Chasing Icarus (17 page)
Authors: Gavin Mortimer
John Moisant, flying an identical machine to Drexel’s, was next to leave the ground, and he climbed swiftly to two hundred feet, higher than both Drexel and Grahame-White, who chugged slowly round the 2.5 km course, rarely rising higher than the eaves of the grandstand. All three fliers were competing in the Hourly Distance event, the aim of which was to complete as many laps as possible within sixty minutes, but it was also the opportunity to qualify for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, a late and controversial addition to the meet’s schedule.
A fortnight earlier a New York businessman, Thomas Ryan, had offered a prize of $10,000 for the first man to fly from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. What an idea! cried the Aero Club of America. Instead of New York City coming to Belmont Park, Belmont Park will go to New York City. What better way to spread the aviation message? Neither Ryan nor the organizers expected the fliers to take the safe route, across country to the sea and then along the coastline; that was approximately sixty-six miles, whereas the direct route was only thirty-three miles. That was, however, as the
New York Times
pointed out, “over the populous sections of South Brooklyn.” The
New York City
Herald
thought it a wonderful prospect, a “thrilling event,” but added with a harrumph that Wilbur Wright was “strongly opposed to flying over cities . . . He says that while it is an aviator’s own business whether he decides or not to risk his own neck, he has no right to endanger the lives of others.”
Taking into account the concern of Wright and some other aviators, the Belmont Park organizers had imposed a stringent entry criterion for any aviator wishing to compete for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race: “The prize will be open to all competitors who shall have remained in the air in one continuous flight one hour or more during previous contests in the meet.”
Thus Grahame-White, Drexel, and Moisant were competing in the Hourly Distance event not just in the hope of winning the $500 on offer, but also to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race. To Drexel, $10,000 (approximately $160,000 today) was small fry, he flew just for the sport; but the sum was large enough to tempt Grahame-White to drop his objection to flying over cities, which he had manifested at Boston. For Moisant, $10,000 would go a long way in bankrolling his next revolution.
For an hour Grahame-White flew placidly but persistently round the circuit. The crowd clapped respectfully, and the man from the
Washington
Post
praised his “workmanlike precision,” but it was hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff. “Here he comes again,” shouted someone in the grandstand, as Grahame-White angled into the home straight past dead man’s turn, “it’s Merry-go-round White.”
Drexel dropped out having completed ten laps in nineteen minutes, and soon Moisant tired of the plodding pro cession and started to lay on a show for the masses, “rising and falling, turning and dipping, as easily and gracefully as a swallow.” Suddenly he swooped down from three hundred feet and shot across the grass as if he were trying to cut it, bringing several hundred spectators to their feet in excitement. And all the while Grahame-White continued on his remorseless way, ignoring the American gadfly, and “turning the corners as closely as a trained race horse.”
Moisant was down after fifty-one minutes with only eighteen laps to his name after all his showboating. He had a small problem with the engine, he explained, but would be back to try again in the second Hourly Distance events. Grahame-White remained aloft the full hour and descended only when he saw his manager, Sydney McDonald, flagging that the time was up. Grahame-White came down smiling; not only had he flown twenty circuits, he’d also qualified for the Statue of Liberty event.
Moisant took off again at two forty-five P.M. in a foul mood, having been docked four laps by the officials on his first flight, “on account of cutting slightly inside a pylon.” What a surprise, muttered some of his rivals, Moisant penalized for cutting corners. His second attempt to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race again ended in failure, this time after forty minutes because of a mechnical problem. His disappointment, however, was small compared to that felt by the Curtiss team when Eugene Ely took the new single-surface machine out of the hangar. Within a few minutes Ely was down with engine trouble, and only one of the Wright fliers, Arch Hoxsey, in an old biplane, could give the crowd their money’s worth. The
New York Herald
described how he went up “growing smaller and smaller, until he finally disappeared in the fog. He was completely lost to view in the clouds for about a minute. He descended as he had ascended, in great spirals, landing as gently on the turf as a leaf dropping from a tree.” Belmont Park exploded in a cacophony of hollering and hurrahs as Hoxsey, in a black leather coat with fur-lined combination leggings and boots that reached to the hips, jumped down and received the congratulations of Ralph Johnstone.
The fog that had shrouded Hoxsey from view sank lower throughout the afternoon, forcing the organizers to cancel the Grand Altitude Contest. They were about to do the same to the cross-country competition when John Moisant whispered something in Peter Prunty’s ear. The next minute the crowd were on their feet applauding as Prunty announced that Moisant wouldn’t be deterred by a spot of fog: he intended to try for the cross-country prize.
