East to the Dawn (80 page)

They were up and at the airfield before dawn for the planned flight to Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, but they had to settle on Caripito, Venezuela—much closer—because construction work at the field shortened it too much to allow them to take off with the planned fuel load. When they landed in Caripito, the general manager of Standard Oil took care of them and put them up in his home. From Caripito they flew the 1,330 miles to Paramaribo, which Fred knew well from his Pan Am days, and they stayed at the hotel where he had stayed then. Their next stop was Fortaleza in northeast Brazil. In both of these places they were, Fred wrote happily
to Helen, “besieged” with invitations of hospitality and showered with kindnesses—to the extent that when they went shopping in Fortaleza for sponge rubber and liquid cement to plug a small leak in the cockpit, the shopkeeper wouldn't let them pay, insisting they take the items as his gift.

He was pleased, Fred wrote, that Amelia had flown the most direct routes rather than the established trade routes to reach Fortaleza, even though that meant they were flying over impenetrable jungle, for it gave him a chance to brush up on celestial navigation.

Gradually he and Amelia became friends. Wrote Amelia, “little by little I came to know my shipmate's full story.” As they crossed the equator (the first time for Amelia), they were so busy that Fred forgot to dunk her with the thermos of cold water he had been saving for the purpose. He wrote to Helen of this part of the flight:

They were planning to spend an extra day at their next stop, Natal, so that the plane could be serviced before the long overwater hop to Africa, but the facilities were so good in Fortaleza that they decided to change and have it done in Fortaleza instead.

Two mornings later they took off at 4:50 A.M. and were in Natal—only 275 miles distant—by seven. Air France used Natal as its jumping-off place for the South Atlantic and had two ships permanently stationed in the ocean to give them weather updates. The airline offered to make the information available to Amelia; at the same time advising her that it was already too late in the day to start across the ocean.

They took off from the pitch-black field at three fifteen the following morning—destination Dakar. The flight went smoothly for most of the way. While over the ocean Amelia broadcast her position every half hour. She and Fred tended to the air canisters, sealing and labeling more than a dozen with the place and time of exposure and stowing them away.

But they didn't land at Dakar, because Amelia second-guessed Fred, thinking him wrong. Fred's instructions were to head south—“change to 36 degrees”—but a thick haze was obscuring the African coast, “and for some time no position sight had been possible,” as Amelia explained, so when she received his note (by way of the bamboo pole), she turned north instead, and they landed at St. Louis, Senegal.

The next day, June 8, they flew the 163 miles south to Dakar, the capital of French West Africa. There they were taken in hand by the governor-general. They ate his French food. (“Where Frenchmen are, there is also good food ... the meals were delicious.”) They attended a reception in their honor given by the Aero Club. Local mechanics fixed a broken fuel meter. They spent the night in the governor-general's mansion. Weather reports showed threatening tornadoes in their path the next day, so they laid over and then altered course slightly north for Gao on the Niger River, a flight of 1,140 miles, which they made in 7 hours and 50 minutes, at an average speed of 143 miles per hour. They slept in the open desert at Gao because it was so hot and both liked the experience “immensely.” Dakar had been another day lost, but Amelia was in no hurry.

The morning of June 11, flying low enough to be enveloped in the steam rising from swampy forests, they flew down the Niger, following the French Air-Afrique route marked by beacons. They spotted a herd of hippopotami in the Chari River and flew on to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, 989 miles distant. There the heat was so intense, the ground crew waited until after sunset to refuel the plane. The next day they took it easy, their destination El Fasher in the Sudan, only 690 miles and a three-hour flight away. El Fasher was truly exotic—the airfield was surrounded by an eight-foot thorn hedge to keep the animals out, their lodgings were in a former sultan's palace, and no one spoke English.

Flying over Africa, Amelia's thoughts strayed back to Bogie, the game she had played as a child in the barn with her cousins and sister. Senegal, Timbuktu, Ngami, El Fasher, Khartoum—places whose names had seemed so mysterious and exotic and tantalizingly far away when she was a young girl dreaming up trips in the old carriage—now lay beneath her as she flew eastward almost straight across Central Africa. Those “imaginary journeys full of fabulous perils,” had a hold on her mind: she was living out her fantasy.

Once they left behind the rivers and recognizable landmarks, Fred found the navigating difficult because the African maps were so inaccurate. He finally gave up on maps altogether, yet his navigation skills were so good, they were never more than half an hour off course, according to Amelia. They continued ever eastward across Africa, stopped briefly at Khartoum, junction of the Blue and White Nile, then crossed the Red Sea.

Amelia was certainly feeling well as she prepared to leave Africa, for on the last stop there, in Assab, she mentioned that she was so hungry, she felt “as hollow as a bamboo horse.” By the time they left Africa, they had been the guests of the governors of Senegal, French West Africa, and French and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, as those countries were then called.
The only serious problems they had encountered were linguistic, and with Amelia's French and German, and Fred's Spanish and Portuguese, they muddled through. Wrote Fred, of Africa, “We had a glorious time.”

England was waxing rhapsodic at Amelia's progress.
The Daily Telegraph
proclaimed her the spiritual descendant of Sir Francis Drake: “The air, it seems, is breeding such a race of men and women as the civilized world has not known since the sixteenth century.”

The flight from Assab was longer than it should have been because the Sultan of Muscat had refused them permission to fly over Muscat, on the southeastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula, which meant they had to fly out along the edge of the Gulf of Aden. Amelia and Fred could see desert in the interior, treeless, parched, dry river canyons, and mountains and hills along the shore. The manual mixture control lever for the starboard engine jammed, which meant Amelia could not regulate the flow to that engine; to compensate and to economize on fuel, she reduced speed. As a result, averaging 147 miles an hour, they took a little over thirteen hours to travel the 1,920 miles to Karachi. Still, long flights were becoming routine.

