Chasing Icarus (18 page)

The spectators who had come down to gossip on the lawn in front of the grandstand hurried back to their seats, while reporters in the press stand picked up their pencils and watched the black castoroil fumes spew from the plane’s exhaust. Grahame-White rose warily, wrote the correspondent for the United Press news agency, but “he needed all his caution, for even at a height of not more than forty feet he pitched like a ship in a heavy storm.” Grahame-White knew at once he was in trouble. He signaled to his mechanics that he was in distress and started to descend. But a gust of wind tilted his biplane to such an angle that the machine stopped moving forward and began to careen sideways. This was what Blériot had taught him was a
side-slip
, the aviator’s equivalent of skidding across the road in an automobile. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
described how Grahame-White was now “drifting helplessly for 800 feet” across the course at the mercy of the wind. He could do nothing to save himself because he was too low to the ground. He would just have to brace himself for the crash and put into practice Blériot’s favorite maxim: “a man who keeps his head can never be injured through a fall.”

Grahame-White’s machine trembled in the air for a moment, then, with a slow roll, toppled out of the sky and hit the ground with a thud that reverberated around Belmont Park. A wing concertinaed and a wheel was seen to bounce across the course. The whirring propeller slashed the grass, sending up a fountain of turf and wooden splinters. Grahame-White emerged without a scratch, noted the incredulous correspondent from the
Brooklyn
Daily Eagle
, and for a few moments “ruefully surveyed the wreck” before making for the hangar.

In the distance, outside hangar No. 18, Moisant’s Blériot was being trundled out by six mechanics. This machine had taken the American across the Channel, its white canvas wings still tattooed with the autographs of the people who’d welcomed him in England. Moisant appeared from his hangar wearing his distinctive flying helmet with its two drooping ear protectors, but before he could climb up onto the seat of his monoplane, the wind picked up the plane, threw it high into the air, and smashed it to the ground.

The right wing was wrecked, the left one badly damaged, and the propeller reduced to kindling. Albert Fileux, Moisant’s chief mechanic, had been flipped ten feet into the air as he clung faithfully to the left wing. The Frenchman was uninjured, but both Moisant’s Blériots now needed repairing if he was to be ready for the International Cup.

Within minutes someone had given the order to revert the strength of wind velocity on the scoreboard to twenty-five, and the blue flag, signaling “no flight,” was also hoisted. The aviators were furious and “accused the committee of attempting to deceive them to appease the waiting crowd.” The wind had never dropped, they said, it was a committee ruse. Nonsense, said Allan Ryan, the general manager of the meet, for some inexplicable reason the anemometer on top of the grandstand had simply failed to register the full force of the gale.

Later, however, when the hullabaloo had died down and the aviators were welcoming friends and family into their hangars, Ryan sneaked into the Wrights’ hangars and asked if someone would go up. Hoxsey and Johnstone told Ryan they’d like to fly but they couldn’t; a contractual stipulation of the Wrights’ forbid flying on a Sunday. Such were the strength of Wilbur’s convictions that he hadn’t even come to the ground, preferring instead to remain at his hotel. Ryan implored the fliers to try to change their boss’s mind, but a twenty-minute phone call from Brookins had no effect. On no account would a Wright aviator desecrate the Sabbath.

At four thirty P.M. a glum Peter Prunty informed the crowd that the wind had put paid to the rest of the day’s events, but he did have some good news. To compensate for the cancellation the aviation committee had agreed to extend the meet by an extra day, so all of Sunday’s tickets would be valid the following Monday, October 31. Later in the evening several of the fliers met in the bar of the Hotel Astor. Having let off steam about the Belmont Park committee, and about the ignorance of the crowd, they finished their aperitifs and moved into the dining room. Near the end of the meal Hubert Latham asked the waiter to charge his friends’ glasses. He got to his feet and announced some sad news: Captain Madiot, an old friend of his, had been killed on Saturday during an air show in France. Would everyone join in toasting a brave man.

CHAPTER TEN

A Death Trap

Monday, October 24, 1910

The official search for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post was launched at daybreak on Monday. The Syracuse
Post Standard
reported that on the explicit instructions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister, “the celebrated mountain police will begin ranging over the wild territory north and northwest of the Great Lakes. These men, who starve like martyrs and ride and fight like demons when it is necessary, will go over hundreds of square miles.” The Royal Northwest Mounted Police also intended to interview every hunter, trapper, huntsman, and woodsman they encountered to ascertain if a large yellow balloon had been seen. In addition to the police hunt, the head of the National Transcontinental Railway said he had sent word to the “thousands of men blazing the way for the new line through the wilderness” to be on the lookout for the two balloonists.

The Aero Club of America had dispatched one of its members, Lewis Spindler, who, so it was said, knew the Great Lakes region like the back of his hand. He had left St. Louis on Sunday for Toronto. Upon his arrival he met Colonel Gibson, lieutenant governor of Canada, and listened to what information had so far come in. A hunter, Charles Treadway, said he’d seen a balloon the previous Wednesday, as he’d tracked a moose near the Kippewa River in northern Quebec. He reckoned the balloon was going fast, about forty miles an hour. Damn near startled the moose, it did. A guide, Richard Cole, was canoeing down a river in Ontario on Thursday when he saw a balloon crash into “impenetrable forest.”

A telegram had also recently arrived from Sam Perkins, copilot of the
Düsseldorf II
, in response to a request for information. “We have no idea of the location of the
America II
,” he said. “The only balloon we saw was a yellow one over Northern Michigan Tuesday afternoon, going south. If the
America
went north, the case is hopeless, as we are as far north as the railroad goes, and for the last 500 miles we saw no civilization.”

The most substantial clue was the message dropped from the basket of
America II
over Thompsonville on Tuesday afternoon. The authorities in Michigan had already made inquiries in the state to discover if anyone had seen the balloon after it passed Thompsonville, and someone had, over the town of St. Ignace on the Upper Peninsula. It was headed northeast, on a course, as was explained to Spindler, “which would carry it east of Lake Superior, past Sault Ste. Marie and into the wilderness north of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.” It was agreed that Spindler would depart in the evening for Chapleau, a remote Ontarian settlement 350 miles northwest of Toronto, from where the search would be coordinated.

The commencement of the search sent a frisson down the spines of American newspapers. LOST AERONAUTS, LIVING OR DEAD? was the headline in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
on Monday morning, which then answered the question in the first paragraph, saying they were “more probably dead from exposure or by accident.” That is, if the bears and wolves hadn’t polished them off first. But the
Tribune
ended with a flight of fancy: “It is within the range of possibilities that the
America II
has succeeded in traveling an even greater distance than was covered by the
Düsseldorf II
and that its crew, after enduring as great, or even greater hardships, has reached in safety some trapper’s cabin too remote to permit of communication with the outside world within a week or more.”

Hawley and Post awoke on Monday cold, hungry, and depressed. The contentment of the previous evening, like the broth, was gone. They had little left to eat now, just a box of biscuits, a few of their meat lozenges, and a tin of soup. The contents of their ballast bags they used as haver-sacks had been reduced to simple necessities, yet they seemed as heavy as ever. Four hard days had already started to emaciate Hawley’s once flabby physique, and his gray tweed suit, darkened with grime, flapped about his belly. Post’s brown velvet corduroy outfit had been shredded during the fight with the undergrowth, and his feet were blistered from his hobnailed boots, which had started to come apart. His goatee had grown wild across his face and itched with a week’s worth of dirt. They set off along the shore at seven A.M., the water to their right and the sky above blue and black like a deep bruise. The ground was flat for the first mile, and Hawley’s knee bore up well as they walked along the beach. Post fell back a little so his companion could lead for the first time. Suddenly Hawley stopped dead in his tracks and “gave an exclamation of surprise.” Post quickened his step and looked to where his companion was pointing. A few yards in front was a shovel leaning against a chopped log. Hawley looked about him and spotted something through the trees on their left. “There’s a tent!” he yelled.

A narrow path just wide enough for one man led through the trees to a clearing where the small white tent had been pitched. An ax was lying in the grass, near a homemade paddle, and a couple of pails containing pieces of muskrat and rabbit. Post could also see a short stick with a fishhook and several traps, but there was no sign of recent life, no footprints in the dew or lingering whiff of breakfast. They unfastened the tent and ducked inside. Good God, they couldn’t believe their eyes. In the center of the tent was a sheet-iron stove with a brown teapot underneath, and hanging from the ridgepole was a pair of round snowshoes. Two large pails were to one side. Hawley peered inside and told Post one contained lard and the other flour. What’s that under the blanket? asked Post. Hawley lifted the blanket. It was a sack of flour. There was a box of homespun clothing, a half-burned wax candle, a can of black powder, a bag of shot. Hawley uncorked a bottle of something syrupy and black and sniffed. Ugh! Post laughed and said it was probably all-purpose medicine for “what ails you.”

