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  Young soldiers from the Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment—several of whom remembered Edgar as Tom Longboat—guarded the big iron gates through which he entered the docks. It felt like a military encampment. Army-issue pup tents covered much of the yard space. Beyond lay a series of giant piers extending into the Hudson River. Six of those, formerly owned by German shipping lines, had been commandeered by the U.S. government, which had replaced most of the German-born dockworkers, lest they remain loyal to the kaiser. The piers were already stacked with bags, crates, and vast quantities of barbwire, all pending shipment.

  Pier 4—a weather-beaten, single-deck wooden structure—housed the well-staffed port utilities offices, where Captain D. F. Chamberlain worked. Like the other offices, his would have been sparsely furnished: just a map on the wall, a chair, and a paper-strewn desk with a candlestick-style phone on it. Edgar—who had little choice but to play along with the notion that he was Tom Longboat—asked the nearsighted, gray-haired Captain Chamberlain for a Certificate of Identification under that name.

  The two of them seem to have got along, meaning Edgar had a good chance of obtaining what he wanted. On the application Edgar claimed to have been born in Syracuse, New York, nearly six years before his real date of birth. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a Native American not possessing a birth certificate, so he showed Chamberlain a forged Certificate of Naturalization, a type of document issued in Oklahoma, where Edgar’s purported tribe had its reservation. The forgery helped Edgar to fool Chamberlain into issuing him a Certificate of Identification, bearing the captain’s signature, a government seal, and a photograph of himself in a seaman’s uniform. If anyone challenged his identity, he could now prove that he was, according to the U.S. government, Tom Longboat.

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  He had five days before setting off for Europe: five days during which the temperature and humidity soared to levels almost as energy sapping as they had been prior to the rainstorm. In that time he could mingle with his fellow crewmen, reacquaint himself with shipboard life, and familiarize himself with his uncomfortable new floating home. He could enjoy his celebrity (or, more accurately, Tom’s celebrity) among the soldiers from the Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment. He could quench his thirst in Hoboken’s waterfront saloons. He could pick up women—or even men, if he wanted to risk trouble with the police. And he could sample the revolutionary new “slam-bang, knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out confusion of noises,” which people were referring to as “jazz”—music that made his own repertoire sound so much more conventional than he was in other regards.

  During this five-day hiatus, he must’ve talked to someone who maybe talked to someone else who alerted the Underwood & Underwood photographic agency to the presence in Hoboken of Tom Longboat. A man from the agency came looking for him. When the photographer eventually tracked him down, Edgar appears to have lied about enlisting in the U.S. Army Transport Service, for which he was merely working as a civilian crewman. He may even have used his newly acquired Certificate of Identification to dispel any doubts.

  Arrayed in a white sailor’s top, worn over a matching T-shirt, he posed for a photograph, eyes staring into the lens, cheekbones underscored by the light, his expression suitably serious, cowlicks of black hair flopping on either side of his forehead. He could have passed for a movie star—a newish breed. The photographer was left in no doubt that the handsome features visible through the camera’s lens belonged to one of North America’s most famous athletes, now on the crew of the SS Antilles.

  The Antilles was a steamship that used to ply the New York City–New Orleans route, carrying cargoes of bananas and other fruit, along with a modest number of passengers. Before being redeployed as a troopship, she had been fitted with extra accommodation, toilets, and cooking facilities. She’d also acquired lookout stations, a speaking-tube communication system, a generous supply of life rafts, and several artillery platforms on the deck. The sight of these was likely to make Edgar and his crewmates worry about the German submarines lying in wait for them.

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  Kit bags slung over their shoulders, a long column of khaki-clad troops in wide-brimmed hats marched down the quayside on the morning of Tuesday, August 7, 1917. Despite the heat, they were wearing heavy winter coats. Military personnel shepherded them onto the pier where Edgar’s ship was moored. They then filed along the gangplanks linking the pier to the Antilles. In advance of the moment when they’d set sail for France, the troops were ordered belowdecks, which gave rise to a lot of grousing. By keeping them out of sight, the authorities maintained the forlorn hope that nobody, especially the local German population, would recognize that the Antilles was transporting troops.

  She cast off at half past one that afternoon. From her deck, Manhattan’s clustered towers continually realigned as she chugged down the Hudson River. A little later, the gigantic Statue of Liberty drifted into view, thrusting skyward as if it had just burst from its mid-channel island. None of the Antilles’s military passengers were visible at that stage, yet the crews aboard other vessels must have figured she was a troopship because they gave supportive whistle blasts. And the band on a nearby tour boat, which had been playing a jerkily urgent ragtime number, lurched into a rendition of “Goodbye, Good Luck, God Bless You.”

  Only after the Antilles had skirted Brooklyn’s huge wharves and entered Gravesend Bay were the troops at last permitted on deck. They reappeared in time to witness their ship’s rendezvous with the rest of what was only the second American military convoy to Europe since the president’s declaration of war. Four other troopships, a battleship, and two smaller escort vessels made up the remainder of the convoy, which soon dropped anchor within sight of the Coney Island lighthouse, tantalizingly close to Edgar’s old haunts.

  He’d have been surrounded over the next few hours by the clatter of boots and blur of passing faces as the Antilles’s human cargo was ushered from one part of the ship to the other. By nightfall the soldiers had all been allocated cramped quarters. Unlike Edgar, few of them would’ve had the nautical experience to recognize the metallic clanking of the anchor being hauled up, at which point the Antilles followed the other ships on an easterly course into the uninterrupted darkness and out of the throttling grip of the New York City summer. When dawn broke, Edgar’s military shipmates were astonished to discover their home country’s shoreline had vanished as unexpectedly as a silk handkerchief during a conjuring routine.

  The Antilles was second in a line of lumbering troopships, escorted by destroyers on both flanks. But the battleship was out of view somewhere ahead. Though the convoy had not yet left U.S. waters, Edgar knew that he could suddenly be pitched into the type of military scenario within which he’d so often depicted himself. A U-boat attack was possible even at that early stage in the convoy’s transatlantic voyage. Off Nantucket nearly six months before America entered the war, an enemy submarine had demonstrated that by sinking five vessels—one Dutch, one Norwegian, and three British.

  Any temptation for Edgar to relax was quashed by constant reminders of this threat. Day and night, teams of sixteen soldiers were assigned to lookout duty. Each of them devoted a maximum of thirty minutes to using binoculars to scan a preassigned fifteen-degree sliver of ocean. Lookouts were drilled until they grew accustomed to making prompt and accurate reports on everything sighted.

  Daily “Abandon Ship” drills heightened the sense of danger. Edgar also had to comply with a series of orders that decreed that all the watertight doors belowdecks should be kept closed in order to restrict the flooding caused by a torpedo strike, that nothing should be thrown overboard lest it alert submarines, and that no light should be visible from the ship after dusk. Even the smoking of cigarettes and the carrying of matches was prohibited at night, because the glow from a cigarette or the flaring of a match would be discernible up to half a mile away—well within the ra
nge of an enemy torpedo. The captain of the Antilles and his officers were nonetheless reassuring about the ship’s ability to withstand an attack. In the event she was torpedoed, her construction would, they said, enable her to stay afloat.

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  Put Edgar in a new place and he’d soon charm people. Already he had made friends with personnel from the First Telegraph Battalion, most of whom hailed from Pennsylvania. With them they had a little black-and-white-spotted terrier named Smoke, who functioned as their mascot. They passed much of the voyage lounging around the deck, rows of soldiers standing along the rails or sitting on the life rafts. Frequent references to how they’d be in “heaven, hell, or Hoboken” by Christmas were commonly heard among outward-bound troops.

  To relieve the monotony, Edgar’s pals from the First Telegraph Battalion started putting on evening entertainments in their stuffy quarters. Behind portholes draped with blankets, they arranged for a performance by a comedian and, on another occasion, a musical quartet, all recruited from their unit. Taking advantage of the presence of what seemed to be a bona fide star, they invited the famous Tom Longboat to appear at one of their shows. He obliged with a selection of anecdotes about his experiences with the Canadian army at Ypres.

  On the men’s eighth evening at sea, bad weather began to brew. Everyone lining the deck kept anxious track of the rest of the convoy as dusk approached, complete darkness gradually enveloping them. Around midnight Edgar and his crewmates finally felt the full force of the storm, which had the ship bucking like a roller coaster. The officers dismissed it as a mere squall, but Edgar’s friends from the First Telegraph Battalion rated it “a very real storm.”

  Between then and the afternoon when the Antilles had commenced her voyage, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had, through a tip-off that probably emanated from the Hoboken waterfront, run a story about Tom Longboat’s enlistment in the U.S. Army Transport Service. Next to the story was a photo of the real Tom Longboat, though the article focused upon Edgar’s fictionalized version of the athlete’s past. “Soon after the European war broke out, Longboat enlisted in the Queen Victoria Grenadiers and fought in the first drive on the Somme front,” the article stated. “He was struck by a piece of shrapnel and was laid up in a hospital for eight months. After his convalescence he returned to the United States and spent some time on the Mexican border, teaching the boys training there at the time the finer points of the running game.”

  Numerous other newspapers, everywhere from New York City to Vancouver, from Kansas City to Indianapolis, picked up the story, which came to be paired with the photo of Edgar taken by Underwood & Underwood. Staff at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle then discovered that there were two Tom Longboats, one of them now in the mid-Atlantic, the other reportedly serving in France with the 180th Sportsmen’s Battalion. The newspaper launched an investigation to determine which of those men was the noted marathon runner. It came down on Edgar’s side. He was tagged as the genuine Tom Longboat, and the genuine Tom Longboat was branded an impostor. Referring to the photo of Edgar, the article declared, “If it is not Tom Longboat, it is his twin brother.”

  While Edgar endured another day and night of strong winds and heavy rain, his photo in the Daily Eagle prompted a spate of letters and phone calls to the newspaper from track-and-field devotees. Most of them insisted the man in the photo was not Tom Longboat. Someone suggested he was the same person who had been in California masquerading as Longboat. And someone else wrote, “This picture is not one of Tom Longboat, but an Indian who was employed on a vessel with me some three years ago. Know that face…Kept me company during the long, dreary night watches for four months, with a voice like Caruso. Bull like a frog.”

  If Edgar succeeded in bypassing heaven and hell and made it back to Hoboken instead, the chances of him winding up in another jail cell were growing.

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  During the early hours of Friday, August 17, 1917, the storm abated, by which time the convoy had dispersed. None of the other vessels could be seen from the deck of Edgar’s ship. A single distant light soon appeared in front of her, marking the battleship at the head of the convoy. Now the Antilles and the other ships had a point around which to reassemble. Yet passing U-boats were bound to be attracted by such a bright light. Exacerbating the tension for Edgar and his crewmates was the pace at which the scattered ships maneuvered into their allotted positions, a pace that replicated the dawdling gracelessness of a party of geriatrics trying to find their seats in a darkened theater.

  Not until the end of the morning was the convoy safely back together. The escort ships then sailed off, and were replaced by a fresh group of destroyers. As the convoy steamed east, the destroyers circled it, later chasing away an unidentified vessel that materialized on the horizon.

  When dusk fell, Edgar and his shipmates were warned that they were about to enter the most dangerous part of the Atlantic. Their lives depended upon them remaining vigilant. Sighting the frothing wake left by a torpedo could win the Antilles vital seconds in which to evade it, or at least lessen its impact. In case Edgar and the others were forced to abandon ship, the officers had them sleep in their clothes. And they were told to have their life preservers always within reach.

  Somewhere to the west of the Antilles, the flashing of Morse code from a British ship punctured the darkness. The message read MY CONVOY WAS ATTACKED BY A SUBMARINE TEN MILES FROM THE PRESENT POSITION.

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  Shortly before noon that Sunday, a sudden spurt of water broke the sea’s sculpted surface, pinpointing where a U-boat had ducked beneath it. The alarm rapidly sounded aboard Edgar’s ship, those half-dozen blasts on a steam whistle heralding the precise moment when his military fantasies became real. With a violent sideways movement that must have yanked at Edgar’s body, the Antilles commenced the standard zigzagging anti-submarine course, which was replicated by the other troopships. Military personnel and crewmen alike sprinted down the swaying corridors and gangways, their boots hammering on the decks, their shouts no doubt bouncing off the ship’s metal walls. While crewmen manned the gun platforms, soldiers in life preservers crowded the deck, where the unfolding drama could be watched with lip-biting anxiety.

  Like sheepdogs nipping at the heels of their flock, the escorting destroyers kept veering close to the Antilles and the rest of the convoy. In the meantime, a torpedo’s fizzing trail was spotted. It etched a line across the water, extending toward one of the destroyers. A simple geometry assignment would now help to determine whether Edgar and his shipmates lived or died. If that moving line intersected with the destroyer, Edgar’s ship was a lot more likely to end up being sunk or disabled. From the masts above him, the lookouts would have seen the tip of the line getting closer and closer. Forty yards. Thirty yards. Twenty yards until it bisected the ocean in front of the destroyer, and then exploded harmlessly.

  The destroyer and its fellow escort vessels converged on the area where they suspected the U-boat was lurking. What looked like garbage cans were rolled from the rear of these ships. Each can was a fifty-pound depth charge, attached by a length of rope to a marker buoy. For a few anticlimactic moments, the buoys would crest the waves in a silent preamble to a stifled boom and a frothing ring of water. Yet no debris surfaced, nothing to imply that the submarine had been hit.

  Everyone aboard Edgar’s ship awaited the next attack. Two more alerts that afternoon propelled the gunners to their positions. Once again the U-boat scored no torpedo strikes.

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  Coming into view at daybreak was a fleet of small fishing boats with weather-stained red, yellow, and sometimes blue sails. Their presence implied that the convoy didn’t have far to go until it reached Saint-Nazaire. Edgar could look forward to practicing his fluent French when he disembarked. Before the Antilles made landfall, though, she had to negotiate a stretch of water
where several shipping lanes bunched into a single narrow channel that doubled as a shooting gallery for waiting U-boats.

  At 8:32 a.m., a faint bristle on the horizon resolved itself into a lighthouse, set on an island just off the coast. Within a few hours Edgar’s perilous journey would be over. A mood of elation prevailed among his shipmates. The sonorous explosion of a depth charge, dropped by a destroyer to the left of the Antilles, cut short the euphoria. Instantly, the gunners aboard Edgar’s ship dashed to their posts. They fired three inconclusive shots at a U-boat that was briefly visible above the surface.

  More gunfire was audible at intervals over the next half hour. Toward the rear of the convoy, someone sighted a submarine’s periscope. Half a dozen shots were fired before the periscope vanished.

  A couple of French airplanes flew over the zigzagging fleet and bombed the submarine. One of their bombs exploded dangerously near a troopship.

  Before the convoy reached the mouth of the river Loire, some twelve further shots were aimed at what now appeared to be multiple U-boats. A torpedo sped toward the troopship just ahead of the Antilles. By swerving like a quarterback sidestepping an opponent, the troopship dodged the projectile, which passed only twenty feet from its hull.

  At last the attack was over. It had gone on for more than an hour, relieved conversations about it only now breaking out around Edgar. A debate raged as to how many U-boats had been sunk. While the ship’s officers plumped for a single hit, others insisted that ten had been destroyed.