Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  If the America II was to pull off a surprise victory, they would have to go some to beat Hugo Von Abercron and August Blanckertz in Germania, the race favorites in everyone’s eyes. Their aluminum-coated balloon had sped over a public school in West Branch, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon at the moment the children were heading home, and a message dropped from the basket had caused pandemonium in the school yard. The boy quickest to grab the message—or perhaps the boy strongest to wrestle it from another’s grip—proudly presented it to the teacher, who read aloud its contents: “Highest altitude, 5700 feet. Twenty-six bags left. Von Abercron and Blanckertz. Germania.” A short message, but one that sent the boys and girls home exuberant.

  As the papers explained on Wednesday morning, that meant the balloon had covered over five hundred miles in twenty-four hours, having used only fourteen bags of ballast. The German pair were on course to establish a new distance record in the International Balloon race, surpassing the existing mark of 873 miles, set by the late Oscar Erbslöh in 1907. The Germania might also challenge the world distance record of 1,193 miles, held by Count Henri de la Vaulx of France, who in 1906 had ballooned from Paris to Kiev.

  The race was exciting the curiosity of Americans for an additional reason, one for which Abercron and his kinfolk had a word, and which had subsequently been incorporated into the English language: Schadenfreude. In its report on Wednesday morning the New York Times wrote that of the seven balloons still in the race, all were headed straight for Ontario, across the Great Lakes. Assuming that the balloons hadn’t ditched in Lakes Michigan or Huron, they would be faced with hundreds and hundreds of miles of sparsely populated Canadian wilderness. The commuters reading their newspapers shivered and thanked God they weren’t in one of those baskets.

  Augustus Post wouldn’t have wished to be anywhere else in the world as he updated his log in the sharp dawn air. The morning star was visible, and so, too, Venus in the west, “while to the south beautiful soft mists and haze gently spread over the sleeping lakes and virgin forests. There was no sound of chanticleers or of any animals that we were accustomed to hear. Their places were taken by the cries of an occasional loon or owl. No smoke from any chimney or any object of civilization modified the charm of this dawn in the wilderness.”

  As Hawley uncoiled himself from his brief nap at the bottom of the basket, he was informed by his copilot that they had just crossed into Quebec from Ontario. Below was Lake Témiscamingue. “Hawley,” exclaimed Post excitedly, his dark musketeer eyes gleaming, “this is the chance of a lifetime. This direction and location north is what they [their rivals] have all been hoping and praying for. It is a wonderful opportunity.” Hawley needed no persuading, he was as keen as his companion to win the race. Ballast was plentiful, and anyway, “the higher currents would carry us east . . . [so] we did not hesitate.”

  Not long after, they passed low over another lake, and in a clearing near the shore they saw a lumber camp and some woodcutters preparing for the day, who, when asked, shouted up the name of the lake through cupped hands—Kipawa. They also, said Post, “offered some advice, which we could not make out before we had drifted away.”

  The advice was probably to put down as soon as possible, for what lay beyond became apparent when the morning had fully broken and Post scanned the horizon for any sign of a place to land. There was none; nothing was to be seen but lakes and rivers. They had taken a terrible risk in pushing on east, embarking on a nerve-racking game of chance. What if the gas should leak? What if the weather should break? They had no control over these factors. They tried to reassure one another by talking of the new Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad being constructed through the wilds of Quebec, but Post confided his true feelings to his logbook at ten A.M.: “Both realize that we are in bad country, and grave danger should we land, on account of the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting out and passing over lakes and rivers.”

  They rose as high as sixteen thousand feet and tore through the sky at speeds of 40 mph, casting anxious glances toward the armada of storm clouds massing in the distance. At midday Post noted the temperature in his log—forty-eight degrees—and his pulse rate, which was 85. Not long after, as he stood at the front of the basket peering through the field glasses, he gave a shout: there was a big lake to the south with three rivers running into it from the north. It was Lake St. John, Post told Hawley; he recalled it from the days when he had hunted moose in the region.

