Bennett must have sensed this, yet he was too proud to issue an apology to the May family or make amends with Caroline. Perhaps he did not believe he had done anything wrong. What business was it of anyone else’s how and where James Gordon Bennett Jr. chose to empty his bladder? He lay low for a day in his house, causing a few of his rival papers to surmise that he had left town—the Sun reported that he had “fled to Canada.”
But the scandal did not die down. On January 3, Bennett walked out of the Union Club after lunch and was just about to step into his waiting sleigh on Fifth Avenue when he was menaced by a dark figure standing at the curb. It was Frederick May, Caroline’s brother, up from Baltimore. A stout man of twenty-six, May was an old-fashioned southerner who believed in chivalry and family honor. He had come to avenge the public disgrace of the May household (not to mention the May piano) and to restore his sister’s good name.
May brandished a horsewhip and commenced to flog Bennett with it. At first Bennett put up no fight. May kept at it, knocking Bennett to the ground and beating him nearly senseless. There was a strange déjà vu about the scene—it was just like the old Herald days, when Bennett’s father had been on the receiving end of many a public thrashing.
“Why don’t you kill me while you are about it and get it over with?” Bennett eventually managed to say. He grappled with his assailant and wrestled him to the ground. By now, the windows of the Union Club were befogged by eager spectators. For a minute or so, the two men rolled around together, pummeling each other until “blood stained the snow from the sidewalk to the gutter,” as one newspaper put it.
Eventually a few Union Club members dashed down to the street and disentangled the grunting opponents. May took off down Fifth Avenue, while Bennett crawled onto his sleigh, holding his jaw and grimacing in pain, with a nasty gash across the bridge of his nose.
The nose was the least of his injuries. Bennett’s pride smarted terribly, and for the next few days, he stewed in his own juices. Then he devised a solution to his discomfort, one that he knew his southern opponent could well appreciate. Jeannette, who was staying with her brother at the family mansion on Fifth Avenue, tearfully tried to intervene, but it was no use. Bennett’s mind was made up: He was going to challenge May to a duel.
The messenger Bennett sent to throw down the gauntlet was his friend Charles Longfellow, son of the great poet. May told Longfellow he would accept Bennett’s challenge, and a secret location was decided upon along the border between Maryland and Delaware, near a place called Slaughter’s Gap. The duel would take place on January 7.
BY 1877, DUELING was illegal everywhere in the United States and, indeed, was widely considered an archaic, if not barbaric, custom. Bennett and May both knew that any district attorney who got wind of the affair would prosecute to the fullest; whoever emerged alive from the episode would likely face a lengthy jail sentence. So it was agreed that the details of the duel would be held in absolute secrecy.
Traveling under assumed names, the two contestants and their retinues—including surgeons—took a train to a rural stop called Slaughter’s Station, then set out on foot over the snowy ground. The cover story they used to reassure suspicious locals was that they were officials dispatched by the Pennsylvania Railroad to scout a new spur line. After an hour they came to a secluded pasture that straddled the border between the two states, not far from the musky banks of the Choptank River. A lookout was posted on the surrounding high ground to ensure that the dueling parties had not been followed.
At about two o’clock, the two men removed their overcoats and took their positions, twenty paces apart. Each man selected and loaded his pistol, while their seconds stood alongside, issuing words of encouragement. May had come dressed in dark clothes, but his second, thinking that black would stand out in bold relief against the snow, gave him a light-colored jacket to slip on. A story in the New York World later reported that May stood sideways, with his back to the wind, and covered his flank with his pistol arm, holding his elbow against his hip—while Mr. Bennett “gave full front, which exposed him to more danger, but enabled him to take better aim.”
“Are you ready?” an attendant called out, and when the contestants nodded their assent, he gave the count: “One, two, three…fire!” The two men raised their weapons and took aim.
Precisely what happened next is disputed, but the likeliest version is that May pulled the trigger first. His pistol apparently misfired (although some accounts say he deliberately aimed into the air). This left Bennett the opportunity to take his time and aim with the utmost deliberation. A few tense moments passed—witnesses thought Bennett, his mustache quivering and bristling, seemed tremendously nervous. He is said to have felt a pang of mercy for his vulnerable opponent. He fired, but his ball only nicked May, striking him a few inches below the shoulder of his pistol arm. The wound was just serious enough for May’s surgeon to declare it “disabling.” Fred May could not continue the duel.
Bennett and May both declared their “satisfaction,” and that was it—the affair was over. Both parties were relieved by this most fortunate outcome, but the two men did not shake hands or even speak to each other as they shuffled back toward the train tracks in the snow.
Along the way, Bennett fell in with his second, Dr. Charles Phelps. “Well, Doctor,” he asked. “Do you think I did right?”
“I would have been very sorry to have killed any man who was at my mercy,” Dr. Phelps replied. Then, seeing the hideous swollen scar across Bennett’s nose, he added, “But I would have been terribly tempted to wing him.”
May reportedly was taken to an uncle’s home in Maryland, where a physician soon gave him a clean bill of health. Bennett and his party checked into a nearby inn and ordered many pitchers of beer. His Herald did not cover the duel, but the New York Times carried several reports—one of which happily noted that the matter had ended “amicably” and that “both parties left the field evidently in high spirits at the pleasant conclusion of what promised to be a bloody tragedy.” Neither man, asserted the Times, was seriously hurt “as to life, limb, or digestion.”
THE BENNETT-MAY AFFAIR has been called the last formal duel fought in the United States. If that claim seems doubtful, certainly it was one of the last, and, because of the prominence of the individuals involved, it drew a great deal of scrutiny across the nation and the world. Law enforcement officials in several states investigated the incident but could not find enough evidence to prosecute; all the eyewitnesses kept to their vow of secrecy. Dr. Phelps even went to jail for his refusal to testify before a grand jury assembled by the New York district attorney. Members of the two dueling parties, hoping to downplay matters and thus throw prosecutors off the scent, anonymously floated to the press a version in which May had not been injured at all—and this was the story that generally stuck.
Still, when Bennett returned to New York, he found that his blunder at the May house was neither forgotten nor forgiven, and his having fought a duel in its aftermath only added a legal dimension to the snickering notoriety of a social crime. He was now persona non grata, just as his father once had been, though for very different reasons. Fifth Avenue hostesses decided that they “did not care to entertain a fellow who apparently had not been housebroken,” said one Bennett biographer.
Bennett’s reaction to being ostracized was curious, or perhaps it was just Bennettesque. If the May family did not want him, if New York society shunned him, if the district attorney was determined to pursue him, then Bennett would take a plague-on-all-your-houses approach: He would leave New York forever. Just as his mother had done, with him and little Jeannette in tow, he would forsake his life in America and exile himself to Paris. He would have nothing to do with the city affixed to his newspaper’s name and would instead run his business empire from an ocean’s remove, relying on exorbitantly expensive transatlantic cables to communicate daily with his editors and convey his every bizarre wish. “It was not so much a case of Bennett banishing himself,
” a biographer later wrote. Rather, it was a case “of New York being banished from his cosmos.”
One day in mid-January he quietly slipped down to the docks and boarded a steamer bound for Le Havre, France. He soon ensconced himself in Paris, in a grand belle époque apartment on the Champs-Élysées. But after he’d been there for a while, he heard through friends that Fred May had come to France, still bent on avenging his sister’s good name. Bennett, fearing an ambush, ordered what was described as a “resplendent” cuirass—a coat of mail—and wore it beneath his clothes for weeks. Finally, maddened by the suspense and growing tired of wearing the hot, heavy armor, he sent friends to confront May and make him state his plans. One of Bennett’s close Paris acquaintances later wrote, “Mr. May declared that he had no homicidal intentions, so, to his great relief, JGB discarded the cuirass.”
