Authors: Gavin Mortimer
Chasing Icarus (14 page)
Sensing that Hoxsey was in a talkative mood, the correspondent brought up the subject of the Wrights’ new plane. What was so secret about it? Hoxsey was having none of it. He’d just had one verbal warning from the brothers, and if he divulged details of their secret machine, he might well be out on his ear. He shook his head and, with a smile, apologized that “he was not at liberty to go into details.” But he did confirm that a new airplane was on its way from Dayton to challenge for the international trophy, and in his opinion it was a dark horse worthy of comparison with any of the four-legged creatures that had graced Belmont Park in the past few years.
Friday, October 21, 1910
Alan Hawley had eventually fallen into a fitful sleep in the early hours of Friday, but he had been awake for a couple of hours when dawn broke over their bivouac. He was cold and hungry and stiff all over, but the excruciating pain in his knee of a few hours earlier was now just a dull ache. He flexed the knee under his blanket and hope began to warm his body: perhaps Augustus Post wouldn’t need to continue alone.
Hawley crawled out of the bivouac and hopped to his feet, putting all his weight on his uninjured left leg. He gently laid his right foot on the ground and began to walk around their camping ground, limping at first until he grew more confident as the knee bore his weight. It was sore, but tolerable.
Post joined his companion outside and they breakfasted on a bar of chocolate and a boiled egg each. Then they went through their packs, discarding those items that were essential in a balloon but superfluous on the ground: two statiscopes, a thermometer, a hydrometer, and one of the two electric lamps, which they tied to the limb of a tree. They hesitated over the barograph, discussing its merits and faults as if it were a pretty girl walking down Broadway; finally Post stowed it in the ballast bag that he slung over his shoulder.
At ten minutes to seven they set off southeast, their feet throwing up a fine spray of dew as they looked for a place to ford the mountain stream. Post soon spotted a fallen log, and once Hawley had stamped on it with his left foot to make sure it wasn’t going to crumble under their weight, they crossed without trouble.
With their entire focus now on what lay immediately before them, the pair’s morale fluctuated with the smallest detail. Post came across another felled log, its bark covered in a rug of moss, but this one gave evidence of having been chopped down a long time ago. It was comforting to think that another human being had once been at this spot. Not long after they encountered a river that could only be crossed by jumping from rock to rock in their hobnailed boots. Hawley slipped and “got a wetting so that we had to go out . . . and lay out the things to dry, including Hawley’s clothes.”
They waited an hour in the weak morning sunshine before Hawley struggled into his damp gray tweed suit and knotted his red tie, then they struck out south again. By 10 A.M. they were skirting a small lake, jostling their way through a dense thicket of alder bushes with always one eye on the ground for any of nature’s hidden traps. At noon Hawley was grimacing in pain, so they rested for a few minutes and Post cut a sliver of chicken for their lunch. Hawley reluctantly agreed to discard his heavy aneroid—a gift from the Aero Club of America—and he hung the instrument from a tree with its glass face open so that perhaps a hunter might find it winking in the sun and return it.
At four P.M. they issued from the alder bushes onto a thin strip of sandy beach that ran alongside the lake. They had covered only seven miles, but Hawley was exhausted, and Post considered the beach a good spot to camp for the night. There was freshwater and plenty of dry wood. While Hawley rested, Post constructed a pyre of logs that was soon well ablaze.
Supper consisted of a piece of chicken and two eggs, and a cup of hot water, then they built a bivouac and settled down for the night. Hawley was soon asleep, shattered by the day’s trek, but Post the outdoorsman went for a walk along the beach to pay homage to nature’s beauty: “The northern lights lit up the horizon, revealing the silhouette of the mountains,” he wrote in his log. “The lake was black and perfectly calm, and later the moon came up and added its silver light to the scene, while the red embers of the fire glowed as the weather-beaten logs burned on the beach.”
The sensational headline in Friday morning’s
New York Times
read HEL-VETIA LANDS; WENT 1,100 MILES. The accompanying report said that the Aero Club of St. Louis had announced the Swiss balloon crewed by Colonel Theodore Schaeck and his aide, Paul Armbruster, had landed in Quebec, thereby smashing the existing International Balloon race distance record of 873 miles. If only they’d managed another 94 miles, the pair would have surpassed Count Henri de la Vaulx’s world-record distance record of 1,193 miles. However, the
New York Times
was quick to point out that this record might yet be broken because the
Helvetia
was “not thought to be the balloon sighted . . . at Kiskisink, Canada, 1,200 miles from St. Louis.”
