Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  “Very good,” replied Simon with a reassuring smile.

  Darkness brought a drop in temperature and in height as the cold contracted the airship’s gas. As they began to dip toward the sea, Wellman ordered the smallest of the three motors, the twelve-horsepower donkey engine, to be broken up and heaved overboard along with more gasoline. Then he joined Irwin in the lifeboat, and for a long time the pair crouched in the swaying vessel trying to establish contact with a shore station or passing ship. Frequently they heard their signal letter Wrepeated over the airwaves, but they were out of range to reply. All they could do was listen impotently as ships flashed back the same message to one another: “Any news of the America?”

  Exasperated, Wellman began to climb the ladder to the car. Suddenly his sheath knife snagged on one of the rungs, and as he tried to free himself, he slipped, losing grip with both hands and feet. Only the jammed knife prevented his falling into the ocean. It felt to Wellman that his legs dangled a long time above the Atlantic, but in seconds Loud and Aubert reached down and hauled him up. For a minute or so no one spoke as they all recovered their breath, then the two engineers began to laugh. Simon joined in, and so did Wellman, his relief giving way to exhilaration at his narrow escape. “This crew seems to be made up of the right kind of men,” wrote Simon in his log, shortly after he came off duty, “and I never wish to be shipmates with a better bunch.”

  When the meeting of the balloonists at the Jefferson Hotel broke up at lunchtime, there was, to the undisguised relief of Albert Lambert, unanimity, with not a disgruntled European to be seen or heard. They had all agreed on the definition of a landing during the race, and Lambert dispatched one of his assistants to type out a press release on the subject:

  • If the basket touches the ground, a landing is made.

  • If the drag rope becomes entangled in trees or trails along the ground for fifteen minutes, a landing is constituted.

  • If a balloon alights in a lake or a river, a landing is made.

  • If a balloon descends in salt water, it is disqualified.

  Lambert had also happily informed the ten teams that the Laclede Gas Light Company had agreed to reschedule the inflation of the balloons from Sunday afternoon to early Monday morning. This news, coupled with the announcement that the winner of the race would receive $2,000, the runner-up $1,500 and the third-place balloon $1,250, sent the balloonists off to lunch in great cheer. One of the French competitors, Walther de Mumm, a scion of the champagne family, produced a couple of bottles with which they celebrated a harmonious morning’s work.

  After lunch the men retired to their rooms and the comfort of soft beds and clean linen. All of the ten two-man crews were experienced balloonists, gloomily aware that that they might not get the chance to lay their head on a feather pillow for several days.

  If the men couldn’t sleep, then they checked and rechecked their provisions and equipment. Had they the right quantity of coffee and an adequate number of canned soups? Would it be better to take more apples and fewer oranges? Should they pack a quart of whiskey or a bottle of crème de menthe? They cleaned their revolvers for the umpteenth time, made sure they had the correct maps, included a spare pair of gloves ( just to be safe), and laid out on the floor of their room the most precious items of all: barometer, thermometer, compass, barograph, and an air-recording aneroid barometer. They lovingly cleaned and polished each one, then repacked them in their cases.

  A little while later they’d unpack everything and do it all again, just to occupy their minds and ward off the inevitable feelings of apprehension that collected in the hollows of their imaginations like pockets of mist on a fall morning. As one of the American entrants busied himself on Sunday afternoon, he stoutly refused to entertain thoughts of the fate that had befallen him in the 1908 International Balloon Cup race. Instead, thirty-six-year-old Augustus Post, copilot to Alan Hawley in the balloon America II, pored over a large map of the Great Lakes region, supplied to him the previous week by Major Hersey of the Milwaukee Weather Bureau.

  Post was handsome, with black hair and eyes and a goatee that made him look more like a French musketeer than an American balloonist. His personality was just as exotic. He was a poet, raconteur, singer, an entertainer who could imitate the sounds of everything from airplanes to canaries, and an actor who had appeared in theaters across America.

  Having graduated from Harvard Law School, Post had returned to his native New York City and bought a Waverley electric car, reputed to be the city’s first horse less carriage. A few years later at the 1900 Paris Exhibition he took to the air for the first time in a balloon, and in 1905 Post became not only one of the founding members of the Aero Club of America, but also its first secretary. Among his friends he counted the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, and that fact alone—his ability to be on good terms with these implacable enemies—was proof of his affability. Everyone liked Augustus Post, except his estranged wife, Emma, who in October 1910 was waiting for their marriage to be annulled in a New York court. To her, Post was nothing but a showboater, a man who “loved the limelight . . . [and] the society of other women.”

  Post wasn’t troubled by his wife’s vow to squeeze him for every last penny. What ever happened, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d experienced on October 11, 1908.

  There were many ways to die in a balloon, as the New York Times had insensitively pointed out in July 1910 when it listed the thirty-five fatalities in the last four years. One could drown, as Paul Nocquet had in April 1906 when his balloon dropped into Gilgo Bay in Long Island; one might be struck by lightning, as poor Lieutenant Ulivelli was near Rome in 1907; one could explode in a ball of fire as two British balloonists had during an exhibition in London in 1908; or one might be swept out to sea, to vanish forever, as was the case with Frank Elkins in 1909, last seen heading out over the Pacific Ocean.

  Perhaps the most terrifying prospect of all was the plummet, the sudden fall from the sky with the balloonists powerless to do anything but scream. Aviators could, at least, struggle with the controls of their machine, allowing themselves a sliver of a sense that their fate was in their own hands.

  When Augustus Post had been invited by Holland Forbes to be his copilot in the 1908 International Balloon Cup race, Post had accepted without hesitation. Forbes was a good man in Post’s estimation, the vice president of the Aero Club of America, and an accomplished sportsman who owned his own balloon, the Conqueror. The pair sailed to Germany, spending much of the voyage with their heads in a series of foreign-language phrase books they had been sent by the race organizers. Taking off from Berlin, the contestants were liable to end up anywhere from Scandinavia to the Sahara, so it was advisable to be as much of a polyglot as possible.

  The day of the race was a Sunday, warm and sunny, and Berlin was teeming with spectators. The Conqueror was the ninth balloon to start, and at 3:40 P.M. it rose into the air to a great cheer. When the balloon reached four thousand feet, Post noted the height in his logbook and also entered the barometer reading. He heard Forbes cluck with delight and say, “How nicely it works!” Suddenly Post felt the basket tremble. He looked up and saw the bottom of the balloon beginning to shrivel as a large tear appeared on one side of the varnished cotton. “She’s gone,” said Post calmly. As the gas rushed out of the tear “like the blowing off of a steam boiler,” Post jumped to his feet and reached for the appendix cord, a rope that acted as a safety mechanism and tightened if pressure was lost so the balloon would keep its shape and not fold up. But the appendix cord hadn’t been designed for such a catastrophe as they now faced. With the balloon holed, turning it into a giant parachute was their only small chance of survival. Post slipped the cord through its knot and it rose inside to the top of the balloon.

  To the tens of thousands of spectators on the ground death appeared assured. A woman standing close to the correspondent from the New York Times screamed, “They are killed!” and turned her face from the sky. The reporter watched transfixe
d as for two thousand feet they “shot down like a bullet.” In the basket Forbes began to cut away the bags of ballast sand that hung from the four corners in a pathetic attempt to halt their descent. Post queried, what about the spectators below, might not they be hit by falling bags? Forbes ignored Post and continued to offload their ballast. Post looked up at the balloon, begging it to come to their aid, and suddenly it did. The New York Times reporter gasped with thousands of others as “the envelope appeared to take, first, a triangular shape, and then was transformed into a sort of parachute at the top of the net, and the progress of the wrecked balloon was considerably arrested.” Post and Forbes felt they were under a large mushroom as the netting over the balloon held firm against the cloth, which struggled to get through its meshes. They were no longer traveling at the speed of a bullet, but as the wind pushed them away from the field toward the city, it seemed to Post “as if some great giant was hurling buildings, streets, churches, up at us with all his might.” For several moments they skimmed the rooftops of first one street, then another, with Post and Forbes clinging for dear life to the concentrating ring above their heads. The basket smashed at an angle into a chimney, bounced upward, and dropped through the tiled roof of No. 7 Wilhelmstrasse in the suburb of Friedenau. Neither man dared move in case their descent had been only temporarily checked. Warily they got to their knees and peered over the basket’s rim. They appeared to be stuck fast in a hole in the roof with the cloth draped over the chimney. Forbes clambered out onto the flat roof, unslung his camera, and started to take some photographs: of the balloon, of the house, of Berlin. “The whole world,” he had decided, “looked beautiful.”

  It was the last time Augustus Post had worked with Forbes, a balloonist Post had come to realize was dangerously cavalier. One of the sandbags cut from their basket had landed on a baby carriage, and only the infant’s nurse’s quick grab of the child in it moments before the impact had prevented a ghastly accident. Moreover, why had the balloon dropped in the first place? When the pair arrived home a fortnight after their miraculous escape, Post refused to comment on the incident but his partner had plenty to say to the press. “It is inexplicable to me why the balloon should burst,” Forbes told reporters on the quayside. “None of the aeronautical experts to whom we referred the matter can find any reason for it.” Then he embellished the story with an untrue account of their crashing through a roof and finding themselves in a woman’s boudoir. “The lady,” he said with a chortle, “was unfortunately out.”

  Unbeknownst to Forbes, Gaston Hervieu, a respected French balloonist, had widely been quoted in the American press attributing the calamity to “the length of the appendix, which increased the pressure at the top of the balloon and caused it to burst. I consider such experiments dangerous before proper experience has been acquired.” In other words, Forbes had recklessly endangered his life and Post’s with his foolish tampering.

  Post’s enthusiasm for aeronautics hadn’t dimmed with his near-death experience, but he vowed to choose his partners with more circumspection. In one of the many articles he wrote for aviation publications, Post declared, “The successful make-up of a team in a long-distance balloon-race depends on many qualifications, mental almost more than physical. For many hours perhaps, two men, cut loose from the earth, sharing a profound solitude, must have one mind and one motive, and must act instinctively with a precision that admits of no hesitation and no discussion . . . Your companion must be one with whom you are willing to share a great memory—and that is in itself something of a test of one’s opinion.”

  By the summer of 1910 Post was as much an aviator as he was a balloonist. Earlier in the year he had become the thirteenth American to solo in an airplane, and he had not long acquired his flying license when Alan Hawley appeared at the door of his Manhattan apartment.

  Hawley had a job persuading Post to join him as his copilot in the balloon America II. Even though they had flown together—and finished fourth—in the 1907 International Balloon Cup race, Post now had other ambitions. He was about to journey to Boston to compete in the Boston Air Show, and was of half a mind to enter the Chicago to New York airplane race, for which the prize was $25,000.*

  Hawley lacked Post’s flamboyance. Where one had an exotic goatee, the other had a modest mustache. Post was a poet and an actor, a man who went running each day to keep in shape; Hawley was a sober-suited stockbroker, less impulsive and more cerebral than his friend, and his portly frame betrayed his fondness for a long lunch. The two were opposites in physique and temperament, but they complemented one another perfectly.

  What won Post over was the revelation that the balloon would be the America II, which had won the USA the International Balloon Cup in 1909. It was considered a “lucky balloon,” and Post couldn’t resist its pull. He agreed to join Hawley after the Boston Air Show, and in the second week of September they were reunited in Indianapolis.

  On September 17 the America II and eight other balloons rose into the air hoping to win the right to represent the USA in the International Balloon Cup the following month. The selection procedure was simple: the three balloons that covered the greatest distance before landing would be chosen. One by one the balloons came to earth, first the New York after only 185 miles, then the Pennsylvania II, then Hossler . . . until only the America II remained airborne. Post and Hawley finally landed in Warrenton, Virginia, 450 miles east of Indianapolis, after a flight time of forty-eight hours and twenty-three minutes. It was a new American endurance record for a balloon, and Hawley told reporters they could have gone on longer but came down “for fear of being blown into Chesapeake Bay.” It had been a memorable trip, but, he added, “While we were passing above Noble County, Ohio, on Sunday evening I distinctly heard two bullets whistle past my ears . . . The government should take steps at once to protect balloonists who are likely to be killed at any time by ignorant or vicious countrymen who persist in firing at them as they fly above farms.” That he and Post had not been shot down was pure luck, and for that they thanked the continued good fortune of America II.

  In New York there was little interest in the balloon race about to start in St. Louis, nor was there much enthusiasm for Walter Wellman and what the New York Sun called his “mad enterprise.” All eyes were on Belmont Park and the forthcoming International Aviation Meet, even though it was still a week away. The Sunday edition of the New York American carried a photograph of Glenn Curtiss greeting two of the French aviators, Count Jacques de Lesseps and Hubert Latham, as they stepped off the steamship La Lorraine twenty-four hours earlier. Both men had expressed their pleasure to be in New York and their eagerness to begin tuning up their aircraft. The race organizers took the Frenchmen to lunch at the Café Martin, and later, when the six-foot-tall count, who was the tenth child of Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, arrived at his apartment at the St. Regis Hotel, he was asked by a reporter what had impressed him most about New York. “Your Fifth Avenue and the constant stream of pretty women passing along it,” replied the twenty-seven-year-old, with the earnest appreciation of a connoisseur. “I think your American women are the personification of elegance and ‘chic.’ They are admirable.”

  Hubert Latham had checked into the the Knickerbocker Hotel (now known as 6 Times Square), an Astor establishment on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, and he was soon sitting at the bar admiring the magnificent twenty-eight-foot-long mural, Old King Cole and His Fiddlers Three, by Maxfield Parrish,* and chatting to the bar steward in flawless English. Born in Paris in 1883 to an English father and a French mother, Latham was a slim, well-dressed man with a pallid complexion, visible evidence of his consumption. A Parisian physician had given him a year to live—eighteen months ago. Latham’s grip on life was still strong, and he intended to keep squeezing until the pips squeaked. He was rarely to be seen without a glass in one hand and his long ivory cigarette holder in the other. The ivory reputedly came from the tusks of an elephant shot by Latham during an expedit
ion to the Sudan in 1905. Big game had been Latham’s first love upon graduating from Oxford University in 1904, but in 1908 he witnessed one of Wilbur Wright’s flights at Le Mans and, like Claude Grahame-White, fell in love with the airplane. He bought shares in Gastembide & Mengin, a struggling company set up by a French mechanical engineer called Leon Levavasseur, who had constructed a lightweight monoplane that had crashed in every trial. Latham cut a deal with Levavasseur: “I will try the machine for you and continue flying with it, no matter how often I smash it. If I am killed, all the better—but you must repair it for me.”

  The crashes were frequent in the first few weeks of the partnership, but Latham survived each one, crawling out from under the wreckage with one hand already reaching for his cigarette case. Steadily, Levavasseur ironed out the flaws in his airplane (christened the Antoinette in honor of the wife of Monsieur Gastembide) until, in June 1909, Latham flew fifty miles without a hitch. The following month he’d left France in an attempt to win the $5,000 prize on offer for the first man to fly across the English Channel. Thousands cheered his departure and thousands waited for his arrival, but it was not to be. Six miles off the French coast the airplane’s fifty-horse power engine coughed like a consumptive and died. Latham made a perfect landing on a flat sea, and as the wooden machine bobbed gently up and down, he lit a cigarette and waited for his rescue.

  Latham was one of several aviators whose photograph appeared in the New York Sun on Sunday alongside an article that listed the names of the twenty-six fliers slated to appear at the meet. The paper also gave details of the money on offer: “The cash prizes amount to $72,300 [approximately $1,152,500 today]. The aviators will also receive a percentage of the gate receipts. One special prize of $10,000 is offered for a flight from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. Another prize of $5,000 will be awarded to the aviator who reaches or exceeds an altitude of 10,000 feet. Other prizes will be given for duration, distance, speed, cross-country flights and passenger carrying.”