Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  * This was correct; the Germania put down in Coocoocache, Quebec, and was later officially credited with 1,079 miles, and the Helvetia landed near Ville-Marie in Quebec after a journey of 850 miles.

  * This was the name given to the inner circle of New York’s high society, said to number four hundred persons, with the Astor family at its heart.

  * His younger brother, Denys, later became a big-game hunter in Africa and was immortalized in the film Out of Africa, in which he was portrayed by Robert Redford.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An Epoch-Making Event

  Saturday, October 22, 1910

  From the west coast of America to Western Europe, the fate of the three missing balloons (the America II, the Azurea, and the Düsseldorf II ) was dissected by the Saturday newspapers. The Times of London ascribed a “feeling of alarm” to the race organizers in St. Louis because “it is believed that they landed on Wednesday night, and that the pilots and their assistants are in distress in the forests of Canada.”

  The San Francisco Chronicle, which had hitherto given the race only perfunctory coverage, ran a scaremongering report on its front page, saying that if the crews hadn’t drowned in one of the Great Lakes, then they would most likely be “somewhere in the wilds of Canada, where they may be the victims of starvation before succor can reach them.”

  Randolph Hearst’s New York American also took a perverse delight in speculating what might have happened to the men, in a front-page article that was illustrated with photographs of Alan Hawley and Augustus Post in the America II, and Leon Givaudan and Emil Messner in the Azurea. Starvation and drowning were the most probable scenarios, said the paper, though of course they might have frozen to death in “the severe snow storms that have been raging over Canada,” or then again, “they may be destroyed by wild beasts.”

  Pessimism laced the rest of Saturday’s newspaper coverage, from the front-page headline on the Boston Daily Globe—FEAR THAT SUCCOR MAY NOT REACH THE AERONAUTS IN TIME—to the World’s NEW YORK PILOTS MAY HAVE PERISHED. The exception was the New York Herald, which felt obliged to strike a more upbeat note as their proprietor had, after all, given his name to the race. In its front-page story the paper said that the missing six men were all “inured to such hardships and privations as may befall them in case they have landed in a wild and uninhabited region.” However, what convinced the Herald that there would be a happy outcome was “that Captain Abercron [in the Germania] landed Wednesday morning but was not able to get into communication with the Aero Club before last night, fifty-seven hours later.”

  The confidence of the New York Herald was borne out a few hours later when the Aero Club of America received a telegram from Messner and Givaudan of the Azurea:

  Have landed thirty-two miles northeast of Biscotasing. Algoma district. Had three days and one night to work our way through woods, passing Lake swimming. Temperature at night 11 Fahrenheit. Please wire news to Biscotasing. Messner. Givaudan.

  From the offices of the Aero Club the news hummed down the wires to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch minutes before they were due to go to press, dashing hopes of a relaxing Saturday evening for the editorial staff. As sleeves were rolled up and fresh coffee ordered, the editor struggled to find Biscotasing on the giant map of the Great Lakes region pinned to the wall of his office. Where the goddamn is it! he yelled.

  Someone eventually found it, and carefully the editor measured the distance between the small Ontarian town and his own city—772 miles. Okay, he said, new headline: AZUREA IS DOWN; GERMANIA SEEMS WINNER OF RACE. Time was running out if they wanted to get to press on time, but they had still one thing to do: update the log of the finishing positions with the Swiss balloon. It was a hurried job, rejigging the template at the last minute, and it showed when the paper was bought and read by St. Louisians on Saturday evening. Azurea was spelled Azuria, and its pilot was “Meisner,” not Messner. A small error, however, and one barely noticed by the men and women who were more interested to read that “officials of the Aero Club of America in New York, Saturday, declared unofficially, according to news telegrams to the Post-Dispatch, that they believe the balloon Germania is the probable winner of the race . . . [and] estimate that their distance traveled was 1,200 miles. This would give the Germans the world’s record.”

  As for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post, the Post-Dispatch had no news. On a sketch of the Canadian wilderness the paper superimposed a photo of the pair along with a large question mark, as black and forboding as most people’s fears.

