Chasing Icarus (7 page)
Authors: Gavin Mortimer
The contingent of American army officers planning to attend at Belmont Park wished they could share the
Herald
’s bullishness, but they had encountered too many shortsighted, penny-pinching bureaucrats of late to hold out much hope for the “final word.”
In February 1910 the
New York Times
had run an article about the visit to the White House of a delegation of American aviation specialists, including Cortlandt Field Bishop, president of the Aero Club, and Brigadier General James Allen, chief signal officer of the army. Their goal was to persuade President Taft to increase the spending on airplanes and dirigibles, and the paper stood squarely behind them, even going so far as to print the respective aerial strengths of the major powers in the hope of shaming the government into action: “Germany has now in military service 14 dirigibles of six different models and 5 airplanes; France has 7 dirigibles and 29 airplanes; Italy 3 dirigibles and 7 airplanes; Russia 3 dirigibles and 6 airplanes; Austria 2 dirigibles and 4 airplanes; England 2 dirigibles and 2 airplanes . . . the United States has just 1 dirigible and 2 airplanes.”
Taft had lent a sympathetic ear to the delegation but refused to accede to their request. Let’s wait and see how aviation develops in the next year or two was the gist of his demurral. A motivating factor in Taft’s decision was his wish to concentrate the United States’ energy and finances on Latin America and Eastern Asia, what he called his Dollar Diplomacy. The USA was heavily investing in both regions in an attempt to create stability, while at the same time promoting American commercial interests at the expense of European ones, and Taft saw no reason why he should divert money to the purchase of airplanes. That Europe was becoming increasingly unruly—what with Serbia recognizing Austria’s claim to Bosnia, Turkey suppressing unrest in Albania, and an arms race between Britain and Germany—was of little interest to Taft. In his opinion war in Europe would not affect the United States.
Yet a month later American papers reported that the French Senate had agreed to increase their military aviation budget by $145,000, and in June the
Baltimore American
carried a dispatch from Berlin stating that $3 million was being spent by the German military in preparation for large-scale aerial maneuvers later that year. The correspondent warned, “German military experts are visionaries . . . their imaginations teem with the dreams of the future in the air. They see the heavens crowded with aerial crafts of all sorts . . . [a] complete aerial navy consisting of big battleships with tubes for casting down explosives, swift clippers of the clouds, corresponding to the present high-speed naval cruisers, small torpedo craft and transport vessels.”
The army asked Glenn Curtiss to put on a display during an Atlantic City meet in July. Curtiss was happy to oblige, only too aware of the potential riches that lay in store for his airplane manufacturing company if the government’s head could be pried from the sand. On July 12 Curtiss climbed up onto the small, hard seat of his biplane and took off toward the Atlantic coast in search of the anchored yacht
John E. Mehrer II
, which, for the purposes of the demonstration, would be an enemy battleship. The oranges heavy in the pockets of Curtiss’s jacket were his bombs. Flying at 45 mph, he approached the yacht at three hundred feet and dropped the first orange. It landed three feet from the officials gathered on the deck. The remaining “bombs” were released with similar accuracy, and later Colo nel William Jones told the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, “The air machine has proved its efficacy.”
Emboldened by the success of Curtiss’s trial, Major General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army, announced that efforts to obtain funds from Congress “at the next session for an equipment of airplanes would be doubled.” Wood let it be known he was demanding nothing short of half a million dollars for what he called an urgent need.
Alarmed at the prospect of a cut in its funding, the U.S. navy launched an offensive against the airplane. Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans wrote a column for the
Boston Sunday American
in early September in which he ridiculed the idea that the airplane posed a threat to the navy. “A few oranges or confetti bombs have been dropped from a height of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet [
sic
],” he wrote, “much to the amusement of the nursery maids and children who saw the experiment . . . Any good baseball player would have caught the oranges, and at the distance from which they were dropped the aviator would have been unseated by the return throw.” Rear Admiral Evans concluded that the experiments were “absolutely futile” and asserted to Americans that, provided they trusted his expertise, “they will not consider the danger to battleships very serious.”
