Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  * The Farman had been loaned to Grahame-White by his friend Clifford Harmon, as his own airplane of that make had been damaged on Sunday and he was still waiting to take delivery of a Blériot with which he planned to compete in the International Aviation Cup.

  * The world’s record was 9,186 feet, attained by Holland’s Henry Wynmalen on October 1, 1910.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Here Are Two Men in a Boat

  Tuesday, October 25, 1910

  The search for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post had intensified by Tuesday morning and now included a reward of $200 for any trapper “supplying information leading to the finding of the balloonists.”* The money came from Mr. H. Diamant, president of the Commission Company, a fur-dealing business with ten thousand correspondents among the trappers and runners in the semicircular district extending from Montreal to James Bay and south to the western extremity of Ontario.

  The papers also carried news from a Monday-evening meeting of the board of directors of the Aero Club of America. If no word of Hawley or Post had been received by Wednesday, October 26, then Louis Von Phul and Joseph O’Reilly—the first crew to have descended in the balloon race—would ascend at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and attempt to find the same air currents that took the America II north. Wisely, added the Chicago Daily Tribune, the pair would not be piloting the balloon that had been ravaged by grasshoppers.

  It was a fanciful plan, but as the Aero Club’s spokesman, Edward Stratton, admitted in an interview with the Albany evening Journal, the formulation of any coherent search plan was proving problematic because of the lack of definite information. “I concede that as the situation now stands, it would be ridiculous to send out relief expeditions,” he said. “But with the cooperation of the press of Canada and the reports from all sources, I believe we can figure with a fair amount of accuracy the course of the America II, provided she got safely across Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay.”

  While Stratton called on the Canadian press to alert their readers to the missing men, the rest of the world’s press spent Tuesday hypothesizing on the fate of Hawley and Post. A headline in the New York Evening Sun screamed WAS POINTED FOR POLE, and the front page of the Boston Daily Globe used an interview with Samuel Perkins as the inspiration for its headline: HAWLEY AND POST, HE FEARS, LOST FOREVER. Perkins expressed his opinion to the paper as he waited at Montreal Station to board the Central Vermont train to New York, where he and Hans Gericke, the pi lot of Düsseldorf II, hoped to be crowned the winners of the International Balloon race. That they would be hailed triumphant had been unofficially confirmed to the London Times by a telegram it received from New York. Under the heading GERMAN BALLOON’S SUCCESS, the British newspaper said the Düsseldorf II was the winner of the tournament with another German crew, Germania, the runner-up.

  It was inconceivable to most Americans that two people—their people—could simply vanish off the face of the earth. This was the twentieth century, after all, an age of unprece dented scientific and technological expansion. Already the world had witnessed the birth of Marconi wireless telegraphy, the invention of the airplane, the extraordinary sight of moving pictures, and the completion of the largest ever ocean liner, the forty-five-thousand-ton Olympic. The vessel had been launched five days earlier in Belfast, with the directors of the White Star Line telling reporters that the Olympic’s sister, the Titantic, would be even more impressive when it was finished. With the sea conquered, the air invaded, the north pole reached (by Robert Peary in 1909), Americans wondered how it was possible that two balloonists couldn’t be found.

  . . .

  Joseph Pedneaud and Joseph Simard had never heard of wireless telegraphy or airplanes or moving pictures. They lived off the land, without recourse to electricity or machines, making their own clothes and gathering their own food. Their interest in the world was confined to the province of Quebec and all that lay in it. Pedneaud had, for a brief while, worked in a mill in Potsdam, New York, but he’d pined for the Canadian wilderness and returned home. Now he farmed the land, and his friend Simard scratched a living as a shoemaker. The pair lived near Saint-Ambroise, a settlement approximately fifteen miles northwest of Chicoutimi, but since the weekend they had been on a hunting expedition, and now, at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, they were “in a bark canoe, on the south side of Sotogama [Tchitagama] Lake, about two miles from the place where the River Blanche pours its water into the lake.”

  The snow of the previous day had ceased, but the trees on the north shore of the lake were powdered white, and the cheerless sky above suggested a fresh layer would soon arrive. Suddenly they spotted a thin trail of smoke coiling above the trees, close to where they knew a trapper called Jacques Maltais often camped.

