Chasing Icarus Read online

  At the St. Louis dinner Johnstone was his usual ebullient self, “happy go-lucky . . . big-hearted, good-natured, one always found him joking and smiling.” But it was all an act. In reality his bonhomie was like a bandage that concealed from his wife his sense of impending doom. Neither she nor little Ralph was allowed near his hangar in the final few minutes before a flight because it was there, as he prepared to go up into the air, that Johnstone’s fear began to seep out like blood through the bandage. First he became quiet, then mournful, and Hoxsey, though the younger of the pair, would play the part of the mother Johnstone had lost in his youth. Don’t worry, Ralph, he would tell him with a tonic smile. Remember what they call us, we’re the “Stardust Twins,” the best stunt fliers in the world. Nothing will happen to us.

  When Brookins collected his gold medal from Albert Lambert, president of the Aero Club of St. Louis, he declined to make a speech: “I do not care to speak quite as much as I care to fly.” If Grahame-White had been present, he would have choked on his cognac at such a missed opportunity for self-promotion, but Brookins had the Englishman very much in his sights that evening, even though he was seven hundred miles east in Washington. Brookins still seethed at the memory of his recent role in Boston’s Claude Grahame-White show, where, on the orders of the Wrights, Brookins hadn’t contested the race to Boston Light and back. “The course is too dangerous for our machines,” Wilbur Wright had told reporters later when asked why no American had challenged Grahame-White. The admission humiliated Brookins and the Wrights, as did the sound of thirty-five thousand American voices singing “God Save the King” when Grahame-White stood on the winners’ podium. But the hour for revenge was fast approaching, and as Brookins endured the small talk of his fellow diners he was confident that in exactly two weeks’ time, on the day of the International Aviation Cup race, Grahame-White would get his comeuppance. The Wrights had just finished testing their latest airplane, and the results had even put a smile— albeit momentarily—on the faces of Wilbur and Orville. Vague news of these trials had leaked out to the press, but as Fly magazine reported at the start of October, no one could yet shed much light on the matter: “Orville Wright has been flying at Dayton with a new machine so swift that it recently got away from him, ending its flight in a smash. Nothing definite is known of this machine except that its planes have been trimmed down to their lowest margin of lifting capacity. Who will drive the machine is still a mystery.” Not for Brookins, it wasn’t.

  For Albert Lambert, president of the Aero Club of St. Louis, it was hard to decide which was preferable: the reticence of Walter Brookins or the jabbering of the European balloonists. There was just no shutting them up during Saturday’s dinner. One of the French balloonists, forty-one-year-old Alfred Le Blanc, was kicking up a fuss about the Laclede Gas Light Company, the official race suppliers. If the company stuck to its promise to start filling the ten balloons tomorrow and not on Monday, race day, the gas would be stale and the race a disaster. Lambert told Le Blanc he would speak to the company first thing tomorrow. Next in the complainants’ queue was Captain Hugo Von Abercron, a short, stocky German with an unmissable mustache who demanded to know why no cash prize was on offer. In Europe such rewards were mandatory, he avowed. Lambert calmed the German and assured him that negotiations were in progress with several prominent businessmen and an announcement would soon be made.* Then Lambert erred by drawing attention to the magnificent silver trophy for which the balloonists were competing. Surely that, a winged female figure with bare breasts and flowing hair, holding the torch of progress in one hand and supporting a elongated gas balloon on her back, was all the incentive required. The Swiss pi lot Emil Messner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It is a beastly work of art,” he spluttered. “It looks like a German sausage!”

  A ruckus then erupted when Lambert was asked to clarify what would constitute a technical landing during the race: when the balloon’s drag rope touched the ground or when the balloon basket did? The correspondent from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch looked on in bemusement as “at once a babel of German, French, Swiss and English arose.” Lambert quieted the confusion by calling for a meeting of the aeronauts the following morning at the Jefferson Hotel, but the beleaguered president’s problems weren’t quite over. “In the midst of the tumult,” reported the Post-Dispatch, “the German entrants could be heard calling for hay.”

  Lambert looked nonplussed. Why on earth did they need hay? To keep their feet warm, they replied in unison, explaining that it could get very cold during a balloon race. Lambert guaranteed them that they would have all the hay they needed. Once calm had been restored to the dinner, a second round of speeches began. Von Abercron proposed a toast to his compatriot Oscar Erbslöh, winner of the 1907 International Balloon Cup race and recently killed in an airship accident. Then one of the American balloonists, Alan Hawley, rose to his feet and on behalf of the United States wished everyone a safe race. “The best advice I can offer you,” he said, “is to keep close to the ground.” The final speaker was the Swiss balloonist Colonel Theodore Schaeck, at fifty-four the oldest competitor in the race. He and Emil Messner had won the cup in 1908 with a 750-mile flight from Berlin to Norway. The voyage had lasted seventy-two hours, forty of which had been spent drifting across the North Sea. So sure had they been that they would ditch and die in the water, Messner and Schaeck had written farewell letters to their families. Grahame-White might have balked at the vulnerability inherent in a free balloon, but putting one’s fate in the lap of the gods was the beauty of the sport in Schaeck’s view. “The airplane is doing great things,” he told his audience of balloonists and aviators, “but I notice that the spherical still exists. Besides, your airplane has still to remain in the air seventy hours or more!”

  Some of the balloonists banged their glasses on the table and cried, “Hear, hear!” casting playful grins at Hoxsey and Johnstone, who smiled and applauded Schaeck back to his seat. Slowly the party began to break up, the aviators mindful of a need for an early start tomorrow so they could organize the transportation of their machines to New York. The balloonists, too, couldn’t afford to wake with a sore head if they had to be at the Jefferson Hotel at ten A.M. to resolve the question of a technical landing. But a few men lingered over their drinks, and among the topics of conversation was Walter Wellman. Had they heard the latest? According to that evening’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he was making capital progress at fifteen knots an hour. What was more, a wireless message from the airship had confirmed that the engines were working well and the sea was calm.

  * Jacon claimed he had been hired by Wellman during the summer for $50 a week, plus expenses, but that no money was forthcoming after the first week. Then, on October 14, Jacon received his back pay, but it was only $30 a week.

  * Penny dreadfuls were cheap and sensationalist novels popular with the British working classes and schoolboys.

  * On July 25, 1909, Blériot became the first man to fly across the English Channel. Leaving France early in the morning in a monoplane of his own design, he touched down in England thirty-seven minutes later.

  * Few women had ever flown up to this time, and only one, Baroness de Laroche of France, had her pi lot’s license. The first American woman licensed was Harriet Quimby in 1911. Before the decade was out, both women were killed in flying accidents.

  * The ninety-eight-foot lighthouse, the oldest in the United States, is on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor.

  † The Belmont Park of today bears little resemblance to the original. In the 1950s the clubhouse was demolished and rebuilt, and the course closed between 1963 and 1968 for a $30.7 million renovation. The old grandstand suffered a similar fate to that of the clubhouse, and new parking lots and approach roads were constructed.

  * Nearly $5,000 was collected at the eleventh hour, with $3,000 coming from Gordon Bennett, but donations also came from the Aero Club and $500 from the brewing magnate Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch. />
  CHAPTER TWO

  Let’s Stick by the Ship

  Sunday, October 16, 1910

  When the balloonists began arriving for their meeting with Albert Lambert shortly before ten A.M., the local papers were in the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel. One story dominated the morning news, encapsulated by the headline in the St. Louis Republic: WELLMAN’S AIRSHIP MAY BE DESTROYED BY TERRIFIC GALE. Alongside the bleak article was the photograph of Wellman and his crew taken twenty-four hours earlier, just before they climbed up the rope ladder into the car, and underneath was another, slightly smaller headline: 100 DEAD IN STORM THAT SWEEPS CUBA. The hurricane had ripped through the Carib bean on Friday, killing scores and causing over a million dollars’ worth of damage in Havana alone when seas broke through the city’s Malecón seawall. Now, the paper warned, the hurricane was tearing up the eastern coast and the America airship was slap bang in its path.

  In the first hours after their departure from Atlantic City, everything had gone according to plan on board the America. Wellman stationed himself as lookout in the lifeboat, passing the time with Jack Irwin, the wireless operator, who had on two thick woolen earphone pads. The young Australian sent his first brief message at eleven A.M.: “We have sighted Long Island and are driving ahead into the northeast.” It was picked up by Robert Miller at the wireless station on Million Dollar Pier, where the families of the crew had assembled after the airship had disappeared from sight. Two hours later Irwin informed Miller that the fog was lifting, and at one P.M. he tapped out a message to their support team: “All did nobly. We are doing our best to repay you for your support.”

  Up in the car Simon was delighted to find that steering a ship in the air was exactly the same as steering a ship in the water. He had cut two circular holes in the celluloid windows to enhance his field of vision, and with the fog now gone he had a magnificent view of the ocean. With Vaniman and his two assistants aft in the engine room, and Wellman and Irwin down below in the lifeboat, Simon was left alone with his thoughts. Conversation was all but impossible because of the noise of the motors, but a few minutes after midday the engines stopped. Vaniman shouted through the speaking tube that it was nothing to worry about, just a bit of sand in the motor. Fred Aubert took advantage of the pause to prepare a round of ham sandwiches, and Wellman asked Irwin to send progress reports to the London Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and the Chicago Record-Herald.

  The rest of the daylight hours had been unexceptional, but dusk revealed a disconcerting sight; illuminating the sky was a steady shower of red-hot sparks from the America’s exhaust. The fireworks display was pretty, but if just one stray spark landed in some cranny of the airship, they would be blown to kingdom come. Wellman had rushed into the engine room, but Vaniman had just shrugged and reassured his skipper that they were perfectly safe. Then at eight P.M., as fog thickened, Simon heard a shout from Wellman through the speaking tube that connected the car to the lifeboat: “Ship ahead!” Simon peered through his two small, circular holes and just made out a large, four-masted schooner not more than a hundred yards away. The vessel was the Boston-registered Bullard, bound for Norfolk and skippered by Captain Sawyer, who had heard of Wellman but had no idea the epic quest was under way. He and his crew thought the light they could see bearing down on them came from a mast of a large steamer, so they “ran about shouting and yelling . . . hoping that its lookout might see us in time to avoid a collision.”