Congress agreed with Evans and turned down Major General Wood’s demand for more funds, but the American army found an unlikely ally in Claude Grahame-White. Before leaving England he had berated the British government for exhibiting similar backwardness, and in America he continued to warn that a frightening new chapter in warfare was about to be opened, and it wouldn’t be confined to Europe. At a dinner given by the National Press Club in Washington in early October, Grahame-White had told his audience of reporters and high-ranking military figures, “Eventually the airplane will be the feature in all wars. Guns and powerful bombs will be carried on them, and the greatest of the modern battleships will be useless.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, October 16, however, Claude Grahame-White had far more pressing matters on his mind than the role of the airplane in future wars; there were women to be entertained, so he spent the afternoon at the Benning racetrack doing just that. The
New York Herald
described how Grahame-White stopped his motor at fifteen hundred feet “and made one of his sensational sweeping dives in front of the club house lawn, landing lightly on the ground just as Miss Katherine Letterman, social secretary to Mrs. Taft, cried out some words of encouragement.” Leaving Miss Letterman blushing like a besotted schoolgirl, Grahame-White shot back into the air and repeated the stunt to a thunderstorm of wild applause. The correspondent from the
Herald
was as rapt as everyone else, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but notice that among the onlookers was Pauline Chase, and she appeared to have one eye on the sky and the other on Marie Campbell, the “uncommonly attractive young woman” who had ridden with Grahame-White at Boston. Curiously, Miss Campbell had now turned up in Washington.
*
The
New York Times
had offered $25,000 to the winner of the Chicago to New York airplane race, but the daunting nine-hundred-mile distance deterred everyone.
*
Parrish received $5,000 for painting the mural in 1906. In 1935 it was moved to the St. Regis Hotel, and in 2007 it was restored at a cost of $100,000.
*
Gordon Bennett was the then sixty-nine-year-old publisher of the
New York Herald
, the paper founded by his father. Though Gordon served in the navy during the Civil War, he gained a reputation as something of a playboy in later years, and in 1877 a New York socialite ended their engagement after a particularly debauched evening. He spent the rest of his years in Paris and died in 1918.
Monday, October 17, 1910
In the early hours of Monday the wind picked up and shifted direction from the northwest to the northeast. Beneath the
America
the empty lifeboat sparred with the ocean, sometimes getting caught by a rising wave, on other occasions swaying just out of reach. The crew jettisoned more gasoline, and as Wellman watched it stream down into the sea, he silently accepted that with it went their chances of ever reaching England. He knew as well as Vaniman that it was ludicrous to imagine they could drift three thousand miles across the Atlantic and pop in for tea with the king at Buckingham Palace. But Vaniman wouldn’t end up in the metaphorical stocks, pelted with public scorn when—if—they returned home having done no more than flirt with the Atlantic. He alone, Walter Wellman, the man whose much publicized attempt to reach the north pole by airship in January 1909 had lasted a mere thirty-three hours, would have to endure another rubbishing in the press, similar to the one he’d suffered the year before when, among other things, he’d been labeled a “fake” and “a four-flusher.” He eased himself into his hammock, removed his spectacles, and rubbed his weary eyes. Death or humiliation, that was the choice he faced.
As Wellman fell into a troubled sleep, Murray Simon, the English navigator, took the watch. At four A.M. he wrote in his logbook, “The wind has eased considerably and things begin to look joyful again. While I’m on watch everybody else is asleep. All the crew wake up one by one and I assure them all is well and there are prospects of a fine day.” With the engines off and the wind down, the silence of the night was matched only by the magnificence of the dawn. Even in their parlous situation, Simon felt moved to comment on “a beautiful sunrise and I quite enjoyed it.” Uplifted by the sight, he descended the rope ladder into the lifeboat and cooked himself breakfast.
Wellman woke at six thirty A.M. to the first piece of good news since they’d left Atlantic City two days earlier—the sun was out.
At midday Simon took advantage of the sun to calculate their position: thirty-eight degrees six minutes north, sixty-six degrees twenty-one minutes west, “about 400 miles east of the Hampton roads,” as he noted in his log. Half an hour later Jack Irwin picked up two shore stations calling the
America
’s signal letter, one in Siasconset and the other in Cape Cod. Over and over they repeated the
W
, but Irwin was unable to make himself heard no matter how loud he shouted into the receiver or how hard he banged the side of the boat in frustration. The rest of the crew joined him in the lifeboat and listened mutely as they heard one of the shore stations “tell us great anxiety exists on land regarding our welfare.”
When the distant voice died, all they could hear was the soft smack of the swell against the hull of the lifeboat. Thoughts of home cast a shadow over them far greater than that of the airship, until eventually Wellman broke the silence with a request for lunch. Fred Aubert dished out six plates of smoked ham and dry biscuits, and afterward Simon sat back in the lifeboat and enjoyed a quiet smoke as Wellman outlined their plan.
For the last few hours the
America
had been running fifteen to eighteen knots per hour with a southeasterly wind, which meant they were headed toward Bermuda. They would hold the remaining gasoline in reserve for what Wellman called “the final struggle” to reach the island. Simon suppressed a laugh for the sake of the others. He admired Well-man’s calm determination, but as a sailor long in the tooth he knew that the chances of reaching Bermuda were negligible.