Post clicked his tongue in satisfaction when he saw a full box of matches, then gave an admiring whistle as he held up a knife with a curved blade and curiously made handle, which, he told Hawley, “was to be used as a wedge in getting bark off a birch tree to make a canoe.” In the far corner of the tent was a pot of cooked beans, a can of brown sugar, and a bar of soap.

Post went outside to collect a few pieces of wood for the stove and returned with a relieved look. It had started to snow. They put up the stovepipe, built a fire, and “as the flames crackled, we unrolled our blankets on the dry balsam floor and relaxed into a delightful state of mind.” “Post,” said Hawley, “if anyone asks me what heaven is like, I shall say it’s a trapper’s tent after four days of terrible travel.”

Post rested for an hour and then, leaving his friend asleep, crawled out of the five-foot-high tent and set about exploring their surrounds. With the snow still falling, he thought it prudent to husband some firewood for their stove. Once he’d chopped some logs and stashed them in the tent, Post began to walk along the trail that led from the shore toward the higher ground. “I had not gone far when I saw a cache on a big birch tree off to one side of the trail,” he wrote in his logbook. The cache was a big roll of birch bark, and inside were various articles of clothing, a tin pail, and a bag of salt. Attached to the cache was a note in French:
No admission without business. Gone down to hunt and trap in lake
Suniore.
Hawley took a pencil from his jacket and added,
Oct. 24, 1910.
Alan R. Hawley and Augustus Post in the Balloon “America II” landed 15
miles northeast from here, Oct. 19, 1910. Left Mo. Oct. 17, 1910.

Post pressed on up the trail in the hope that when he reached the top of the ridge he would see further signs of habitation, or possibly find a canoe. But he saw nothing and after several minutes of fruitless halloing he returned the way he had come “as the snow was getting thick.” Hawley was awake and Post described his brief exploration. Hawley told Post he had been doing some thinking. He intended to stay at the campsite “to wait for the trapper, if it took all winter.”

Post didn’t argue, now wasn’t the time, but he knew better than his companion that unless the trapper returned before the spring, this tent would be their tomb. The snow had arrived and would remain for the next four or five months; not even the most skilled Canadian woodsman could survive such a climate, particularly if he was wearing a city suit.

Post concealed his anxiety from Hawley and instead cooked up a banquet of biscuits and hot soup. Then Post repaired his boot with a length of cord he had found in the tent and “with a smart fire burning in the stove, we rested, reviewing our hardships, speculating as to the return of the trapper, and canvassing our ability to cook the flour into cakes and biscuits.”

Later in the day Post exchanged a few strong words with his partner when “Hawley thought I was stingy with the firewood, but it took strength to split it, and I had been taught prudence.” Hawley also pestered for more food, confident that they were now out of danger, but Post advised caution. They replenished the stove with wood, finished off the box of biscuits, and settled down for the night, as outside the snow continued to fall.

Allan Ryan arrived at Belmont Park early on Monday morning in need of a change in fortune. Sunday had not been a good day for the general manager of the aviation tournament. No flying, a restless crowd, accusations of endangering aviators’ lives, an official protest about the safety of the course from Alfred Le Blanc, and a threatening letter from a Mr. William Ellison. To cap it all off, his wife—or rather, the family chauffeur—had been caught speeding on the way home from Sunday’s event. At this very moment his wife was waiting to appear at a Queens courthouse.

As if Ryan needed reminding of his trying Sunday, it was all there in the morning papers waiting for him on his desk. Even his wife’s indiscretion. He picked up the
New York Herald
with its disturbing front-page headline: FRENCH AVIATORS IN REVOLT, DEMAND NEW COURSE FOR TROPHY RACE. The
New York American
carried an interview with the troublesome Monsieur Le Blanc in which he was quoted as saying, “The international course as it has been laid out by the Aero Club of America is a death trap. It goes over tall trees, stables, telegraph wires, and railroad tracks with scarcely a patch three hundred yards wide at any place where an airplane may land.”

Le Blanc had outlined his dissatisfaction in a wire to the Aero Club of France and was awaiting their response, but if they advised him to withdraw from the tournament, then he would not hesitate to do so. So would Hubert Latham, said the
Herald
, who had been asked by a reporter on Sunday what he thought of the course. “If I were to tell the truth about the track, it would be ‘suicidal,’ ” he had replied, adding, “and after that I probably would have to leave America.”

Unfortunately for Ryan, sipping his coffee as he flicked through the papers, the French aviators weren’t alone in disliking the course. Armstrong Drexel had been quoted in the
New York Sun
saying that the course was “doubly dangerous,” not just because of the obstacles listed by Le Blanc, but also because of the high winds. “Most emphatically do I say,” concluded Drexel, “that the international course is to be protested.”

What worried Charles Hamilton, according to an interview in the
New York Sun
, was that final corner before the home stretch. He didn’t use the expression
dead man’s turn
, but in the presence of the paper’s correspondent the American had jabbed his cane in the direction of the red-and-white pylon and warned that if Le Blanc or any flier in a hundred-horse power machine “tried to make that turn at the acute angle marked by the pylons the fore and aft ends of his airplane would come together like a jackknife while the engine broke through the center.” The
Sun
asked Hamilton how, if the organizers refused to alter the course before Saturday’s big race, one might successfully negotiate the corner. Well, that’s just the problem, replied Hamilton: “To get around that turn at great speed, a man would have to fly so wide that he would have covered eighty miles before he could be credited with flying the sixty miles prescribed. But if you make a wide turn, you have to fly over the grandstand, and if you fly over the grandstand, you will be penalized, and there you are.”

Hamilton, though, had no intention of withdrawing from the race, and neither did John Moisant, whose name brought a smile to Allan’s face. Good old John, he could always be relied on to offer his support. Asked to comment on the circuit by the
New York Herald
, Moisant had replied that he found the criticism a bit puzzling; after all, “at Rheims [in the 1909 International Aviation Cup] Mr. Curtiss had to fly over houses and trees when he won the cup. There isn’t a course in the world of five kilometers that is entirely free of obstructions of some sort. I certainly shall fly over the course.”

Claude Grahame-White and the two other British fliers, Alec Ogilvie and James Radley, were reported to have no gripes about the course, and neither did the Wright or Curtiss teams. We’ll have a race, Allan said to himself, aware that he was chairing a meeting of the committee later in the morning to discuss the French protest. Then he turned to the next problem—William Ellison, spokesman for the homeowners in the vicinity of the Belmont Park course.

The
New York Sun
carried a front-page report about the letter that Ellison had sent on Sunday to every aviator in which he expressed the anger felt by many local residents whose homes were under the flight path of the international course. What vexed them so was the erection of the giant canvas screens along the fence at the west end of the course. Not only were they an eyesore, they also blocked the residents’ view of the flying. If the screens were not removed, the paper reported, then “aviators who fly above certain adjacent properties will be winged with bullets.”

Ryan had already given his initial reaction to the letter—“childish”—but he couldn’t risk a few hotheaded cranks taking potshots at his aviators, so the screens, or at least some of them, would have to be dismantled. First, however, he had to attend to another pressing problem. Ryan called the head of the Pinkerton security team to his office. Have you seen the morning papers? he asked. No, he hadn’t. Ryan told him they were full of accounts of the heavy-handedness of his men; worse than that, it wasn’t the spectators complaining, it was the aviators. Ryan picked up a copy of the
New York American
and read a paragraph describing how John Moisant—
the
John Moisant—“was obliged to pay his own way into the meet on Sunday because he had forgotten his arm brassard.” Then Ryan’s old friend Monsieur Le Blanc was livid because his ballooning partner and translator, Walther de Mumm, hadn’t been granted access to the hangar area. The less we antagonize Le Blanc, the better, Ryan suggested. Then, pointing to the
World
, Ryan read the report about Claude Grahame-White being turned away from the entrance because he hadn’t his pass. How can your men not recognize the most famous aviator in the world—particularly when he had Pauline Chase on his arm? It had taken a few choice words from Grahame-White, the
World
said—“that sounded like the roaring of the lion”—to convince the Pinkerton guards it would be wise to step aside.