It took him thirty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds to fly the twenty miles to the captive balloon and back. When he landed, he was so cold he had to be lifted from his seat. Later Moisant confessed to reporters that the fog hadn’t troubled him, but he’d been “so blinded by rain that he couldn’t make out the balloon afloat in the Hempstead Plains.”
Moisant basked in the crowd’s acclaim as around him the other aviators packed up for the day unnoticed. The first day of the Belmont Park Meet had ended with no doubt as to who had been its star. Playing to the press with all the adroitness of Grahame-White, Moisant donated his airplane’s propeller to the
New York Herald
, the most influential newspaper in America as far as aviation was concerned. The paper blushed at such largesse and thanked Moisant, the man whose daring skill “has won for him a host of friends.”
*
Dr. John Moorhead, with a corps of assistants from Bellevue Hospital, was in charge of a “fast automobile ambulance,” but this was not yet in place at the time of Shriver’s accident.
Sunday, October 23, 1910
Neither Augustus Post nor Alan Hawley felt much like talking when they woke early on Sunday morning. It was still raining and the pair felt weak and in no condition to endure another day’s trek through the tyrannical wilderness. They breakfasted on an egg and a couple of crackers as the rain beat on the canvas roof of their bivouac in a despondent symphony. Post wrote in his log, “Each of us realized without mentioning it to the other, that our lives might be drawing to a close.” After they had eaten, Hawley took an envelope from the inside pocket of his shabby overcoat and told Post that it had been given to him by a friend shortly before he’d left New York; it was to be opened only if Hawley found himself in trouble. It felt an appropriate moment. He opened the envelope and removed the card. It’s a prayer, Hawley told Post, and he began to read:
A PRAYER FOR MR. HAWLEY
Dear God, the best friend of all: Watch over and keep him from danger in his perilous trip and may his heart go up to Thee in tender gratefulness for all thy goodness. Grant him his ambition to win and bring him safely back.
Hawley slipped the envelope back inside his jacket as “tears started to our eyes.” A short while later they noticed the rain easing, and within the hour it had stopped. “Our ambitions,” Post wrote, “which had been at rather a low ebb, flowed strong again, and urged us on.” They were soon striding purposefully along the damp beach with Hawley telling Post his knee felt much improved after a day’s rest. They clambered up and over the boulders without impediment and saw that ahead the shoreline appeared free of obstacles, except for a series of streams that emptied into the lake. Post peered through his field glasses and told Hawley that none of them should pose a problem, even for an old cripple like him. They started to laugh as they struck out east, and by lunchtime the two men had forded the streams.
At three o’clock they agreed to pitch camp when next they came to a suitable spot, and a few minutes later they found such a place in the lee of a steep bank by the lake. “There was plenty of driftwood and birch-bark,” wrote Post, “and a fire was soon crackling to cheer us up.” Post informed Hawley with a melodramatic flourish that he was going to prepare for them both a most sumptuous supper, a surprise dish he had been planning for a couple of days. He unwrapped a dozen chicken bones from a handkerchief, and with what meat remained on the bird he cooked a delicious broth. Afterward they lay back in their bivouac plump with satisfaction, both with a sense that they were through the worst of their ordeal.
In the early hours of Sunday, Samuel Perkins sent a message to his father in Boston: ALL SAFE. 1230 MILES. LAKE KISKISINK, QUEBEC. By the time the news was made public it was too late for many of the Sunday papers, but not the
St. Louis Republic
, which had been tipped off by a member of the St. Louis Aero Club. The editor summoned his staff and a new front page was laid in time for the distribution trucks: DÜSSELDORF II DOWN AT KISKISINK, QUEBEC; NEW WORLD’S RECORD. Having checked Kiskisink on the map, the
Republic
editor estimated the balloon had flown 1,240 miles, not the 1,230 miles given by Perkins in his telegram. But 1,240 miles or 1,230 miles, who cared. It was a new balloon record, one that beat the
Germania
into second place. The
Düsseldorf II
was the winner of the International Balloon Cup. Yes, it was unfortunate that it bore the name of a German city and was pi loted by a German, but the aide was an American boy, and for most newspapers that was reason enough to rejoice.
For the
Boston Globe
there was an additional cause for celebration: Perkins was not only an American, he was one of theirs. PERKINS OF BOSTON AND GUERICKE SAFE ran the headline, as if in misspelling the German pilot’s name they were puckishly undermining his significance. The
Globe
proudly listed Perkins’s aviation achievements and boasted that though he was “perhaps better known as a manipulator of kites of all descriptions than as a balloonist . . . his knowledge of the upper air currents has long been recognized.”