  Simard, kneeling Indian-style in the bow of the canoe, turned to Pedneaud at the stern and suggested that they paddle across to say hello to Maltais. As they moved swiftly through the water toward the shore, they caught sight of a white tent through the trees, and in the next instant a man in a gray suit emerged on his hand and knees. He stood up, stretched, and halloed loudly. “He was facing the mountain north of the lake,” Simard recalled later, “and did not see us . . . Joseph Pedneaud answered by a loud hallo.”

  Augustus Post and Alan Hawley had enjoyed the luxury of a hot mug of water for breakfast on Tuesday morning along with a couple of crackers each.* Now the flap of their tent was open and an inquisitive squirrel snuck in to see what crumbs he could find. Hawley told Post he was going to go for a wash in the lake, just as soon as he found that bar of soap they had seen the previous day. As his friend searched for the soap, Post opened his logbook and began to write:

  Another night has passed with no sign of life, but God provided tent, stove, and eatables, which we dare not touch. Mr. Squirrel has come to bid us good-morning, and eat our shoes, and bite Hawley. He is smelling him just now. He has two black stripes down his back. Looks like the inside of my “Micmac” coat. Mr. Jean Jacques Rousseau* has not yet returned to welcome his anxious guest of whom he is unaware. The custom of staying out all night is not confined to any particular locality.

  Hawley and the squirrel departed the tent as Post closed his logbook and began to put on his boots. He heard his companion’s morning greeting, and a few seconds later he heard it answered. Was it an echo? Then Hawley screamed, “Come out, Post! Here are two men in a boat.”

  Post was out of the tent in a flash, and together he and Hawley—even with his bad knee—ran down to the water’s edge to welcome the canoe. “We dropped here in a balloon,” said Hawley, pointing to the sky and making a circle with his hands, “and have found this camp. Will you help us get out to the nearest habitation?” Pedneaud smiled and replied in English that all the hand gestures were unnecessary.

  As Hawley and Post helped drag the canoe up onto the beach, the French Canadians regarded them with a quizzical eye. Clearly “they had suffered much misery, and had had little to eat for several days.” After they had all retired to the warmth of the tent, Post replenished the stove as Hawley gave a vivid account of the last five days. Then he asked where exactly they were. Pedneaud told them that the nearest habitation was nearly twenty miles to the south, nothing more than a small settlement called Rivière à l’Ours (Bear River). What about the houses they had seen from the balloon during their descent? Hawley inquired. The two hunters listened to a description of the America’s final resting place and agreed that the buildings Hawley and Post saw “were near where the Peribonka River empties into Lake St. John, fifteen miles to the west, over an almost impassable country.” Had you not found Maltais’s camp, Pedneaud told the balloonists, your chances of survival would have been slim, very slim. Did Pedneaud know Maltais? Post asked. He did, he was a trapper, but he had no idea when he would return. They hadn’t touched any of his belongings, stressed Post, not even his food.

  Simard and Pedneaud exchanged a few words in French, then the latter turned to Post and said, “We will take you up the river in our ca
noe to the nearest habitation.” Post grabbed the Canadian’s hand and thanked him, saying, “We will pay you.” The two accepted the offer, explaining that they were at the start of a three-week trapping expedition and would expect to be paid only for the hours they lost in paddling them to safety.

  With everyone satisfied, Hawley asked if either man possessed some tea. “We have not had anything hot for a week, and we are almost starved.” Pedneaud said, yes, they did have some tea. Then he turned to Simard and said something in French. They both laughed. Pedneaud explained that his friend, who knew no English, was the expedition cook, and if they liked, he would prepare the greatest breakfast of their lives. Hawley and Post stared in joyful disbelief as Simard dipped into his haversack and removed “some big slices of bread and pork, which he soon had frying in the pan, sending out an odor that nearly drove us crazy with anticipation.”

