“How’s the ship?”
“Everything seems O.K. There’s been a little trouble with the fuel-flow
meter and analyzer, but I think they’ll cure that here.”
“How’s Fred?”
“Fine....”
“Having a good time?” George asked.
“Oh, yes,” AE answered. “It’s been very worth while. We’ll do it again,
together, some time.”
“O.K. with me. Anything else?”
“Well, I’ll cable tomorrow an estimate of when we should get to
Howland. Good-by.... See you in Oakland.”
Amelia hung up the telephone and walked away slowly. GP was a most
considerate and understanding husband, and when their friends had their
little jokes about George’s role as the “forgotten husband,” he was
always good-humored. After the Atlantic flight, she remembered, her
Unknown Husband was decorated. Friends and well-wishers had gathered
in her hotel suite in New York. The rooms were crowded with floral
bouquets of congratulations.
A woman friend of AE’s went from bouquet to bouquet untying ribbons of
various colors, and from them she fashioned a rosette. She walked over
to George, who was sitting in one of the easy chairs.
“Stand up, husband!” the woman said. The husband obliged. She fastened
the decoration to the lapel of GP’s coat. “For distinguished service in
self-effacement beyond the line of marital duty, I hereby bestow upon
you the ‘Order of the Forgotten Husband.’”
A flash of laughter cracked across the room. GP smiled uneasily, then
laughed with the others.
“And,” added AE from the side line of spectators, “for having a sense
of humor, too.”
Then, later, he organized other forgotten husbands of women fliers into
the Forty-Nine Point Five Club. The women had formed an international
organization of licensed women pilots and called themselves the
Ninety-Nines. AE was the first president of the group. Not to be
outdone, GP proposed a new trophy from the 49.5’s. It was an endurance
prize to be awarded to the first wife who stayed home the longest. The
trophy: a cut-glass baby bottle with crossed silver safety pins. The
award was never made. There was no one who qualified.
Amelia kicked up the dust at Karachi as she remembered the telephone
conversation with GP. Certainly she had never qualified for the trophy,
but she would give it an honest try if she ever got home from this long
trip. There was another continent to fly over, and another after that;
not to mention the Pacific Ocean, which was more than equal to both of
them put together.
For the present, however, the chance to ride a camel could not be
foregone. Amelia and Fred rose to the occasion--literally. The way
the camel swung up from the ground, nose-diving forward then lurching
backward, Amelia, ensconced between the humps, felt as if she were
going into a flat spin.
“Better wear your parachute,” Fred called over to her.
After the ride, or rather the swing aloft from extended rubber pads,
AE went to the post office to have the “covers” canceled for her
subscribing philatelists back home.
Out at the airport, the largest AE had ever seen, mechanics from
Imperial Airways worked around the clock getting the Electra back into
top-flight condition. Two instrument specialists on loan from the Royal
Air Force repaired the troublesome fuel-flow indicator and the jammed
mixture-control lever.
5. _India to Australia_
Two days later, on June 17, the Electra was pronounced ready; and on
that same day they left Karachi for Calcutta, 1,390 miles directly
across India to its eastern border.
Shortly after take-off low clouds formed and sped by beneath the wings
but were soon outrun. The waves of sand of the Sind Desert now whipped
into little whirlpools; then, driven by a strong wind from the south,
they became a sandstorm of unabated fury. Amelia climbed higher in
escape.
Ahead there was no storm, and she could see ridges that grew from
the ground rising to foothills and then to mountains. They were like
“sharks poking their backs through a yellow sea.”
Over Central India aids to contact flying became a surfeit of plenty:
well-mapped railroads, rivers, and mountains were easily identified. By
such landmarks her way was made easy.
But it was not so in the air. Large black eagles dived out of the sky
toward the Electra. They soared and swung and spun about the plane,
giving Amelia many moments of fretful anxiety. If they flew into the
propellers, they would be chopped into bird-and-feather burger which
could choke off the Wasp engines. That she missed them was a miracle of
purblind fate and wide-eyed flying.
Below, the mountains had descended into plains. Mosaics in neat squares
of brown, green, and gold were laid out as if on a vast floor, the
squares joined by silver-and-gold inlay that reflected the sky and the
sun.