  At three P.M. they started to descend, and as they dropped, the land below began to take shape. They could see in the distance cultivated fields, the odd building, even what looked like a mill. Post “made a mental survey of the country and mapped the route to the nearest houses in my mind while Hawley was handling the balloon.” They began to pick up speed as they got lower, and the air currents closer to the ground buffeted their basket so that once or twice the pair lost their balance. Post threw out the drag rope as the wind bullied them north, over a small lake, and toward a forested mountain. Among the trees on the lower slopes were large boulders, so Hawley dumped another bag of ballast and the America rose, its drag rope touching the ground as the basket sped over the tops of seventy-foot trees. “Hang on,” cried Hawley, “I’m going to take her down!”

  He reached up and yanked the ripping cord and out rushed the gas. Hawley and Post grabbed hold of one another as the America crashed through the trees, splintering smaller branches, bouncing off larger ones, falling toward the rocky gorge below.

  The SS Trent of the Royal Mail Steamship Company finally reached New York at three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, having been held up by dense fog outside Sandy Hook for five hours. But at one thirty P.M., wrote the correspondent from the New York Herald, one of two dozen reporters on the deck of the tug John A. Bouker, “the sun broke through the thick mist and Captain Down proceeded slowly to the Narrows. The Lusitania of the Cunard Line, and half a score of other outgoing steamships, met the incoming Trent, and under their shrill whistles kept up a deafening salute for fully a quarter of an hour. Passengers rushed to the decks of the steamships and cheered for Mr. Wellman and the crew of the America.”

  Wellman stood on the bridge of the Trent bowing to well-wishers, and waving to his wife and daughters, whom he’d spotted on a tug, along with Melvin Vaniman’s wife, Mildred, and Sarah Loud, mother of Lewis. Fred Aubert cradled the airship’s cat in his arms and blew a kiss to Rebecca, his sweetheart, while Murray Simon took snapshots of the whole triumphant scene.

  When they dropped anchor at quarantine, several of the Trent’s passengers began negotiating over the ship’s rail with the newspapermen for the sale of photographs of the rescue, and Wellman, who had changed back into his khaki aviation suit, cupped his hands to his mouth and impatiently requested a newspaper.

  A bundle of papers was thrown up to the Trent from one of the tugs, and the airmen “fairly tore them to pieces in their eagerness to see that the eyes of the world were directed toward them. Wellman was one of the most eager of the readers. He was really but a scanner, for he went over the front page with his trained newspaperman’s eye, then laid them aside.”

  Wellman was desperate to discover how the voyage had been perceived by the American press. A heroic failure? A foolish dream? A humiliating farce? Having passed through quarantine and embraced their families, the crew posed for photographs and answered questions prior to checking in at the Waldorf-Astoria. What’s the injury? they asked Wellman, pointing with their pencils to the sling that contained his right arm. He’d hurt his little finger, he responded, during the rescue. Some of the newsmen smirked at each other from under the brims of their derbies. A sling, just for a sore little pinkie.

  Why the failure? someone asked. It wasn’t because of leaking gas or faulty engines that they’d had to abandon ship, replied Wellman, it was the equilibrator. “Before starting out on this balloon voyage we were of the opinion that no dirigible could reach Europe without an equilibrator,” he said. “Now we know that a dirigible can
not get there with an equilibrator.” He described how the equilibrator had held the balloon back and at times pulled it down toward the water. But they’d learned the lesson, said Wellman, beaming, and wouldn’t make the mistake again. So you intend to have another try? Wellman nodded and replied that he and Vaniman “think we know how a ship to achieve such a voyage must be built—larger than the late America with a greater lifting force, more powerful engines, greater resources of reserve gas and ballast, and a method of overcoming the fluctuations of buoyancy due to expansion and contraction” of gas. Tittering spread among the assembled reporters. So in short, start again from scratch? “Such a ship will come as surely as day follows night,” replied Wellman testily, “and we cannot help feeling that our effort has been the means and will increasingly be the means, as we digest the hard lessons we learned, of hastening the day when aerial craft for purposes of, I do not say of peace, but of war, and more particularly of preventing war, will be part of the equipment of all the great powers.” So in conclusion, Wellman was asked, you consider your foray out into the Atlantic has been worthwhile? “The experiment speaks for itself. We broke all records for dirigible airships. We traveled 1,010 miles over the sea and were actually in the air for seventy-two hours. Vaniman and myself learned invaluable lessons, which we think were worth learning.”

