The pair said they would have that glass of wine after all, and as they rued their misfortune, Post spotted a newspaper on a table. May I? he asked the priest. Of course. Post picked up the paper and his jaw dropped. There on the front page “was a big headline about Hawley and Post lost in the wilderness and all the powers of the Canadian government being rallied to their rescue.” Post showed it to Hawley, and the priest jumped to his feet, exclaiming, “This is you! Are you these gentlemen?” Before Post could answer, sounds came from the telegraph, followed by squeals of excitement from the priest. Communication had been reestablished. He took his seat in front of the telegraph as Hawley asked if he would send the first message to Charles H. Heitman in New York City, a good friend but also a member of the Aero Club of America: LANDED PERIBONKA RIVER. LAKE CHILAGOMA [this was Hawley’s best attempt to spell Tchitagama], NINETEENTH. ALL WELL. HAWLEY.
Hawley then instructed a telegram be sent to his brother, William, in New York, only this time he didn’t attempt to wrestle with the lake: LANDED IN WILDERNESS WEEK AGO. FIFTY MILES NORTH OF CHICOUTIMI. BOTH WELL. ALAN
My turn, said Post, stepping forward, and asking the priest to send a message . . . to whom? His estranged wife, Emma? No. He would prefer to let his sister, Mrs. Clapp-Ward, in Long Island, know he was okay: LANDED SAFELY NEAR LAKE ST. JOHN. JUST OUT OF WOODS. ALL WELL. RETURNING. AUGUSTUS.
That was it, no one else needed to be notified for the time being. But then they saw the French newspaper on the table, with news of their disappearance and the prediction that the Düsseldorf II had won the International Balloon Cup. Perhaps, too, there was also that quote from Sam Perkins, about his belief that Hawley and Post were “lost forever.” They asked Abel Simaud to send one final message, to Perkins: LANDED PERI-BONKA RIVER, NORTH LAKE CHILAGOMA. 19TH. ALL WELL, RETURNING. HAWLEY-POST.
They didn’t care that they’d butchered the name of the lake; they just wanted Perkins to know the trophy wasn’t his. The French newspaper had printed a map of the Düsseldorf’s position, and Hawley and Post knew they had landed farther north; not just farther north than the Düsseldorf, but farther north than every other balloon in the competition.
From St. Ambroise, Hawley and Post rode in a buckboard to Chicoutimi along the potholed dirt track. Several times they had to jump down and walk up the steep hills alongside the exhausted pony. They arrived at the town’s only hotel, the Château Saguenay, at ten o’clock in the evening after a five-hour journey and thanked the priest for all his help. Please accept this donation for the parish poor, they said, slipping several dollar bills into the priest’s hand.
No one was at the front desk when Hawley and Post entered the hotel. They rang the bell and waited. After a few seconds the manager, Mr. Joseph Guay, appeared from a back office. Used to welcoming city folk on hunting trips, he wasn’t perturbed by the sight of the disheveled pair. “Back from the bush?” he said with a smile. “Well, I hope you had the same good luck as the three gentlemen from Boston who were on my hunting ground last week.”
Post laughed. “We had good luck, but not the one you speak of.”
Guay listened to the account of the men’s trek and verified their landing place. He had hunted for years in that area and was familiar with the mountainside and the gorge in which they had come down. After supper, Guay took Hawley and Post into his office and they sent a couple more telegrams; then Guay explained that as a commissioner of the Superior Court of the District of Chicoutimi, he had the power to authenticate their point of descent. He signed a statement to that effect and handed it to them. It was nearly midnight now, and Hawley tucked the statement into his pocket and with a weary “Good night” climbed the stairs to his room. Post agreed to speak to the reporter from the Associated Press, if a cognac could first be produced. The reporter yelled for a bottle of the hotel’s finest, then sat down with his note pad and pencil. In his opinion the two Americans had arrived in Chicoutimi looking like “half wild men” with their clothes torn and muddy, and he was eager to hear all about it. Post narrated their trek without resorting to melodrama or mock heroics. He made no mention of his companion’s injured knee nor of the bitter temperatures, saying only that the terrain had been “extremely rough and our travel was necessarily slow and arduous in the extreme, as there were no trails we could follow. The bush was dense and we had a hard time fighting our way through.” Warmed by the hotel and relaxed by his drink, Post was incapable of summoning the words to adequately describe the nights they had spent in the open. It had been a strenuous trip, he told the reporter, “but we didn’t suffer any really severe handicaps.” Post drained his glass and got to his feet. But before he retired for the night, a thought struck him—what had happened to Walter Wellman. Did the reporter know? He told Post the outcome, and the balloonist “was disappointed but not surprised that the attempt had proven a failure.”
A gale was blowing on Wednesday morning at Belmont Park, and Allan Ryan scowled as he watched the flags above the hangars dancing in the wind. The prospects of a full day’s flying seemed slim. Perhaps it had been a mistake to stage America’s first international aviation competition at Belmont Park, he mused. Hadn’t the New York Times called the ground not so long ago the “breeziest race track now in use . . . a veritable cave of the winds”?
Look on the bright side, Ryan murmured: the sun was shining, his wife’s speeding fine had been small, and his appendix, which had been grumbling for the past week, was dormant. Then Ryan grimaced as he remembered that later in the morning he had to tour the course with Monsieur Pierre Gasnier, a representative of the Aero Club of France, so that the Frenchman could decide whether he would advise his compatriots to compete in Saturday’s big race. It was going to be another long day, Ryan told himself, treasuring the early-morning solitude of the clubhouse.
One of the first aviators to arrive at Belmont Park was Claude Grahame-White, who, along with his manager, Sydney McDonald, rode from New York City in a fancy carriage belonging to the Hotel Astor. A few reporters were already hanging around the entrance hoping for a few words from the competitors, but having read the morning papers, the Englishman was in no mood for conversation. The papers had lampooned his timidity and contrasted it with the nerve of Johnstone and Hoxsey, soaring to the heavens, and the dash of Moisant’s and de Lesseps’s cross-country flights. Grahame-White had done nothing more than go “for a daily promenade around the track.” Perhaps, sneered the New York Sun, it would be best if he “substituted an aerial taximeter for his barograph,” such was his penchant for charging people for a short flight. The paper then insulted Grahame-White by calling him an “air chauffeur,” on the very page in which it recounted Count de Lesseps’s reaction to the same description by Cortlandt Bishop.
Why had they turned against me? Grahame-White asked his manager. A fortnight earlier he’d been the darling of America, yet now he was being cruelly mocked. Some sections of the crowd had even started to sing a rhyme as he flew remorselessly round the track:
Aviation is vexation,
Postponement is as bad;
They call me rash, but I get the cash
As fast as I can add.
But Grahame-White was merely flying to his strengths. His Farman biplane was reliable but slow, ill equipped to challenge for any speed prizes or altitude contests. The Blériot racer that he’d ordered from France had yet to arrive, so all Grahame-White could do was enter the hourly distance events and use his exceptional physical stamina to good effect.* All the laps he clocked had another purpose, of course, one that hadn’t occurred to the public or the press; that was to familiarize himself with every nuance of the course, so that on the day of the International Aviation Cup race he would know when best to throttle, when to bank, where the wind swirled, and, most crucially, how best to take dead man’s turn. As for the charge of his being a harpy, that was nonsense. So far at Belmont Park he’d earned $1,700 in prize money, more than anyone else, but not by much. Arch Hoxsey had $1,575 and John Moisant had $1,
300. As for the accusation of his being an air chauffeur, Grahame-White had taken up only one passenger at Belmont Park, and that was Eleonora Sears. It wasn’t as if he’d instructed spectators to form an orderly queue outside his hangar.
But Grahame-White guessed the real reason for the hostility, and it had nothing to do with aviation. The evidence was right there in front of him, in the photographs in the World and the New York Herald, which depicted him at the controls of his grounded biplane, while snuggled up behind was a laughing Eleonora Sears, wearing very much the look of a young woman in love. Inside the papers were sly references to the pair’s having lunched together at the Turf and Field Club. How romantic, was the intimation, were it not that Grahame-White was engaged to Pauline Chase. What sort of man would treat his fiancée with such contempt? Not a gentleman.
Now, as Grahame-White arrived at Belmont Park, he bridled with indignation at his treatment. Jumping down from the carriage, he glowered at the reporters and handed the driver a tip. The watching reporter from the New York Sun noticed that the “person on the box did not lose himself in transports of enthusiasm” at the size of Grahame-White’s largesse.
Eleonora Sears arrived not long after her alleged beau with her brother, Frederick, who was fresh off the midnight express from Boston. He had been dispatched by his parents with implicit instructions to prevent his sister from riding the sky with Grahame-White, and a telegram had also been sent to Miss Sears. Was it because they feared for their daughter’s safety, or her reputation? Eleonora didn’t know, but she told the reporters at the front gate of Belmont Park that she was “disgusted” at the order. “I love it,” she said of flying. “I’m crazy about it and I came down here to learn to fly.”
Sears and her brother showed their passes to the Pinkerton security men and headed toward hangar row. She had braided her long brown hair before leaving the family apartment, but she had to hold on tight to her sailor’s hat as the wind blew hard from the northwest.
Quite a throng had already formed in and around the aviators’ hangars, and it continued to swell throughout the morning. Katharine Wright appeared, having refused to say anything to the press about her brothers’ latest machine—reticence was obviously a family trait, said the reporters, laughing, after she’d gone—and the wives of Glenn Curtiss, Eugene Ely, and James Mars arrived laden with picnic hampers for a hangar lunch. Clifford Harmon escorted his wife through the gate, expressing his concern for Messrs Hawley and Post, and confirming he had indeed offered a reward of $1,000 for news of their fate.
The McKenzie sisters, Ethel and Grace, wafted through the entrance, with Grace blushing as she accepted the congratulations of everyone on her engagement to Jacques de Lesseps. Colonel John Jacob Astor emerged from his limousine with his eighteen-year-old son, Vincent, and Mrs. William H. Force and her two daughters, Katharine and seventeen-year-old Madeline, the latter trying her darnedest to look like an adult in a brown walking costume and a black felt hat topped with coque plume. Astor’s look of contentment was similar to Grace McKenzie’s, thought the reporters. Was he simply enjoying his newfound freedom after his recent divorce, or did it have more to do with the presence of Madeline Force, the teenage girl nearly thirty years his junior who was rumored to be his companion?* Then the reporters began to nudge each other and point toward an automobile that had just arrived. A dainty black boot emerged, then a small but perfectly formed leg . . . and out stepped Pauline Chase, looking like a million dollars in a navy blue suit with mink collar and cuffs. This should be interesting, the reporters said with a wink. The reporter from the World trailed Chase toward hangar row, willing Eleonora Sears to appear. And suddenly he saw her, just at the moment Chase did. “Hardly had the two conspicuous young women spied each other,” he wrote, “than they promptly proceeded to pass in opposite directions without recognizing. To the spectators standing near, the incident was immediately understood.”
Everyone who visited hangar row was asked to make a contribution to the reward on offer to find Alan Hawley and Augustus Post (on top of the $1,000 offered by Clifford Harmon). Aviators, their friends, and their families opened their wallets, and $2,000 was collected in little more than an hour. Glenn Curtiss and his team of fliers pledged $1,000 among them, Charles Hamilton and Ralph Johnstone threw in $100 apiece, and even Grahame-White was rumored to have dipped into his deep pockets for something. The Wright brothers were generous, too, remembering well the help Augustus Post had given them during their aeroplane trials at Fort Myer two years earlier.
The benevolence seemed to be infectious at Belmont Park this day, penetrating even the aloof exterior of Monsieur Pierre Gasnier, representative of the Aero Club of France. He, Allan Ryan, and Cortlandt Bishop had spent the greater part of the morning touring the course and discussing the French objections. Gasnier suggested that certain trees be cut down, that depressions be filled, and that half a dozen telegraph poles be removed. He laughed off Le Blanc’s suggestion to demolish a row of houses; that was just Alfred’s inimitable sense of mischief. After the trio had returned to the club house Gasnier announced with a smile that, provided the changes were made before Saturday’s race, “there is no further cause for controversy.”