More details emerged throughout the day as Perkins talked to reporters either over the telephone or face-to-face with those who had already been dispatched to the region to search for Hawley and Post. Perkins began with the bare bones of their story, but then, like Augustus Post and his chicken broth, he began to flesh out his tale with each subsequent recital. In his first interview, quoted in the Sunday edition of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, Perkins described how they had descended from ten thousand feet as they approached Lake Kiskisink; not long after he told the
World
that the
Düsseldorf II
had “dropped eighteen thousand feet in nine minutes.” Once on the ground he and Gericke had packed a few provisions and started to traipse “through dense undergrowth” for three days. On later reflection, the pair “literally had to cut our way through the underbrush. We crawled on our hands and knees. Our clothes were torn almost to shreds.” Was that the most harrowing part of your trip? he was asked. Oh, no, said Perkins, that was when “we heard wolves and other wild animals . . . the only weapon we had was a little .22-caliber revolver.” By the time the
New York Times
got hold of Perkins he “had seen tracks of very large animals, evidently bears . . . The worry was constant, especially as we had no firearms and our only weapons were jackknives.”
But amid all the contradictory accounts of their adventure, which had ended when they encountered a gamekeeper on Saturday afternoon, the one unequivocal fact was that the
Düsseldorf II
had covered 1,240 miles. They had won the balloon race. And as for the whereabouts of Hawley and Post . . . ?
The Sunday papers didn’t hold out much hope. The
New York American
said they probably landed in “the wild Nipigon country, inhabited only by a scattered tribe of Ojibway Indians and infested with wolves.” Iowa’s
Sunday Times Tribune
reported that Colonel Theodore Schaeck of the
Helvetia
had seen a balloon falling into Lake Huron, which he now took to be the
America II.
Even if they hadn’t plunged into a lake, said the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, how could they possibly survive now that “winter has already begun in Canada and the berries and roots on which the missing aeronauts might have subsisted in another season have disappeared”?
The signal bomb exploded at one thirty P.M. on Sunday afternoon and the second day of the Belmont Park Meet began, but within seconds the yellow smoke was being whipped across the course by a violent wind from the northwest. While the sun played peekaboo through the clouds, the flags on top of the hangars were taut in the gale. A khaki-clad man scaled the ladder to the giant scoreboard and hung two big white letters,
K
and
R
—the code for a wind velocity of more than 25 mph. None of the aviators felt like venturing out; they shared Grahame-White’s view that with the flimsy construction of their machines an airman “flying in a wind is rather in the position of a man who puts to sea in a small boat when waves are high. Once he can clear the shore, the boatman feels at ease; but should a breaker catch him before he reaches the smooth, rolling billows a little distance from the beach, his craft may be overturned and dashed to pieces. So with the airman; his moments of peril, when flying in a gusty wind, come just as he is soaring from the ground, and when descending from a flight. Then an airwave, like a seawave, may lift his craft and drive it with a crash to earth.”
There was no ill wind for the vendors, however, who enjoyed a roaring trade as the majority of spectators idled away the time buying things they didn’t need. A photographer who had constructed a replica of a small biplane charged people to have their picture taken sitting at the controls wearing a tatty flying helmet he’d picked up from somewhere. Not far away two Gypsy fortune-tellers dressed in yellow-and-red kimonos pledged to disclose people’s future for a quarter. Up at the very top of the grandstand, the cheap seats, a covey of impish fans decided it would be fun to play a prank on the ladies and gentlemen preening on the lawn below. Sometimes it was a whooping cheer, sometimes a burst of excited applause, but each time the youngsters made a noise “the unfortunates who were promenading, assuming that a machine was coming out of its hangar across the field, would charge in a wild rush for the railing.”
Among the cream of Manhattan society, wraps and furs were much in evidence, with a veritable menagerie of animals sacrificed to keep out the cold: black beaver hats, brown beaver hats, a muff of silver-fox fur, coats of baby seal, white coney, or bearskin, one entire costume of baby lamb, and a hat bordered with Rus sian sable. Only one lady, according to the
New York Herald
, had bucked the trend, and that was Eleonora Sears, the Boston socialite and erstwhile passenger of Claude Grahame-White’s. She was “dressed in a severely plain costume of brown tweed, made shorter than walking length.”
