Chasing Icarus by Gavin Mortimer Read Free Book Online Page A

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