  The cold woke Augustus Post on Saturday morning, the sort of cold that pierces a man and wraps itself around his bones. He lay curled up in a ball under his blanket, listening to the wind whip the sand against the bivouac. One glance at Hawley’s gaunt face told Post that it had been another wretched night for his companion. His soft jawline was covered in a tabby-colored stubble, and the gentle eyes were rimmed red with exhaustion.

  He didn’t lie when Post asked about his knee—it hurt like hell—but he was game to press on. It would soon improve once he’d walked out the overnight stiffness. Post prepared breakfast, a chicken roll for Hawley and a piece of chicken and an egg for himself. It was gone in seconds and neither man felt any the better for it. They set off along the beach “with the weather so cold that at times our clothing was frozen to our bodies.” After a mile or so the sand ended at the foot of a jumble of smooth boulders, clustered together like giant eggs in a basket. Hawley told Post he would give it a go, but as they started to climb over the boulders, “Hawley’s leg hurt him so severely that we could go no farther that day. We forced ourselves back a quarter of a mile to a protected spot we had passed under a bank overhung with balsam and sheltered by the projecting roots of a big white birch.”

  The sky was now pencil gray and Post knew more snow was on its way, so while Hawley made a bivouac from the balsam boughs, Post took care of the fire, and “none too soon, for it began to rain, first a drizzle, ending in light snow.”

  They remained in camp for the rest of the day, sleeping and sharing the odd chocolate bar as the snow fell. Now and again Post braved the elements to scour the beach for fresh supplies of driftwood with which to feed the fire, and when it was blazing to his satisfaction he and Hawley “talked over the events of the voyage and incidents in our lives.” They buoyed each other with confident predictions that they must have won the race; after all, if their calculations were correct, they had traveled around twelve hundred miles, a new world’s record; they talked of food and described to one another the first meal they would order when back in New York. Post pulled Hawley’s leg about his promise to the Bronx Zoological Gardens to bring back a muskrat from their trip. If we do see a muskrat, Post said to his friend, laughing, we’ll eat it, not carry it.

  The snow had turned to sleet by the time the sky turned black, but before the pair turned in, Post fed the fire more logs and Hawley experimented with several positions before settling on the one that caused his knee the least discomfort. Hawley bade his friend good-night and closed his eyes, but long after Post had fallen asleep, he was still awake, wrestling with a dilemma he knew he could no longer postpone. Finally Hawley dozed off, having decided that in the morning if he was unable to continue, he would insist that his companion go on alone, leaving behind half their stash of food, and the revolver.

  Rain was still over Belmont Park on Saturday morning, but only a persistent drizzle, not the heavy downpour of a few hours earlier. A stiff breeze carried the rain from the east, past the grandstand, past dead man’s turn, until it lashed the doors of the green hangars at the western end of the track.

  Sodden reporters congregated in the press box and told each other it could be worse—at least they hadn’t had to fork out $450 for the privilege of a box in the covered grandstand. They looked out across the course, “at the rain-soaked stretches of the grass field [which] rapidly promised signs of being transformed into a lake,” and shook their heads glumly at the sight of the muddy dirt track ov
er which the likes of Sysonby had once galloped. The national flags that drooped from their poles above the hangars mirrored the shoulders of the few optimists who’d arrived at first light and paid $1 for the privilege of getting soaked in the field enclosure. Some of those bedraggled spectators had bought a cup of coffee for twenty-five cents from a kiosk and were now sheltering under the steel arches of the grandstand, while others huddled under umbrellas, flicking through the official program, which they’d bought for twenty-five cents. They weren’t amused: 114 pages, of which 72 were advertisements. Others unfurled newspapers from inside their thick jackets and caught up with the latest news on the hunt for Hawley and Post. Then they turned their attention to the previews of today’s events at Belmont Park and laughed sardonically as they read the opening sentence of the New York Herald’s front-page story: “At the dawn of the opening day of the great International aviation tournament at Belmont Park auspicious weather is all there is now needed to make the Meet an epoch-making event.”