In Karachi, waiting for them, was Jacques de Sibour with a supply of new maps and relevant data. Jacques was later quoted as saying that Amelia exhibited in Karachi a “whole attitude almost frighteningly different from what he had known.” Unfortunately that brief observation merely adds a spot of mystery; without defining what her new “attitude” was, it is a tantalizing but not helpful piece of information, particularly as the reports Amelia was filing each night about this time indicate the activities and observations of a fit person. The first morning in Karachi, she rode a camel, likening the first moments to the first symptoms of a flat spin. Fred, too, was in good spirits. Watching the camel's antics, he shouted, “Better wear your parachute.” Amelia went “cameling” a second time. She and Fred were checked out by British doctors who found their “robust healthfulness beyond question.”

Another, stronger indicator of Amelia's good health and the pleasure she was taking in the trip is a recording of her telephone conversation with George, who telephoned her in Karachi on June 15. The conversation was mechanically recorded in the office of
The Herald Tribune,
from whence it was placed.

George asked her how she felt, and Amelia answered, “Swell! Never better.”

The plane, too, was fine, she told George, except for a problem with the fuel flow meter and analyzer, which she expected would be fixed in Karachi.

He wanted to know how long she would stay in Karachi—two days,
she thought. Where was she headed? “Probably Calcutta.” Was she having a good time? “You betja! It's a grand trip. We'll do it again, together, sometime,” she replied. The enthusiasm is unmistakable and genuine. Fred, too, “is fine.”

Slightly over halfway around the world, Amelia was now on the home stretch and seemingly on schedule. She was obviously relieved to be where she was, pointing out that “Karachi airdrome is the largest that I know.” It was the main intermediate point for all the traffic from Europe to India and the East, so Imperial Airways (British), KLM, Air France, and Pan American all were there, and their mechanics as well. The engine parts from Pratt and Whitney were there as specified. She had the Karachi post office stamp the covers. She even had a telephone conversation with George.
Everything
was going like clockwork.

It is from Karachi that we have a detailed description of the cockpit—Ameliagave its exact size in feet and inches, the layout of instruments, and so on, in response to a reporter's casual question.

Fred felt upbeat, too. He was having a wonderful time, as his letters show. In a letter to his wife he praised Amelia as “a grand person for such a trip. She is the only woman flier I would care to make such a trip with because, in addition to being a fine companion she can take hardship as well as a man, and work like one.” It seemed as if Amelia had chosen the perfect person to accompany her.

She was sending George a steady stream of notes penciled on pages ripped out of her logbook or from a scratch pad, then stuffed into any old envelope. Most of them concerned chores for him to do concerning the flight—little courtesies like writing, on her behalf, to those who had been hospitable to her. That showed discipline, for every evening, no matter how long the day, after seeing to the maintenance of the Electra and to the refueling (the gasoline had to be inspected) and after the socializing, Amelia then had to make sense of the day and telephone or cable her story to the
Herald Tribune.
She also kept a log of the trip. Not all her notes to George concerned the tasks at hand. From India she wrote, “I wish you were here. So many things you would enjoy.... Perhaps some day we can fly together to some of the remote places of the world—just for fun.”

From Karachi Amelia and Fred flew to Calcutta, 1,390 miles distant. On that flight they were surrounded by black eagles, “giving its pilot some very bad moments.”

About this time, Amelia made a telephone call to George. As it had been arranged ahead of time, George asked Gene Vidal and Paul Collins to wait for it with him in his suite at the Hotel Seymour. Paul made notes of what he heard—of both sides of the conversation.

This conversation has caused great puzzlement and confusion about the actual state of affairs on the Electra. “I'm starting to have personnel trouble,” Paul heard Amelia say, to which George replied, “Stop the flight right there and don't take any chances.” To which Amelia answered, “I have only one bad hop left and I am pretty sure I can handle the situation.”

Paul was sure he heard right, that Amelia had without doubt said “personnel trouble.” Both he and Gene were amazed at the clarity of the telephone connection and the conversation. “We could both hear plainly what she was saying to her husband.”

George, naturally worried, asked Amelia to call him when she reached New Guinea. Gene and Paul concluded that Fred had started drinking again.

Even though they had reversed direction, the delayed start of the flight had still left them at risk of being caught by monsoons, which started in June and ran through October; now, just as Amelia and Fred were making their way from India to the South China Sea, the monsoons hit. It was June 17. “We hoped to squeeze through before they struck their stride,” wrote Amelia. They just missed. In Calcutta it had rained all night, turning the field to mud. But advised that more rain was coming, which would render a takeoff totally impossible, they left at dawn with only a partial load of gasoline so that the plane would not be too heavy—and even then they only just got off the field. They flew only the 335 miles to Akyab in Burma. There the monsoons hit them hard, so hard the rain beat patches of paint off the wings. Badly wanting to put that weather pattern behind them, Amelia took off but was forced by the rains to turn back. Fred, using dead reckoning, got them back over the Akyab airport “after two hours and six minutes of going nowhere.” They had to spend another night there. They took off the next morning, June 18, for Bangkok, necessarily flying at eight thousand feet to stay clear of mountains, but after flying blind for two hours in heavy rain, they called it quits and decided to settle for Rangoon, half the distance. The sheets of water lost their force near sea level, and the sight of mere clouds caused Amelia to burst into poetry—so happy was she to see some break in the unrelenting rain—and quote Longfellow: