Chasing Icarus (9 page)

Moisant boldly steamed into the bay of Acajutia, a well-garrisoned, fortified Salvadorean port, at noon on June 12, 1907. Before the commander of the fortress knew what the visiting craft was about, Moisant had trained his guns on the tower of the fortress and in less than five minutes had disabled the defenses so that not a shot could be fired. Then, landing his men, he captured the garrison, imprisoned the commander and forced 100 Salvadorean soldiers to join his ranks on the pain of death . . . Marshaling his forces, he set out for his avowed purpose of capturing San Salvador, the capital of the Republic, sixty miles from Acajutia. It was there that his brothers were in jail . . . [and] it was there that the flower of the Salvadorean army, 3,000 strong, was garrisoned . . . Giving no heed to the fact that the odds were about ten to one against him, Moisant led his troops on to their second victory. Sonsonate, twelve miles inland from Acajutia, on the way to the capital, was taken after a brief but fierce attack. The invaders caught the Sonsonate garrison off its guard and though desperate resistance was made, the town was soon in the possession of the enemy. Moisant lost twenty-five men in the fighting here; the Salvadoreans lost more than forty . . . Moisant had cut the wires from Acajutia to Sonsonate, but he did not take this precaution promptly enough after capturing the latter place. Before the lines were severed an energetic telegraph operator rushed to a key and flashed the news of the capture of the town to San Salvador.

Rumors had soon spread through Moisant’s army that a force of three thousand soldiers was headed their way on special trains with orders to give no quarter. The press-ganged Salvadoreans stole away in ones and twos, and the Nicaraguans began to argue among themselves. Moisant tried to allay the men’s fear, exhorting them to remain steadfast so that together they could defeat the president’s army. But it was to no avail. Panic set in among his men and Moisant had no choice but to retreat to the gunboat.

President Figueroa derided Moisant as an American
diablo
and put a price on his head. He also declared that the incursion was proof that the whole family had been conspiring against him since the day they arrived in Salvador. The time had come, said Figueroa, to execute George and Alfred Moisant as an example to other would-be American insurgents. The threat finally stirred the United States government into action. President Roosevelt warned Figueroa that if so much as a hair on either American’s head was harmed, there would be dire consequences. A cruiser, the USS
Olympia
, steamed into Salvador’s waters to demonstrate the seriousness with which America treated threats to its citizens. Within days George and Alfred were released and the embargo on the family coffee plantation lifted, but John Moisant wasn’t through with President Figueroa. He organized another coup in May 1909, but word was leaked to the U.S. government, which ordered his interception by the USS
Albany.
State Department officials told Moisant he had become an embarrassment and a nuisance. If he was caught in Salvador in the future, then they wouldn’t intervene, he would be left to fend for himself.

Moisant appeared to heed the warning. He settled in Guatemala and opened a bank and for a few months led the life of a respectable businessman. But President Figueroa was never far from his thoughts, particularly as Guatemala bordered Salvador. Then in early 1909 Moisant read an article in a newspaper about the airplane, and an idea began to take shape in his head. He wrote to one of his sisters in San Francisco and told her he was off to Europe to learn how to fly. She wasn’t surprised, her John had “always had an inventive turn of mind.” What Moisant didn’t disclose in his letter was that when he had learned how to fly, he would return to Salvador and finish his revolution by air.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
knew nothing of Moisant’s belligerent ambition; the paper just glowed with pride that a man they claimed as one of their own had “in six months mastered the fine points of this new game [flying] as he mastered the arts of business, diplomacy and warfare in the little explosive republic to the south.” The rest of the United States was equally in awe of John Moisant following his return home, and it began to dawn on people that they might, just might, have found an aviator every bit as glamorous as Claude Grahame-White and Count Jacques de Lesseps. Of course, Moisant wasn’t as handsome as the Englishman, but while Grahame-White had been selling motor cars in Mayfair, Moisant had been waging war in Salvador. Suddenly Moisant was elevated from unknown to number one, America’s best hope for retaining the International Aviation Cup. His opinion was sought on all things aviation, and Moisant was happy to talk—just so long as the reporters didn’t poke around in his past. On October 13 he used an interview in the
New York Evening Sun
to mock those who doubted the military potential of the airplane, saying, “People talk of shooting at flying machines from the ground and warding off an attack in that way. We can travel seventy miles an hour, more than that soon, and can go up five thousand feet or more. Can they hit us under those conditions?” Asked by the
New York Globe
if his dream of building a metal airplane was nothing more than a flight of fancy, Moisant wagged his finger at the correspondent and said, “That’s one of the greatest troubles with airplanes today, and the reason they are not safer and a greater commercial possibility. Their construction is too frail and there are too many wires and the wings are too flimsy. Would you expect an automobile to be safe if it had a canvas body and a lot of little wires to work it by?”

