East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  Amelia had given the agreed-upon telegram to Mike Jackman to send to George Putnam a half hour after they left: “VIOLET CHEERIO AMELIA,” the signal for their successful departure. As they boarded the dory at 10:50, Andy Fulgoni, the Paramount cameraman, took their picture. There weren’t many townsfolk about—the Friendship had set off too many times before, only to return, for them to turn out. Slim Gordon climbed onto the pontoons and cranked the engines; they sprang to life. At 11:10 he cast off the mooring lines, taxied slowly to the head of the harbor, dumped a can of gas, and tried but failed to take off. The engines were then stopped and examined, then the fliers were observed to dump out more gasoline and taxi back to start again. Again the Friendship roared off down the harbor, and again the pontoons remained glued to the water. It looked as if the day was going to be a repeat of other days. On the next try, however, the plane rose slightly. Then more cans of the gas, so carefully loaded the day before, went overboard. Now only seven hundred gallons remained. On the next attempt, taking off from the head of the harbor and heading southwest toward the open sea, after about a mile the seaplane lifted off the water, then slumped back down, but kept going. Amelia described it.

  I was crowded in the cabin with a stop watch in my hand to check the take-off time, and with my eyes glued on the air speed indicator as it slowly climbed. If it passed fifty miles an hour, chances were the Friendship could pull out and fly. Thirty—forty—the Friendship was trying again. A long pause, then the pointer went to fifty. Fifty, fifty-five—sixty. We were off at last.

  It was a dangerous takeoff; it took a full three minutes. She later told George Putnam that the takeoff was the most dangerous part of the flight; the plane had “rocked and staggered” as it plowed through the water, both outboard engines sputtering from the salt spray. Observers watched the plane disappear out to sea, then reappear a few minutes later, and circle very low over Trepassey Harbor at a height of about fifty feet as they made one final check of the Whirlwind engines and got their bearings. Then finally the Friendship straightened out and again disappeared, this time for good, heading northeast.

  Mike Jackman could finally send Amelia’s cable.

  When she found out that the Friendship had actually taken off, Mabel, still sitting in St. John’s, was stunned. Stunned because, faced with the same weather reports, her pilot, Oliver Le Boutillier, had decided against taking off, and his decision prevailed on the Columbia; on Charles Levine’s plane, the pilot was in charge. Le Boutillier was quoted as saying that as he had reports of two storms approaching on the Atlantic and as his ambition was to be the oldest living aviator, he would not take any chances; he would await more favorable weather reports.

  With ill grace Mabel promptly charged that Dr. Kimball had sent the Columbia a different and more ominous weather report than he had sent the Friendship—a charge Dr. Kimball vehemently denied, declaring the weather information given was “precisely the same in each case.” Dr. Kimball further infuriated Mabel by announcing that although he had freely given her enterprise weather information, since it had been gathered at the expense of Miss Earhart’s backers, now that the Friendship was airborne, no previous financial arrangements having been made, he would do so no longer.

  The Friendship was airborne—but with only seven hundred gallons offuel. It was the beginning of twenty anxious hours.

  It was 12:21 P.M. Newfoundland time when the Friendship finally inched its way into the air. To plot their course, they had Bill Stultz’s original and only navigation chart, upon which each day in Trepassey Amelia and Bill had plotted the Atlantic storm and weather patterns as they received the information from New York. It was not in terribly good shape—“with its endless erasures and new markings it was almost worn through.”

  Their hoped-for destination was Southampton, England. Commander Byrd had made their flight plan. Byrd’s decisions were in large part a response to the problems he had encountered flying the Atlantic the summer before. He and his companions, following the example of Lindbergh before them, had flown the great circle course to Europe because it was the shortest route. But unlike the Spirit of St. Louis, Byrd’s America had gotten lost; he had ended up ditching his land plane in the sea off the coast of France. Flying the great circle course took finesse; it involved periodic resetting of compasses and course changes that eventually threw his plane off course. The commander wouldn’t ever admit that the America had been off course, but nevertheless the flight plan he decreed for the Friendship provided for flying the rhumb line (the same compass heading from start to finish) rather than the great circle course, obviating the necessity of altering course and resetting compasses. Bill would simply have to steer 106 degrees and adjust for wind direction and drift.

  But there was a drawback—following a compass heading (a rhumb line) was always longer than following a great circle course. Using it meant adding forty miles to the Friendship’s flight.

  At first the visibility was good, as the Friendship winged its way northeast over nearby Mutton Bay, then Biscay Bay. The rivers and lakes of Newfoundland—“wonderful greens and blues”—appeared beneath; soon they flew over Cape Ballard on the eastern shore, and then they were over the open sea, where for the first hour the visibility was good.

  Then the weather closed in.

  They had hit a storm system and were in the midst of thunder-clouds—tall threatening cumulonimbus clouds rising straight up, topped by ice crystals. Bill climbed to 2,500 feet to try to find clear sky, then to 3,300 feet. At 5,000 feet, Amelia wrote, visibility momentarily improved, but then they flew into the storm. There was no way over it. Below them there were snow flurries, ahead more fog. The temperature in the cabin was a brisk forty-two degrees. They dropped to 4,000 feet, into the teeth of the storm. It was the heaviest storm Amelia had ever flown through. However, it was no more than they had expected; it was the stormy weather Kimball had predicted and that had kept Le Boutillier from taking off. They were also bucking headwinds.

  Bill Stultz radioed Cape Race that they had left the banks of snow, fog, and hail behind and were now flying in clear weather. That evening he made contact with two ships, each of which gave him a bearing, which enabled him to fix his position. He found out that he was only ten miles off course. He was pleased; he had no idea that it would be his last radio fix.

  Amelia wasn’t terribly comfortable. The warmest place, as far forward as she could get to the cockpit, which was heated by the exhaust from the engines, involved perching between the gas tanks. Back in the cabin it was cold, and there was no comfortable place to sit because the lifesaving cushions, along with the rubber raft, had been left behind and they were wearing their flying suits. There was a small window on either side of the cabin. On the port side in front of the window was the chart table; the radio was next to it. Amelia took several photos northward kneeling beside the chart table. So long did she kneel looking out that she complained she was getting housemaid’s knee. Occasionally she went forward, trading places with Slim or Bill. When Bill came back to send or receive messages, she would look up the call letters. Once, trying to overcome a headache, she fell asleep.

  When she woke up, it was morning and the radio had quit. They were enveloped in fog as they would continue to be for almost nineteen of the twenty hours of the flight. As Amelia wrote later, “We might as well have been flying over the cornfields of Kansas for all we could see of what was beneath.” At one point Bill climbed to 11,600 feet to try to get over the clouds that “reared their heads like dragons in the morning sun,” but the fog rose still higher. In fact, they were flying in the midst of towering cumulus clouds—clouds that are large, dense, tall towers with a height of anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 feet, sometimes with merged bases and separate tops in the shapes of puffs, mounds, and towers—impossible to rise above.

  Occasionally the wet weather made the outboard engines, slightly caked with salt, turn over roughly, but each time they recovered. Amelia wrote of her pilot, “Bill sits up alone. Every mu
scle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous also.”

  What she did not mention in her log was that she had found a bottle of liquor that Bill had stashed away.

  As the hours of flying continued, the tension increased. Seven hundred gallons of fuel was barely enough to get them to Ireland; if they were off course, they would be in serious trouble.

  The air speed indicator didn’t give them actual speed but only speed through the air—how fast a stream of air was passing the wing of the ship. If a plane was going 80 miles per hour and there was a 20-mile wind against it, the indicator would register 100 mph—and if a plane was going 120 and there was a 20-mile following wind, it would still register 100 mph.

  Wind drift indicators were used to figure out wind speed and direction, but they worked only if they could be seen. If they vanished into the fog, if the waves were never visible (another way to judge the wind was by watching the whitecaps), there was no way to estimate wind speed, and if there was no way to estimate wind speed, there was no way of knowing how many miles they had gone.

  The view from the Friendship was zero. All those hours had passed, and the only thing they knew for sure was that they should have reached Ireland long before. In hopes of sighting land, Bill nosed the plane down between the fog layers, at first gently, then steeply—so steeply Amelia’s ears hurt. Water began dripping into the window, the port engine started to cough. Then the other two began to sound ragged. At three thousand feet the descent eased, Amelia’s ears felt better, and she thought the motors sounded better, although “not so good.” They began to see patches of ocean; then after a half hour, through a break in the clouds, some five miles to the south of them, they saw a steamer. It was the America, although they couldn’t see its name. They were happy to see the ship, for it meant that they were flying over the shipping lanes, which, that close to Europe, was exactly where they should have been. But if they were on course, the steamer should have been on the same course as they were. Instead, it was going directly across their path, which threw them into confusion. Since their radio couldn’t send but might possibly receive, they tried to drop a note on the America’s deck asking it to radio its position.

  Dropping things onto boat decks was not an uncommon thing to do in those days. As late as 1933, Ernest Grooch, a Pan Am pilot, as a lark, successfully dropped the Sunday papers onto the deck of the liner President Hoover when he sighted it in the China seas. The Friendship crew now expected the steamer would either radio them or paint the latitude and longitude on the deck, a common courtesy that ships extended in those years. So they weighted their query down with one of the remaining Boston oranges, and Amelia tied it with a silver cord, then dropped it down through the hatch; it missed the ship by two hundred yards and sank immediately. Using more precious fuel, they circled and tried again with their one remaining orange, only to miss again by several hundred yards.

  They had some thoughts of giving up, of landing in the sea near the steamer and being picked up, as Ruth Elder and George Haldeman had been when they landed six hundred miles off the Azores the summer before. That way, at least, they would live to tell the tale. But Bill simply said, according to Amelia, “Well, that’s out,” then swung the plane back on course and kept straight on.

  Their situation was precarious. They had started out with 700 gallons of fuel. At full power each engine burned 20 gallons an hour; Lindbergh had figured that his one Wright Whirlwind engine would burn 16 gallons per hour and had actually averaged just under 11. If each of their three engines performed as well as Lindbergh’s and there were no leaks, they would be using up 33 gallons each hour, which gave them an estimated 21 hours and 40 minutes of flying time before their fuel ran out. That meant there was no margin for error. And they had detoured twelve miles off course when they sighted the ship—and then circled it—in all wasting some twenty-five minutes and at least fifteen precious gallons of gas.

  As Amelia learned later from the ship’s captain, they had left the scene too quickly. When the America realized the plane was the Friendship, they at first tried, fruitlessly, to communicate with them by radio. Then Captain Fried ordered the ship’s name and course to be chalked on the deck, but by then the Friendship was gone.

  In point of fact they were only a mile off course and didn’t know it. The fog was so thick that it had obscured the land beneath them. The Friendship had flown right over Ireland, passing over Valentia and Dingle Bay, their first checkpoint in Europe as it had been Lindbergh’s. When they sighted the America they were already over the Irish Sea, which was why the ship seemed to be going the wrong direction.

  Now Bill, really worried, kept the Friendship at five hundred feet, flying just beneath the fog, so that they could continue to see the sea. They began to see small craft but, like the America, apparently going in the wrong direction. They kept thinking they saw land (a common occurrence; Lindbergh mistakenly thought he had seen trees) and kept being disappointed. Bill was at the controls, and Slim, beside him, was gnawing at a sandwich, when out of the mists he saw a blue shadow. He looked at it for a while, then pointed it out to Bill. The sandwich flew out the window as Slim realized that this time it was land.

  Bill thought it was an island off the Cornwall coast, “as I could see from the map that it was not Ireland.” He was under a great deal of pressure to set down—the Friendship was so close to being out of gas, the engines were sputtering unless the plane was flying level, and even then the port motor was coughing a bit, according to Amelia. So he couldn’t fly over land in his seaplane—he had to follow the coast, where he could set down.

  Just then Bill saw what looked like a break in the coastline. He followed it, peering through rain and a leaden sky up to what turned out to be a bay, and past a factory town they would learn later was Burry Port, Wales. Then he circled back, dipped around the Burry Port Copper Works chimney stack (passing, according to one observer, only a few yards from it), and then landed. Bill wrote, “I picked out the likeliest looking stretch and brought the Friendship down in it.”

  They tied up to a buoy near some railroad docks.

  It was lunchtime when the Friendship landed, but because of the steady drizzle, there were not many people about. Workers looking out their windows saw the plane tied up to Number 10 buoy, but it took a while for the townspeople to react. Eventually Ernest Bevan, an accountant at the Crown Colliery who had seen the plane fly by and circle back called up Cyril Jefferies, junior clerk at the Great Western Railway Company, whose desk was in front of a huge window overlooking the water and who could plainly see the craft. He was at that moment staring excitedly at it out his window and suggested Bevan get help to the plane. Just then railway official C. H. Owen walked in and, taking charge of the situation, called Norman Fisher, head of the Frickers Metal Company also nearby, who had a rowboat tied up at the docks, and told him to get out to the plane; Fisher grabbed one of his employees and finally did just that. It was dead low tide and rather a long row; Jefferies, watching them make their way slowly out, had time to eat his sandwich, dig up some newspaper accounts of the flight (he had not been aware that the Friendship had finally become airborne), and walk to a spot on the beach opposite the plane—at low tide, it was more mud flats than anything else—before Fisher reached it.

  By the time Norman Fisher arrived, Amelia, Slim, and Bill, who had been waving to attract attention (according to Amelia, for nearly an hour), had closed the plane’s door. Fisher knocked on the side of the plane, perhaps too timidly; there was no response. Possibly exhausted and still deaf from the sound of the engines (possibly Amelia still was wearing the ear stoppers given her by Marie Byrd), they didn’t hear the knock. But after a few minutes the door finally opened, and a long conversation ensued. Fisher was explaining to the fliers that the island they had seen was Lundy Island at the entrance to the Bristol Channel, and that they had landed on the coast of Wales, not the coast of Cornwall or Ireland. Not that they really cared by that time exactly which shore they had reached.
“No one,” Bill said later, “was more thankful than I was to see the Welch coast.... I saw the estuary which I now know to be Burry Port, and after circling to make sure everything was clear I landed on a strip of water and fastened up to a buoy.”

  Having doffed the flying suit he had been wearing over his everyday clothes, Bill set about making himself presentable, then went off in the boat, stunning the waiting Cyril Jefferies when he alighted on dry land, who observed, “He was dressed in a grey trilby, at a nonchalant angle, a light macintosh coat, and a dark double breasted suit, just as if he was going for a stroll down Broadway. His appearance enhanced my respect for him. The normality of his appearance suggested the coolness of a man of courage.”

  Under the circumstances, Bill’s aplomb was all the more remarkable, considering he had gone ashore in search of two things—a telephone to notify the group waiting for them at the Imperial Airways slipway in Southampton that they had landed, and another more pressing one, fuel for the plane. Not altogether surprisingly, the Friendship’s three Whirlwind engines had not been as efficient as the one Whirlwind engine that had powered the Spirit of St. Louis. As Bill admitted in his first interview, “I came ashore to see about gasoline. At the moment I have not enough to let us rise again.”