Chasing Icarus (20 page)

Brookins reappeared with the Wrights a little later, and his barograph indicated that he’d reached 4,882 feet, way inferior to his personal best of 6,175 feet, established at Atlantic City three months earlier.

At four o’clock Peter Prunty roared through his megaphone that it was time for the second hourly altitude contest, but only Armstrong Drexel signaled his desire to try to outdo de Lesseps. Having watched the earlier aerial duel as he lunched from a picnic hamper on the grass in front of his hangar, Drexel now fancied going up in the air. Dressed in black oilskins, and with his queer-looking helmet, he rose at a rapid rate until once more the spectators’ heads and necks began to feel the strain. Then the black dot to the northeast became slowly bigger as he descended. He had none of the problems that had afflicted Brookins; it appeared to the press and the public that Drexel had climbed and dropped in thirty-two effortless minutes. His brother outsprinted the French mechanics in a race across the grass to congratulate Drexel on what Peter Prunty told the crowd (subject to official confirmation) was an altitude of 7,105 feet, a height only ever bettered by two men.
*
Anthony Drexel reached the machine, expecting his brother to jump into his arms in triumph, but Armstrong remained in his seat, literally frozen to it. Eventually, said the
World
, Drexel was assisted down by his brother and mechanics, and he “plodded unsteadily over the field to his hangar. His face was marked with oil that had flowed from his motor. His teeth were chattering.” Someone suggested a swig of brandy, but Armstrong shook his head, saying he wanted only water. He gulped down two large goblets while a lady’s fur coat was wrapped around his shoulders and reporters gathered around for a quote from the normally garrulous aviator. Confirmation came through the megaphone that Armstrong Drexel had indeed reached a height of 7,105 feet.

Prunty built to a crescendo as he screamed into his megaphone. Or put it another way, folks, that’s “more than a mile and a third up in the air.” To think, aviation fans told each other, that this time last year the altitude record had been a puny 508 feet.

The house saluted a new American altitude record, but the millionaire flier’s arms were too stiff to acknowledge the applause. How cold was it up there? he was asked. “It was beastly cold,” he replied. “Hell was high.”

One more event was scheduled for Monday—the grand speed contest. But after the drama of the altitude competitions, the organizers thought it best to first lay on a comic interlude for the crowd, the equivalent of the aviation clown entering the big top in his spluttering automobile to hoots of laughter. Roland Garros and his mechanics wheeled his Demoiselle from its hangar and the Frenchman jumped up onto what the correspondent from the
New York Sun
likened to a good-size umbrella. The propeller was engaged, and a ripple of giggles swept the grandstand as the engine started up with a
pfut, pfut
. He’s not really going to go up in that, is he? people asked one another as Garros began to hop across the grass. “When she first leaves the ground one is minded of a rubber ball,” wrote the
Sun
. “She bounces back to brush the grass blades for just a moment and then she is off for good.” But once up in the air Garros picked up speed, and he was soon zipping around the course, taking the corners with far more ease than the big biplanes, then ripping along the homestretch at a pace that startled the spectators. He returned to earth after a few minutes, his machine wreathed in its exhaust fumes. “No policeman in Central Park would stand for the way a Demoiselle smokes for a minute,” wrote the
Sun
, as Garros touched down with a bump and a bounce, waving to the crowd, who stood and cheered and roared with laughter.

For the final event of the day, the crowd pushed and shoved for the best view of the three machines that were being shouldered one by one across the wide infield from the hangars to the sandy racetrack in front of the grandstand. Peter Prunty announced the names of the three entrants in a speed race open only for biplanes: John McCurdy and James Mars in their Curtiss machines, and the little-known American John Frisbie in an invention of his own. Then Prunty explained the rules of the contest: the race would be over ten laps of the two-and-a-half-kilometer inner course, but each airplane was obliged to cover the twenty-five kilometers in under forty minutes or their time would be annulled. The three machines would take off one after another, from a standing position at the starting post used in horse races. At a shot from the timekeeper’s pistol the engine would be engaged while mechanics held the machine in place; a second shot fired from the timekeeper’s pistol sixty seconds later would be the signal for the plane to start moving. The second machine would start to run its engine only when the first was safely in the air, and likewise the third craft.

