Chasing Icarus (11 page)

When the newsmen returned to their offices from the quayside to write about Roland Garros, they found waiting for them on their desks a facsimile of a statement telegraphed by Glenn Curtiss from his manufacturing headquarters in Hammondsport, New York, to J. C. McCoy, chairman of the Belmont Park Aviation Committee. The characteristically laconic announcement stated simply that two of his fliers would be operating new racing machines, monoplanes, during the forthcoming meet.
*
Tantalized by the brevity of the exciting revelation, the
New York
Herald
telephoned Jerome Fanciulli, manager of Curtiss’s New York office, and charmed some further details from him. “In the lines and the chassis they [the new machines] are essentially Curtiss airplanes,” explained Fanciulli, “though the lower plane surfaces are practically eliminated and the surfaces of the upper planes greatly reduced.” Yes, yes, said the
Herald
reporter impatiently, but what are the machine’s chances of winning the International Aviation Cup for America? “It should be much faster than the racer used by Mr. Curtiss at the Boston meet,” reckoned Fanciulli, “which found him somewhat unprepared to compete with Mr. Grahame-White’s speedy Blériot. Since the meet, Mr. Curtiss has concentrated his energies on perfecting the new fliers.” In conclusion, said Fanciulli, Mr. Curtiss was confident of putting up a good show.

Most of the ten balloons in the International Balloon race had stayed low on Monday night, sometimes skimming no more than two hundred feet above the ground in the cool night air. None thought of jettisoning some of their valuable ballast bags to increase their height; that tactic could be employed later, if they encountered sudden pockets of cooler air during the day (when normally the sun’s heat would be expected to expand the gasbags) or if they lost height because of gas seeping out through the stitching of their balloons.

Seven of the crews were confident their balloons were leakproof; these were the ones made from silk and treated with rubber. Hugo Von Abercron had gone even further with his balloon,
Germania
, covering its rubber surface with aluminum dust so that, in the words of the
New York
Herald
, “it glistened like silver.” Trials in Germany had convinced the forty-one-year-old Abercron that the sheen of metal better deflected the sun’s rays. The balloons that hadn’t been reinforced with rubber were the French
Condor
and two of the American entrants,
St. Louis No. 4
and
Million Population Club.
They had just a thin layer of varnish covering the silk envelope of their balloons, which was inefficient at preventing gas from escaping but efficient at absorbing rain or dew—just what a balloonist didn’t want.

To add to the Americans’ woes their balloons had been attacked by St. Louis’s grasshoppers during Sunday night, and it had quickly become evident to Louis Von Phul and Joseph O’Reilly in
Million Population
Club
that though they had laboriously patched up as many holes as they could on Monday, gas was escaping at an alarming rate. Throughout Monday night the pair had off-loaded nearly two thirds of their ballast as they headed northeast, and at half past five on Tuesday morning they had only fourteen sandbags remaining. As dawn broke, they could see to their east Lake Michigan, its flat surface the color of marble. So tempting. Younger, rasher, more inexperienced balloonists might have taken on the lake, their common sense giving way to their pride, but Von Phul and O’Reilly knew that to do so would be reckless to the point of suicidal. They’d scrutinized the map by flashlight and cursed when they calculated that they would have to cross Lake Michigan at its widest point—eighty miles from shore to shore. Eighty miles with now just ten bags of ballast. If the weather turned, if the temperature dropped, or if it began to rain, they no longer had enough ballast to prevent the balloon from plunging into the lake.

At seven A.M. they passed north over the lakeside town of Racine, dispensing with another couple of sandbags to ensure they didn’t become entangled with a church spire. A few miles farther on was open country, and Von Phul brought down
Million Population Club
within sight of Lake Michigan. The land belonged to John Tramball, not a man who frightened easily, and instead of a shotgun blast he welcomed them with an invitation to his breakfast table. Having demolished a plate of ham and eggs, Von Phul telephoned the race organizers in St. Louis to tell them he’d come down six and a half miles north of Racine, Wisconsin, giving him an estimated distance of 320 miles.

The early hours of Tuesday had also been a little trying for Jacques Faure and Ernest Schmolck in the
Condor
. Progress had been swift at first, and the Frenchmen’s hearts began to pump a little quicker when they saw the southern shores of Lake Michigan beneath them. Despite the accoutrements on board—the mattress, stool, cologne, Brie, roast beef, and one dozen bottles of champagne—the balloon soared to ten thousand feet. The pair slipped on their fur-lined gloves and turned up the collars of their coats and congratulated themselves on their impressive start.

Then came the hours of terror, dread, and pain, the effect of which were all too visible when Ernest Schmolck sat before reporters in a Chicago hotel the following evening. With his right arm in a sling and his face heavily bruised, the Frenchman told how “we suddenly struck a zone of air where the temperature was close to zero. The gas in the balloon began to condense rapidly and we started falling.”

They fell quickly, and silently. One thousand feet . . . two thousand feet . . . three thousand feet. They cut away bags of ballast, threw out the cologne, the Brie, the roast beef, bottles of champagne one by one, but still they fell . . . four thousand feet . . . five thousand feet. “After a sheer drop of six thousand feet there came a brief halt,” explained Schmolck, “and we thought we were safe, but the relief was only for a moment. Again the balloon began to drop.” Over the side went some more sandbags and the last of the champagne and the twelve bottles of mineral water. They heard the splash as each hit the black waters of Lake Michigan. Faure told Schmolck it was no good, they were doomed. All they could do was hope to swim to safety. “We were within a hundred feet of the surface of the great lake when we discarded our shoes and coats and clasped our life preservers to our bodies,” said Schmolck. And then, he said, shaking his head at the reporters in merry disbelief, “Just when we thought ourselves lost, the balloon was halted in its downward flight.” They were forty-five feet above the lake, saved only by the drag rope that hung from the basket and had touched the water, reducing their weight and arresting their descent. If there had been any champagne left, they might have opened a bottle, but instead they breathed a deep sigh of relief and put their faith in the thin length of rope that dangled beneath the basket. And then a stroke of luck: the wind picked up and pushed them southwest, back across the lake, until they sighted land. And the arm, the reporters asked Schmolck, was it injured during the descent? Oh, no, he explained, that came later, after a further mishap. “Our attempt to land was fraught with new perils. The balloon sailed three miles over the rough country at express-train speed, dragging the basket in its wake. The basket was dashed against fences, farm houses, and three chimneys fell during the onslaught. Fences were bowled over and small trees knocked down. Finally a stout barbed-wire fence caught us and held long enough to throw Monsieur Faure and myself headlong into a marsh filled with muddy water. We half swam and half waded to terrafirma.”

Schmolck’s arm had been lacerated during the landing but fortunately not broken. He and Faure had taken a while to gather their senses before setting off on foot to find help. The
Condor
had come to rest just outside the Wisconsin lakeside town of Two Rivers, forty miles southeast of Green Bay. They’d covered little more than four hundred miles, but neither Schmolck nor Faure cared. They were alive.

During the first night in the
America II
, Alan Hawley and Augustus Post had quickly settled back into the familiar routine that had served them well during the 1907 race. They ushered in Tuesday with a can of hot mutton broth, “heated by putting water upon lime packed about the tin which, in slacking, produced heat enough to bring the soup to a palatable temperature.” Once they’d wolfed down the broth, the pair put the cans under their coats and warmed their chill bodies for a few pleasurable minutes.

Hawley and Post drank water from their quart bottles at regular intervals and played a game of animal identification as they passed over endless pastures. The horses, they discovered, chased after the balloon, but chickens and pigs “exhibited their usual panic with noisy sounds and frantic rushing in all directions to escape the great hawk which, no doubt, they thought was going to get them.” A little before three A.M. they exchanged greetings with a man on the porch of his isolated house, who told them they were in Whiteside County, Illinois. Hawley decided to turn in for the night and curled up on the bottom of the basket. Post took the first watch, standing on the forward side of the basket and keeping a constant eye on the statiscopes, aneroids, and other instruments. He made the occasional remark in the logbook, noting at four forty A.M. that they were in Stephenson County, Illinois, traveling north by east at an altitude of seven hundred feet. The
America II
was now in perfect equilibrium, and they hadn’t needed to add or remove any sand from their ballast tray since eight o’clock on Monday evening. The tray, containing a tin scoop, hung in a corner against the side of the basket, with a fresh sack of ballast underneath in case of a sudden disturbance. Post and Hawley knew not to play idly with the tray, for “in a state of equilibrium, the ballast is put out by the spoonful and even a small piece of paper thrown out will change the delicate balance.”

Hawley was on his feet to greet the sunrise at six eleven A.M., just as they crossed the state line into Wisconsin below Newark in Rock County. Forty minutes later they were three miles south of Janesville, Wisconsin, and a ten-year-old girl was shaken awake by her mother and told to get outside quick, something special was happening. The balloon passed low enough for the little girl to make out the red flag of the Aero Club of America on the yellow envelope and the words
America II
.

With the heat of the sun the balloon rose rapidly to two thousand five hundred feet, and at nine forty A.M. Lake Michigan came into sight. They approached the water between Milwaukee and Port Washington, but once they were over the lake the temperature dropped and so did the
America II
. Neither man was concerned about the steady descent as they came to within two hundred feet of the lake. Post threw out the drag rope and for a while they drifted sedately northeast. Soon, however, the wind changed and they were pushed back over the western shore.

They tried again, this time ridding their basket of some ballast and rising to nearly six thousand feet with the strength of the sun aiding their elevation. Out of reach of the cooling influence of the water and with the return of a northeasterly wind,
America II
traversed Lake Michigan without incident and passed over Ludington, Michigan, a settlement on the eastern shore, at two P.M. Fifty miles farther on, Hawley dropped a handwritten message near a farmstead in Thompsonville, addressed to Albert Lambert, president of the Aero Club of St. Louis:

America II passed over this place Tuesday. Course due north. HAWLEY
& POST.

Soon it was twilight, then darkness, and Hawley and Post spent some time scooping out sand from the ballast tray to establish an equilibrium now that their gas had contracted with the night air. At four thousand five hundred feet they had to their northeast an invigorating view of WILL LAUNCH LIFEBOATS AND TRUST TO YOU 81 Lake Huron sparkling in the bright moonlight, one of those vistas that makes a man feel privileged. Inspired by the sight, neither Post nor Hawley jibbed at the idea of crossing the water in the dark. They’d had a grand run to date, and they trusted their luck to hold.

*
On October 15 Curtiss had informed the Belmont Park organizers that he wouldn’t personally be appearing to defend the International Aviation Cup, which he had won in Rheims in 1909, but he promised nevertheless to send a team to compete. The
World
reported that in the future Curtiss “intends giving up flying except for experimental purposes.”

CHAPTER FIVE

We Are in Bad Country and

Grave Danger

Wednesday, October 19, 1910

Wednesday’s papers carried depressing news for devotees of American ballooning. The stark headline on the front page of the
St. Louis Republic
said it all: BUT ONE AMERICAN BALLOON IN RACE. Underneath was a dispiriting account of the first thirty-six hours of the International Balloon contest, beginning with the capitulation of
Million
Population Club
, continuing with the dramatic descent of the
Condor
, and finishing with the sorry saga of Harry Honeywell and J. W. Jolland in
St. Louis No. 4
.

Despite the problems with the grasshoppers,
No. 4
had performed flawlessly for the first twelve hours, crossing Lake Michigan at the cost of only seven of their thirty-one bags of ballast. But once over Michigan, things had started to go wrong; it became a constant struggle for Honeywell to keep the balloon in equilibrium, and at times it felt as if they were in a small craft on a rough sea, riding the crest of white-tipped waves. By midday they were down to their last ten bags of ballast, and by four thirty P.M. they had just six remaining. They had done what
Million
Population Club
hadn’t and defied Lake Michigan, but it would be folly to chance their arm again and attempt to cross Lake Huron a few miles to their northeast. They put down in a green wheat field near Hillman, 550 miles northeast of St. Louis, and a score of wide-eyed locals helped pack up the balloon, though not before Honeywell had “examined it and found that some patches I had pasted on before the start to cover up some [grasshopper] holes had peeled off, and I suppose that’s what caused the trouble.”

Of the third U.S. entry,
America II
, the
New York Times
had no news and was only able to advise readers in its Wednesday edition that no news must be good news. It added that of the seven balloons still up “the
Germania
is thought to be ahead,” its distinctive aluminum covering the first to be reported crossing Lake Michigan the previous day.

The
New York Times
was way off the pace on Wednesday morning. By the time it was being read by New Yorkers on their way to work, only four balloons, not seven, were airborne, and of those one, the
Harburg II
, containing William Assmann and Lieutenant Leopold Vogt, was in desperate straits.

It had been a breeze at first for the German pair, literally and metaphorically, as they crossed Lakes Michigan and Huron without incident. At six o’clock on Tuesday evening they were over the eastern end of Georgian Bay in Ontario at a debilitating altitude of eighteen thousand feet. Vogt could see for miles, but all he saw in the dregs of daylight was a great expanse of water pockmarked with bays, inlets, and islands. They were both fearfully cold in their basket, fighting the desire to lie down and sleep; perhaps it was another effect of altitude that rendered Vogt insensate, for suddenly he decided “to take a chance . . . I pulled the valve and we descended with terrific force.” It was an extraordinary gamble, a crazy one considering they had only two bags of ballast left with which to allay their drop. They were, in effect, in free fall. As they plummeted through the black sky, the pressure on their eardrums made the inside of their heads feel as if they were filled with cotton.

As Gull Island rushed up toward them, it appeared Vogt had been prodigiously foolhardy, but two hundred feet from the ground the tip of the drag rope hit the rocky shoreline and the distribution of weight fractionally altered so the basket spun round and the envelope folded over into the sort of parachute that had saved Augustus Post and Holland Forbes in Berlin. Nonetheless the collision between water and basket was awesome, rendering both men unconscious.

They had come down in Lake Nipissing, a shallow, forty-mile-long stretch of water that drained into Georgian Bay. Pneumatic floats kept the basket from sinking as the breeze blew the senseless pair farther from the shore, until eventually a wave crashed over the rim of the basket and revived Vogt. He looked groggily around and saw that Assmann was in a terrible state. A bone protuded from his shattered left arm, and his right hand had been bent back at a hideous angle. The most serious injury, however, was the severed artery in his right arm, the blood of which had already turned the water in the basket red. Miraculously, Vogt had no broken bones, and for the next hour he endured the bitter temperatures of the lake as he towed the basket to an island shore with the drag rope. It was a maddening struggle, a ceaseless fight against the wind, which frequently caught the envelope of the balloon and pushed the basket back toward the middle of the lake. But Vogt finally felt pebbles beneath his feet and hauled the basket into shallow water. He carried Assmann up the rocky beach, and in that moment a gust of wind blew the basket out of Vogt’s reach back into the lake. Inside was food and drink and a medicine chest, but Vogt was too exhausted to give chase.

Vogt fashioned a tourniquet out of a handkerchief to try to stem the flow of blood from Assmann’s artery, applying soothing words of comfort. Don’t worry, William, he said, a rescue party will be along at first light. As Assmann dipped in and out of consciousness, Vogt explored the island: it was uninhabited save for a colony of gulls.

