At ten minutes to seven they set off southeast, their feet throwing up a fine spray of dew as they looked for a place to ford the mountain stream. Post soon spotted a fallen log, and once Hawley had stamped on it with his left foot to make sure it wasn’t going to crumble under their weight, they crossed without trouble.
With their entire focus now on what lay immediately before them, the pair’s morale fluctuated with the smallest detail. Post came across another felled log, its bark covered in a rug of moss, but this one gave evidence of having been chopped down a long time ago. It was comforting to think that another human being had once been at this spot. Not long after they encountered a river that could only be crossed by jumping from rock to rock in their hobnailed boots. Hawley slipped and “got a wetting so that we had to go out . . . and lay out the things to dry, including Hawley’s clothes.”
They waited an hour in the weak morning sunshine before Hawley struggled into his damp gray tweed suit and knotted his red tie, then they struck out south again. By 10 A.M. they were skirting a small lake, jostling their way through a dense thicket of alder bushes with always one eye on the ground for any of nature’s hidden traps. At noon Hawley was grimacing in pain, so they rested for a few minutes and Post cut a sliver of chicken for their lunch. Hawley reluctantly agreed to discard his heavy aneroid—a gift from the Aero Club of America—and he hung the instrument from a tree with its glass face open so that perhaps a hunter might find it winking in the sun and return it.
At four P.M. they issued from the alder bushes onto a thin strip of sandy beach that ran alongside the lake. They had covered only seven miles, but Hawley was exhausted, and Post considered the beach a good spot to camp for the night. There was freshwater and plenty of dry wood. While Hawley rested, Post constructed a pyre of logs that was soon well ablaze.
Supper consisted of a piece of chicken and two eggs, and a cup of hot water, then they built a bivouac and settled down for the night. Hawley was soon asleep, shattered by the day’s trek, but Post the outdoorsman went for a walk along the beach to pay homage to nature’s beauty: “The northern lights lit up the horizon, revealing the silhouette of the mountains,” he wrote in his log. “The lake was black and perfectly calm, and later the moon came up and added its silver light to the scene, while the red embers of the fire glowed as the weather-beaten logs burned on the beach.”
The sensational headline in Friday morning’s New York Times read HEL-VETIA LANDS; WENT 1,100 MILES. The accompanying report said that the Aero Club of St. Louis had announced the Swiss balloon crewed by Colonel Theodore Schaeck and his aide, Paul Armbruster, had landed in Quebec, thereby smashing the existing International Balloon race distance record of 873 miles. If only they’d managed another 94 miles, the pair would have surpassed Count Henri de la Vaulx’s world-record distance record of 1,193 miles. However, the New York Times was quick to point out that this record might yet be broken because the Helvetia was “not thought to be the balloon sighted . . . at Kiskisink, Canada, 1,200 miles from St. Louis.”
The Times knew not the identity of the balloon, but with the Germania also reported down—with only 850 miles covered—it could be one of only three: “The Swiss balloon, Azurea, Lieut Messner, pi lot; the German balloon Düsseldorf II, Lieut. Hans Gericke, pilot; and the America II, A. R. Hawley, pi lot.”
A few hours later, St. Louis’s only evening paper, the Post-Dispatch, suggested that while the Helvetia and Germania had indeed descended, reports had them confused, and in fact the German balloon had covered the greater distance, not the Swiss one.* But the main thrust of the newspaper’s front-page article on Friday evening was the growing sense of dread among race organizers that one or all of the missing three balloons had met with calamity. The Post-Dispatch reported that the board of governors of the St. Louis Aero Club had convened a meeting on Friday morning to discuss their plan of action. The upshot of that meeting was a telegram from Albert Lambert, the president, in which he asked all steamship companies operating on the Great Lakes to be on the lookout for any trace of the balloons. Lambert then sent duplicate telegrams to Colonel J. M. Gibson, lieutenant governor of Ontario, to Sir Alphonse Pelletier, lieutenant governor of the province of Quebec, and to the offices of Hudson Bay Company in Montreal, in which he appealed for their help in locating three balloons “last sighted Tuesday sailing over Lake Huron and the region adjoining. Their course, east of north, would take them into the Canadian wilds. Their provisions and wearing apparel are limited. They should have landed Wednesday night.”