Hundreds of spectators pressed against the white rail in front of the grandstand as John McCurdy’s aircraft was placed on the sandy track, its nose just nudging the white canvas strip that was the starting line. McCurdy settled back into the seat and bent down to hear a final set of instructions from Glenn Curtiss as the first pistol shot rang out. A mechanic spun the propeller but the engine didn’t catch. There was a groan from the crowd. Someone yelled out words of encouragement. The mechanic tried again, and this time the engine started. McCurdy shouted something to Curtiss, who fumbled around in the pockets of his jacket and handed the flier his goggles. The timekeeper was staring intently at his watch, shouting down the seconds as the machine coughed out black smoke. The mechanics began to edge themselves into positions from where they could safely let go of the machine. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . bang! The reporter from the
New York Sun
was up out of his seat as McCurdy pushed down the throttle and the “plane was dancing right down the middle of the track as clean away as a thoroughbred and then up, to a path it liked better.” Frisbie was up next, and then Mars, who rose into the air just as McCurdy negotiated dead man’s turn for the first time and tore down the home straight. The timekeeper told Peter Prunty the time for McCurdy’s opening lap—two minutes and 141.5 seconds. The crowd roared its approval, and they did so with even more gusto when the same aviator dipped under two minutes on his second lap.

Frisbie wasn’t as quick but he seemed to be picking up speed as he scooted down the back straight toward the western end of the field, then past the high fence along which the contentious canvas screens had been erected. A few of them had been dismantled earlier in the day on the orders of Allan Ryan, but not all. As Frisbie passed the fence, a gust of wind rushed through “and sent the airplane crashing to the grass on its beam ends, smashing a wing and rolling Frisbie along the sod for yards.” The aviator staggered to his feet mouthing obscenities at the fence and kicking great lumps out of the grass. “He’s up!” Prunty cheerfully informed the crowd, whose eyes reverted to the two remaining contestants, both of whom took note of Frisbie’s fate and increased their height.

The crowd reluctantly began to take their leave of Belmont Park once McCurdy had beaten Mars to win the speed race. Ten laps, twenty-five kilometers, in nineteen minutes—the feat sent the ten thousand spectators home in high spirits. One of them, Mrs. Florence Langworthy Richmond, wrote next day to a friend in Warren, Pennsylvania, describing her emotions at what she’d witnessed: “Aviation is so contrary to all our hitherto conceived ideas of the boundaries of man’s power and endeavors. I understand the sensations of the Indians when they first saw steamboats . . . I cannot begin to tell you of the fascination which these new air creatures have for us poor earth-bound things . . . I felt that we were looking upon the dawn of a new era of which I could not live to see the full light. The airplanes were apparently perfectly guided and controlled; they rose, they dipped, they held a straight course, they turned with no visible effort. They stand for much done, but they are only pioneer craft after all.”

Those durable enthusiasts who dallied over their picnic hampers under a saffron sky had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Charles Hamilton try out his formidable Hamilton racer, with its 110-horse power engine. To the reporter from the
Evening Sun
still filing his copy in the press stand, the airplane “roared around the course twice like an eighteen hour train to Chicago hitting a wagonload of loose rails at 2 o’clock in the morning.” Pleased with her? he asked Hamilton later. Not too bad, replied the flier, “but I didn’t dare let her out.” That would happen only on the day of the International Aviation Cup race.

As Hamilton limped toward his automobile, he passed one of the Wrights’ hangars, its canvas walls illuminated by the lanterns that were still burning inside. All the other aviators had retired for the night; Claude Grahame-White was in the front row of the audience watching Pauline Chase in
Our Miss Gibbs
, John Moisant was dining with his brother, Alfred, in the Hotel Astor, and in the private banquet room of the Knickerbocker Hotel, Hubert Latham, Alfred Le Blanc, and two balloonists, Jacques Faure and Walther de Mumm, were enjoying the hospitality of James Regan, the hotel’s proprietor, at an extravagant party to celebrate his establishment’s fourth birthday. But Orville and Wilbur planned to burn the midnight oil this evening, tuning up their Baby Grand racer. On Tuesday, Orville intended to stun Belmont Park, and the world, with the first public demonstration of his new machine.

*
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 canoe 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.