1910

The descent of the
America II
had stopped at exactly fifteen minutes to four on Wednesday afternoon. Post noted the time in the logbook. It was forty-six hours since they had left St. Louis, and the pair agreed that they must be in with a chance of winning the International Balloon Cup. First, however, they had to deal with the more urgent problem of extricating themselves from a precarious situation. Neither had been injured in the fall, but the basket had landed in a rocky, shallow gorge, and the yellow envelope of the balloon was draped over a tall pine tree. They hauled the basket out of the gorge, laid it on a large, flat stone, and secured it to the trunk of a tree with the drag rope. The storm clouds they had passed on their way down were now starting to leak sullen raindrops, so Post rigged up a shelter using “our light waterproof basket-cover over an open umbrella above the basket” while Hawley laid out a thick blanket on the basket floor.

Once inside, the pair ate some food and examined their map under a battery lamp, but they were unable to confidently identify their exact position. “After talking things over and discussing the ease with which we should walk back to the houses we had seen and send back for the balloon,” said Post, “we lay down and fell asleep.”

. . .

The complacency of Hawley and Post was misplaced. Although they didn’t know it, “they had landed in the angle formed by the Peribonka River and Lake Tchitagama, half a mile north of a pond called Lac de Sable, fifty-five miles from any habitation, and seventy-five miles northwest of a railway terminus called Chicoutimi.” The few houses that Hawley had seen during their descent were in fact fur trappers’ lodges, rarely occupied during the winter months when no one but the most experienced hunter penetrated the depths of the Quebec wilderness.

The region would become famous three years later with Louis Hémon’s classic novel,
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of the Lake St. John
Community
, a love story based on the author’s own experiences. Hémon would write that in the early fall “the woods were putting on a dress of unearthly loveliness . . . of the birches, aspens, alders and wild cherries scattered upon the slope, October made splashes of many— tinted red and gold. Throughout these weeks the ruddy brown of mosses, the changeless green of fir and cypress, were no more than a background, a setting only for the ravishing colors of those leaves born with the spring, that perish with the autumn . . . but ’ere long there sweeps from out of the cold north a mighty wind like a final sentence of death, the cruel ending to a reprieve.” Then comes the snow, warned Hémon, and God help the man “who loses his way, for a short day only, in that limitless forest.”

The wind that tore through the mountain gorge on Wednesday evening was so fierce it uprooted birches, spruces, and pines. Post and Hawley were “awakened by the falling of the limb of a tree which struck the basket and gave the impression that we were slipping down the side of the rock on which the basket rested.” Throughout the night they trembled in the bottom of the basket as the night sky bellowed and blazed. The storm had yet to blow itself out at first light on Thursday, but as snowflakes began to fall, they felt it prudent to get on their way.

While Hawley warmed some soup for breakfast, Post climbed farther up the mountain to survey their position. He returned with disconcerting news; there were no villages or farms; they were marooned in a sea of green. They had their soup, and as they mopped up the remains with a bread roll, Post said that their best hope was to head south.

The dynamics of the relationship between the pair had shifted since their landing. Up in the air, Hawley was the pi lot, but down on the ground, Post tacitly took control. Though he made his money as a New York banker, Post was an outdoorsman at heart, a hunter and a sportsman with an instinct for survival. Hawley, on the other hand, belonged in the boardroom, not the backwoods, and he moved with the diffidence of a man who knew it.

They packed three ballast bags, one with their aeronautical instruments, another with food, such as crackers, ten boiled eggs, a cold chicken, jars of deviled ham and of tongue, twelve bars of chocolate, some fruit, their condensed-meat tablets, and the last three tins of soup. The third bag contained three knives, a handsaw, a hammer, a can opener, two balls of cord, two battery lamps, and a box of waterproof matches. Hawley loaded his .38-caliber revolver, and Post pinned a scribbled note to the basket:

This is the balloon “America II,” pi lot, Alan R. Hawley; Aide, Augustus Post. Left October 17, 1910, 5:46 pm, representing America in the Gordon Bennett International Balloon Race and landed here October 19, 3:45 pm. We have gone south around big lake.

Not long after seven A.M. they set off, with Post leading the way in his suit of dark brown velvet corduroy, a small pocket compass cradled in his gloved hand, treading over ground “covered with a mass of rotten stumps, fallen tree trunks and decayed leaves, through which rock ledges penetrate at frequent intervals, making progress slow and exhausting, as well as dangerous.”

They moved carefully down the mountainside, snaking their way through a forest of pine trees. Once they caught a glimpse down to their right of the small lake (Lac de Sable) that they had seen during the final moments of their descent. At two P.M. they sat down on a log, its black bark still damp from the snowflakes, and gorged on some pears and oranges, which were “very refreshing, but hardly in keeping with a forest that gave no sign of a human being ever having been there.” Post pointed to the luxuriant carpet of moss that grew only on one side of the trees and explained to Hawley that in this region it was one of nature’s compass points: moss formed only on the north face of the trees.

They washed the juice off their hands in a mountain river, then hoisted the ballast bags over their shoulders and set off south. Lower down the slope the pine trees petered out and the balloonists were confronted by an almost solid wall of underbrush. Brambles tore at their legs, ripping through the serge material of their pants and crisscrossing their shins and thighs with angry red scratches, while branches as thick as a man’s wrist had them ducking and weaving. Sweat poured down Post’s face and collected in his ragged beard as he hacked at the foliage with a hunting knife. Now and then he sank up to his knees in a morass, levering himself free with the aid of a branch.

Post stepped over a fallen log, then bobbed under a low-hanging branch. As he chopped and slashed at some brambles, he heard a cry from behind. Spinning round, he saw Hawley slumped over the log, clutching his right knee. “Damn it,” he said, groaning, as Post put an arm under his shoulder and helped him up. “I thought the log was solid but it crumbled the moment I stepped on it.”

Hawley flexed his right knee a few times, gave it a good rub, and waved Post on, telling him he was fine. For another hour they continued to battle the undergrowth until finally, just before four P.M., the branches became thinner and the brambles fewer. Soon they were moving freely and were rewarded with a view of a long stretch of water running east to west. Post gave a triumphant “Yes!” It was Lake Tchitagama. He hurriedly unfolded the map and found the lake with his finger. Lake St. John and its surrounding villages lay beyond and to the west, but Post knew from previous hunting trips that the western end of Tchitagama drained into the Peribonca River, which was too wide to cross. They would have to skirt round the eastern end of Tchitagama, then swing back west and tramp cross-country toward Lake St. John. Not long after, they decided to camp for the night next to a mountain stream. They constructed a bivouac from branches and leaves, with the waterproof basket-cover as a roof, but didn’t have enough dry wood to build a fire. Shivering in the deepening cold, they dined on a boiled egg each and a can of con-sommé. Post borrowed Hawley’s revolver and shot at a red squirrel foraging for food, but the bullet missed and the animal vanished into the trees.

The pair sat and talked for a while, then Post fished out his hip flask of cognac from his coat pocket and they toasted each other’s health. They fell asleep to the soothing movement of the stream but before long Post was woken by the sound of stifled groans. Hawley mumbled an apology for his lack of stoicism but explained he was suffering terrible pains in his right knee. Post offered a few weary words of sympathy but was soon fast asleep under his blanket. Hawley tossed and turned in search of the most comfortable position and eventually dozed off. But not for long. He woke feeling scared and lonely, besieged by a wilderness that was closing in on a wounded man.

The whereabouts of Hawley and Post was largely overlooked in Thursday’s newspapers. Instead, the extraordinary escape of Leopold Vogt and William Assmann in the
Harburg II
dominated the coverage of the International Balloon race with newspapers vying for the most dramatic headline. DROP 18,000; IN LAKE 3 HOURS was how the
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported it. The
New York Times
ran with BALLOON IN LAKE; CREW SWIM ASHORE, while the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
headlined its front page VOGT AND ASSMANN PLUNGE INTO LAKE, adding in its subheading that they had had “a thrilling descent.”

Vogt wouldn’t have used that adjective; instead he told reporters that it had been “an experience which I do not care to repeat,” and that if not for the appearance of the two “Cherokee Indian hunters,” who had paddled them to the mainland and dropped them within walking distance of a railroad station, he didn’t think Assmann would have survived much longer. Vogt’s copilot was now sitting up in a hospital bed, bruised and blooded, but in remarkably good heart.

St. Louis Republic
also gave a full account of the
Harburg
’s terrifying ordeal and added that Alfred Le Blanc had descended in the
Isle de
The
France
“on the edge of civilization . . . rather than attempt to go further and land in some inaccessible place, from which he could not return for the New York airplane meet next week.” According to the
Republic
, five balloons were still up in the race, but that figure was amended to four in the evening edition of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, which also told its readers of an unconfirmed report that the race favorite,
Germania
, had come down somewhere in Quebec.