The Hudson Bay Company replied at once to the request, informing the Aero Club that it had alerted all its trapping and hunting posts scattered throughout northern Ontario and Quebec and that within a few hours a search covering the two provinces would be instituted.
The front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Friday evening was a collector’s item for all balloon aficionados. Not only was there the ominous news from the International Balloon race, but also what the paper justifiably called “a remarkable photo” of the death throes of the America. Taken by a passenger aboard the SS Trent, the photograph showed the airship in the early-morning sunshine with the lifeboat still attached and the malevolent shape of the equilibrator just visible under the water.
By the time the newspaper was on sale, the men of the America were back in Atlantic City, their low-key reception in New York just a distant memory as “two military companies and a band escorted Walter Well-man and his crew from the station to the Hotel Chalfonte,” and an estimated five thousand people lined the streets to cheer them on their way. The six men had barely enough time to deposit their bags in their rooms before they were whisked off to a dinner in their honor in the banquet room of the Hotel Shelburne. Telegrams were read out from those unable to attend, including one from President Taft, and then Joseph Saius, head of the American Exhibition Company, the expedition’s biggest financial backer, addressed the diners. “No name since Columbus has been regarded with such respect as that of Wellman,” he exclaimed. “No names have ever been received with greater commendation than the name of Wellman and the men who with him made up the crew of the America . . . Since the America has left Atlantic City, the entire world has watched the progress of the Wellman project, and I believe tonight that the scientists of the world have secured solutions to new problems of the air through the bravery of the crew of the America.”
When the thunderous applause had abated, Wellman rose to his feet and thanked the people of Atlantic City for their loyalty in those dragging weeks when the American press had subjected him and his men to “calumny and abuse while we were forced to await proper conditions.” But that was all in the past, and Wellman let it be known that he was prepared to reach out the hand of friendship to his erstwhile traducers. “One of the things demonstrated by the America’s trip,” he explained to the men and women seated before him, “was the possibility of offering a real conquest of the air. With all its mistakes, I believe that American journalism seeks only to do right. I, who have suffered much from its attacks, still believe that it is only mistaken, and not pessimistic.”
As Wellman’s chest swelled with sanctimony, the Chicago Daily Tribune was laying the last of its type for the Saturday edition. Among the latest reports of the International Balloon race and the imminent start of the Belmont Park Meet, the paper took time to wonder why Wellman had been so touchy ever since his return. After all, it said, “Any person that attempts the highly improbable with no convincingly good reason is a legitimate subject of banter.” And that was a neat encapsulation of— the Tribune hesitated to use the word adventure—Wellman’s escapade, which had proved only that “an unwieldy gas bag, a ‘dirigible,’ that steers like a thistle seed, will remain in the air, under favorable circumstances, a certain number of hours.” The paper was quick to reassure its readers that it yielded to no one in its admiration of Wellman’s daring, but then “we have long admired Mr. Empedocies, who, peradventurous [sic] as Mr. Wellman, dove into a volcano a
nd presently reappeared as a cinder.” The Tribune’s peremptory conclusion was that “the air craft has not yet been designed that will cross the Atlantic.”
For the favored five hundred spectators admitted to Belmont Park on Friday, the afternoon of aviation thrills was “such has seldom been seen in this country.” Most of the people admitted to the course were friends and relatives of the fliers, but a few were enthusiasts who had come on the off chance of gaining admittance a day before the start of the tournament proper. Midway through the afternoon, reported the New York Herald in a breathless tone, “Arch Hoxsey in a Wright biplane, Mr. Grahame-White in a Farman biplane, and Mr. J. Armstrong Drexel, in a Blériot monoplane, were in the air at one time . . . by far the most remarkable sight those in the vicinity of New York have ever been permitted to witness.”
