Free Chasing Icarus by Gavin Mortimer

with Evans and turned down Major General Wood’s demand for more funds, but the American army found an unlikely ally in Claude Grahame-White. Before leaving England he had berated the British government for exhibiting similar backwardness, and in America he continued to warn that a frightening new chapter in warfare was about to be opened, and it wouldn’t be confined to Europe. At a dinner given by the National Press Club in Washington in early October, Grahame-White had told his audience of reporters and high-ranking military figures, “Eventually the airplane will be the feature in all wars. Guns and powerful bombs will be carried on them, and the greatest of the modern battleships will be useless.”

    On the afternoon of Sunday, October 16, however, Claude Grahame-White had far more pressing matters on his mind than the role of the airplane in future wars; there were women to be entertained, so he spent the afternoon at the Benning racetrack doing just that. The New York Herald described how Grahame-White stopped his motor at fifteen hundred feet “and made one of his sensational sweeping dives in front of the club house lawn, landing lightly on the ground just as Miss Katherine Letterman, social secretary to Mrs. Taft, cried out some words of encouragement.” Leaving Miss Letterman blushing like a besotted schoolgirl, Grahame-White shot back into the air and repeated the stunt to a thunderstorm of wild applause. The correspondent from the Herald was as rapt as everyone else, but nonetheless he couldn’t help but notice that among the onlookers was Pauline Chase, and she appeared to have one eye on the sky and the other on Marie Campbell, the “uncommonly attractive young woman” who had ridden with Grahame-White at Boston. Curiously, Miss Campbell had now turned up in Washington.

    * The New York Times had offered $25,000 to the winner of the Chicago to New York airplane race, but the daunting nine-hundred-mile distance deterred everyone.
    * Parrish received $5,000 for painting the mural in 1906. In 1935 it was moved to the St. Regis Hotel, and in 2007 it was restored at a cost of $100,000.
    * Gordon Bennett was the then sixty-nine-year-old publisher of the New York Herald , the paper founded by his father. Though Gordon served in the navy during the Civil War, he gained a reputation as something of a playboy in later years, and in 1877 a New York socialite ended their engagement after a particularly debauched evening. He spent the rest of his years in Paris and died in 1918.

CHAPTER THREE
    A Sort of Bleeding to Death
    Monday, October 17, 1910
    In the early hours of Monday the wind picked up and shifted direction from the northwest to the northeast. Beneath the America the empty lifeboat sparred with the ocean, sometimes getting caught by a rising wave, on other occasions swaying just out of reach. The crew jettisoned more gasoline, and as Wellman watched it stream down into the sea, he silently accepted that with it went their chances of ever reaching England. He knew as well as Vaniman that it was ludicrous to imagine they could drift three thousand miles across the Atlantic and pop in for tea with the king at Buckingham Palace. But Vaniman wouldn’t end up in the metaphorical stocks, pelted with public scorn when—if—they returned home having done no more than flirt with the Atlantic. He alone, Walter Wellman, the man whose much publicized attempt to reach the north pole by airship in January 1909 had lasted a mere thirty-three hours, would have to endure another rubbishing in the press, similar to the one he’d suffered the year before when, among other things, he’d been labeled a “fake” and “a four-flusher.” He eased himself into his hammock, removed his spectacles, and rubbed his weary eyes. Death or humiliation, that was the choice he faced.
    As Wellman fell into a troubled sleep, Murray Simon, the English navigator, took the watch. At four A.M. he wrote in his logbook, “The wind has