Chasing Icarus (15 page)

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 began 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.”

*
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 over 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.