In the distance the Ganges River sparkled, and beside it the city of
Allahabad stood out against the white brightness of the encircling
countryside. Beyond the city mountains green with luxuriant growth rose
sharply into towering magnificence. Rainstorms engulfed the peaks.
Amelia plowed through.
Air currents from off the mountains lifted the Electra an added 1,000
feet into the air. AE jammed the control column forward, trying to hold
down the nose of the plane. Sheets of rain smashed down on wings and
fuselage and lashed back from the props against the cockpit windows.
Once over the tops, the mountains quickly became plains that would
continue for the next hundred miles all the way to Calcutta. Low clouds
now scudded by and the weather cleared, revealing a quilted patchwork
of gray, green, and tan rice fields.
More towns and an increasing number of railroads indicated that a big
city was at hand. AE watched factories and mills and many villages grow
thicker as she approached the heart of the city.
Harbor, docks, many intersecting streets, and countless white buildings
bright in the sun: these were Calcutta. As she reached Dum Dum airport,
another squall line moved in and broke across the Electra just as
Amelia began her letdown for a landing. Rolling down the runway the
plane sent up sheets of spray. Then as suddenly as it had begun, the
rain stopped, and the sun shone as before. It was 4:00 P.M.
Four hours later Amelia was sound asleep. The long, hard flight had
exhausted her; her eyes, tired and sore from the constant strain of
watching ground, wings, and instruments, had closed as if from an
involuntary reflex action.
Because of the Honolulu crack-up and the consequent change in plans
that turned the flight to a west-to-east crossing at the equator, the
monsoon season, which they had hoped earlier to escape, was now upon
them. For India, it meant that the winds, beginning in June, would
sweep in from the Indian Ocean in the southwest, carrying with them
rains heavy, violent, and destructive. For the Electra, it meant cross
winds and downpours, for its course lay directly in the path of the
monsoon. For Amelia, it meant one of the supreme tests of her skill,
courage, and endurance.
During that night of June 17 the monsoons began. When Amelia and Fred
reached the airport in the morning, the ground was wet and soggy. A
take-off would be risky at best; but the forecast was for more rain,
which would make a take-off impossible. Amelia decided to chance the
risky.
She revved up the engines. Slowly, as she added throttle, the Electra
began to roll and gain speed. Tail up and at full power, the plane
sloshed through the mud and strained to become airborne. The end of
the runway loomed ahead; in a desperate move, AE pulled back sharply
on the control column. The Electra broke from the mud, then began to
settle, but finally held. Amelia pulled up the gear; the wheels, still
spinning and slinging mud, rose into the wells. As the plane rose in a
steep climb, the underside of the wings and fuselage just cleared the
treetops at the edge of the field. The Lockheed had done it again.
Difficult and dangerous as it was, the take-off was but the beginning.
The worst was yet to come. The sky was a dull metallic gray, and in it
leaden clouds heavy with rain crowded about the plane. AE felt that
they were grim harbingers.
Through occasional holes in the clouds Amelia saw scattered chunks
of land that looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They marked the
mouths of the Ganges. From the hot land, steam rose as if from a giant
cauldron. In a constantly moving pageant, rice fields dotted with
workers, grass houses, and green trees sped by.
The weather clearing ahead, Amelia recognized the two unmistakable
landmarks of Akyab: two golden pagodas and many volcanic islands.
Beyond the city was the airfield with two runways and one hangar. She
wanted to refuel and push on to Rangoon that same day, but the monsoon
proved a superior foe.
At Akyab, while the Electra was being refueled, AE checked the weather
reports for the way ahead. They were dire and discouraging. Amelia
decided she would have to try to get through somehow.
No sooner had she leveled off from her climb out of take-off, and
turned into her course heading, than a head wind, full of rain, hit
the Electra squarely on the nose. It was the heaviest rain Amelia had
ever seen. Sheet after sheet, thick and concentrated like shovelfuls of
gravel, flung back from the props and slapped against the windshield.
The Electra heaved and churned through wave after wave, through wall
after wall of water. Amelia could not see out from the cockpit and had
to fall back completely upon her instruments.
For two hours she pitted herself and her plane against the storm,
trying to break through the monsoon. Finally exhausted, her legs and
arms heavy as lead from fighting stick and rudders, she relented, and
retreated from the encounter. Reluctantly, she turned out to sea, nosed
down to the tops of the waves, and headed back to Akyab.
For her navigator Amelia had nothing but praise. “By uncanny powers,”
she wrote later, “Fred Noonan managed to navigate us back to the
airport, without being able to see anything but the waves beneath the
plane.”
When they returned to Akyab, the weatherman at the airport told them
that the weather would probably not improve for three months. Amelia
wondered if she and Fred would not have to set up light housekeeping
and wait things out. She talked things over with him. They decided that
they would try again.
The next day, the nineteenth, they set out, hoping this time to reach
Bangkok in Siam. Amelia, quickly realizing that yesterday’s tactics of
trying to fly under the monsoon would not work again, now climbed to
8,000 feet, hoping to top the mountains and somehow plow through. She
was determined to make it.
She set her eyes on her instruments and flew her plane blind. Through
the tossing and pitching of the plane and the pounding of the rain she
brought the Electra through. She worked her legs constantly, trying to
hold the rudders. Hands gripped to the wheel, her arms pressed forward
then pulled back on the control column; the plane now rolled left,
now right. Her legs and arms began to ache and then to stiffen as she
fought to keep the nose up, the wings straight and level.
The instruments were her only guide, her only hope. She flew the
little yellow plane on the artificial horizon before her, and held the
pointer on the compass heading by flying the needle and ball of the
turn and bank indicator. Never far from her right hand were the engine
throttles, set evenly forward and registering 150 mph in the white
quadrant of the air-speed indicator. Out of the corner of her eye she
kept constant check on the altimeter and the rate of climb. Again for
two hours she worked and sweated and fought.
She broke out into the clear, the victor. Below her were plains,
brilliant in the morning sun. She pressed back in her seat and heaved a
heavy sigh. It was a blessed relief to see the earth again. Through the
plains meandered the Irrawaddy River.
Clouds appeared again; and Amelia, carefully choosing the openings
of light among them, skillfully skirted her plane this way and that
between them for the next 50 miles.
Far in the distance, about twenty miles in from the sea and near a wide
river, she saw a great golden pagoda pointing brightly above the dark
shadows of a city. It was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, AE quickly determined
from her map, and that meant Rangoon. She grinned happily: she was dead
on course.
They landed to refuel and with the intention of leaving immediately for
Bangkok. But the Electra had not rolled to a stop when a heavy downpour
engulfed the airport, making a take-off out of the question.
Amelia and Fred made the best of the delay by sight-seeing. The first
tour was a short motor trip on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay. The
fliers, in a sudden release from their tensions, could not restrain
themselves from singing snatches of Kipling’s “The Road to Mandalay,”
although they shuddered to think of the number of tourists who must
have done exactly the same thing on the same road.
After finishing the line--“Where the flying fishes play”--Amelia turned
to Fred.
“That’s it,” she said to him.
“What is?” Fred asked.
“_Flying_ fishes,” she answered. “See?” Amelia explained: “That’s what
aviators are--ought to be--if they’re silly enough to squash around
aloft at this season.”
Fred agreed. He had never known at sea storms like those of the last
two days.
They then went to see the golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the same that had
guided them into the city from the air. Fred refused to go inside, but
Amelia kicked off her shoes, climbed the long flight of steps to the
top entrance, and entered to see the many Buddhas and to watch the
white-robed men at their priestly tasks.
On the morning of June 20 they were off for Bangkok. They crossed the
upper half of the Gulf of Martaban to Moulmein, then flew across the
north-south range of mountains that marked the dividing line between
Burma and Siam. From the height of 8,000 feet Amelia looked out beyond
the right wing and back to Rangoon: like the prow of a ship, the city
divided the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea, creating
the wide Bay of Bengal on the right side and the smaller Gulf of
Martaban on the left.
Since take-off, clouds had begun to form. What had been gentle
sheep-backed formations far into the west now grew and changed into
forbidding anvil-shaped thunderheads; in the east, flanking the range
of mountains, clouds broke and scattered, baring to Amelia’s view green
foothills that gradually sloped and diminished into broad, thickly
snarled jungle. As she looked at the heavy undergrowth, Amelia hoped
she would never have to pancake the Electra anywhere below.
They cut across the Mae Klong River. In the distance were plains backed
up by mountains. Slowly a ragged outline on the horizon became the
sharp needle points of Buddhist temples and the peaked roofs of tiled
buildings. It was the city of Bangkok. Through the city AE could see
from above how the Mae Nam River continued its tortuous course from the
mountains in the north to the Gulf of Siam in the south.
Hoping to make Singapore before nightfall, they landed at Bangkok only
to refuel and be on their way again.
Back in the air, Amelia stretched the sectional map across her knees
and studied the way ahead. Singapore lay on an island to which pointed
the long 900-mile finger of the Malay Peninsula. To reach it, she would
have to cut across the Gulf of Siam, then proceed on a course east of
the Malay coast, and finally head directly south.
She looked out from the cockpit. The day was clear and the visibility
unlimited. She found it hard to believe that she was flying over the
fabled world she had so often set out for, riding the old buggy in
the Atchison barn, or lying on the floor in the parlor looking at one
of Grandfather Otis’s big geography books. She loved the sound of the
names, Siam and Cambodia, and she picked out others at random from the
map--Bang Saphan, Lem Tane, Koh Phratnog. Yet there were two of them
below: Siam to the right, Cambodia to the left.
Nevertheless, Amelia shook her head, as she had failed to see
Timbuktu, so had she missed seeing the famous Taj Mahal in Negra, which
had not been far off the Karachi-Allahabad leg. It, too, would have to
wait for another time. Now, there was too little time and too much to
see.
She now followed a valley across the mountains, then swung down the
western coast from Alor Star in Malay. The clouds over the peaks were
beginning to grow: cumulus into cumulo-nimbus, cumulo-nimbus into great
thunderheads.
A deep green jungle unfolded below, with an occasional scar that marked
the cut of a road across the undulating hills and flatlands.
After six hours of flying Amelia sighted Singapore. Letting down from
altitude, she passed over countless ships in the great sprawling
harbor, then continued over the vast city to the airport. At 5:25 P.M.
the Electra touched down.
Amelia and Fred had dinner with the American consul general and his
wife. After dinner the fliers begged to be excused, and turned in. At
3:00 A.M. they were up and on their way back to the airport, eager to
get on to their next stop, Java, which lay on the other side of a third
crossing of the equator. It was the morning of June 22.
The Electra soared into the air. Over the sea along the coast of
Sumatra, then across the southeast point of the island, Amelia guided
her plane into the world down under of the Southern Hemisphere.
In quick succession she noted the jungle and swamp of a long chain
of islands; then sudden and abrupt, the volcanic mountains of Java,
imperious and proud, which rose out of the mist to dominate the
surrounding sea below them. Like suckling pigs, tiny islands lay along
the mother shore for their nourishment.
Amelia landed at Bandung and taxied the plane to the hangar. According
to plan, the Electra was scheduled for a complete going over. The plane
in the hands of the mechanics, Amelia and Fred decided to get a closer
look down into one of the volcanoes they had flown over.
In a borrowed car they drove up the mountain to the rim of the crater
at 6,500 feet. For the first time on the long trip they felt a chill
and put on their flying jackets. The sulphur fumes from the volcano
were strong and sickening; they reminded Amelia of the strong gas fumes
in refueling that sometimes made her ill. Nevertheless, she could not
restrain herself from looking down into the crater. It was pointless to
drive to the top and not see what she had come to see. She bent over
the rim and looked down: a pool of bright green water glittered softly
hundreds of feet below.
At 3:45 the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June, Amelia and
Fred climbed into the Electra. They hoped to fly this day non-stop
to Australia. AE started the engines. She watched the instruments
closely as the needles moved up in response; then, as in Miami when
they first started out for the world flight, one of the important
engine instruments failed. Something had gone wrong; but without the
instrument operating correctly there was no point in proceeding.
It was not until two o’clock that afternoon that they heard they could
now move out. Because of the late start, they decided to fly only as
far as Surabaya, 350 miles away. On the way, what had been failure
of engine instrument for Amelia now became failure of navigation
instruments for Fred Noonan. He could not get his most important
long-range instruments to function properly. Reaching Surabaya, they
turned around and flew back to Bandung. To go on without aids for the
difficult navigation that lay ahead, especially over water, would make
the rest of the world flight extremely dangerous.
Before they left Surabaya to retrace their steps, AE was called to the
telephone. It was GP, calling from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his United
plane was refueling before continuing on to California. George had
heard from Amelia that there had been some difficulty with the plane.
“Is everything about the ship O.K. now?” he asked.
Amelia, refusing to worry her husband concerning something he could do
nothing about, held back the truth.
“Yes,” she said abruptly; then softly added: “Good night, hon.”
“Good night,” GP answered. “I’ll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”
When the Electra landed in Bandung, Dutch technicians were hastily
called to work on the faulty navigation instruments. While they worked,
Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing in the close-by city of Batavia.
Pilot and navigator had made an agreement not to do any shopping;
they did not want to add any weight to the plane. Six pounds, they
reminded each other, equaled one gallon of fuel. But Amelia broke the
pact to buy a knife. She purchased it--a handmade sheath knife at a
metalworker’s shop--for her friend John Oliver La Gorce of the National
Geographic Society; she wanted him to add it to his extensive knife
collection. She jammed the knife under her belt. She wanted to carry it
all the way to Washington, D.C., and make an official presentation of
it to her friend.
It took two days to repair the Electra. On Sunday morning, June 27,
Amelia and Fred left Bandung, hoping again to reach Australia. But what
had been the conspiracy of instruments now became the conspiracy of
time. For every fifteen degrees of longitude crossed, they would lose
one hour; and the day would grow shorter the longer and farther they
flew east.
For this reason they had to land, after only five hours of flying, at
Koepang, on the island of Timor. The flight from Java to Timor had been
for Amelia an experience in extremes, as the lush tropics became arid
wastes--and rich abundance, monastic sparsity.
Except for a fuel shed at Koepang there were no other storage
facilities. Amelia and Fred pulled out the cloth covers from the back
of the fuselage and covered the props and engines. Then with the help
of some of the natives they turned the Electra into the wind and staked
it down to the ground.
The next morning, again before dawn, they climbed wearily into the
plane. The Electra rolled down the grass runway and jumped into the
air from the steep cliffs of the island. Over the Timor Sea the head
winds were strong, and it was not until three and a half hours later
that Amelia sighted the bright emerald sea on the northern coast of
Australia. They landed at Port Darwin.
Again, as it had happened before in arriving at a new country, Amelia
and Fred had to be fumigated. For the last time they stoically
submitted to the spray guns.
At Port Darwin they unloaded their parachutes and sent them home.
Over the Pacific a parachute would be of no use whatever. Gracefully
declining all invitations, Amelia and Fred parted for their separate
rooms to turn in early for much-needed rest. The next stop was Lae, New
Guinea, only a few hours away from Australia, but an eternity away from
home.
6. _New Guinea to Howland Island_
The flight from Port Darwin to Lae, on June 30, was a flight of seven
hours and forty-three minutes of the same day. The flight from Lae to
Howland Island, however, was a flight into yesterday. For Howland lay
one day earlier across the international date line. By the flight to
the other side of the 180° of longitude there was one day to be gained;
but to get to the great divide, there were two hours to be lost. And
two lives.
In March, before she had cracked up in the earlier try for Howland
from Hawaii, AE had written: “It is much better not to let fatigue of
any kind creep into the early part of any expedition, for it cannot be
eliminated later.”
Now she was weary and tired from a fatigue that could not be
eliminated. Twenty-two thousand miles of flying in only forty days had
taken its unremitting toll upon her and Fred.
Amelia wanted to be home by the Fourth of July and before her
thirty-ninth birthday on the twenty-fourth. She considered the
7,000 miles that lay before her and wrote in her logbook: “Whether
everything to be done can be done within this time limit remains to be
seen.” And before she left Lae to begin the longest leg of the world
flight--the 2,556 miles to Howland, she hastily scribbled: “I shall be
glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”