CHAPTER XXVII 

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC BY. AIRSHIP 

     Having satisfied myself beyond peradventure that Peary had reached the Pole, and realizing that this great quest was at an end, I turned next to a project which had long been in my mind—to attempt a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by airship. We made that voyage in October, 1910. All the world was kind enough to watch our effort with keen interest and warm sympathy. All the world now knows the result. In future chapters I shall ask the reader to accompany my comrades and myself on that memorable voyage, that strange journeying for three days and nights through the air over the stormy sea, a voyage which had the grim specter ever hovering near, which broke all airship records for time and distance, and which in the end was brought to a fortunate conclusion by one of those combinations of chance so rare and strange as to seem almost miraculous. 

     Before taking the reader with me upon this remarkable adventure, I want him—and doubt­less he wants for himself—to know more of what has gone before; what the enterprise really -was; why it was called into being; how the idea had its genesis ; what the plan, what the dif­ficulties in its way, and how we had contrived and striven to overcome them. The story of the voyage itself will be rapid, vivid, full of action, life, human interest, peril, adventure. But a great part of that story will be only half clear, will lose much of its true value and significance, if the reader has not become familiar beforehand not only with the soul and heart, but with the lungs, the muscles, the sinews of the project. 

     As we stole forth through the fog that morn­ing of the fifteenth of October and set our prow to the eastward over the waters of the broad Atlantic, we were a half dozen human pigmies astride a great machine weighing a total of about 26,000 pounds—thirteen tons of steel, silk, rubber, gasoline, engines, provisions, hydrogen, a thousand things welded together in a modern lighter than-air aerial craft.

     Whether this frail combination of art, artifice, and science was to prove a true and serviceable ship of the air, or a grim Frankenstein, we did not know. That is precisely what we were try­ing to find out. We were trying to achieve with steel, power, engineering and man's mechanical cunning such mastery of space and distance through an aerial ocean never yet traversed as would constitute the realization of a splendid dream. 

     That was what made it worth while. It is always worth while to strive, to venture, to work, to dare—and leave the rest to the gods—in an effort to realize man's dreams of conquest of the elements; to do something—be it much or little —for progress, to widen the frontiers of knowl­edge and achievement. 

     It is even worth while to try and fail, because failure often teaches as much as success. Of course it is far better to try and win. But the men who do try in any of these fields of en­deavor, be they fit for their work, have a way of looking all the possibilities squarely in the eye. 

     Our effort to cross the ocean by airship we had always regarded as a great scientific experiment whose outcome, like that of all experiments, must be in doubt. Everyone can see the dramatic aspect of sailing forth upon a voyage three thousand five hundred miles through the air over a stormy sea, despite the fact that the longest airship voyage thitherto made was only about nine hundred miles, and that over land. 

     Everyone could see that such a venture was audacious, possibly heroic, probably epic. But a voyage like this, with all its danger and with the chances heavily against success the first try, should have better justification than the mere de sire to perform a sensational feat. The moving spirit should be not simply a desire to astonish the world, but to confer lasting benefit upon mankind. 

     Our hope and aim were not primarily commer­cial utilization of airships. Our dreams carried us not toward the regular lines of aerial trans-ocean transportation which so many optimists see in their visions. 

     Whatever the aeroplane may bring forth—and that the future alone can determine—we know full well the limitations of air travel by such motor-balloons as ours. These limitations probably, we cannot say surely, fall short of the requirements of true commercial utility. Com­mercial use inevitably means a high degree of safety, of regularity of service, certainty of arri­val at a predetermined destination—all these as elements of the indispensable operation for profit. 

     In our opinion, all these objections not only hold but are likely to continue to hold against the motor-balloon. The operation of a lighter­ than-air ship is essentially extra-hazardous. Under favorable conditions the craft may do much; under unfavorable conditions loss or disaster quickly follow. Being inevitably extra-hazardous, it is adaptable—at least in its present stage—only to purposes wherein the price of the hazard may be paid. That is not in commerce. But it is in sport, in exploration, and in war. In all of these, extra risks being inevitable and acceptable, the motor-balloon is available. 

     We have nothing to do with sport in the air —dignified and admirable as it may be. We have had something to do with aerial exploration, and we wish to have something to do with aerial warfare. Growing out of my experience in de­signing, building, equipping and navigating the second largest airship in the world had come certain ideas of making the motor-balloon a ter­ribly destructive engine of war. It is my belief that through methods of our own, evolved from actual experience, the motor-balloon is to play an important part in the war plans of the future, and aid materially in making war so scientific, so destructive to property, that in the end there will be no more wars. The transat­lantic voyage was deliberately planned to fur­ther this idea, to call the attention of the gov­ernments of the world to the military and naval value of such air-craft. Dreamers we may have been, but we had had some experience. We were not mere tyros or adventurers, and a definite and dignified aim, not bald and bold sensationalism, moved us. 

     So much for the soul and heart of the dream; now for the material side, the lungs, the muscles. The airship America with which we had made two voyages from Spitzbergen in our efforts to reach the North Pole, one of more than a hun­dred miles out over the Arctic Sea, was gener­ously lent us by Mr. Victor F. Lawson, of Chi­cago, president of the association which had built the ship and supported the polar expedi­tions. But for a chance to cross the Atlantic the airship required enlargement, improvement, a new steel car, new engines, fittings, appliances of all sorts, costing a large sum of money. 

     All my life a journalist, and proud of it, al­ways a believer in the principle that journalism of the best sort is alert and enterprising in try­ing to do something for progress, I again turned to journalism for financial assistance. 

     I am proud of the fact that I was able to form a combination of the greatest newspaper in the old world, the London Daily Telegraph, with the journal which is generally regarded as being the foremost in the eastern part of our own country, the New York Times, and the leading paper of interior America, the Chicago Record-Herald, with which I have been con­nected all of my active life. 

     These great journals, assuming no direct re­sponsibility for the voyage, but leaving all that to me, advanced the forty thousand dollars which we had estimated to be necessary to put the project through. It was not their fault that the unexpected cost of reconstruction and outfit of the airship made it necessary for us to make up a considerable deficit out of our slender private purses.