For a time, Bennett took up with a Russian mistress who went by the name “Madame A” and was said to be the “most disagreeable woman in Paris society.” He did not revive his love with Caroline May—and would spend most of the rest of his life as a bachelor. He never again lived in New York.
8 · THE SAGE OF GOTHA
In March 1877, James Gordon Bennett, his interest in an Arctic expedition quickening, decided it was time to pay a visit to Dr. August Petermann, the Arctic expert. Bennett took a succession of trains from Paris east across the French countryside, then burrowed into the hinterlands of Germany. The train ride was, Bennett groused, “a tiresome journey,” and it cramped his style to clatter across such soporific expanses, to a realm his newspaper could not reach and his yachts could not penetrate. He passed through the Thuringian Forest, the ancient land dipping and heaving like a dark green sea. The train dropped into a fertile basin, a patchwork of cow pastures and mustard fields, and then chuffed into the prim village of Gotha.
Gotha was a medieval burg of about fifteen thousand people, quaint in the extreme, with winding cobblestoned streets and crisp church spires and forthright buildings of stone and brick. The fountains in the public squares were fed by a canal that brought fresh water from a river fifteen miles away. Looming over the town was an enormous baroque fortress—the Friedenstein Palace—built in the 1650s. A newspaper reporter at the time described Gotha as a “dreamy drowsy town … It looked as if an event had not happened for a hundred years.”
Bennett made his way to the Justus Perthes publishing house, where Dr. Petermann ran his geographical Anstalt, or institute. Although Gotha was in the middle of nowhere—certainly from Bennett’s jaundiced perspective—it had long been one of Germany’s preeminent publishing centers. Incongruously, this rustic town was also a bookish town. Not only were maps and atlases produced here, but also encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, magazines, and all manner of specialty publications. It was steeped in the fine art and delicate machinery of design, lithography, copper engraving, color printing, bookbinding, and other facets of the trade. A studious perfectionism governed the rhythms of town life, and late into the night one could feel the vibrations of the steam-powered rotary presses.
Petermann greeted Bennett in the drafting room of his institute, where teams of apprentice cartographers sat hunkered over their tilted tables, working with compasses and horsehair paintbrushes and hachuring pens. Petermann liked to bring visitors here. His monthly journal, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, was designed and prepared here—as were his numerous atlases. Although the Duke of Gotha had awarded Petermann a professor’s chair with an honorary doctorate at the University of Göttingen, about seventy-five miles to the northwest, the position was little more than a sinecure, and he rarely set foot on the campus. This busy workshop in Gotha was his real home. He kept an open office in the midst of the scratching, scribbling deskwork. Bennett, not quite knowing how to address the eminent cartographer, simply called him “Your Doctorship.”
Petermann’s Anstalt had long been a kind of clearinghouse for the latest geographic knowledge. Exploration fueled his atlases; his atlases, in turn, fueled exploration. The Latin motto of his magazine was Ubique terrarum—“All around the world”—and the slogan was often accompanied by the ancient ouroborous symbol, a serpent consuming its own tail. The image reflected the kind of circular reasoning that lay at the heart of Petermann’s enterprise at Gotha: Knowledge of the world would feed ever more knowledge of the world.
PETERMANN ALWAYS TOOK pleasure in showing off his little empire, which he ran with an exacting efficiency. He was often cruel to the underlings who labored for him, and he was stingy with compliments. “He knew how to teach, but it was difficult for him to praise his students’ work,” one Perthes colleague later wrote. “He rose to world renown on the backs of his co-workers.”
Still, there was a wonderment to the operation he had established. Here in his busy atelier, a remarkably accurate portrait of planet Earth was steadily taking shape and sharpening into ever-clearer resolution. Here every feature of the world was given a name and a contour and a coloration—every river, cape, fjord, glacier, swamp, and isthmus. No detail was too small for Petermann’s mapmakers. Every major elevation differential was noted, every prevailing sea current, every road and railway, every oasis and caravan route, even the known locations of the telegraph wires that had been strung across continents and the braided cables that had been submerged along the ocean floor.
Petermann’s maps were second to none. They were reliable, up-to-date, technically brilliant, and intricately beautiful, usually colored by hand. They were chock-full of data, with complex renderings of relief and gradient, and endless loops and whorls of isotherms showing subtle differences in climate, population densities, and changes in oceanic temperature. His staff could execute a new map extremely quickly. Larousse, the French publisher of popular dictionaries, had a few years earlier doffed its hat to Petermann’s work: “Today Petermann is regarded in all civilized nations as the premier authority of our epoch on the subject of geography.”
After giving him a tour of his geographischer Anstalt, Petermann led Bennett through the Perthes publishing plant, with its copper engraving machines and large presses. Then they strolled over to Petermann’s villa near the train station. They passed through his garden and repaired to his study, where the shelves sagged with nearly every Arctic book that had ever been written. Petermann, said one Arctic historian, had come to be viewed as the world’s “Polarpapa,” a kind of “international president of the geographical world.” People from around the globe came to Gotha to sit with him and hear his views on Arctic exploration. He had won numerous accolades and honorary degrees, and the royal houses of Italy, Austria, and Spain, among others, had awarded him prestigious medals.
Yet there was something wacky about August Petermann. Many of his views on the Arctic were, we now know, absurdly off base, or just odd. He recommended, for example, that explorers kidnap at least one male and one female Eskimo from every High Arctic native tribe they encountered and bring them back, in the fashion of Noah’s ark, so that scientists might study the captives and send them on tour for the viewing public. He had a pet theory, based on no particular evidence, that Greeks and Italians were, genetically speaking, the two nationalities best disposed to withstand the rigors of Arctic travel. (Possibly, this was because he genuinely believed it was balmy up there.) He also maintained that salty ocean water could not freeze, at least not to a degree sufficient to mantle the entire pole in ice; ice packs hugged only the Arctic coastlines, he believed, and were primarily the product of freshwater rivers meeting the Arctic seas. At other times, he put forward a slightly different argument: that salt water could freeze, perhaps, but that when it did, all of its salt content was leached out or excreted in an “efflorescence.” In any case, he insisted, ice packs contained little or no salt—so Arctic explorers could rely on the ice cap as an unfiltered source of fresh water.
When it came to the Arctic, Petermann was a man “with an undeviating affinity for the wrong guess,” noted David Thomas Murphy, a historian of German Arctic
exploration. “Such notions strike the modern reader as so unlikely, so spectacularly counterintuitive, and in retrospect so wrong that they seem to border upon the deranged.”
Petermann had never ventured to the Arctic himself. Indeed, his sojourn to the United States was by far the most ambitious trip of his life. He was, said another historian, “the supreme armchair rover.” Yet he grew only more stubborn in the face of contrary evidence provided by men who had been to the Arctic. In many ways Petermann was an enigma—a combative romantic, a meticulous dreamer with a taste for the spectacular. “His character combined outstanding virtues with disastrous faults,” Murphy wrote. “He was undoubtedly a visionary, energetic and determined, gifted in his field, and possessed of public relations skills.” But he was also a “ ‘hare-brained’ eccentric whose fanciful misconstruction of Arctic geography led a succession of polar explorers to disaster.”
All the same, Bennett was fascinated by Petermann and wanted to hear everything he had to offer. Bennett made only sketchy notes of their three-hour meeting, so it is not known precisely what was said, but he later sent a Herald reporter back to Gotha to recapture the conversation and present the professor’s wide-ranging views on the state of the art of Arctic exploration.
THE SAGE OF GOTHA applauded Bennett for his willingness to underwrite a new polar push. “This Arctic business belongs to the world at large,” Petermann told the Herald reporter. “Now that the Congo and the Nile sources have been settled, this is the one great thing that remains to be done.” And the Americans, he said, were the ones to do it. If he’d ever had any doubts, his trip to the Centennial Exposition had clinched his views.