On October 12 Moisant had visited Belmont Park for the first time in a dark suit and derby and found the course to be “very satisfactory.” He forecast it would be the greatest air show ever seen and caused gales of laughter among the reporters with another prediction, that “the next generation will use airplanes as we use automobiles.” Are you serious? they asked, and Moisant’s dark eyes narrowed. “There is no great mystery or great difficulty about operating an airplane,” he growled. “Learning to guide an airplane is about as easy as learning to ride a bicycle.” He cited his own experience in flying across the Channel. “Latham, Le Blanc, and Blériot said I was crazy . . . [and] when I said I was going to take a passenger, they thought I had gone stark mad . . . but I had a map and a compass in front of me and had no difficulty.” To the American newsmen Moisant’s comments were as welcome as summer rain after the drought of interesting quotes from America’s other aviators. The
New York City
Post
commented that his public statements “since his arrival in this country have been of extraordinary interest. No one else talks with the assurance and apparent mastery of the subject displayed by the young American.”

But Moisant’s turns of phrase didn’t go down well with his peers, most of whom had read his thoughts as they prepared to leave St. Louis for Belmont Park. In their opinion it was nothing more than a shabby publicity stunt from a loudmouthed novice. If flying was as easy as cycling, then why had nearly twenty aviators been killed since the start of the year, many of them experienced men such as Léon Delagrange, the Frenchman, and Charles Rolls of England?

The Wright brothers’ exhibition team refuted Moisant’s remarks in interviews with the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, with Walter Brookins calling him “foolish” for flying from Paris to London with such little experience. “He’s lucky he didn’t break his neck . . . an aviator must acquire a fine judgment of direction, of speed and of distance.”

Arch Hoxsey echoed Brookins, labeling Moisant’s Channel flight “miraculous luck.” As for flying being as easy as cycling, that was plain dumb: “If a man on a bicycle makes a mistake in judgment and falls, he escapes with bruises,” Hoxsey asserted, “but an error of an aviator—a pull on the wrong lever, the warping of the wrong wire—may cost his life.” Only Ralph Johnstone conceded that in the basics of both skills there might be an element of truth in Moisant’s comments, although— and here a look of thoughtful mischief spread across his face—“it is easier to learn to make the spiral descent in an airplane than to learn to loop-the-loop on a bicycle.”

Newspaper editors rubbed their hands in delight at the public spat, and the Belmont Park organizers pumped the hand of Cortlandt Field Bishop. Well done, old man, for getting that Moisant fellow over, the demand for tickets to the aviation meet was now so great they’d had to open two more box offices at their Fifth Avenue headquarters. From a revolution in Salvador to a revolution in American aviation, John Moisant was one of a kind. But what would happen, the organizing committee asked one another gleefully, when Moisant, the American revolutionary, met Grahame-White, the English gallant . . . a repeat of 1776, perhaps?

John Moisant’s brief flight around Belmont Park on the Monday evening christened the course. Not only was he the first of the competing aviators to have had a practice spin, but it was also the first time a monoplane had graced the New York skies. The
New York Herald
correspondent counted himself privileged, as did the workmen, who resumed their painting when the display was over, chattering excitedly to one other about the little piece of history they had just witnessed.

