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Antonio
Scarfoglio &
The Around-the-World Race of 1908
Some
sources seem to have taken their
information on the
"Great Race" from the 1965 movie of that name, starring Tony Curtus,
Jack Lemmon,
and Natalie Wood. There are two glaring errors in that otherwise
delightful Blake Edwards movie: (1)
in spite of the original plan to do so, the cars did NOT drive through
Alaska
and over the ice-bound Bering Straits to Siberia; (2) none of the
participants
looked
anything like Natalie Wood. Other than that, the real race was just as
good as the
film. The race was sponsored by the Paris
newspaper, Le Matin, and came
hard on the heels of the spectacular Peking-to-Paris race
of 1907. This one would be even better!—leave New York, drive to the
Pacific, get to Alaska, cross the ice at the Bering Straits, drive
through Siberia back to Europe and Paris. Thus, on February 13, after
an ocean voyage from Le Havre, the Zust met the other entries at the Times building
in New York City for the start. Scarfoglio describes the competition: "...the US entry, the Thomas
Flyer ...sleek and low like a dolphin... the German Protos,
short and squat on its rough wheels...the three
French cars: the pyramid-like De Dion Bouton and the fragile and small Motobloc
and the Sizaire...as if all the manufacturers have built bits and
pieces of the
national psyche into their cars ...including our own Italian Zust,
slim and
nervous." (Slim and nervous or not, the Zust was a good example of emerging auto technology of the day: it was model 28/45 HP—a model produced from 1905 through 1908—, four cylinders, chain drive, top speed of 60 mph.) A lap around
the Times building, a few
national
anthyms, cheering crowds,
a shot from a starter pistol and they were off! In the Zust with
Scarfoglio were the main driver, Giulio Sirtori, and the mechanic,
Heinrich Haaga. As they set off,
Scarfoglio wired the Mattino that
he expected "to reach
Paris on July 15." That estimate was a gross miscalculation of
the difficult journey ahead. The Zust The
Zust
Approaching
Chicago, the temperatures drop
to -26° C. (-13 F.), all the cars at some point have to be towed by
animals. Back home in Naples, il Mattino publishes a
race supplement, a large map of the route.The map is
hand-drawn from an imaginary point over the north pole looking down at
that
part of the northern hemisphere of interest for the race; thus, the
reader can
trace the course of the race in a circular, clockwise fashion from
start to
finish. Scarfoglio
leaves Chicago on March 1.The
cars start to spread out. The Thomas
Flyer is leading as they head
into the plains. Another French
car, the Motobloc, gives up the ghost. Now there are four. The
Zust really out west The Zust crosses the Rockies, and moves
down toward Los Angeles.
Scarfolgio complains that the
leader, the Flyer has
violated the rules by using a railway tunnel to avoid the difficult
climb and descent. In Death Valley, he spots four human skeletons by
the side of the trail.The Italian car gets to
Los Angeles in the first week of April after a six-week trip across the
US (three times longer than planned). Scarfolgio writes that the Flyer has again cheated by turning
north earlier than
agreed upon in order to make for San Francisco and the ship to Seattle
and Alaska.
Riding
the rails
"Three days ago, we left San Francisco for Seattle on the steamer, City of Puebla. We arrived today, having made good time. We were supposed to embark here in Seattle on the Humboldt for Valdez, Alaska. But at the Hotel Butler in Seattle we found a strange telegram from the Zust company, our sponsor, telling us to abandon the idea of driving across Alaska and to embark on the Aki-Maru, leaving tonight for Yokohama, Japan. The Thomas [ahead by some days] has had to turn back [from the Bering crossing] because the thaw has set in*. Thus ends our bold dream of adventure, dashed by the arrogance of having taken things too lightly. We left New York too late and spent too much time crossing America. Our adventure on ice will not happen. We are not going to Alaska. We will, to be sure, still face many treacherous and difficult areas, but it won't be worth a thing without having crossed the virgin Bering Straits." [*Schuster
gave up the Alaska venture
almost immediately, the sled trails through the snow were too narrow
and the arctic ice
at the Bering Straits was melting.] The cars ship to Yokohama, Japan and cross
to the west coast on roads that are so steep and full of tight hair-pin
cutbacks that the cars have to be picked up and carried through each
turn. They cross to Vladivostok by a two-day ferry trip. The German
team, led by Lt. Col. Hans Koeppen of the 15th Prussian Infantry, is
actually the first to land
at the Russian port. Then, the Italian and French cars disembark from
the same ship. A few days later, the Thomas Flyer, delayed because of the Alaska
detour, shows up. Suddenly
it's a
race again. On May 15,
Scarfoglio writes from
Vladivostok that they are all wasting days waiting for the Russian
bureaucracy to let them leave the city. Scarfoglio says that "the
De Deon, which crossed
with us, is not going to go on, this on order from their home office.
Tomorrow they ship for Shanghai. There are just the three of us left."
Also, the Italian chief driver, Sirtori, is called back to
Italy. Scarfoglio and his mechanic will continue
without him. On May 21, Scarfoglio writes, "The Thomas and the Protos
left this morning in the driving rain." The German car picks up a 15-day
penalty for having used a train from
Ogden, Utah to Seattle in the United States (there were no spare parts
for the Protos in
Utah). Rather than spot the
other cars the 15 days in Vladisvostok by waiting out the penalty,
the Protos
leaves Vladivostok together with the
American car; Koeppen says that even if he doesn't "win" the race, he
will
cross the
finish line first (which he does, many weeks later, in Paris, four days
ahead of the Flyer). For
reasons that are not clear—Scarfolgio says they had to wait for a
telegram from the Zust
company for permission to continue—the Italian car waits three
weeks, until May 5. The Italian car will never again be in contention,
but now the point is just to slog on and finish. The plan
of all three cars: make for
the Manchurian railway and straddle a rail, as they did in the
Western US, or drive on the access roads still in use by construction
crews (the Trans-Siberian railway would not be completed until 1913).
The
route: through Manchuria and Mongolia and on to Irkutsk, across Lake
Baikal, on to Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, across the Urals into
European Russia, on to Moscow, St. Petersburg, along the Baltic into
Poland, then Germany and home to France. From Vladivostok to St. Petersbug is about
6,000 miles as the crow flies. Crows, however, are well above the
rain and mud of Siberian spring, bandits, very wild animals, and a
few close calls with the Trans-Siberian train. And crows
never have to send out for gasoline. All
of the cars carry guides. In early July, il Mattino runs a front-page
spread on the race, a dispatch from Scarfoglio called "Leaving
Manchuria". They are now headed for Lake Baikal, beyond which they
start picking up decent roads, helped along by better weather.
The Zust is welcomed in
Moscow by the Italian ambassador to Russia. Near St. Petersburg, their
car frightens a horse drawing a cart; the animal bolts and throws a
young boy riding in the cart to the ground. The child dies and
Scarfoglio and Haaga are in a Russian jail for three days before the
authorities decide that they are not responsible. They are sent on
their way. They are given are a hearty welcome in
Berlin, and on September 17, six weeks behind the other two cars, they
roll into Paris after seven months. Officially, the American Flyer
finishes first, the German Protos second,
the Italian Zust third. "The Zust is tired. Not the other two.
The Protos
and Thomas get replaced by other cars every 1000 kilometers...We have
heard
about that everywhere we pass— from railway workers, hotel owner,
private
parties, all of them people who have seen and who know. It doesn't
matter.
We're now racing for ourselves and consider ourselves to have no
competition
since the Dion dropped out, the only car that raced against us
fairly..." I
don't know. The
idea that the competition was using
replacement cars along the way is simply self-serving and
implausible.The Italian car finished the most difficult automobile race
in history and that should have been enough. No sour grapes needed. In
any event, the Thomas Flyer
is now on display in Harrah's Automobile Collection in Reno, Nevada;
the German Protos is in the
Deutsches Museum
in Munich; some sources claim that the Zust was destroyed by fire
after a road-show exhibit in London shortly after the race. Other
sources say it was salvaged and is currently under restoration in
Canada. In
comparison with the 1907 Peking-to-Paris
race, in which four out of five starters finished (the winner in 61
days, the last car just two weeks behind), the 1908 event turned into
an
interminable ordeal that outran public interest after the
first few months, with updates usually appearing only as single
paragraphs
in il Mattino by mid-way
through the race. It did, however, generate interest in the United
States in improving the system of roads, interest that led to the
construction of the Lincoln Highway a few years later. Scarfolgio returned to his reporting and
within a few months of the end
of the race was reporting on the devastating earthquake in Calabria in
December, 1908. In June of 1909, he reported on the infamous
massacre of Armenians in Adana, Turkey; in 1910 he published a
widely-read interview in the Paris paper, Matin, with empress Eugenie
[the wife of Napoleon III]; he co-founded a film journal, L'arte muta [The Silent
Art] in
1915 and in 1924 he was
responsible for producing Italy's first newspaper photo supplement
section, il Mattino Illustrato, using the new
rotogravure
printing process. He and his brothers had taken over il Mattino upon the death of
their
father in 1917, but were ousted
in 1928 by the bank of Naples in what amounted to a "hostile takeover." Antonio Scarfoglio lived through an age of
great change. When he was born, the nation state of Italy was only 15
years old; he
lived through its growing pains and two World Wars; he saw the
rise of Fascism and Communism;
he was born before the Eiffel Tower was completed, when the steam
engine was king and powered flight a fantasy; and a few days before he
died in 1969, his old newspaper, il
Mattino, was running photos of Armstrong and Aldrin rehearsing
the first moon landing. Interestingly, at his passing il Mattino published—as paid-for
obituaries—only two small notices, one from his
immediate family and the other from colleagues at the Union of
Neapolitan Journalists, which he had helped to found decades earlier.
(The lack of attention given his death by his old paper was perhaps the
result of lingering hostility between the paper and Scarfoglio family.)
The crosstown rival paper in Naples, il
Roma, on the other hand, ran a long and laudatory article.
"Totò Scarfoglio has died," it proclaimed, using the nickname of
endearment for "Antonio." It praised his early reporting of the 1906
eruption of Vesuvius, the Great Race, his work abroad in France, and in
general lauded him as a jovial, energetic man of extreme likeability,
someone who took advantage of being a contemprary of the greats of
young Italy, the likes of D'Annunzio and Crispi, in order to help shape
early Italian journalism. Amid all that, who knows if,
towards the end, Antonio Scarfoglio didn't harbor whimsical thoughts
about the modern
world, maybe something along the
lines
of, "Yes, going to the moon is
some pretty fine technology and, no doubt, a great adventure...but you
know something?...I drove a car around the world in 1908."
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Antonio Scarfoglio
Driving north from New York
City,
all of the
car have problems: they stop and put snow chains on,
often they lose the road because of the
snow, and they have to dig their cars out every few hundred meters.
Scarfoglio complains
that the Americans seem to be spending all their money on trains and
nothing on roads. (Indeed, the road were nothing like the good French
road
that all six cars had jousted along from the offices of 
As they
head toward Chicago, the cars are
still within hours of one another and often change the lead. They pick
up help wherever possible; friendly mechanics, scouts who bring them
fuel—often on horseback—from the few pumps scattered along the
route; the US Flyer gets some
spare parts from Thomas
In
the month of March, in
Nebraska, all the
cars at some point "ride the rails". That is, while the rules prohibit
loading your car onto a train from one point to another, nothing says
you can't get up there on the track and straddle one rail, one wheel on
the outside dirt and the other on the railroad ties between the tracks.
It's bumpy, but it's better than no road at all. By the end of March,
Scarfolgio is in
Goldfield, Nevada, "a town of wood and canvas in the middle of a
desert." 
By this
time, Scarfoglio, the German car and
the one
remaining French car are days behind the Thomas Flyer.