Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  At three o’clock they agreed to pitch camp when next they came to a suitable spot, and a few minutes later they found such a place in the lee of a steep bank by the lake. “There was plenty of driftwood and birch-bark,” wrote Post, “and a fire was soon crackling to cheer us up.” Post informed Hawley with a melodramatic flourish that he was going to prepare for them both a most sumptuous supper, a surprise dish he had been planning for a couple of days. He unwrapped a dozen chicken bones from a handkerchief, and with what meat remained on the bird he cooked a delicious broth. Afterward they lay back in their bivouac plump with satisfaction, both with a sense that they were through the worst of their ordeal.

  In the early hours of Sunday, Samuel Perkins sent a message to his father in Boston: ALL SAFE. 1230 MILES. LAKE KISKISINK, QUEBEC. By the time the news was made public it was too late for many of the Sunday papers, but not the St. Louis Republic, which had been tipped off by a member of the St. Louis Aero Club. The editor summoned his staff and a new front page was laid in time for the distribution trucks: DÜSSELDORF II DOWN AT KISKISINK, QUEBEC; NEW WORLD’S RECORD. Having checked Kiskisink on the map, the Republic editor estimated the balloon had flown 1,240 miles, not the 1,230 miles given by Perkins in his telegram. But 1,240 miles or 1,230 miles, who cared. It was a new balloon record, one that beat the Germania into second place. The Düsseldorf II was the winner of the International Balloon Cup. Yes, it was unfortunate that it bore the name of a German city and was pi loted by a German, but the aide was an American boy, and for most newspapers that was reason enough to rejoice.

  For the Boston Globe there was an additional cause for celebration: Perkins was not only an American, he was one of theirs. PERKINS OF BOSTON AND GUERICKE SAFE ran the headline, as if in misspelling the German pilot’s name they were puckishly undermining his significance. The Globe proudly listed Perkins’s aviation achievements and boasted that though he was “perhaps better known as a manipulator of kites of all descriptions than as a balloonist . . . his knowledge of the upper air currents has long been recognized.”

  More details emerged throughout the day as Perkins talked to reporters either over the telephone or face-to-face with those who had already been dispatched to the region to search for Hawley and Post. Perkins began with the bare bones of their story, but then, like Augustus Post and his chicken broth, he began to flesh out his tale with each subsequent recital. In his first interview, quoted in the Sunday edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Perkins described how they had descended from ten thousand feet as they approached Lake Kiskisink; not long after he told the World that the Düsseldorf II had “dropped eighteen thousand feet in nine minutes.” Once on the ground he and Gericke had packed a few provisions and started to traipse “through dense undergrowth” for three days. On later reflection, the pair “literally had to cut our way through the underbrush. We crawled on our hands and knees. Our clothes were torn almost to shreds.” Was that the most harrowing part of your trip? he was asked. Oh, no, said Perkins, that was when “we heard wolves and other wild animals . . . the only weapon we had was a little .22-caliber revolver.” By the time the New York Times got hold of Perkins he “had seen tracks of very large animals, evidently bears . . . The worry was constant, especially as we had no firearms and our only weapons were jackknives.”

  But amid all the contradictory accounts of their adventure, which had ended when they encountered a gamekeeper on Saturday afternoon, the one unequivocal fact was that the Düsseldorf II had covered 1,240 miles. They had won the balloon race. And as for the whereabouts of Hawley and Post . . . ?

  The Sunday papers didn’t hold out much hope. The New York American said they probably landed in “the wild Nipigon country, inhabited only by a scattered tribe of Ojibway Indians and infested with wolves.” Iowa’s Sunday Times Tribune reported that Colonel Theodore Schaeck of the Helvetia had seen a balloon falling into Lake Huron, which he now took to be the America II. Even if they hadn’t plunged into a lake, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, how could they possibly survive now that “winter has already begun in Canada and the berries and roots on which the missing aeronauts might have subsisted in another season have disappeared”?

  The signal bomb exploded at one thirty P.M. on Sunday afternoon and the second day of the Belmont Park Meet began, but within seconds the yellow smoke was being whipped across the course by a violent wind from the northwest. While the sun played peekaboo through the clouds, the flags on top of the hangars were taut in the gale. A khaki-clad man scaled the ladder to the giant scoreboard and hung two big white letters, K and R—the code for a wind velocity of more than 25 mph. None of the aviators felt like venturing out; they shared Grahame-White’s view that with the flimsy construction of their machines an airman “flying in a wind is rather in the position of a man who puts to sea in a small boat when waves are high. Once he can clear the shore, the boatman feels at ease; but should a breaker catch him before he reaches the smooth, rolling billows a little distance from the beach, his craft may be overturned and dashed to pieces. So with the airman; his moments of peril, when flying in a gusty wind, come just as he is soaring from the ground, and when descending from a flight. Then an airwave, like a seawave, may lift his craft and drive it with a crash to earth.”

  There was no ill wind for the vendors, however, who enjoyed a roaring trade as the majority of spectators idled away the time buying things they didn’t need. A photographer who had constructed a replica of a small biplane charged people to have their picture taken sitting at the controls wearing a tatty flying helmet he’d picked up from somewhere. Not far away two Gypsy fortune-tellers dressed in yellow-and-red kimonos pledged to disclose people’s future for a quarter. Up at the very top of the grandstand, the cheap seats, a covey of impish fans decided it would be fun to play a prank on the ladies and gentlemen preening on the lawn below. Sometimes it was a whooping cheer, sometimes a burst of excited applause, but each time the youngsters made a noise “the unfortunates who were promenading, assuming that a machine was coming out of its hangar across the field, would charge in a wild rush for the railing.”

  Among the cream of Manhattan society, wraps and furs were much in evidence, with a veritable menagerie of animals sacrificed to keep out the cold: black beaver hats, brown beaver hats, a muff of silver-fox fur, coats of baby seal, white coney, or bearskin, one entire costume of baby lamb, and a hat bordered with Rus sian sable. Only one lady, according to the New York Herald, had bucked the trend, and that was Eleonora Sears, the Boston socialite and erstwhile passenger of Claude Grahame-White’s. She was “dressed in a severely plain costume of brown tweed, made shorter than walking length.”

  Suddenly a message was relayed from the club house to the hangars by one of the race organizers. The measurement of the wind’s velocity was mistaken, the anemometer on top of the grandstand had been checked and the wind was sixteen miles an hour, not twenty-five. The implication was clear—would someone mind putting on a show for the public?

  A small man with oversize ears, sallow skin, sunken eyes, and hair the color of copper wire gave a contemptuous laugh from a rickety steamer chair outside the door of hangar No. 2. Charles Keeney Hamilton might have risen from his chair to remonstrate with the official if his legs had allowed, but he’d arrived at Belmont Park on Friday “limping, scarred and speaking with an impediment.” What is it this time, Charlie? the other aviators had asked, laughing. The twenty-nine-year-old from Connecticut dismissed their questions with a playful wave of his cane. Everyone knew the history of the likable Hamilton, the man the French called trompe-la-morte (death dodger) because of his record of fifty crashes in the past two years. “There’s little left of the original Hamilton” was the joke rookie aviators all heard when first introduced to the man. He’d broken both legs, both collarbones, one ankle, several ribs, dislocated a shoulder, crushed his pelvis, and in his most recent accident, the one from which he was still suffering, he’d endured a novel agony. Flying in a meet at Sacramento, California, the
previous month, Hamil-ton’s rudder had jammed and he’d flopped from the sky in front of twenty thousand spectators. Several days later, swathed in bandages and propped up in a hospital bed, he told reporters that as he smashed into the ground “the steering wheel jammed me back against the radiator and held me fast, while the scalding water trickled over me.” He was still conscious when they carried him to the ambulance, and even after being pumped full of opiates, one thing had stuck in Hamilton’s memory—the looks of pitiless satisfaction on the faces of the spectators. “I really believe,” he said later, “that this game has gotten to the stage where they are disappointed if someone isn’t injured or killed.”

  No, Hamilton told the Belmont Park official, he wouldn’t take to the air in such a wind just to amuse the paying public. Firm shakes of the head came from other aviators, too, many of whom shared Hamilton’s views on the people who came to watch them, people who would in another time have shrieked with delight in Rome’s Colosseum. A reporter who’d asked Eugene Ely for his thoughts on the average aviation spectator was told, “I see the crowd below me looking upward, and I know every man who watches me start downward half expects to see me killed. I suppose they all figure how they’ll help pick up my bones someday.” And Ralph Johnstone, though he might fly like a man with neither wit nor wisdom, was no fool when it came to the public. They weren’t there for the “advancement of science,” as one newspaper had suggested to Johnstone, that was pure bunk. The people went to see him and Arch Hoxsey because “what they want are thrills. And if we fail, do they think of us and go away weeping? Not by a long shot. They’re too busy watching the next man and wondering if he will repeat the performance.”

  No one seemed prepared to fly. Up in the press stand the New York Sun correspondent noted, “When 1:30 came and went and there was no starting of the first events most folks climbed down [from their boxes] to the platform before the grandstand or to the field lawn just for the sake of keeping moving.” A few lost patience and began to drift away, a terrible apparition for the Belmont Park committee, who thought of all the bills and dimes escaping their grasp.

  More pressure was applied to the aviators, and this time with success. Perhaps John Moisant succumbed first to the pleading of the organizers, or maybe it was Grahame-White, ignoring his own advice about the wind. But whoever, a few minutes before two o’clock the pair had ordered their mechanics to wheel out their planes and the race was on to see who would be first to take off.

  As the blue flag above the scoreboard was lowered and the white one run up, spectators thumbed through their programs searching for the page with the flag denotations, the same ones in use at the Times Tower: red—flight in progress; white—flight probable; blue—no flight. The committeemen sat back smiling.

  Grahame-White fastened his fur-lined gabardine jacket as his mechanics filled the tanks of his Farman biplane with petrol and castoroil. Armstrong Drexel wandered over and asked his friend if thought it prudent to go up on such a day. Wasn’t Grahame-White breaking one of his cardinal laws—never to take a risk just to please the public? But the Englishman had been upstaged by Moisant the previous day, and now was his opportunity to reclaim his mantle as the world’s greatest flier. And besides, Eleonora Sears was in the audience.

  Grahame-White climbed up on the seat of the Farman in front of the seven-cylinder engine and the two-bladed wooden propeller. A mechanic squirted petrol into the valves, and another started the propeller with a sharp downward tug. The engine gave a heartening roar, and the men holding on to the airplane watched for Grahame-White’s signal. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and waved a hand in the air. The mechanics released their grip, and Grahame-White worked the controls as the biplane began to move across the grass.

  The spectators who had come down to gossip on the lawn in front of the grandstand hurried back to their seats, while reporters in the press stand picked up their pencils and watched the black castoroil fumes spew from the plane’s exhaust. Grahame-White rose warily, wrote the correspondent for the United Press news agency, but “he needed all his caution, for even at a height of not more than forty feet he pitched like a ship in a heavy storm.” Grahame-White knew at once he was in trouble. He signaled to his mechanics that he was in distress and started to descend. But a gust of wind tilted his biplane to such an angle that the machine stopped moving forward and began to careen sideways. This was what Blériot had taught him was a side-slip, the aviator’s equivalent of skidding across the road in an automobile. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described how Grahame-White was now “drifting helplessly for 800 feet” across the course at the mercy of the wind. He could do nothing to save himself because he was too low to the ground. He would just have to brace himself for the crash and put into practice Blériot’s favorite maxim: “a man who keeps his head can never be injured through a fall.”

  Grahame-White’s machine trembled in the air for a moment, then, with a slow roll, toppled out of the sky and hit the ground with a thud that reverberated around Belmont Park. A wing concertinaed and a wheel was seen to bounce across the course. The whirring propeller slashed the grass, sending up a fountain of turf and wooden splinters. Grahame-White emerged without a scratch, noted the incredulous correspondent from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and for a few moments “ruefully surveyed the wreck” before making for the hangar.