  The newspapers didn’t share Wellman’s upbeat assessment of his journey. He had already been denounced in the morning edition of the New York Sun for embarking on a harebrained enterprise that was destined to end in “inevitable defeat . . . and the risk of drowning.” It did not, concluded the paper, “think compliments are in order, except for a safe issue from a foolish adventure.” Its sister paper, the Evening Sun, was less censorious in its Wednesday editorial, but nonetheless asked, what had been the purpose of the trip? “He sailed forth into unknown perils, as a man jumps in the dark. Had he landed in Europe, it would have proved nothing except that he was a very bold and very lucky man. The way of flying across the Atlantic with some safety and certainty would still have had to be found.”

  The editorial of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch provided the most thoughtful analysis. The paper began by commending Wellman and his five companions on their gallantry, likening their voyage to that “of the old days of the Vikings.” Then it turned its attention to what, if anything, the America had taught the world. The Wellman experiment, said the paper, “tends to confirm the growing conviction that conquest of the air is far from achievement by a dirigible balloon. The flying machine will probably beat it to the goal. The balloon is beautiful and the flight of it is a fine sport, but for the serious business of aerial transportation, it gives little promise of success.”

  The reporters who swarmed over Belmont Park on Wednesday morning were of a different kind from those waiting impatiently at the Battery for the arrival of the SS Trent. They neither knew nor cared of the difference between a biplane and a monoplane, and they didn’t recognize the small Chicagoan who glared at them with “eyes of agate” as he walked briskly toward his hangar. Instead they tutted in irritation at the mud that stuck to the soles of their polished shoes and blew into their hands, impatient for the arrival of the man whose name was the talk of New York. These were the correspondents whose preferred milieu was a charity ball or an opening night, where they inhaled the rarefied air of New York high society and waited for the city’s rich and famous to supply their columns with the oxygen of gossip. Few men in America were more famous at this moment than the one for whom they were waiting, the English aviator with the matineeidol features whose engagement to Pauline Chase had been announced by her agent, Charles Frohman, the previous evening.

  When Claude Grahame-White arrived in an automobile with his manager, Sydney McDonald, he must have been prepared for the furor. Most morning papers—and not just in New York—carried reports of the impending marriage. The Post-Dispatch had even had the temerity to make the story their front-page lead, shunting the latest update on the International Balloon race to a side column. Underneath a photo of the happy couple was the headlineand a story that suggested Grahame-White had popped the question at five hundred feet. The Post-Dispatch said that while New Yorkers might not be surprised at the news, what with the Englishman having “occupied a front-row seat at every performance of Our Miss Gibbs at the Knickerbocker Theater,” Bostonians would be shocked and disappointed. “They were sure there was going to be an airplane romance, with Grahame-White as one of the central figures, but they were only half right. The name which they had been whispering to each other was that of Miss Eleonora Sears . . . It was known that the English aviator was much in the company of Miss Sears and that he took her to dinners and social functions while he was the leading aerial lion of the Boston aviation season.”

  However, the paper attested, anxious that its readers shouldn’t infer that Grahame-White’s morals were anything less than scrupulous, friends of Miss Chase had informed the Post-Dispatch that “she was never jealous of Miss Sears . . . There was a perfect understanding between Grahame-White and the famous actress.”

  The New York Herald—much like the subject of its story—had scooped its rivals and carried a brief interview with Miss Chase, moments after she had confirmed her victory from the chaise lounge of her dressing room. “Yes, it’s true,” she said, flashing one of her enchanting smiles, “and I’m very happy. We will be married next spring in London.” Chase then disclosed that her devotion to her betrothed was such that she intended to retire and would “say good-bye in Peter Pan in the Duke of York’s Theater [in London].”