At one thirty P.M. a member of the Signal Corps knelt beside a hole in the ground at the back of the scoreboard and lit the fuse of a signal bomb. As its yellow smoke scooted across the course, the hangar doors remained firmly shut: after Sunday’s debacle, no one would risk taking off in such a wind. The Evening Sun reporter noted that the inactivity on hangar row “brought disappointment to the calamity howlers who looked . . . for tumbles if the airmen should decide to risk their necks.” The crowd had come expecting to see a battle royal—eight Americans in four types of planes flying twenty laps to decide the three places in the Stars and Stripes’ team for Saturday’s grand race. The fans had talked of nothing else on the trains out from New York (except whether Hawley and Post had been eaten by wolves or bears, or frozen to death, or perhaps starved), and they wanted action, but the committee had no intention of endangering America’s top fliers three days before the biggest competition in international aviation. Cortlandt Bishop and Allan Ryan called a meeting of the eight competitors, and the elimination race was postponed to Thursday, with the aviators free to begin the twenty-lap course anytime between nine A.M. and five thirty P.M.
The crowd was becoming restless as the hands of the clock on the scoreboard neared four. The wind had eased since Peter Prunty’s announcement two hours earlier that the International Aviation Cup elimination race had been postponed to Thursday, and the spectators wanted some action. Suddenly, over on hangar row “they saw the long shape of Hubert Latham’s Antoinette being coaxed out of its lair by the diligent hostlers.”
With Latham in the air, others followed, and soon a swarm of airplanes were in the sky: Emile Aubrun in his Blériot, then Count de Lesseps, René Simon, and Roland Garros. Out came the Americans, headed by Armstrong Drexel, with Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone in close attendance, and the newest of the Wright fliers, Phil Parmalee, also up. Good grief, exclaimed the reporter from the New York Sun, was that Grahame-White? It was, and he “was spurning his old stone sled of a Farman . . . [and] cutting aerial didoes in a Blériot.”
Latham, Aubrun, and Drexel headed east, toward the captive balloon over Hempstead Plains, racing each other the twenty miles there and back in the cross-country event. Hoxsey and Johnstone laid on a few of their favorite aerial cowboy stunts before the gallery, and Parmalee and Brookins circled the course in the hourly distance event.
Brookins was flying one of the Wrights’ new machines; it wasn’t the Baby Grand, but it was a similar design and Orville had given him instructions to put the wind up Grahame-White. Show him what it can do, Orville told Brookins. Grahame-White had swapped his Farman for his Blériot as a defiant response to his knockers, but it was his old fifty-horse power Blériot and not the hundred-horse power racer that was scheduled to arrive in New York in twenty-four hours.
Orville Wright didn’t care. He kept a stopwatch on the pair for several laps, jotting down their times in a note pad. The reporter from the New York Sun watched as Brookins gained on Grahame-White until they were virtually nose to tail. The American drew level, then eased ahead, to the evident delight of his compatriots. In the grandstand a man in a leather coat leaped to his feet and screamed, “There goes the winner of the big race!” Orville Wright shared the man’s confidence. He snapped shut his stopwatch and turned triumphantly to the correspondent of the New York Herald standing alongside him. “Seven seconds better in each lap than Grahame-White in his Blériot,” Orville said with just the faintest of smiles.
In all the excitement caused by Brookins’s humiliation of Grahame-White—and the return of the three machines in the cross-country race—many people had failed to spot Arch Hoxsey and Ralph John-stone climbing off southeast into the slate-colored sky. But now, nearly an hour later, neither man had reappeared out of the night sky. Hundreds of spectators loyally waited for their return, and though the correspondent from the New York Sun could no longer see those people around him, he heard how they “raised their voices in excited arguments as one assured his neighbor that he could see the stars blotted out where the airplanes were coursing aloft in the blackness.”
At the entrance to one of their hangars Wilbur and Orville Wright were becoming increasingly concerned. “Where are they?” fretted Wilbur, looking to the heavens. “Where are they?” The brothers ordered their mechanics to pour the contents of two five-gallon drums of gasoline onto the grass, and with a great whoosh the markers were ignited. A few minutes later people heard the “whir and thudding of propellers,” then someone gave a yell “and a black form was seen flitting across a star lighted space.” Then a second shape became discernible, and within sixty seconds both airplanes were safely back on the ground. Their barographs when compared showed that Hoxsey had climbed to 6,183 feet, three hundred feet higher than his friend. Not that Johnstone cared, for it took several minutes to pry his gloves from his frozen fingers, and “it was only after an hour of brisk rubbing with alcohol that he was able to dress in his street clothes and leave the tent.”
Chasing Icarus Page 21