The SS
Trent
had reached New York on Wednesday afternoon, twelve hours before the hurricane that had ripped through the Carib bean roared across the city’s latitude. Though much of its energy had been dissipated since its destruction of Cuba, the driving rain that drenched Walter Well-man on Thursday morning as he left the Waldorf-Astoria bound for Atlantic City was a chilling reminder of just how close he and his crew had come to disaster.

Nearly four inches of rain poured from the skies, more than had fallen in the preceding four months of drought. Streets were flooded, sewers clogged, trolley lines stalled, and the subways received great cataracts from the stairways and through ventilator gratings. Water had to be pumped out from the Pennsylvania tubes under the East River, and in Brooklyn several buildings were evacuated when the rain began to weaken foundations. A horse was killed when it was driven through a pool of electrified water on East Twelfth Street in Flatbush, and the church of St. Thomas Aquinas at Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street in Brighton Beach was badly damaged when a fifteen-foot section of the sidewalk immediately outside subsided under the weight of floodwater.

By noon the storm had passed and New Yorkers emerged blinking into the pale sunlight. The damage wasn’t as bad as they’d first feared, and the
New York Sun
reported there was “almost a spring freshness in the grass of the parks, which had been looking dingy and desolate.” Some of the wild-chestnut trees in Battery Park had begun to blossom again, and the city as a whole felt revivified by the storm.

Early on Thursday afternoon the
Teutonic
docked at New York, and among the green-about-the-gills passengers who staggered down the gangplank were a trio of French aviators—Emile Aubrun, René Simon, and René Barrier—and a Swiss flier, twenty-eight-year-old Edmond Audemars. There to greet them was Cortlandt Field Bishop, who unknotted their frayed nerves with an automobile trip around the city, then a stroll through Central Park in the company of a
New York Herald
reporter. Audemars told the paper that he would be flying a Demoiselle—like his good friend Roland Garros—and though the plane had a comic appearance, he believed it would surprise a few people at Belmont Park. “I intend to enter most of the general events,” he said, “and I certainly do not intend to miss any of the regular prizes if I can help it.”

Emile Aubrun cut a stylish figure as he admired Central Park. He was wearing a double-breasted, tan overcoat and derby, and he frequently rolled the ends of his waxed mustache between thumb and forefinger. The twenty-nine-year-old had learned to fly in 1909—the twenty-first Frenchman to receive his aviation license—but the first to go through his training without having once crashed his airplane, a feat his instructor attributed to his “cool head and cleverness.” A month before leaving France for New York, Aubrun had flown 186 miles in three hours and thirty-three minutes in his Blériot monoplane, but his greatest exploit, in the eyes of the
New York Herald
reporter, “was that of flying second to Mons. Le Blanc in the ‘Circuit de L’Est,’ the recent 488 miles cross country race over half of France. They were the only aviators who finished in the contest.”

Once the tour of the city was over, the four aviators were deposited at their hotel, the Knickerbocker, where they were welcomed by Hubert Latham and Bertrand de Lesseps and his sister Countess de la Bergassiere, both of whom were becoming increasingly anxious about their brother Jacques, who had gone to Canada three days earlier to call on a young woman and who had not been heard from since.

Not too far from the Knickerbocker, at the Manhattan Hotel, the fliers of the Wright Exhibition Team had also just checked in, having arrived from St. Louis. Ralph Johnstone retired to his room with his wife and young son, Walter Brookins was his usual unapproachable self, but Arch Hoxsey “was full of snap and ginger,” as he often was when the stern-faced Wright brothers weren’t loitering in the background. Although he didn’t let on to the
New York Herald
correspondent (who had hotfooted it to the Manhattan Hotel from Central Park), Hoxsey had almost been fired from the Wright Exhibition Team the previous week after he took Theodore Roosevelt for a quick spin during the St. Louis Meet. Wilbur Wright had reportedly been “very, very angry over the incident” and warned Hoxsey that if something similar occurred in the future, he would be sacked because the Wrights “don’t care for that kind of notoriety.” With Wilbur Wright en route to New York from Dayton, Ohio, and Orville to follow at the weekend, Hoxsey felt less constricted and he sat in the hotel lobby chatting away to the reporter, though Hoxsey drew a veil over the Roosevelt faux pas. “Of one thing the public may be sure,” he forecast, “that as long as a Wright machine is in the game, there will be some flying at Belmont Park every afternoon. It will take more than a fifty-mile zephyr to scare the operator of a Wright biplane!”