  The flattering tone of the reportage was regrettably sullied by an ungentlemanly aside from the Herald, which whispered from behind its hand that “rumor has engaged the actress to various men in the past.”

  The paper had the decency not to list the suitors who had fallen by the wayside—not the American millionaire in 1902, nor the English motorcar manufacturer in 1907, not the purported alliance in 1908 with Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the noted polar explorer, not even J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, in 1909.* And the Herald was far too discreet to point out that only last month a report had appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune confidently asserting that Chase had agreed to marry a wealthy Londoner—“popular in the clubs and at the theaters”—called Nicholas Jarvis Wood.

  Perhaps the snide reference in the Herald to his fiancée’s history of engagements accounted for the dark frown upon Grahame-White’s otherwise perfect face as he stepped out of the automobile on Wednesday morning. Referring all questions to his manager, Mr. McDonald, the Englishman marched toward the hangars, where John Moisant was already tuning up his monoplane.

  As Grahame-White approached his two hangars, numbers 14 and 15, he could see Moisant and his mechanic, Albert Fileux—his passenger on the Channel flight—preparing the Blériot monoplane. The pair were dressed in blue overalls stained black with engine grease, and Moisant had on a thick sweater. Grahame-White walked over and introduced himself. As ever, he was impeccably dressed, in a dark blue three-piece suit and bow tie, and brogues that had been polished that morning by the bellboy of the Hotel Astor.

  It was the first time the pair had met, though both were familiar with each other’s prowess, and for that reason genuine respect was in the handshake. These were two men at the pinnacle of their profession, sharing a common danger and living life with an intensity few could match. But behind the bonhomie each was eyeing up the other, evaluating his strengths and weaknesses. Moisant had the brittle sensitivity of the small man and bridled inwardly at the disparity of physiques. What hair he had left on his head barely reached up to his rival’s broad shoulders. Psychologically, however, the American considered himself superior to Grahame-White. Moisant was one of life’s risk-takers, combining natural aggression with a gambler’s daring, as he had first shown in Central America and then in his flight across the Channel. Grahame-White was more cautious. When he had arrived in Massachusetts and seen the proposed route of the race around
Boston Light, he persuaded the organizers to reroute it over open country rather than the densely populated section of the city as had originally been planned.

  A few weeks later, at the Brockton Fair show, Grahame-White had refused to fly in front of 120,000 people because of a vicious crosswind, even ignoring the impassioned pleas of the management, who feared a riot if there was no entertainment. Fortunately for the organizers, the showman in Grahame-White had come to the fore, and he’d addressed the jeering mob from the back of an automobile with a megaphone pressed to his lips: “Now listen to me. I know you’re angry because you’ve paid to see me fly and here I am on the ground . . . [but] it would be flying in the face of Providence to fly this afternoon. I can buy a new airplane, ladies and gentlemen, but I can’t buy a new life.”

  Moisant was less guarded in his approach to flying; after all, hadn’t he told the newspapers earlier in the week that there was nothing much to the aviation game? It was as easy as riding a bicycle.

  The two men shook hands and parted with a smile. Maybe Grahame-White was still on Moisant’s mind as he climbed into his monoplane, or perhaps there was another reason he didn’t open the cock to start the oil supply before he took off. For two circuits of the Belmont Park course the error went unnoticed by the American, but as he began his third lap, he glanced down at the oil gauge . . . Damn it! He’d forgotten to open the cock. If Grahame-White had been in Moisant’s position, he would have landed at once, indifferent to the presence of a rival, but proud Moisant reckoned he could fix the problem forty feet from the ground. Eyewitnesses later described to the New York Herald how Moisant had passed the grandstand and was approaching the stables at the east corner when “the monoplane was seen to dip suddenly and then dart toward the ground, nose downward, and turn toward the right. The monoplane fell on the right wing, crumpling it like a Chinese lantern under a road roller. The machine almost somersaulted, crushing and breaking the other wing.”