Drexel remained in the air for three minutes, but Hoxsey and Grahame-White were up for ten, circling the five-kilometer course like a pair of boxers prowling the ring at the start of a bout. When Grahame-White touched down on the grass, still soggy after the heavy rain of the previous day, Drexel was waiting to welcome him. Drexel was in his late twenties, a “heavily-built and good-natured man,” with a small mustache that looked more as if he had forgotten to shave above his lip for a few days rather than any serious attempt at facial fashion. A millionaire playboy with the common touch, he had no side and no sense of self-importance. His great-grandfather Francis Drexel had fled Austria during the Napoleonic Wars to avoid conscription and arrived in America in 1817, eventually founding the eponymous banking firm in Philadelphia twenty years later. Now the family was one of the richest in the country, and earlier in the year a union had taken place with the Goulds, the banking family whose estimated fortune of $200 million exceeded that of even the Drexels.
The engagement party for Anthony Drexel—Armstrong’s younger brother—and his fiancée, Marjorie Gould, had been held in February 1910, in the Fifth Avenue mansion of her parents, and 250 of New York’s “400”* attended what was as much a celebration of excess as it was of a forthcoming marriage. More than five thousand orchids, each costing $1, decorated the many rooms and halls of the house, and each guest was presented with a jeweled charm as a keepsake (rings for the ladies, scarf pins for the gentlemen) from the famous Mrs. Van Rensselaer. An orchestra, hidden behind the greenery at the foot of the staircase, entertained the lucky few, before everyone sat down to a meal that cost $100 (approximately $1,600 today) per head.
Two months later Armstrong had been his brother’s best man at the wedding at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, and his speech at the reception was well received, though not as well received as the $2 million worth of wedding presents, or the $2,500 cake, which was decorated with jewels supplied by Tiffany and arrived under armed guard.
In June, Armstrong Drexel had seen another of his siblings married off, this time his sister, Marguerite, who had stepped out of a London church as the wife of Guy Montagu George Finch-Hatton,* better known in En-gland as Viscount Maidstone. The alliance didn’t go down well across the Atlantic, with one newspaper saying that “another cofferful of American dollars [has] found its way into the custody of the British nobility.”
A fortnight after the wedding Armstrong Drexel, who had been taking flying lessons in England for several months, was awarded his aviation license by the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain, only the fourteenth issued. Having learned to fly under the instruction of Claude Grahame-White, Drexel accompanied him to various meets in England and Scotland throughout July and August.
The pair had got on famously from the start, with each man finding qualities to admire in the other that were deficient in his own character. Drexel lacked Grahame-White’s physical grace, and his own amiable but rather oafish appearance made him one of those cursed men who was always considered by a woman as a friend, never a suitor. Grahame-White, for his part, enjoyed Drexel’s modesty and manners, and his unwillingness to take either life or himself too seriously. In short, the American’s innate security complemented the Englishman’s innate insecurity. What they did share, however, was an uncommon courage. They were intelligent, imaginative men, aware of the risks of every flight, but prepared to run them nonetheless. “If you think of danger when you’re flying, you’re as good as killed,” said Drexel once. “The aviator must act as if there were no difference between life and death.” When Grahame-White taxied to a standstill at Belmont Park after his ten-minute practice spin, Drexel helped him from his Farman biplane and introduced his brother, Anthony, and his sister-in-law, Marjorie, both of whom were aviation enthusiasts. Soon, however, someone else arrived at Belmont Park whose interest in the machines was even more acute, but far less welcome to Grahame-White than Mr. and Mrs. Drexel’s. Wilbur Wright appeared in the middle of the afternoon with a team of mechanics and a large wooden crate containing the brothers’ new airplane. The indefatigable correspondent of the New York Herald pressed for details of the machine, “but not a man connected with the Wrights would say a word about it and not a line of the new machine will be revealed until it is uncrated the next morning.” All Wilbur was prepared to say to the paper was “Wait until Orville comes.”
Wilbur Wright then cast a beady eye down hangar row, counting the number of airplanes on view that, in his opinion, infringed the patent of the Wrights’ original flying machine.