  In the distance, outside hangar No. 18, Moisant’s Blériot was being trundled out by six mechanics. This machine had taken the American across the Channel, its white canvas wings still tattooed with the autographs of the people who’d welcomed him in England. Moisant appeared from his hangar wearing his distinctive flying helmet with its two drooping ear protectors, but before he could climb up onto the seat of his monoplane, the wind picked up the plane, threw it high into the air, and smashed it to the ground.

  The right wing was wrecked, the left one badly damaged, and the propeller reduced to kindling. Albert Fileux, Moisant’s chief mechanic, had been flipped ten feet into the air as he clung faithfully to the left wing. The Frenchman was uninjured, but both Moisant’s Blériots now needed repairing if he was to be ready for the International Cup.

  Within minutes someone had given the order to revert the strength of wind velocity on the scoreboard to twenty-five, and the blue flag, signaling “no flight,” was also hoisted. The aviators were furious and “accused the committee of attempting to deceive them to appease the waiting crowd.” The wind had never dropped, they said, it was a committee ruse. Nonsense, said Allan Ryan, the general manager of the meet, for some inexplicable reason the anemometer on top of the grandstand had simply failed to register the full force of the gale.

  Later, however, when the hullabaloo had died down and the aviators were welcoming friends and family into their hangars, Ryan sneaked into the Wrights’ hangars and asked if someone would go up. Hoxsey and Johnstone told Ryan they’d like to fly but they couldn’t; a contractual stipulation of the Wrights’ forbid flying on a Sunday. Such were the strength of Wilbur’s convictions that he hadn’t even come to the ground, preferring instead to remain at his hotel. Ryan implored the fliers to try to change their boss’s mind, but a twenty-minute phone call from Brookins had no effect. On no account would a Wright aviator desecrate the Sabbath.

  At four thirty P.M. a glum Peter Prunty informed the crowd that the wind had put paid to the rest of the day’s events, but he did have some good news. To compensate for the cancellation the aviation committee had agreed to extend the meet by an extra day, so all of Sunday’s tickets would be valid the following Monday, October 31. Later in the evening several of the fliers met in the bar of the Hotel Astor. Having let off steam about the Belmont Park committee, and about the ignorance of the crowd, they finished their aperitifs and moved into the dining room. Near the end of the meal Hubert Latham asked the waiter to charge his friends’ glasses. He got to his feet and announced some sad news: Captain Madiot, an old friend of his, had been killed on Saturday during an air show in France. Would everyone
join in toasting a brave man.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Death Trap

  Monday, October 24, 1910

  The official search for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post was launched at daybreak on Monday. The Syracuse Post Standard reported that on the explicit instructions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister, “the celebrated mountain police will begin ranging over the wild territory north and northwest of the Great Lakes. These men, who starve like martyrs and ride and fight like demons when it is necessary, will go over hundreds of square miles.” The Royal Northwest Mounted Police also intended to interview every hunter, trapper, huntsman, and woodsman they encountered to ascertain if a large yellow balloon had been seen. In addition to the police hunt, the head of the National Transcontinental Railway said he had sent word to the “thousands of men blazing the way for the new line through the wilderness” to be on the lookout for the two balloonists.

  The Aero Club of America had dispatched one of its members, Lewis Spindler, who, so it was said, knew the Great Lakes region like the back of his hand. He had left St. Louis on Sunday for Toronto. Upon his arrival he met Colonel Gibson, lieutenant governor of Canada, and listened to what information had so far come in. A hunter, Charles Treadway, said he’d seen a balloon the previous Wednesday, as he’d tracked a moose near the Kippewa River in northern Quebec. He reckoned the balloon was going fast, about forty miles an hour. Damn near startled the moose, it did. A guide, Richard Cole, was canoeing down a river in Ontario on Thursday when he saw a balloon crash into “impenetrable forest.”