Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (29 page)

The
Isère,
a thousand-ton, three-masted vessel, could carry eight hundred tons, so Liberty’s weight presented no problem. If the weather did not allow for sailing, the vessel could travel by steam. Under normal circumstances, the journey would take a couple of weeks.

In New York, General Stone had a few problems of his own to solve before Liberty’s arrival. Not only did the American Committee lack funds to finish the pedestal; it still had no firm plans for how the statue would be anchored to its base, and Bartholdi had given him no strategy as to how the statue would become a lighthouse. If Stone could not devise a way to sufficiently illuminate the statue, it would not be maintained by the U.S. government as specified in the original authorization. No staff would be set to work on Bedloe’s Island. Stone’s effort would end with a rusting, deep red metal hulk on an abandoned oyster bed. (No one at that time publicly anticipated the luminous green of her later patina.)

Aside from Stone, the next party most interested in Liberty’s arrival might have been Adolph Sanger, president of the Board of Aldermen, the city legislature. But Sanger couldn’t even get a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce and citizens’ committee to plan a greeting celebration and was forced to complain to the mayor. Stone grew depressed at the lack of excitement among the general public.

The ship was expected in the harbor by Wednesday, June 10. Stone figured the city would hold a reception on Saturday, June 13. Wednesday came and went without a sign of the ship.

As of noon the following Monday, Stone still had heard nothing. It was said that the seas from Rouen to Fayal were particularly high in those weeks. It wasn’t common for ships to wreck crossing the Atlantic, but the ocean was always unpredictable. Word came that the
Isère
might have been headed all the way south to Nassau in the Bahamas for refueling. Stone had to hope that the
Isère,
to save coal, had attempted to make most of her journey by sail. She had the capacity to carry only six days of fuel. If she ran out, she would have to rely on the weather.

On Tuesday, an American pilot boat set out from New York Harbor to search for a different steamship that was meant to be in port by then. Through the rain and fog, the little boat slipped under the prow of a strange bark-rigged ship with a high funnel between its masts. The lookout shouted down to his captain that he thought this bark-rigged ship was a tramp.

“What ship?” the lookout yelled to the strangers.

In broken English, someone on board the vessel shouted back: “
Isère
from Rouen!”

Just then, the rain intensified into a full-fledged storm. Gale winds flung the downpour at the decks. The
Isère
did not move and the pilot boat captain gave up on trying to figure out this boat’s mission and headed for safety.

Then, as dawn broke on July 17, the American lookout at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, glimpsed a vessel. The view was so murky that the American watchmen couldn’t make out the ship’s identity.

After some hours, the gray lightened slightly, the ship pulled up her anchor and slunk closer through the rain. Up her mast shot an American flag. Her crew were demonstrating affection for the nation they were visiting, to whom the ship was bringing the largest colossus in the world.

The lookouts shot a happy salute for the
Isère.

Stone was just reporting to work that foggy morning when he received the telegram:
ISERE CARRYING STATUE
,
WAITING INSTRUCTIONS TO REMOVE
.
ANSWER IMMEDIATELY
.

Stone could not contain his excitement. He telegraphed back:
A THOUSAND WELCOMES
.
I WILL GO TO SEE YOU IMMEDIATELY
.

Stone raced the few blocks from his Broadway office to Castle Garden and joined Louis de Bebian, agent of the French line of steamers, at the dock. President Sanger also had caught word of the arrival and went down to the dock to join them. With the three aboard, the
William Fletcher
set out toward Sandy Hook’s Horseshoe for a rendezvous with the long-awaited
Isère
.

At ten thirty they spotted the ship. The little tugboat blasted a welcome. On deck, Captain Lespinasse de Saune, a tiny man with “small feet and a polite smile,” wearing a sword, his hat cocked, and his Legion of Honor star pinned to his chest, bowed and waved.

Sanger waved back.

The barefoot French sailors, who had gone each of those twenty-seven nights with only five hours of sleep, raced about, washing down the deck, preparing for the Americans to step on board.

When Singer, Stone, and de Bebian crossed the gangplank, de Saune threw his arms around them. They had been forced to break their journey at Fayal in the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic, for fuel. The
Isère
had been tossed around so ferociously after leaving Rouen that the sailors feared they could almost have gone down.

Now the
Isère
was here in New York. That vast deck, about two-thirds of a football field in size, swarmed with sixty-five sailors. A black canvas tarp had covered the hold for the journey. Some of the sailors peeled it back. Stone, Singer, and de Bebian peered inside.

They could make out nothing. It was only blackness, and the smell of wood.

“Please jump,” a bushy-bearded lieutenant said, gesturing with his hat toward the abyss.

Sanger drummed up the courage to make the leap. The others jumped after him, landing in warmth and darkness.

Monstrous crates loomed everywhere in that echoing dimness, the boxes stacked like bricks and stretching on for what seemed the whole length of the ship. The 220 crates—some of them twenty feet long—held sheets of dark metal in various shapes. There were bundles of iron rods, parts of Eiffel’s support columns painted a bright vermillion. The lieutenant let in a little more light from above and pointed to a large box cradling a conch-like object large enough to shelter a few street urchins. He pulled at a pretend strand of hair near his ear. “Curl,” he said.

The visitors nodded.

Then, as they accustomed themselves to the dark, they began to understand the strange nature of what lurked in that dimness. The diadem of Liberty’s crown rested in a frame as big as a wagon tunnel. Through the slats in the crates they would be able to see the gulley of the nostril the size of a footprint. In another they saw the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the fingers. They had read about the scale but had never imagined it to be quite this awesome.