While the rest of the men napped in the warmth of the afternoon sun, Simon retrieved from the car his logbook and camera. First he took a snapshot of the airship, then one of Kiddo the cat stretched out contentedly in the lifeboat. Simon opened his logbook: “The
America
airship will die from sheer exhaustion, a sort of bleeding to death, and before the last comes we must take to the boat,” he wrote, demolishing his skipper’s plan in a sentence. That prospect held no fear for Simon, who was experiencing a nostalgic yearning for the old-fashioned type of ship. “I am looking forward with plea sure to three or four days in the lifeboat. It is well stocked with provisions, water and tobacco. It contains several sleeping berths, sea anchor, and wireless plant. That lifeboat has always looked good to me. It is the most complete little craft for its size I have ever seen and reflects credit upon Saunders of Cowes, who built it. My favorite sport is boating, but whether my longshore shipmates will regard two or three days in an open lifeboat in the Atlantic in the light of sport I do not know.”
However, launching the lifeboat presented a problem large as well as dangerous. Simon described it succinctly as “that blessed equilibrator.” The lifeboat was suspended between the airship and the equilibrator; to launch the lifeboat the equilibrator would need to be submerged, but the moment they released the lifeboat’s shackles, the reduction in weight would pull the equilibrator up out of the water and . . .
It didn’t require much imagination to picture the damage that a two-ton, thirty-three-foot-long equilibrator could inflict on a twenty-seven-foot-long lifeboat. But instead of contemplating their grisly demise, the men’s thoughts turned to ways of solving the problem. Lewis Loud suggested the most obvious solution—to get rid of the equilibrator. How exactly? they asked. Easy, replied Loud. He proposed to sit in the boatswain’s chair while the others lowered him down and he cut the cords that held it. Brave, said Wellman, and bold, but also impractical; the loss of the equilibrator would create such an imbalance that after a rapid rise the
America
would gradually sink down into the water.
The other two solutions were dependent on factors outside their control. They could wait for a calm sea and still breeze before launching the lifeboat, so that they stood less chance of being hit by the equilibrator, or they could sit it out in the airship until they made contact with a passing vessel.
They decided to sit it out, to keep headed toward Bermuda for as long as possible while they scanned the endless ocean for a ship. Their best chance of salvation in the opinion of Irwin lay in the regular steamer that left Bermuda each Monday bound for New York. Taking their charts and plotting the steamer’s probable speed, they reckoned it should be under them sometime on Tuesday morning. The information passed around the men like a mug of strong rum, warming them with hope. But soon the feeling faded and each contemplated the risks they faced during the night if the wind got up or rain fell. Then the equilibrator would drag them down, but they no longer had the reserves of gasoline to lift themselves clear of danger; instead they would have to take to the lifeboat, in the darkness and on a heavy sea, and with the equilibrator eyeing them like some ruthless monster from the deep.
Wellman spent the late afternoon locked in the watertight compartment of the lifeboat, his eyes glued to the barometer in case the reading should start to drop. But by six P.M. the weather was still fair, so Wellman gave the order to throw overboard what ever they could spare. Simon tossed away a five-pound box of sugar, several jars of bacon, and some biscuits. What a waste! young Aubert thought, laughing, as he looked on. The sharks won’t think so, said Simon, and who knows, perhaps they’ll be so full they won’t eat us. The joke wasn’t appreciated.
They had a feast for supper of cold bacon, biscuits, and malted-milk tablets, then lay back in the lifeboat smoking and spinning yarns. There was no talk of equilibrators or engines; instead, the tales were of “fair damsels left behind,” and of their slim ankles and silken hair.
Despite the uncertainty of what lay ahead, there was no anxiety in the boat; rather there was a serenity, the sort experienced on the eve of a battle by soldiers who have put their faith in a higher power. Simon marveled at the night sky and wrote that in the bright moonlight “millions of stars are twinkling and the water below gleams like silver. Flying fish hover around our strange craft, and below big batches of gulf weed drift lazily by. It’s perfectly calm, peaceful . . . we all feel elated—the reaction, possibly, after tremendous strain during the last two days. We have no fears for our immediate future.”
Several hundred miles west of the airship
America
the moonlight was drawing out the lyricist in the
New York Herald
’s correspondent as he sat in the empty press stand at Belmont Park. It had been a slow day thus far, and the pages of his notebook were as empty as the seats around him, save for a few quotes from Count Bertrand de Lesseps, brother of the aviator, Jacques, about the exorbitant rates demanded by Lloyd’s of London for the insurance of spectators during the forthcoming air show. With a suit for damages having recently been filed against the Asbury Park Meet organizers,
*
American companies had recoiled at the idea of underwriting the Belmont Park Meet. Lloyd’s hadn’t, however, though they’d charged $500,000, and the organizers had also taken out a $2,500 policy to insure the hangars and other temporary structures. Each airman had been asked to pay a 1 percent premium, and Bertrand de Lesseps was outraged. “For the same amount of premium demanded for the time of this meet I could take out a much larger policy for a year in France,” he’d muttered to the
Herald
reporter.