Their tenacity in pursuing lawsuits had made the Wrights the most despised men in the world of aviation in 1910. Louis Paulhan, the hero of Los Angeles in January, had been served with an injunction after the meet, which prevented him competing elsewhere in the United States and led him to describe Wilbur Wright as a “bird of prey.” The manager of Glenn Curtiss’s aircraft factory, Harry Genung, said it appeared that the Wright brothers believed “the world owed them a bounty” when Genung’s boss’s activities were also grounded by a legal challenge. The resentment created by the Wrights’ paranoiac greed was best summed up by a newspaper cartoon that depicted the brothers furiously waving their fists at an airplane passing overhead and shouting, “Keep out of my air!”
That any French and British aviators had dared come to America to compete at Belmont Park was due to the persuasive powers of Cortlandt Field Bishop, who, as president of the Aero Club of America, had got the brothers to agree to leave their legal team at home when they came to New York. “The Wright Company has given guarantee that no obstacle will be placed in the way of foreign competitors,” Bishop had written in a letter to the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain in August, “and no proceedings will be taken against them during the different events of the meeting. The Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup is included in this agreement.”
The Wrights had acceded to the request from Bishop in the belief that the aviators would be in America only to compete at Belmont Park; but then they had gone to Boston and spluttered in indignation as Grahame-White humiliated their own fliers in a machine they believed—as they did all airplanes—infringed on their copyright. They had been outmaneuvered by the English matinee idol, but what could they do? They couldn’t serve an injunction against Grahame-White, the most popular aviator in the world, and prevent him flying in New York because they had given their word, and to two men to whom their integrity was far more important than their popularity, their word was their bond. They could do nothing, they realized, except prevail in the International Aviation Cup with their new, very secret machine, then pounce on Grahame-White if he should so much as set foot in an airplane in America once the Belmont Park Meet was at an end.
As the shadows on the Belmont Park course lengthened in the autumnal sun of Friday afternoon, a convoy of horse-drawn trucks began to arrive at the hangars carrying the crated machines of the foreign competitors. Hubert Latham directed one of the trucks to the front of his hangar, No. 20, one along from that of Roland Garros, who had just landed after a twenty-minute flight in his Demoiselle.
Latham and his chief mechanic, a Frenchman called Weber, breathed a sigh of relief as they be
gan to pry open the rectangular wooden crate containing the Antoinette monoplane. The machine had been held at the port for three days since its arrival in the hold of the Niagara, and it had taken a furious telephone call on Thursday evening before customs officials agreed to allow the airplane to be delivered to Belmont Park. Eager for his first sight of the famous Antoinette, the correspondent from the New York Herald looked on as the crate was opened. Weber and Latham disappeared inside the crate, and suddenly there was a curse. Then another, and another, each one more vehement than its predecessor. Latham emerged and requested that the Herald’s reporter inspect the plane “as a witness of the condition it was in.” The correspondent peered in and “found that the wings had been severely crushed in by the timbers thrown into the inside by the truckmen, and that under the strain the frail braces of the big wings had collapsed in several places. The tail had also been crushed by some heavy weight falling on it.”
Officials from the Aero Club of America were summoned so they could see for themselves the incompetence of the truckmen, and it was nearly dark when they arrived to find Latham, with a cigarette in his mouth, still trying to calm his irate mechanic. The four men who had brought the crate from the dock offered to help unload it, but their suggestion was met with a barrage of furious Gallic obscenities. The officials apologized and promised Latham every assistance in repairing the damage first thing in the morning.
Latham accepted their apology with characteristic good grace. It was, after all, his fifty-horse power Antoinette; his hundred-horse power machine was due to arrive aboard the steamer Chicago in three days, ample time to prepare for the International Aviation Cup race the following Saturday. Weber wasn’t so easily placated, however, and he muttered dark oaths to the Herald about a deliberate American plot to wreck Monsieur Latham’s chances of victory. “We have traveled with that machine crated in exactly the same manner as it now is all over Europe and have never had it injured . . . I have never seen anybody attempt to handle it in the manner that these men have gone about it.”
Chasing Icarus Page 13