Back up on deck, de Saune swept off his hat again and presented a vellum to Stone. The document, embossed with portraits of Washington and Lafayette, officially transferred ownership of the statue from France to America. Stone could not disguise his delight, clutching the vellum to his chest with childlike glee.

Eventually the various players dispersed to their respective boats. Stone tucked the spyglass case holding the vellum under his arm. As day faded into afternoon, a little rowboat pulled up alongside the
Isère
.

Inside were three spirited Frenchmen who had traveled from the Battery to welcome Liberty. The
Isère
reeled in her anchor, blew a stream of smoke out her high stack, and headed up the bay toward the city. The small boats and yachts followed her, “like kingbird after a crow,” making a racket with their steam whistles and horns.

By the next day, the citizens of New York had learned that the statue had arrived on their shores. Stone’s office at Liberty and Nassau Streets was crowded with civil and military commanders, all eager to learn how they might participate in the formal greeting ceremony. By the nineteenth, nothing could hold back the masses from swarming the area between City Hall and the Battery for Stone’s parade, even though the mud left behind by the previous days’ rain was an inch deep on Broadway.

On the stock exchange, two French-born members brought business to a standstill when they marched with their flag around the exchange floor. Their American colleagues paraded behind, mutilating the Marseillaise in poor off-key French.

A full four thousand spectators crowded the hills overlooking the Narrows, the waterway between Staten Island and Brooklyn. The excursion steamers the
Grand Republic
and
Columbia
, which were at capacity, carrying two thousand people each, sailed closer to the
Isère
.

As the dignitaries, including Stone and Evarts, the president of the American Committee, ventured toward Bedloe’s Island on the calm bay, they sipped champagne and waved to all the pleasure boats trailing behind. Passengers on the lower decks drank keg beer and pumped their arms to a German band repeatedly oompahing the Marseillaise.

A hundred steamers and yachts became part of the water procession. Saluting guns sounded from the forts. When the
Atlantic
arrived at the
Isère,
she could hardly get through the crowd of tugs and yachts pulled tight to her hull.

Stone and Evarts waited for their moment to board, but as the
Isère
gangplank was lowered, it could not meet the
Atlantic
’s lower entrance. Another attempt was made at a higher level. That worked, and when the somber Evarts leapt a rail, the observers on board the boats applauded and shouted their appreciation for his minor acrobatics. Evarts bowed to his admirers. Spirits were high.

That mood would not last. Just days later the
Telegram
ran a headline “The Great Image: Bartholdi’s Imperfect Ideas to Be Completed.” A reporter named Edward Rudolf Garczynski, who described himself as “a penniless Polish nobleman supporting himself through literature,” had paid a visit to the American Committee offices in the Bryant Building. There he found Stone, alongside Joseph Drexel, the self-satisfied-looking banker and philanthropist who also served on the American Committee.

Their office was papered with architectural renderings of Liberty and photographs Bartholdi had sent of the erected statue with the roofs of Paris at her waist. Stone had responded curtly to most reporters’ questions. Some months earlier, when a reporter innocently had asked if the statue would be put up by French workmen, Stone replied: “Don’t you think the American workmen are capable of any work of that kind?”

Garczynski expected better treatment because he claimed to know Stone: earlier, the general had solicited Garczynski’s advice on the best stone for the pedestal’s facing. This odd detail would suggest that Stone trusted Garczynski’s understanding of the challenges of building.

Now Garczynski sought to ask a few questions of his acquaintance and he recounted the exchange moment by moment in his article. He began by inquiring how the copper plates would be fastened to the iron skeleton.

“Why,” said General Stone, “it’s plain enough. You see on the wall that series of photographs sent us by Bartholdi. This one”—Stone pointed to a very general sketch of an “embryo lighthouse”—“is the skeleton of the interior of the statue. These four columns are the iron pillars, which will communicate, with our system of supporting and anchoring, steel girders. Around these four columns you see a sparse tracery of lines. These are the iron rods on which the copper plates rested when the figure was set up in the Parc Monceaux.”

“But,” broke in Drexel, “the conditions are absolutely different. There the figure was surrounded by high buildings, and was besides sheltered by the brow of the hill. You remember the Barrière de l’Étoile, or, as people call it, the Arc de Triomphe, is on the very top; then the ground slopes away to the left toward the Bois de Boulogne and . . . the figure was put up in the center of the little park, which is in reality a private square garden, like Stuyvesant Park here.”

Garczynski interpreted Drexel’s description as a critique of the support strategy: “Are we to understand, then, that Bartholdi, the sculptor, has not perfected plans for all the details?”

“He certainly has not,” answered Stone. “He has left considerable work for American engineering ingenuity.”

“Would it be possible to erect the statue permanently with only such appliances as have come in the
Isère
?” asked Garczynski.

He attested that both replied: “It would be impossible.”

They then turned to the problem of the galvanic action between the copper and iron. Engineers from Nevada had warned the reporter of the horrors that could result.

“This much at least is certain, is it not, Mr. Drexel, that the French have left us this matter to solve?” Garczynski probed.

“Yes, that is so,” said Drexel. “They have given us the skin and the bones and we have to make out the rest.”

Stone and Drexel went on to complain about the instability of the upraised arm and how Bartholdi and Eiffel had sent no clear plan on how to deal with the support.