Suddenly a message was relayed from the club house to the hangars by one of the race organizers. The measurement of the wind’s velocity was mistaken, the anemometer on top of the grandstand had been checked and the wind was sixteen miles an hour, not twenty-five. The implication was clear—would someone mind putting on a show for the public?
A small man with oversize ears, sallow skin, sunken eyes, and hair the color of copper wire gave a contemptuous laugh from a rickety steamer chair outside the door of hangar No. 2. Charles Keeney Hamilton might have risen from his chair to remonstrate with the official if his legs had allowed, but he’d arrived at Belmont Park on Friday “limping, scarred and speaking with an impediment.” What is it this time, Charlie? the other aviators had asked, laughing. The twenty-nine-year-old from Connecticut dismissed their questions with a playful wave of his cane. Everyone knew the history of the likable Hamilton, the man the French called
trompe-la-morte
(death dodger) because of his record of fifty crashes in the past two years. “There’s little left of the original Hamilton” was the joke rookie aviators all heard when first introduced to the man. He’d broken both legs, both collarbones, one ankle, several ribs, dislocated a shoulder, crushed his pelvis, and in his most recent accident, the one from which he was still suffering, he’d endured a novel agony. Flying in a meet at Sacramento, California, the previous month, Hamil-ton’s rudder had jammed and he’d flopped from the sky in front of twenty thousand spectators. Several days later, swathed in bandages and propped up in a hospital bed, he told reporters that as he smashed into the ground “the steering wheel jammed me back against the radiator and held me fast, while the scalding water trickled over me.” He was still conscious when they carried him to the ambulance, and even after being pumped full of opiates, one thing had stuck in Hamilton’s memory—the looks of pitiless satisfaction on the faces of the spectators. “I really believe,” he said later, “that this game has gotten to the stage where they are disappointed if someone isn’t injured or killed.”
No, Hamilton told the Belmont Park official, he wouldn’t take to the air in such a wind just to amuse the paying public. Firm shakes of the head came from other aviators, too, many of whom shared Hamilton’s views on the people who came to watch them, people who would in another time have shrieked with delight in Rome’s Colosseum. A reporter who’d asked Eugene Ely for his thoughts on the average aviation spectator was told, “I see the crowd below me looking upward, and I know every man who watches me start downward half expects to see me killed. I suppose they all figure how they’ll help pick up my bones someday.” And Ralph Johnstone, though he might fly like a man with neither wit nor wisdom, was no fool when it came to the public. They weren’t there for the “advancement of science,” as one newspaper had suggested to Johnstone, that was pure bunk. The people went to see him and Arch Hoxsey because “what they want are thrills. And if we fail, do they think of us and go away weeping? Not by a long shot. They’re too busy watching the next man and wondering if he will repeat the performance.”
No one seemed prepared to fly. Up in the press stand the
New York
Sun
correspondent noted, “When 1:30 came and went and there was no starting of the first events most folks climbed down [from their boxes] to the platform before the grandstand or to the field lawn just for the sake of keeping moving.” A few lost patience and began to drift away, a terrible apparition for the Belmont Park committee, who thought of all the bills and dimes escaping their grasp.
More pressure was applied to the aviators, and this time with success. Perhaps John Moisant succumbed first to the pleading of the organizers, or maybe it was Grahame-White, ignoring his own advice about the wind. But whoever, a few minutes before two o’clock the pair had ordered their mechanics to wheel out their planes and the race was on to see who would be first to take off.
As the blue flag above the scoreboard was lowered and the white one run up, spectators thumbed through their programs searching for the page with the flag denotations, the same ones in use at the Times Tower: red—flight in progress; white—flight probable; blue—no flight. The committeemen sat back smiling.
Grahame-White fastened his fur-lined gabardine jacket as his mechanics filled the tanks of his Farman biplane with petrol and castoroil. Armstrong Drexel wandered over and asked his friend if thought it prudent to go up on such a day. Wasn’t Grahame-White breaking one of his cardinal laws—never to take a risk just to please the public? But the Englishman had been upstaged by Moisant the previous day, and now was his opportunity to reclaim his mantle as the world’s greatest flier. And besides, Eleonora Sears was in the audience.
Grahame-White climbed up on the seat of the Farman in front of the seven-cylinder engine and the two-bladed wooden propeller. A mechanic squirted petrol into the valves, and another started the propeller with a sharp downward tug. The engine gave a heartening roar, and the men holding on to the airplane watched for Grahame-White’s signal. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and waved a hand in the air. The mechanics released their grip, and Grahame-White worked the controls as the biplane began to move across the grass.