  As the sound of the airship’s engines grew louder, Sawyer and his men still couldn’t see the ship that they now felt certain was going to run them down. The skipper later confessed there had been pandemonium on deck as they braced themselves for the collision. And then suddenly, “out of the darkness and mist shot a big aerial phantom . . . the thing was such a big surprise for all hands that we were knocked off our pins.” The sailors dropped to their knees, clasped their hands in prayer, and looked up in terror as the airship passed above them. Over the noise of the engines, Sawyer also heard the airship scraping the topmasts as she veered away. Up in the car Simon knew they had come perilously close to death, but the Englishman in him couldn’t resist making light of the incident in his log: “I don’t suppose they had heard about us, and I would like to hear their remarks now!”

  In the early hours of Sunday the America pushed on east at a steady 15 miles an hour. They were on schedule to fulfill Wellman’s prediction of reaching England in ten days. At four A.M. the engines were turned off and everyone—save the lookout—got his head down for a couple of hours’ rest. Simon crawled into his hammock after a twenty-hour shift, “too tired even to dream,” and fell asleep in seconds as the airship drifted peacefully northeast.

  Wellman shook Simon awake. The two-hour sleep had felt more like two minutes, but the anticipation of another day’s adventure quickly swept the fatigue from his body. As Simon sat down at the controls, Vaniman started the motors and they were on their way once more. By eight A.M. the fog had thinned and Simon spotted a fishing boat, and the ripples of shoal water underneath, “which proved we were in Martha’s Vineyard, which is between Nantucket Lightship and the mainland.” Wellman was cock-a-hoop when he learned of their position. There would be no humiliation in pulling up short on the coast of New En-gland, and now the broad Atlantic stretched before them. He told Aubert to cook breakfast and to be sure to make it a good one: ham, eggs, and strong coffee all round. Simon reckoned it the finest breakfast he had had in a long time, one that fed his morale as much as his stomach. The biggest unknown before their voyage had been the America’s engines, but they had been faultless in the twenty-four hours since their departure. Why shouldn’t they remain so? For the first time, Simon succumbed to temptation and pictured the faces of his friends and family when he arrived in England.

  It was around ten A.M.—just as the balloonists sat down with Albert Lambert in St. Louis’s Jefferson Hotel—when things started to go wrong for the America. Since dawn the weather had been becoming ever more aggressive, but now the breeze was a wind and heavy gusts from the southwest struck the airship. Each blow sent the craft shooting forward at an alarming speed as the equilibrator “jumped from wave to wave, fifty to eighty feet each leap.” Sometimes the equilibrator dived beneath the ocean, and the airship’s cables were pulled taut for a few seconds until it leaped clear. Then the sudden release of tension sent the car rocking from side to side with Simon struggling to remain upright in his seat. He looked fearfully around him as the car creaked and groaned with every fresh gust. Huddled in the bowels of the lifeboat, Wellman and Jack Irwin felt themselves drop ever closer to the whitecapped waves of the Atlantic.

  If the lifeboat hit the surface, they knew it would be torn loose from its shackles, portending a miserable end to their adventure, and their lives. It was too dangerous to try to climb back into the car with the wind so strong, so through the speaking tube Wellman ordered the crew to lighten the craft’s load. Vaniman and this team of engineers jettisoned some gasoline, and for a while the America regained its buoyancy. “It’s a pity to see that good fuel going to waste,” Simon wrote in his log, “but we have to do it to save the ship.” Then he added as an afterthought, “I would like to have some of those longshore ‘old women’ here with us now.”

  At noon they dumped more gasoline to lighten the sagging America, but by two o’clock on Sunday afternoon they had passed through the eye of the storm, and a relieved Wellman and Irwin scurried up the ladder into the car. The strain of the last few hours was etched into every one of their faces, and Vaniman in particular seemed upset by their tribulation.

  Wellman asked Simon for an estimate of their position, and he replied that they had covered 140 miles since the sighting of the fishing boat at eight A.M. In the last couple of hours they had been pushed northeast and were drawing near to the transatlantic shipping lanes. Vaniman gave a nervous cry and asserted that the time had come to issue a Mayday over the wireless and to then launch the lifeboat. Wellman disagreed, accepting that while
they didn’t now have enough gasoline to get them across the ocean, they could still make a run for England if the wind changed to out of the west. Vaniman laughed, a short disbelieving laugh, and challenged his captain to put it to the vote. Wellman turned to the first man, Lewis Loud, and asked if he wished to abandon ship or remain aloft.

  “Let’s stick by the ship,” said Loud.

  “I am with you for fighting it out,” said Simon.

  “So am I,” said Irwin.

  “And I, too,” said Aubert.

  To lift the spirits of the crew Wellman told Aubert to rustle up a hot meal. Later, as they sat back replete and momentarily relaxed, Aubert spoke wistfully to Simon of his girlfriend. How he wished he were back in Atlantic City, the two of them on the hotel veranda holding hands. He looked Simon in the eye and asked, “What our are chances?”