  The bread was a big loaf not long out of its outdoor clay oven, and soon the beards of the two Americans were glistening with hot pork fat. They swirled each mouthful of sweet, hot tea around their mouths and told Pedneaud he was right, it was a meal they would never forget. “It is remarkable how different one’s feelings can become in about ten minutes,” wrote Post in his log. “The world had changed to a most delightful place, and these men, who were only two good-hearted fellows out for a vacation trapping muskrats, seemed to us to be emissaries of all our friends and of the whole universe.”

  As a reward for cooking such a delicious breakfast, Hawley gave Simaud his pistol and a box of cartridges, then they packed their meager belongings into their ballast bags and departed the camp. Post and Hawley sat back-to-back in the center of the canoe, the latter facing Pedneaud in the stern and Post looking at the back of Simaud kneeling in the bow. They headed south toward the settlement of Rivière à l’Ours with the balloonists marveling at the way the thin bark of the canoe glided through the water. At one moment Simaud “whipped out the pistol and pointed it at the head of a muskrat swimming away.” He blazed away unsuccessfully at the animal without upsetting the delicate equilibrium of the canoe. A poor shot, but a skilled canoeist, thought Post.

  A series of rapids at the head of the lake required a portage. Pedneaud shouldered the canoe, and Simaud carried their provisions as Hawley and Post trotted obediently behind like two puppies trailing their masters. For the next couple of hours they paddled up a narrow river, “with bushes and trees on each side almost shutting us in, and no sound but the drip of the paddle.” To break the silence, Post sometimes broke into a rendition of “Sing Hosanna,” but for most of the trip the balloonists leaned back against one another and savored the experience.

  They came to another set of rapids and another portage, and as Post followed the trail through the undergrowth alongside the river, he saw the recent camping place of an Indian family. Over lunch Pedneaud told him that the Indians were headed deep into the wilderness to spend the winter hunting so they could return in the spring and sell the pelts.

  They made camp in the late afternoon, not long after they had passed the southern end of Lake à l’Ours. Post asked Simaud if he could borrow his hook and line, then spent a happy hour before supper fishing for trout in the lake. He caught several and brought them back to the tent, proud that he had proved himself of some value in the wild. Simaud put aside the fish for breakfast and served up some fried pork and bread. Then Post and Hawley began to chat to Pedneaud about their voyage, explaining that in a balloon such as theirs it was possible to rise to twenty thousand feet. At first Ped-neaud refused to believe it possible, but when Post dug out his barograph charts, Pedneaud accepted that the feat was not impossible. Next, the two balloonists spread out on the floor of the tent a map of their route from St. Louis to where they believed they had descended. Did Pedneaud agree they were correct in their landing place? He studied the map and after a few moments said, yes, he believed they were “substantially correct.” In which case, Post and Hawley told one another, they had traveled more than twelve hundred miles in their balloon. The International Balloon Cup must surely belong to them.

  The International Aviation Cup was foremost in Orville Wright’s mind as he arrived at Belmont Park on Tuesday morning. The breeze from the southwest was a little stiffer than on Monday, perhaps ten or twelve miles an hour, but no sign of rain clouds was in the blue-gray sky. Orville joined his brother in a hangar and prepared to take out the Baby Grand racer.

  A couple of thousand spectators were already on the grounds, many of whom had bought an official tournament flag—a gilt-edged airplane on a red-and-blue background—from one of the Boy Scout vendors on their way from the railroad station. Now they were waving them as Count de Lesseps took Grace McKenzie for a spin in his Blériot monoplane. Those already ensconced in the corporate boxes peered haughtily through their field glasses and wondered aloud when the engagement would be announced. The correspondent of the New York Sun noted that many in the grandstand had foot rugs, to protect against the wind, while a number of ladies complained that all that craning of the neck the previous day had played havoc with their hairpins. Some of the more hardy members of New York’s high society had installed themselves on thick woolen rugs on the lawn and were discussing what would be best to ease the strain of the aero stare. A barber’s chair, proposed someone, which raised a chorus of titters. Another suggested that a fortune was “waiting for the genius who can construct a neat, serviceable check rein . . . a strong strap which can pull the head back to any given angle and hold fast in that position. Such a strap could be fastened to a belt worn around the waist.”

  De Lesseps returned to earth with Miss McKenzie and helped her down from his airplane. Did that hand linger a fraction too long on her waist? asked the snoopers in the grandstand. As the young Canadian woman moved elegantly toward the grandstand, she was intercepted by a patrol of reporters. How was the flight? they inquired. Wonderful, replied Miss McKenzie. “Count de Lesseps handles his machine with such confidence and with such skill that one would have to be a coward indeed to doubt his ability to take care of things.” Will you be going up again? “I shall certainly fly again.” Has he asked you to marry him? McKenzie gave a smile, a coy smile, but fluttered up to her box without saying another word.

  Just before noon a mechanic pulled back the two large flaps of the Wrights’ canvas hangar, and a few moments later the Baby Grand racer was wheeled out to cries of delight from the crowd.

  Reporters lounging in the press stand jumped to their feet when they saw the Wrights’ great secret out in the open. When they picked up their field glasses and recognized Orville as the man in the flying clothes, they could barely contain their exhilaration. The younger of the two brothers had never before flown in the East—discounting the brief exhibition he had performed for the military at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908*—but here he was about to take the controls of what, in the eyes of the New York Sun’s reporter, resembled a “boy’s sized edition of the Wright biplane of familiar model.” He noticed that as the Baby Grand was shouldered onto the infield, “the foreign birds and their mechanics dropped everything else to see what the new type of racer would do.”

  Wearing a leather coat, Orville Wright climbed up into the seat, “placed to the left of the center of the lower plane so that the driver’s weight will help in the stabilization of the airplane by making up for increased weight of heavier engine at his right.” Wilbur exchanged a few words with his brother, then, with a confident smile, he retreated to the grass in front of the hangar, where he squatted, the position he always adopted when watching his machines at work.

  The propeller was engaged, the engine started, and off went Orville Wright, bouncing across the grass and rising into the air. He circled the course, then, after he cornered dead man’s turn with ease, he let out the engine and shot past the grandstand at a speed that left the reporters flabbergasted. Sixty miles an hour? No, sixty-five. More like seventy-five, said the man from the New York Sun. The correspondent from the New York Herald had a s
topwatch on the Baby Grand as it streaked around the two-and-a-half-kilometer course. Wright turned into the home straight as all around the grounds “men, women and children jumped up on camp chairs, on seats and on railings, and yelled themselves hoarse.”

  The Herald’s man stopped the timer as the Baby Grand crossed the strip of white canvas running across the sandy track. He puffed out his cheeks in astonishment: one minute and twenty-six seconds—more than half a minute faster than John McCurdy’s best lap in Monday’s speed race. Watching from his rickety steamer chair outside his hangar, Charles Hamilton was equally impressed. The Baby Grand was half the size of his monstrous 110-horsepower Hamilton, but its agility was awesome. The most worrying thing, however, he told the Sun’s correspondent, was that “you can’t tell whether Orville is letting her out or not. The chain gear makes so much noise that down here I can’t tell exactly how hard and fast the engines are going.”

  When the demonstration had finished, several reporters hurried over to hangar row to discover if the Wrights were happy with how the machine had performed. On his way past some of the other hangars the New York Herald correspondent couldn’t help but notice the “intense discouragement in the camps of the foreign competitors” in the light of the Baby Grand’s display. The normally taciturn Orville Wright was “communicative to a slight extent,” and for several minutes he talked about his latest invention, explaining first that he and his brother had had no time to make anything especially for the machine because they wanted to have it ready for the Belmont Park Meet. For example, the gearing, the sprocket wheels, and the propellers came from existing stock in their Dayton factory. “When I have time, I will turn out propellers especially for these machines,” he continued, “and these will give a much higher rate of speed than we will get from these stock parts.” The Herald’s correspondent noted how Orville was like a man on his honeymoon, “gazing lovingly” at the airplane as he spoke, oblivious of the presence of others. The Herald asked why it was that while other inventors, particularly the French, were increasingly putting their faith in the monoplane, he and Wilbur believed in the superiority of the biplane. Wright admitted that the monoplane was a thing of beauty but, he added, “The innate fault of the single-plane machine is its weakness. It can never be made as strong as the biplane. The single plane always will be a weakness that will make advances beyond a certain point impossible.”