The
Times
knew not the identity of the balloon, but with the
Germania
also reported down—with only 850 miles covered—it could be one of only three: “The Swiss balloon,
Azurea
, Lieut Messner, pi lot; the German balloon
Düsseldorf II
, Lieut. Hans Gericke, pilot; and the
America II
, A. R. Hawley, pi lot.”
A few hours later, St. Louis’s only evening paper, the
Post-Dispatch
, suggested that while the
Helvetia
and
Germania
had indeed descended, reports had them confused, and in fact the German balloon had covered the greater distance, not the Swiss one.
*
But the main thrust of the newspaper’s front-page article on Friday evening was the growing sense of dread among race organizers that one or all of the missing three balloons had met with calamity. The
Post-Dispatch
reported that the board of governors of the St. Louis Aero Club had convened a meeting on Friday morning to discuss their plan of action. The upshot of that meeting was a telegram from Albert Lambert, the president, in which he asked all steamship companies operating on the Great Lakes to be on the lookout for any trace of the balloons. Lambert then sent duplicate telegrams to Colonel J. M. Gibson, lieutenant governor of Ontario, to Sir Alphonse Pelletier, lieutenant governor of the province of Quebec, and to the offices of Hudson Bay Company in Montreal, in which he appealed for their help in locating three balloons “last sighted Tuesday sailing over Lake Huron and the region adjoining. Their course, east of north, would take them into the Canadian wilds. Their provisions and wearing apparel are limited. They should have landed Wednesday night.”
The Hudson Bay Company replied at once to the request, informing the Aero Club that it had alerted all its trapping and hunting posts scattered throughout northern Ontario and Quebec and that within a few hours a search covering the two provinces would be instituted.
The front page of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
on Friday evening was a collector’s item for all balloon aficionados. Not only was there the ominous news from the International Balloon race, but also what the paper justifiably called “a remarkable photo” of the death throes of the
America
. Taken by a passenger aboard the SS
Trent
, the photograph showed the airship in the early-morning sunshine with the lifeboat still attached and the malevolent shape of the equilibrator just visible under the water.
By the time the newspaper was on sale, the men of the
America
were back in Atlantic City, their low-key reception in New York just a distant memory as “two military companies and a band escorted Walter Well-man and his crew from the station to the Hotel Chalfonte,” and an estimated five thousand people lined the streets to cheer them on their way. The six men had barely enough time to deposit their bags in their rooms before they were whisked off to a dinner in their honor in the banquet room of the Hotel Shelburne. Telegrams were read out from those unable to attend, including one from President Taft, and then Joseph Saius, head of the American Exhibition Company, the expedition’s biggest financial backer, addressed the diners. “No name since Columbus has been regarded with such respect as that of Wellman,” he exclaimed. “No names have ever been received with greater commendation than the name of Wellman and the men who with him made up the crew of the
America
. . . Since the
America
has left Atlantic City, the entire world has watched the progress of the Wellman project, and I believe tonight that the scientists of the world have secured solutions to new problems of the air through the bravery of the crew of the
America.
”
When the thunderous applause had abated, Wellman rose to his feet and thanked the people of Atlantic City for their loyalty in those dragging weeks when the American press had subjected him and his men to “calumny and abuse while we were forced to await proper conditions.” But that was all in the past, and Wellman let it be known that he was prepared to reach out the hand of friendship to his erstwhile traducers. “One of the things demonstrated by the
America
’s trip,” he explained to the men and women seated before him, “was the possibility of offering a real conquest of the air. With all its mistakes, I believe that American journalism seeks only to do right. I, who have suffered much from its attacks, still believe that it is only mistaken, and not pessimistic.”
As Wellman’s chest swelled with sanctimony, the
Chicago Daily Tribune
was laying the last of its type for the Saturday edition. Among the latest reports of the International Balloon race and the imminent start of the Belmont Park Meet, the paper took time to wonder why Wellman had been so touchy ever since his return. After all, it said, “Any person that attempts the highly improbable with no convincingly good reason is a legitimate subject of banter.” And that was a neat encapsulation of— the
Tribune
hesitated to use the word
adventure
—Wellman’s escapade, which had proved only that “an unwieldy gas bag, a ‘dirigible,’ that steers like a thistle seed, will remain in the air, under favorable circumstances, a certain number of hours.” The paper was quick to reassure its readers that it yielded to no one in its admiration of Wellman’s daring, but then “we have long admired Mr. Empedocies, who, peradventurous [
sic
] as Mr. Wellman, dove into a volcano and presently reappeared as a cinder.” The
Tribune
’s peremptory conclusion was that “the air craft has not yet been designed that will cross the Atlantic.”
For the favored five hundred spectators admitted to Belmont Park on Friday, the afternoon of aviation thrills was “such has seldom been seen in this country.” Most of the people admitted to the course were friends and relatives of the fliers, but a few were enthusiasts who had come on the off chance of gaining admittance a day before the start of the tournament proper. Midway through the afternoon, reported the
New York
Herald
in a breathless tone, “Arch Hoxsey in a Wright biplane, Mr. Grahame-White in a Farman biplane, and Mr. J. Armstrong Drexel, in a Blériot monoplane, were in the air at one time . . . by far the most remarkable sight those in the vicinity of New York have ever been permitted to witness.”
Drexel remained in the air for three minutes, but Hoxsey and Grahame-White were up for ten, circling the five-kilometer course like a pair of boxers prowling the ring at the start of a bout. When Grahame-White touched down on the grass, still soggy after the heavy rain of the previous day, Drexel was waiting to welcome him. Drexel was in his late twenties, a “heavily-built and good-natured man,” with a small mustache that looked more as if he had forgotten to shave above his lip for a few days rather than any serious attempt at facial fashion. A millionaire playboy with the common touch, he had no side and no sense of self-importance. His great-grandfather Francis Drexel had fled Austria during the Napoleonic Wars to avoid conscription and arrived in America in 1817, eventually founding the eponymous banking firm in Philadelphia twenty years later. Now the family was one of the richest in the country, and earlier in the year a union had taken place with the Goulds, the banking family whose estimated fortune of $200 million exceeded that of even the Drexels.
The engagement party for Anthony Drexel—Armstrong’s younger brother—and his fiancée, Marjorie Gould, had been held in February 1910, in the Fifth Avenue mansion of her parents, and 250 of New York’s “400”
*
attended what was as much a celebration of excess as it was of a forthcoming marriage. More than five thousand orchids, each costing $1, decorated the many rooms and halls of the house, and each guest was presented with a jeweled charm as a keepsake (rings for the ladies, scarf pins for the gentlemen) from the famous Mrs. Van Rensselaer. An orchestra, hidden behind the greenery at the foot of the staircase, entertained the lucky few, before everyone sat down to a meal that cost $100 (approximately $1,600 today) per head.
Two months later Armstrong had been his brother’s best man at the wedding at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, and his speech at the reception was well received, though not as well received as the $2 million worth of wedding presents, or the $2,500 cake, which was decorated with jewels supplied by Tiffany and arrived under armed guard.
In June, Armstrong Drexel had seen another of his siblings married off, this time his sister, Marguerite, who had stepped out of a London church as the wife of Guy Montagu George Finch-Hatton,
*
better known in En-gland as Viscount Maidstone. The alliance didn’t go down well across the Atlantic, with one newspaper saying that “another cofferful of American dollars [has] found its way into the custody of the British nobility.”
A fortnight after the wedding Armstrong Drexel, who had been taking flying lessons in England for several months, was awarded his aviation license by the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain, only the fourteenth issued. Having learned to fly under the instruction of Claude Grahame-White, Drexel accompanied him to various meets in England and Scotland throughout July and August.
The pair had got on famously from the start, with each man finding qualities to admire in the other that were deficient in his own character. Drexel lacked Grahame-White’s physical grace, and his own amiable but rather oafish appearance made him one of those cursed men who was always considered by a woman as a friend, never a suitor. Grahame-White, for his part, enjoyed Drexel’s modesty and manners, and his unwillingness to take either life or himself too seriously. In short, the American’s innate security complemented the Englishman’s innate insecurity. What they did share, however, was an uncommon courage. They were intelligent, imaginative men, aware of the risks of every flight, but prepared to run them nonetheless. “If you think of danger when you’re flying, you’re as good as killed,” said Drexel once. “The aviator must act as if there were no difference between life and death.” When Grahame-White taxied to a standstill at Belmont Park after his ten-minute practice spin, Drexel helped him from his Farman biplane and introduced his brother, Anthony, and his sister-in-law, Marjorie, both of whom were aviation enthusiasts. Soon, however, someone else arrived at Belmont Park whose interest in the machines was even more acute, but far less welcome to Grahame-White than Mr. and Mrs. Drexel’s. Wilbur Wright appeared in the middle of the afternoon with a team of mechanics and a large wooden crate containing the brothers’ new airplane. The indefatigable correspondent of the
New York Herald
pressed for details of the machine, “but not a man connected with the Wrights would say a word about it and not a line of the new machine will be revealed until it is uncrated the next morning.” All Wilbur was prepared to say to the paper was “Wait until Orville comes.”