Now, at around two A.M. on Wednesday morning, Assmann began a duet with the wind, a groaning dirge that troubled Vogt. “The lonesomeness and darkness of the place were appalling,” he confessed later. “Our clothes were wet to the skin and we had nothing with which to light a fire. All the remainder of the night we remained on the island alone. I trying as best I could to attend to the injuries of my aide . . . His wounds bled awfully all night and I feared for his life.”

Assmann only survived because two Indians left their village early on Wednesday morning to go hunting. At six o’clock they were paddling across Lake Nipissing when through the gray murk of dawn they saw a strange object in the water. What could it be? they asked one another, prodding the basket warily with their oars. Vogt heard the voices and leaped to his feet, screaming, “Over here! Over here!”

The other two competitors to come down early on Wednesday were the Swiss balloon
Azurea
, and the French crew of Alfred Le Blanc and Walther de Mumm in
Isle de France
. Emil Messner and Leon Givaudan landed near the small Ontarian town of Biscotasing at one A.M., and the
Isle de France
three hours later and only twenty miles to the southeast, having covered a similar distance of 725 miles. What had brought the two balloons to earth was the sighting of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a thread of silver winding its way through the dense wilderness like the spoor of a giant slug. In the
Azurea
Givaudan clasped his pi lot’s shoulder in relief, “for had it not been for this lucky sighting . . . we would surely have been lost forever in the vicinity of Hudson Bay.”

The
Isle de France
had crossed the northwestern corner of Lake Huron on Tuesday evening, and their arrival in Canadian territory was greeted, said Mumm, by a pack of wolves, which raced after the low-flying balloon, “growling and snapping and looking all too anxious for prey.” Le Blanc growled back and told Mumm to load the revolver. No wolf was going to impede the progress of the irascible Frenchman, especially when he had to be in Belmont Park in three days’ time to deal with an English lion, Claude Grahame-White, for whom Le Blanc had a visceral dislike.

At four A.M. Mumm spotted the railroad, what he called the “highway to civilization,” and the basket came down with a bump among some trees and a herd of elk, which scattered. A bison
*
was “standing near, seemingly awestricken by the strange creature from the air.” Le Blanc and the bison eyeballed each other for a few moments, then the animal turned and fled for its life.

The little Frenchman wasted no time in stuffing some essentials into a haversack and setting off along the track, leaving behind in their basket a treasure trove of champagne and spirits, and the unopened bottle of Bromo-Seltzer. A breathless Mumm stumbled behind his pilot as they walked and ran until, after five and a half hours, they reached a village. Le Blanc barked out orders in French to Mumm, who translated for the bewildered villagers, and soon they were sitting down to a breakfast of bread, jam, and coffee.

The reports in Wednesday morning’s papers first piqued the interest of the American public. Hitherto the race had aroused only a couple of paragraphs in most cities’ papers outside of St. Louis itself, a quaint sideshow to the Are-they-dead-or-alive? drama of Walter Wellman, and the dare-devil antics of the aviators. But national pride was now at stake, what with two American balloons already down and deflated. Hopes rested on Hawley and Post—but where were they? None of the papers knew, although the
New York Herald
reported that a large yellow balloon had been seen over Manistee, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, early on Tuesday afternoon heading northeast. That was the last sighting.

If the
America II
was to pull off a surprise victory, they would have to go some to beat Hugo Von Abercron and August Blanckertz in
Germania
, the race favorites in everyone’s eyes. Their aluminum-coated balloon had sped over a public school in West Branch, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon at the moment the children were heading home, and a message dropped from the basket had caused pandemonium in the school yard. The boy quickest to grab the message—or perhaps the boy strongest to wrestle it from another’s grip—proudly presented it to the teacher, who read aloud its contents: “Highest altitude, 5700 feet. Twenty-six bags left. Von Abercron and Blanckertz.
Germania.
” A short message, but one that sent the boys and girls home exuberant.