  New York Sun, promising its readers that they were about to witness the best airplane show in the short but exciting history of aviation, The cautioned those intending to attend later in the day that though the meet wasn’t scheduled to start until one thirty P.M., “airmen have a habit of working not only during office hours but before and after as well [so] you’ll run little risk of having time hang heavy by making the early start.”

  Not all newspapers were so toadying in their coverage of the tournament. Those spectators who had bought their weekly copy of the New York City Review were surprised to read a venomous piece by Colgate Baker. All the recent aviation hullabaloo had annoyed Baker, who reckoned that the fliers would have people believe there was some great mystery to flying a plane when in fact there was none. Yet they’d fooled the public, and now they were “coining their heroic feats at our expense in greedy and almost frenzied haste.” Baker excepted John Moisant from his polemic, a man he considered frank and honest, and reserved his fiercest criticism for Claude Grahame-White. Baker was sick of Americans fawning over the Englishman and found it distasteful to see him treated as a “conquering hero, followed everywhere by a crowd of adoring flying fans.” Hero? hissed Baker. He was nothing of the sort; while Moisant “is painfully modest and self-deprecating in his manner, avoiding the limelight whenever possible, Mr. Grahame-White . . . delights to bask in the full glare of the calcium and wants all that there is in the game.”

  “Look over there!” the cry went up, and all eyes turned toward where the spectator was pointing. The doors of hangar No. 17 were being folded back by two men in damp overalls, and in the next instant the nose of a biplane appeared. “Who’s seventeen?” someone shouted. People leafed through the advertisement-laden program until they found the hangar numbers. Seventeen belonged to Tod Shriver, a former printer from Manchester, Ohio, who had been one of Glenn Curtiss’s mechanics when he triumphed at Rheims in 1909. Earlier in the summer Shriver had qualified as an aviator in his own right, only to break his legs in a crash two weeks later. But here he was, Slim as he was known, in leather coat and well-cut suit, gamely hobbling toward his machine on crutches. He handed the sticks to a mechanic and accepted a helping hand up into the seat. Once he’d made himself comfortable and carried out his final checks, Shriver signaled for his mechanic to start him up. The fifty-horse power engine of his Dietz biplane hummed into life, and the spectators sheltering under the grandstand raced round to see the first flight proper of the Belmont Park Meet.

  Shriver took off into the easterly wind and soon passed the grandstand at a height of one hundred feet, the engine now burring contentedly. He banked left, round one of the red-and-white pylons, and flew north for a few hundred meters before negotiating another pylon and turning west, so he was flying parallel to the back straight of the racecourse. Everyone watched as Shriver swung southwest, past hangar row, and toward dead man’s turn. To the spectators standing nearest to the tight corner, the strength of the wind was the same as it had been when Shriver had wheeled out his plane, but a hundred feet in the air there were eddies and gusts, one of which caught the little biplane as it approached the dreaded turn. Shriver’s plane dipped, then listed to the right. A collective gasp came from the press box; one or two of the journalists jumped to their feet, their hands covering their mouths. They could see Shriver tussling with the machine’s controls. “At 50 feet the biplane appeared to have righted itself,” reported the New York Herald, “then it suddenly turned and plunged to the earth. As it struck the machine crumpled up and it seemed that the aviator must have been killed or seriously injured.”

  People ducked under the white guardrail and sprinted across the grass toward the wreck. Shriver was pulled out, bleeding heavily from deep wounds to his face and to his hip, where a bolt had gouged out a lump of flesh. He promised he would be back flying by the end of the week, but his helpers knew they were the words of a man whose senses lay among the wreckage of his airplane. Shriver was put in an automobile and driven to Nassau Hospital in Mineola by Mr. Dietz, the man whose machine was now being cleared away by officials.*

  Throughout the morning the other aviators began to arrive at Belmont Park. Armstrong Drexel stepped out of his chauffeur-driven automobile, along with his brother and sister-in-law, who retired to the box they had hired for the week. Jacques de Lesseps, reinvigorated after his Canadian tryst, turned up with his brother and sister, and Hubert Latham appeared with his mechanic to see to their damaged airplane. Roland Garros and Edmond Audemars journeyed out together from the Knickerbocker Hotel and tossed a coin to see if it would be the French tricolor or Swiss cross that fluttered above their hangar. Audemars guessed right and the Swiss flag was run up the pole.

  John Moisant skipped onto the grounds with all the excitement of a small boy on Christmas Day, thrilled at the prospect of the challenges that lay ahead. He was greeted by his French mechanics, including the faithful Albert Fileux, who had spent the night sleeping in the hangar under the wings of Moisant’s replacement Blériot.

  Claude Grahame-White showed up soon after with Pauline Chase, whom he escorted to her seat in the grandstand. Having kissed her goodbye, he walked over to the hangars, stopping for a friendly word outside most, but not the four cavernous tents in which were housed the Wrights’ machines.

  Although the rain had started to leak through the roof of the tents, forcing the machines to be covered with tarpaulin, Wilbur Wright was surprisingly unconcerned. In fact, for a man who was usually solemnly reserved, he seemed in singularly good humor. When the correspondent from the Washington Post plucked up the courage to ask why, Wright explained that shortly after breakfast he had received a telegram from his legal team. “All our suits for infringement of patent rights have been decided in our favor in the German courts,” he exclaimed, his hawklike eyes bright with triumph. The suits elsewhere were still pending, he continued, but Wright was clearly “confident that the courts of America and Europe an countries would follow Germany’s lead.”

  Word of the decision carried swiftly down the row of hangars, and, said the Post’s correspondent, it “concerned the foreign fliers.” If other countries did indeed endorse the German ruling, then “no Blériot, Cur-tiss, Farman, or in fact any make of machine that has adapted the . . . vital points first worked to a practical solution by the Wrights—which includes every design of air machine in existence—henceforth can legally be flown.”

  It wasn’t just the foreign aviators who now faced the prospect of being grounded by the Wrights’ bloody-minded tenacity. Glenn Curtiss, the winner of the 1909 International Aviation Cup, was also embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the brothers, one that was being buffeted from court to court, and although for the moment he was still at liberty to fly and manufacture airplanes, the German decision had worrying implications for his company.

  Curtiss and his team of fliers arrived at the racecourse from the Belvedere Hotel, bringing with them on the back of a truck their new airplane, the one that was almost as
secret as the Wrights’ and had so excited the New York Herald a few days earlier. Enmity ran deep between the two factions, and the Curtiss aviators received welcoming sneers from the Wright fliers as they approached hangars 5 and 6. Curtiss considered the brothers grasping and dogmatic, while the Wrights let it be known “that they didn’t think the Curtiss planes were any good and that they were dangerous to fly.” Furthermore, Walter Brookins, Arch Hoxsey, Ralph Johnstone, and Frank Coffyn (who had recently retired from flying but who was present at Belmont Park) “were taught by the Wrights that the Curtiss crowd was just no good at all.” Curtiss and his quartet of fliers shut the door of hangar No. 5 and began to uncrate the airplane as the rain continued to drum on the roof. The eldest of the four aviators was James “Bud” Mars, a thirty-four-year-old from Michigan, who had changed his family name from McBride to Mars on joining a circus as a trapeze artist. Further stints followed as a high diver and fairground parachutist, before Mars earned his aviation license in August 1910. Two months later, on October 1, he’d unsuccessfully tried to win the $1,000 on offer for the first man to fly across the Rocky Mountains. He was found by a search party sitting unharmed beside his smashed machine having crashed into a rock face.

  Mars was best pals with Eugene Ely, a married man from Davenport, Iowa, who carried the nickname King of the Ozone and was famous for thrilling the crowds with the Ely Glide. Climbing to a thousand feet, he would then shut off his engine and rush down to earth at an angle sometimes as steep as thirty degrees before pulling out of the dive at the last moment.