by Ed Caesar
On the same day that the Mail wrote up this twist, the subject of its article was already racing ahead of the news. Wilson spent a sunny late-spring day in his machine with a stiff wind at his back, the cloud-capped Alps to his left, and southern France spilling out to his right under a Cézanne sky. He landed in Marseilles before dark, the warmth of the late evening a blessing after his hours in the wind-rushed cockpit. Wilson covered his Moth, then found cheap lodgings close to the landing strip.
* * *
From Marseilles, Wilson flew east, following the shoreline of the Côte d’Azur and the Italian Riviera. Its pretty towns and golden beaches passed below him like a summer tour: Saint- Tropez, Fréjus, Cannes, Antibes, Cap-Ferrat, Monaco, Menton, Ventimiglia, Bordighera, San Remo. The cobalt-blue water faded in the shallows to the lightest of greens.
As the Italian coastline wound northeast at the cape of Bussana, Wilson left its path and headed directly eastward, 130 miles over the sea to Pisa. It was the first time he had ever flown without sight of land—a nerve-racking moment for any pilot. But his map and his compass were true, and he landed at the air force base in Pisa in time for an excellent lunch with the officers of the Italian air force: the Regia Aeronautica Italiana.
The RAI pilots greeted Wilson like a brother. They loved record breakers and pioneers. The RAI had never fought in a war, but they were expert at flying their machines long distance. The chief of the RAI was a friend of Mussolini’s and a former newspaper editor named Italo Balbo, who knew about the propaganda value of a spectacular flight by a Fascist Italian. The RAI’s most accomplished aviator was a colonel named Francesco de Pinedo, who, in 1925, had flown thirty-five thousand miles in 202 days in a seaplane from Rome to Melbourne, to Tokyo, and back to Rome. Since then, the RAI had concentrated on mass-formation flights. The message was: strength in numbers. When Wilson landed his Moth at the base in Pisa, the RAI was a few weeks away from its biggest coup yet—an Air Armada of two dozen seaplanes flying round-trip from Italy to America.
In Pisa, Wilson got the royal treatment. Toasts, speeches, slaps on the back. He spoke no Italian, but clearly some of the officers spoke one of Wilson’s languages: English, German, or French. Wilson understood the sentiment. After lunch, the Aeronautica officers each signed his name on Ever-Wrest, then they wished Wilson the best on his journey. Two hours after leaving Pisa, he landed at another Aeronautica field, in Rome, where he stayed the night. That afternoon, as the Moth was being serviced, he wrote a letter to the Evanses, telling them about his progress. Wilson’s confidence was sky-high.
“So far,” he wrote, “the trip is a piece of cake.”
Wilson planned to be in Africa by the following evening. He set off in the morning for Naples, along the west coast of southern Italy. There he refueled, ate an early lunch, and took off for Sicily. It was perhaps the most beautiful leg of the journey so far. As he gained altitude, Mount Vesuvius bubbled on his port side, the island of Capri passed beneath him, and the whole, gorgeous, craggy Amalfi Coast, with its seaside towns built madly into the steep hills, disappeared behind his left wingtip. Soon, the Tyrrhenian Sea, sparkling blue and white, was all that lay ahead.
The flight from Naples to Catania took three hours. Before long the welcome bumps of the Aeolian Islands appeared over the nose of Ever-Wrest, then the triangle of Mount Etna, Sicily’s volcano. Wilson touched down at the Italian air force base in Catania at 3:00 p.m. He wanted to make the final 270-mile hop to Tunis that same afternoon, but as he flew out into the Strait of Sicily, a strange swirling mist rose from the sea, making it nearly impossible to see much more than his hand in front of his face.
Africa could wait a day. Wilson turned the Moth around, then flew back out of the mist and across the island of Sicily, with a low sun at his back, and Ever-Wrest’s shadow stretched on the ground in front of him. He landed in Catania again at dusk. He had a drink with an Italian airman who spoke good German, then a steak dinner for one.
As he ate, Wilson wrote a letter to Enid alone, telling her about his journey. Evidently, she had been much on his mind.
“Was just thinking how nice it would have been had you occupied the vacant chair at my table,” he wrote. “Keep smiling.”
* * *
Wilson had spent four days flying low over the playgrounds of Europe, as spring turned to summer. A piece of cake. The hardest section of the flight was about to begin. As he left the coast of Sicily, bound for Tunis across a hundred miles of sea, the clouds gathered in the straits. Everything above a height of five hundred feet was mist and grayness. Wilson couldn’t see a thing. Without a horizon in sight, it was tough to keep the Moth level. Sometimes, it was hard to know which way was up.
Wilson attempted to steer a course where the air was clear. He steadied his plane below the line of clouds. He was so close to the water he could see the whitecaps. Sometimes, even at this low height, the mist covered everything, and he flew blind. In the cockpit, with his feet nervous on the rudder, and his right hand clammy on the control column, he half expected the sea or a cliff to flash before him, too late for him to dodge. The crossing took a little more than an hour. When he found the coastline, and blue skies, he was jubilant. Ten minutes later, Wilson was on the runway at Tunis.
Wilson’s plan was to fly eastward from Tunis, along the North African coast, toward Egypt. This, he knew, was dangerous country. Between each staging post on this section of the journey were long stretches of desert sand and rock. The previous month, Captain Bill Lancaster’s Avro Avian had gone missing one thousand miles south, in the Sahara, on a London to Cape Town record attempt. That was six weeks ago, and he had still not been found. (When Captain Lancaster was discovered, nearly three decades later, in the Algerian desert, the sight wasn’t pretty: a broken-backed plane, a logbook, a corpse.) Wilson had packed an emergency box with gallons of drinking water in case of emergency. It would not sustain him long if he crashed in the desert.
Wilson could have flown to India via the Middle East and India north of the Mediterranean, through Eastern Europe and Constantinople: a gentler, if slightly less direct path than the one he had chosen. Amy Johnson and others flew the northerly route, while Bert Hinkler preferred the southern. Having toyed with both options, Wilson had made his decision and cut his maps.
It was imperative that Wilson reach Cairo. In the months during which he’d planned his journey to the Himalayas, he understood he would need to fly through Persia, which required a permit. His application to fly in Persian airspace had been processed in London through the Automobile Association. He had been assured that the document would be waiting for him with a British officer in the Egyptian capital. Wilson’s idea was to use coastal airfields to hop toward his prize in Cairo.
In Tunis, however, he stumbled. After his terrifying flight across the Strait of Sicily, Wilson landed the Moth at an airfield on the outskirts of the Tunisian capital, but he couldn’t find anybody to help him refuel. Wilson wanted to fly two hundred miles south, to Gabes, at the southern end of the Tunisian peninsula, but he would not risk doing so without a full tank. So, instead of risking the journey to Gabes, he flew less than an hour north, to Bizerte, a coastal town with an airstrip and—he hoped—more helpful engineers. But at the Bizerte airfield, he was arrested. Three policemen surrounded his Moth, then drove him to a police station, where they locked him up. His adventure appeared to have ended before it had properly begun.
* * *
The officers left Wilson to stew for a heavy half hour or so. When they released Wilson, the Bizerte police told him he could not stay in their city. Wilson explained in French that he was not a tourist, and that he only wanted to refuel and be on his way. They told him he was not permitted to do that, either. Wilson had no alternative but to fly back to Tunis, with his fuel supplies dangerously low, to try his luck once more. He made the flight safely, but again, nobody would help him. He scoured the Tunis airfield for someone, or something, to salvage his mission. By some luck—good or bad, he would
soon discover—Wilson found some rusty fuel drums. He poured their contents into Ever-Wrest.
Wilson flew south, with the sea on his left-hand side, and the desert to his right. The Moth’s engine might have sounded normal, but for how long? What was in those drums? For all he knew, he could have filled the plane with Ovaltine.
Wilson landed at Gabes, on the Tunisian coast, and set off once more—eastward, Cairo-ward—but within a few miles his engine started a death rattle. The whole plane started to shudder. He cut his speed, then wheeled his craft around. He had to get back to Gabes. The Moth was losing height now. He barely made the landing. Just after he touched down, his engine cut out entirely.
A French engineer at the airfield told Wilson that water in his tanks had caused the engine to fail. The Englishman counted his blessings. If the Moth’s engine had died a few minutes later, he might never have made it back to safety. If it had cut half an hour earlier, the same fate was likely. It must have been hard not to think he was being protected. Hard not to think that someone up there liked him.
* * *
Wilson refueled at Gabes from reliable tanks. He then traveled hundreds of miles, spending hours and hours in the air, the milky shoreline to his left and a continent to his right. What did he chew on in those lonely, sun-bleached hours? A year and a half earlier, he had boarded a ship to Durban, thinking that a life in Britain’s African colonies was his future. So much had changed in so little time. Back then, he had not met Enid. Back then, he had not found a true way of living. Back then, he had no thoughts of Everest.
At Tripoli, in the Italian-protected province of Tripolitania, he made friends with Regia Aeronautica pilots again. They no doubt regaled him with tales of the riotous motor Grand Prix that had been held in the city weeks earlier—an event watched by thousands and mired by suspicions of race fixing. The air base where Wilson had landed was in the middle of the Grand Prix course. Wilson flew onto another Italian protectorate, Cyrenaica, where he landed at Benghazi, before flying on to Tobruk. He was in Egypt now, which, despite more than a decade of independence from Britain, was still crawling with British soldiers and officials. Wilson arrived in the Egyptian capital seven days after leaving Stag Lane. He had now flown about as many solo hours on his weeklong adventure as he had in training for it. Every time he entered the cockpit, his skills and his confidence improved. In Cairo, he telephoned a stiff-shirted officer in the Royal Air Force delegation to collect his ticket to fly over Persia.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Wilson,” said the official, “there was something through about you a couple of days ago.”
Wilson was passed on to the official’s superior.
“Sorry, old man, there’s no permit here for you. If there’s anything I can possibly do for you, just let me know.”
Wilson had the Persian permit fixed up weeks ago, in early April. He had made all the proper representations through his friends at the Automobile Association, who guaranteed that the document would be awaiting him in Cairo. But now these officials couldn’t find it or said they never had it in the first place. Cairo was full of British government employees. One of them, Wilson thought, must be able to help him. He spent a day visiting officers of His Majesty’s government, none of whom could help.
* * *
Wilson feared he was being stymied by civil servants in London. Maybe this muddle in Cairo was their roundabout way of stopping him?
Wilson believed he understood what was at the root of the government’s distaste for his mission: class. If a party of highborn gentlemen wished to fly to Everest, arrangements could be made. The Houston–Mount Everest flight was led by the Marquess of Clydesdale, an aristocrat who was educated at Eton and at Oxford, just as all Everest climbing expeditions—including the group of Brits who were on the mountain at this very moment, led by Mr. Ruttledge—had been led by the highborn, and the highly educated.
Wilson was not the right type. He hadn’t attended a private school. He spoke like a northerner. His father, however successful, had worked in the mills. Wilson’s wartime heroics could not help him, either. He had only ever been a “temporary gentleman.” Wilson’s cleverness, pluck, and sportsmanship—English words, laden with class assumptions—didn’t count for much. Britain still liked its adventurers posh.
In fact, Wilson’s agitation was misplaced on this count. It seems that the civil servants simply sensed the potential for a human tragedy and a diplomatic embarrassment, and they hoped to quietly snuff out Wilson’s adventurous spirit before he caused himself or his country damage. But in doing so, they made a guileful and determined enemy. Wilson despised bureaucrats, especially after the unfairness of his treatment over his war pension, and he both hated and pitied the higher classes.
“How bloody awful it must be to be brought up a snob,” he wrote in his diary. “Real manhood,” he continued, lay among the poor, “not amongst the monocles and so and sos of the dontcherknows.”
Whatever the reason why Wilson’s mission was being blocked, he would not stand for it. When the journalists had asked him, back in England, whether he would heed the warnings of the Air Ministry, he was ebullient. The gloves are off! Nevertheless, Wilson had a decision to make in Cairo. He believed that his Persia permit had been lost, or destroyed, on purpose. But knowing that he had been unfairly treated didn’t help him much. He could turn around and fly home, but then what sort of man would he be? And what sort of mission was this if it could be stopped by a few pen pushers?
The kingdom of Persia was enormous, and directly in his path. But maybe he could acquire a new permit from another British official, closer to the border with Persia. Or maybe there was another route Wilson hadn’t thought of. He vowed to push on.
* * *
Cairo was good for something: the British mechanics at the airfield knew their way around a plane, and his Moth was given a once-over to make sure everything was in order. Refueled and serviced, Wilson set out for Baghdad, capital of the Kingdom of Iraq. It was eight hundred miles, give or take. He flew it in two days, with stops at Suez, Gaza, Bethlehem, Amman, and the British fort at Rutbah Wells to refill the Moth and stretch his cramped legs.
At Bethlehem, Wilson said a prayer for the baby who saved him. At Amman, he ate breakfast while Royal Air Force men paraded for their superiors. Rutbah Wells was an odd spot: a sun-baked fort, in the middle of a sandy waste, filled with men with clipped British accents. He stopped briefly, before pressing on. Between Rutbah and Baghdad, the earth was a near-featureless expanse of yellow and orange sand. Wilson trusted his compass, and glimpses of the snaking oil pipeline that crossed the desert beneath him. He reached Baghdad before nightfall and instantly fell in love with its café-lined streets and crowded souks.
In Baghdad, he met more British officials, but none could help with his Persia permit. Wilson rethought his plans. Persia was a boulder he needed to clamber around. The only chance was to the south, he thought: the so-called Trucial States. He would follow the coastline of the Persian Gulf, more or less. The change of plan rendered his maps mostly useless now, and so he hunted for new ones in the Baghdad bazaars. The best he could find was a dog-eared school atlas with a page showing the western part of the Persian Gulf. It would have to do. He sketched out distances. The Shaibah airfield near Basrah, 270 miles from Baghdad, might serve as his first pit stop. The island of Bahrein, 350 miles from Basrah, might serve as another. He plotted out his route on the school atlas.
Wilson set off early. From Baghdad to Shaibah there were landmarks to guide him: a fort, the bends of some mighty rivers, a village, a town. In three hours, he reached the base. The Royal Air Force pilots stationed at Shaibah were in a chatty mood. As Wilson refueled the Moth, he asked them about possible routes to India, missing out Persia altogether. A cinch, they said: south to Bahrein, east to Sharjah, on to Gwadar in India. Interesting, said Wilson. He hadn’t heard about Gwadar. It was also too far east to be on his torn old school atlas.
Wilson thanked them for their kindness, checked
his map, pointed his craft upwind, and took off toward Bahrein. He could not know that his conversation with the pilots at Shaibah had sent the local British officials into another flat spin. By midday, an adviser to the Bahrein government had telegrammed one Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Loch, the British political agent in Bahrein, to warn him about Wilson and his incoming Moth. Loch consulted the government of Bahrein, then decided that Wilson had to be stopped. He informed the Imperial Airways employees who managed the airport in Bahrein that on no account could Wilson be allowed to refuel, or to leave the island.
As Wilson cruised in his Moth, he knew nothing about the flurry of communiqués beneath him. The matter at hand was pressing enough. He spent more than four hours in the air, in the middle of a burning day, flying over sparkling waters of the Gulf, twelve miles from the shore. It was monotonous, fatiguing, dizzying, but he made it. The island of Bahrein came into view like a pardon. He landed at 2:00 p.m.
The buildings around the landing strip were woven shacks. Outside one of the shacks was a brass bell, which was rung four times for the approach of an airplane, and six times when the machine was ready to leave. Bahrein was so hot that the airfield engineers carried their tools around in water buckets. Wilson’s head ached from the journey. He brought Ever-Wrest to a stop, then asked the engineers to fill her up in time for a 6:00 a.m. departure the next day.
* * *
Wilson’s requests were denied. Instead, he was hauled in front of Lieutenant Colonel Loch—Britain’s man in Bahrein—who asked Wilson what on earth he was up to. Wilson explained the whole story: how he was assured a Persia permit back home, but how it was lost in Cairo. He told Loch he was sorry for landing in Bahrein, but he didn’t think he needed permission. He asked whether it might be possible to fly on to Sharjah, fill up his plane, then proceed to India.