Jacques de Lesseps was happy to leave such administrative minutiae to his brother. Of greater concern to him was the course around which he would have to fly. He and Hubert Latham had arrived at Belmont Park on Monday afternoon and blanched at what they had seen. Houses, trees, railroad tracks, and telegraph poles all skirted the hexagonal five-kilometer circuit, yet the biggest hazard to the aviators’ safety, in their view, lay at the western end of the course, where the final turn before the grandstand was alarmingly tight.
As they came around the back straight of the racecourse, inside the row of twenty wooden hangars that had been erected, the aviators would have to angle left, almost at ninety degrees, past a tall red-and-white pylon that was less than a hundred yards from the grandstand that flanked the home straight. Latham told de Lesseps that the English expression for such an acute corner was
dead man’s turn
.
†
Latham advised the
New York
Herald
that “while there were conditions that he did not approve of he would nevertheless compete.” However, added the Frenchman, tapping a cigarette on his silver case, what the reaction would be of his compatriot the more . . . how could he put it? . . . “excitable” Monsieur Alfred Le Blanc, when he saw the course, Latham wouldn’t care to imagine.
Latham and the de Lesseps brothers, accompanied by their ravishing sister, Countess de la Bergassiere, left their worries behind and lunched at Manhattan’s elegant Café Martin on Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway. Later in the afternoon Jacques de Lesseps caught a train to Canada to visit a young woman to whom he had taken a fancy during an aviation show in Montreal the previous month. He would return in a few days, he told his brother, but in the meantime he issued strict instructions: keep an eye on our sister—Grahame-White is on his way to New York.
Once the de Lesseps had departed Belmont Park, the
New York Herald
correspondent spent Monday afternoon kicking his heels as he waited in the vain hope that an aviator might arrive to take his machine for a spin, but none appeared, and instead of the thrilling sound of a hundred-horse power engine, the only noise was the hammering of nails as workmen rushed to finish converting the 650-acre Belmont Park from a horse track into an aviation field. With the start of the tournament just five days away, the transformation was all but complete, and the organizers were confident that the half million spectators expected to attend the weeklong meet would be accommodated without problem.
The betting ring under the grandstand now resembled a “covered and inclosed amphitheater, where an exhibition bazaar and trade show will be conducted. Airplane motors and other accessories and appliances for air craft, automobiles, motor boats, and all other things used in connection with outdoor sports will be exhibited.” In front of the green-and-yellow grandstand the once immaculate lawn had been overlaid with two hundred corporate boxes, and what little remained of the grass had been churned to mud by a combination of heavy rain and workmen’s boots. A temporary stand had been added to one end of the grandstand, increasing the number of spectator boxes to five hundred, and a press stand had also risen from the turf with a hundred individual desks and telegraph instruments at the reporter’s right hand.
The racecourse itself had also been altered, so much so that “should any of the old followers of horse racing enter Belmont Park now they would think that they had never seen the place before.” The fences had been removed, the jockey board taken down, the timers’ stand had vanished, replaced by a judge’s box in the shadow of dead man’s turn. Opposite the grandstand on the other side of the racetrack was a vast scoreboard fifty feet long and thirty feet high with ladders for the scorers. The infield jumps and wings had been uprooted, and the track and infield sod leveled. Eleven red-and-white pylons, each thirty-five feet tall surmounted by a twenty-five-foot flagpole, marked out the route of the five-kilometer course, and incorporated into this circuit was a smaller two-and-a-half-kilometer course, staked out with additional pylons. In the northwest corner of the grounds, near the club house, a number of chestnut trees had been felled and towering canvas screens erected along the high fence to prevent people from watching the show for free. The club house had been given a make over for the influx of Belmont Park’s exclusive members with a lick of paint and some new furnishings, and for the first time in months all the electric elevators were functioning. Automobiles would be parked on the grass either between the hangars and the club house or at the eastern end of the field, but how organizers would cope with the demand had yet to be resolved. They had received nearly five thousand applications for parking spaces for the first day alone, five times the number available. All but the fabulously rich and famous were politely being requested to take the Pennsylvania railroad to Belmont Park, but the organizers’ headquarters on the eleventh floor of an office block on Fifth Avenue was already inundated with furious complaints from people whose social standing was at stake—a certain type of New Yorker would not countenance riding the railroad.