As the papers explained on Wednesday morning, that meant the balloon had covered over five hundred miles in twenty-four hours, having used only fourteen bags of ballast. The German pair were on course to establish a new distance record in the International Balloon race, surpassing the existing mark of 873 miles, set by the late Oscar Erbslöh in 1907. The
Germania
might also challenge the world distance record of 1,193 miles, held by Count Henri de la Vaulx of France, who in 1906 had ballooned from Paris to Kiev.

The race was exciting the curiosity of Americans for an additional reason, one for which Abercron and his kinfolk had a word, and which had subsequently been incorporated into the English language:
Schadenfreude
. In its report on Wednesday morning the
New York Times
wrote that of the seven balloons still in the race, all were headed straight for Ontario, across the Great Lakes. Assuming that the balloons hadn’t ditched in Lakes Michigan or Huron, they would be faced with hundreds and hundreds of miles of sparsely populated Canadian wilderness. The commuters reading their newspapers shivered and thanked God they weren’t in one of those baskets.

Augustus Post wouldn’t have wished to be anywhere else in the world as he updated his log in the sharp dawn air. The morning star was visible, and so, too, Venus in the west, “while to the south beautiful soft mists and haze gently spread over the sleeping lakes and virgin forests. There was no sound of chanticleers or of any animals that we were accustomed to hear. Their places were taken by the cries of an occasional loon or owl. No smoke from any chimney or any object of civilization modified the charm of this dawn in the wilderness.”

As Hawley uncoiled himself from his brief nap at the bottom of the basket, he was informed by his copilot that they had just crossed into Quebec from Ontario. Below was Lake Témiscamingue. “Hawley,” exclaimed Post excitedly, his dark musketeer eyes gleaming, “this is the chance of a lifetime. This direction and location north is what they [their rivals] have all been hoping and praying for. It is a wonderful opportunity.” Hawley needed no persuading, he was as keen as his companion to win the race. Ballast was plentiful, and anyway, “the higher currents would carry us east . . . [so] we did not hesitate.”

Not long after, they passed low over another lake, and in a clearing near the shore they saw a lumber camp and some woodcutters preparing for the day, who, when asked, shouted up the name of the lake through cupped hands—Kipawa. They also, said Post, “offered some advice, which we could not make out before we had drifted away.”

The advice was probably to put down as soon as possible, for what lay beyond became apparent when the morning had fully broken and Post scanned the horizon for any sign of a place to land. There was none; nothing was to be seen but lakes and rivers. They had taken a terrible risk in pushing on east, embarking on a nerve-racking game of chance. What if the gas should leak? What if the weather should break? They had no control over these factors. They tried to reassure one another by talking of the new Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad being constructed through the wilds of Quebec, but Post confided his true feelings to his logbook at ten A.M.: “Both realize that we are in bad country, and grave danger should we land, on account of the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting out and passing over lakes and rivers.”

They rose as high as sixteen thousand feet and tore through the sky at speeds of 40 mph, casting anxious glances toward the armada of storm clouds massing in the distance. At midday Post noted the temperature in his log—forty-eight degrees—and his pulse rate, which was 85. Not long after, as he stood at the front of the basket peering through the field glasses, he gave a shout: there was a big lake to the south with three rivers running into it from the north. It was Lake St. John, Post told Hawley; he recalled it from the days when he had hunted moose in the region.

At three P.M. they started to descend, and as they dropped, the land below began to take shape. They could see in the distance cultivated fields, the odd building, even what looked like a mill. Post “made a mental survey of the country and mapped the route to the nearest houses in my mind while Hawley was handling the balloon.” They began to pick up speed as they got lower, and the air currents closer to the ground buffeted their basket so that once or twice the pair lost their balance. Post threw out the drag rope as the wind bullied them north, over a small lake, and toward a forested mountain. Among the trees on the lower slopes were large boulders, so Hawley dumped another bag of ballast and the
America
rose, its drag rope touching the ground as the basket sped over the tops of seventy-foot trees. “Hang on,” cried Hawley, “I’m going to take her down!”