On Monday evening most of Moisant’s rivals were en route to New York from either Europe or St. Louis. Those on the train heading East left behind a city still flushed with aviation fever. The sixty thousand spectators who on Saturday had peeked through their fingers watching the death-defying stunts of Ralph Johnstone spent Sunday recovering before another great spectacle presented itself—the start of the International Balloon Cup race. The twenty balloonists had arrived on the rectangular aero grounds, between Newstead and Chouteau avenues, at two o’clock on Monday morning to supervise the inflation of their twenty-eight-thousand-cubic-feet balloons, and twelve hours later they had been joined by fifty thousand St. Louisians. Police authority began to creak under the sheer weight of numbers, and it was decided to close Pa-pin Street to traffic and turn it into a vantage point for bystanders. Residents in the street, and in Chouteau Avenue, were delighted and started to hawk their houses—come and watch from the comfort of our home, ten cents for a standing spot and twenty-five cents for a kitchen chair. Elsewhere, on the northern side of the field, across the way from a vacant lot, the occupants of a row of brick flats had clambered up onto the roof to watch what to some resembled a field of giant mushrooms. A better view was to be found from one of the two grandstands that had been erected—holding a total of four thousand balloon enthusiasts, who had each paid $1.50 for the privilege—on the east and west sides of the aero grounds. Yet the best spot of all was from the walkway that encircled the base of the four-story-high red gas tank that had filled the balloons. Here a hundred corporate guests of the Laclede Gas Light Company drank champagne, nibbled canapés, and loosened their ties as the temperature climbed into the eighties. With opinions inflated by alcohol, the guests discussed the likely victor and, ever so discreetly, wagered one another. Some went for Alfred Le Blanc and Walther de Mumm in
Isle de
France
, a balloon that had the backing of Frank Lahm, the American victor in 1906; others laughed at the idea; in their view it had to be the veteran Swiss crew of Theodore Schaeck and Paul Armbruster in
Helvetia
, the very same balloon that had carried Schaeck across the North Sea two years earlier. The
Düsseldorf II
was fancied by one or two, who reckoned that the fusion of German thoroughness in pilot Hans Gericke, and American chutzpah in copilot Sam Perkins, would be a winning formula. The more patriotic of the guests, having accepted a refill from one of the impressively attired waiters, tipped one of the three American balloons to win. Doubt it, they were smugly informed, haven’t you heard the news? Two of the U.S. entries, the two from St. Louis, right enough, were laid out on the field overnight without a tarpaulin covering. Feasted on by grasshoppers. Holes everywhere. They say they’ve patched them up but . . . well, if I were you, I’d save your money.

A detachment of soldiers from the Signal Corps ringed the balloons to prevent spectators from getting too close, and only a handful of reporters and Aero Club officials were allowed near enough to observe the crews’ final preparations. The correspondent from the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
was curious to discover what supplies each balloon contained. He was startled to find that the European baskets were weighed down with alcohol: on board the
Düsseldorf II
was “a quart of whisky, four quarts of assorted wines, a bottle of cognac, twenty-four bottles of beer”; the second of the three German balloons,
Germania
, piloted by Hugo Von Abercron and his aide, August Blanckertz, carried “eighteen bottles of beer, six bottles of champagne and three bottles of Hoch [beer]”; the
Helvetia
was equipped with beer and whiskey; the Swiss crew of Emil Messner and Leon Givau-dan in
Azurea
showed the reporter a small wooden box, inside which were “two quarts of whisky and one bottle each of brandy, chartreuse, Benedictine and crème de menthe.” As for the two French crews . . . the reporter had never seen anything quite like it. While the American balloons had only the bare necessities—field glasses, hunting knives, water, and food such as fried chickens, boiled eggs, canned soups, and, in the case of Alan Hawley and Augustus Post, “specially prepared lozenges, one of which is said to be sufficient nourishment for one day”—the French baskets were regally furnished. Jacques Faure, a cousin of Hubert Latham’s, and his copilot, Ernest Schmolck, in
Condor
had “a mattress and a pillow, a camp stool, a medicine chest, a bottle of cologne . . . one dozen pint bottles of champagne, two quarts of whisky, one dozen pints of mineral water, three fried chickens, 2 pounds of ham, 2 pounds of roast beef, 1 pound brie cheese, three pots of cheese, one can of corned beef and two loaves of bread.” It was harder for the reporter to ascertain the exact contents of the
Isle de France
’s basket, on account of Le Blanc being “very excitable and irritable,” but “case after case of champagne were opened and stacked on one side of the basket . . . to the number of about four dozen pint quarts.” Not surprisingly, added the newsman, Le Blanc also threw in a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer.