On Monday morning, twenty-four hours after the Friendship left Boston, Stultz took off from Halifax for Trepassey, reaching it at two in the afternoon. By this time the flight was worldwide news. Once ashore, Amelia again dodged reporters, walking to a nearby Roman Catholic convent where she visited with the nuns, while Stultz and Gordon returned to the ship to pump gas until sundown. Stultz said they would spend the night at the house of a local family and take off for Ireland at noon.
When reporters could not talk to Amelia they described her: “Miss Earhart’s slightness of build was accentuated by the tight-fitting brown knickers [sic] and high-laced boots she wore when she stepped from the plane here.… Her close-cut, light hair was tousled by the wind, for she wore no hat.” In New York G. P. gave the press the cable he had received from her: “Good trip from Halifax. Average speed 111 miles per hour. Motors running beautifully. Trepassey harbor very rough.… Everybody comfortably housed and happy.”
It was the last time the crew of the Friendship would be comfortable or happy for the next thirteen days. During those days Amelia kept in constant touch with G. P. In Boston where she had seen him frequently, along with Railey and Byrd at the latter’s house, she realized that the flight was only one of a dozen projects Putnam managed at any given moment. She could not resist teasing him about this, telling him a child’s story about a shrewd cat named Simpkin who caught a mouse and because he was not hungry at the moment stored it under a teacup. Having a mouse available whenever he wanted one seemed such a good idea he thought it even better to catch and store more. Amelia told G. P. he was a “Simpkin” and it was to “Simpkin” she sent her messages. When he suggested she “turn in and have your laundering done” she answered, “No laundry because underwear all worn out and shirt lost to Slim at gin rummy.”
Amelia’s cheery cables disguised her growing anxiety. Within forty-eight hours of their landing at Trepassey she realized Stultz was an alcoholic. The only member of the crew competent enough to pilot the trimotored Fokker and navigate the Atlantic, the restless, nervous Stultz began to drink. While Amelia played cards with Slim Gordon in the drafty, primitive house where they stayed, or went hiking with him whenever the gale-force winds abated, Stultz found solace in the bottle. He left it only to make dangerous and futile attempts to get the Friendship airborne.
Stultz made three attempts on June 6 and eight on June 12, four of them after discarding the movie camera, film, a large thermos, and all their extra clothing. He tried again the next day, dumping 135 gallons of gasoline to lighten the plane but he could not lift it off the choppy waves of the harbor. After this failure he decided to overhaul all three engines with Gordon but he beached the plane on a sand ledge and could not get it off until midnight when the tide rose. That same day Mabel Boll sent Amelia an invitation from Harbor Grace, another port in Newfoundland, where she had already arrived in the Columbia, suggesting that the Friendship return to Harbor Grace where smoother waters would make it easier to take off. Boll was inviting Amelia to a race with the Columbia, a plane Stultz knew was faster than the Friendship. The message provided yet another excuse for him to drink himself into a stupor.
On the night of June 16 Amelia took command of the flight. She was already legally the captain, authorized in writing “to have control of the plane … and of all its employees as if she were the owner.” The agreement had been written by lawyer Layman who cabled her on June 13: “Please send Putnam confidential report what goes on. Are you satisfied there? Can we help more here or there? Do you see his [Stultz’s] messages?”
Amelia realized something would have to be done. She told Gordon her decision while she sat with him at the dining-room table, listening to Stultz up in his room, drunk and feverish with a cold, cursing as he paced up and down. If Gordon was willing, Amelia wanted to leave the next morning. The good-natured Gordon was willing. Stultz had so exasperated him that he was ready to take the next boat back to Boston unless Amelia took over.
They both knew the risks were appalling. Stultz had yet to lift the big plane off the bay waters. To do so he would have to cut back fuel to a dangerous minimum. Doc Kimball’s latest message from New York warned of unstable weather conditions. But at seven the next morning, a Sunday, Amelia pounded on the door of the room shared by Gordon and Stultz. When Gordon opened the door she saw Stultz sprawled on the bed, snoring. Gordon pushed him under a cold shower, dressed him, and brought him back to Amelia, who forced him to drink cup after cup of hot coffee. An hour later he was downstairs, sober enough to eat breakfast. Amelia left the table long enough to send a cable to G. P. It read, “Violet. Cheerio! A.E.” Violet was the code word for takeoff. When she returned she told reporters, “We are going today in spite of everything.”
They left the boarding house with Amelia and Gordon steadying Stultz between them, walking him down the steep path to the wharf. Amelia helped load more gasoline into tanks while Gordon put Stultz and four extra tins of fuel aboard. An hour later, when Gordon climbed down onto a pontoon to start the engines the surly Stultz left him barely enough time to scramble back into the cabin before gunning the engines and taxiing out onto the harbor. Three times Stultz tried and failed to raise the heavy craft. Twice they dumped auxiliary fuel tins overboard. On the fourth attempt, the Fokker plowed through the water for two miles, rose slowly, dipped, steadied, and rose again, wobbling up through the fog, one water-drenched engine sputtering. They were on their way.
The captain of the Friendship retired amidships where she started the log with the time of departure—11:40 A.M. Not long after she spied a whiskey bottle lodged between a rib of the fuselage and Gordon’s tool kit. Her impulse was to open the hatch and throw it out just as she had once poured her father’s hidden supply down the sink, but she left the bottle where it was. Stultz might need it later.
Three hundred miles out of Trepassey the plane was enveloped by fog. Searching for a clearing, Stultz climbed into a snow squall. Without de-icing equipment, he was forced to take the ship down again, so quickly that Amelia slid across the deck and into the oil drums stored behind the seat. Regaining her place amidships Amelia watched him struggle to stay awake for the next one hundred miles until the weather cleared when he signaled for Gordon to take over, then fell asleep in his seat.
Seven hours out Amelia wrote in the log, “I am … kneeling here at the [chart] table gulping beauty. Radio contact. Rexmore, Britisher bound for New York.” It was the last radio contact. Amelia dozed off after midnight until she was awakened by Gordon’s voice calling for ships to “come in.” None did. The radio was dead. They would have to depend on Stultz’s navigational skills. They had been flying for sixteen hours and had four, possibly five, hours of fuel left.
At dawn Stultz came down through the clouds searching the cold, grey waters for a ship. At 6:30 they sighted the S.S. America, which Stultz circled while Amelia tied a message to two oranges and dropped it. She missed. Now on the emergency tank with about one hour’s fuel remaining, Stultz sighted a fleet of fishing boats. Minutes later Amelia saw land, then a smokestack less than a mile off. Stultz circled what seemed to be a factory town on the coast and brought the ship in for a perfect landing. The Friendship’s flight across the international time zones of the Atlantic ended at Burry Port, Wales, where it was one o’clock in the afternoon of June 18, twenty hours and forty minutes after their departure from Trepassey. Its crew was 3,000 miles from Boston and 140 miles from Southhampton, where a vast crowd had gathered to see the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.
CHAPTER SIX
The Circus
One hour after the Friendship landed off the Welsh coast, Norman Fisher, the High Sheriff of Carmanthenshire, pulled his small dinghy alongside the big plane.
“Do ye be wanting something?” he asked the young woman in the fur-lined coverall who leaned out from the open hatch.
“We’ve come from America,” she said. “Where are we?”
“Have ye now?” Fisher said. “Wel
l, I’m sure we wish you welcome to Burry Port, Wales. I’ll go see about getting ye mooring space for the flying machine and getting ye ashore.”
Until the sheriff rowed out to them, no one in Burry Port seemed overly curious about the flying machine. Amelia had waved at a group of longshoremen loading coal on a freighter by the quay but, after waving back, they went back to work. The exhausted, short-tempered Stultz was threatening to run the Friendship right into the quay when Fisher arrived and offered to take one of the crew back to shore. Stultz went, leaving Amelia and Gordon on the plane.
From Burry Port, Stultz telephoned Hilton Railey in Southampton where he had been standing by for two weeks. Stultz called at 2:45. Three hours later Railey and Allen Raymond of the New York Times arrived in Burry Port. By then two thousand people—almost the entire population of the town—had heard about “the girl flyer” and were waiting on the dock to see Amelia. When she stepped ashore she was literally assaulted by “men, women, and children who tried to touch her flying suit, shake her hand or get her autograph.” Railey and Raymond, along with three policemen and the sheriff, locked arms to form a circle around her and fought their way for one hundred yards to the nearest shelter, the office of the Fricker Metal Company.
Amelia was stunned. “The accident of sex,” she said, had made her the star of “our particular sideshow.” An hour later she was forced to run the gauntlet again surrounded by additional police mustered to escort her to a local hotel. She was angered and frightened by the shoving, clutching, grasping strangers and the reporter’s questions about her personal life. At the hotel, Stultz and Gordon ate dinner and went to their rooms to sleep. Amelia, who was too upset to eat, still had to write the first of four stories on the flight that Putnam had promised to the Times.
An hour later, when Hilton Railey went to her room to collect the story along with messages for Amy, Muriel, and Marion Perkins, he was shocked to see how ill she looked. Her hands shook, her face was blotched and grey, and when he reached out to pat her shoulder, she flinched like a caged animal.
“Aren’t you excited?” he asked.
“Excited? No,” she said. “It was a grand experience but … Bill did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage.”
In the story she gave to Railey she praised Stultz and Gordon but protested that she had never touched the controls of the Friendship, even though she had had five hundred hours of solo flying.
When Railey saw her the next morning after she had had six hours of sleep and her first hot bath since leaving Boston, she appeared to have forgotten her grievances of the previous night. On the brief flight from Burry Port to Southampton, she flew the Friendship at last, after Stultz invited her to take over the controls. At Southampton, where thousands waited to see her, she was met first by two women who could have been the subjects of her feminist scrapbook clippings of the previous decade. They were Mrs. Guest, who had bought the Friendship so that a woman could make the transatlantic flight, and Mrs. Foster Welch, the Lord Mayor of Southampton and first female sheriff of England.
For the remainder of the day, crowds gathered to see Amelia wherever she went. In Southampton, four mounted policemen struggled to hold back hundreds of eager autograph seekers who thrust bits of paper at her through the open windows of the Lord Mayor’s Rolls Royce. During a fifty-mile drive to the Hyde Park Hotel in London, track fans returning from Ascot waved to her from their cars. More admirers gathered in the hotel lobby and on the sidewalk outside, pushing and jostling to catch a glimpse of her.
In her flower-banked room she sat on a sofa, barricaded behind a tea table while photographers’ flashguns flared and reporters fired questions at her. Asked if she was afraid during the flight, she said, “Mr. Stultz is such an expert pilot that I never felt afraid.” She cited Stultz again in an answer to the congratulatory telegram sent by President Calvin Coolidge: “The crew of the Friendship desire to express their deep appreciation of your Excellency’s gracious message. Success entirely due to great skill of Mr. Stultz.” When Byrd called from New York she told him, “The success is yours too, Commander, for it was your wonderful ship that brought us through.”
George Palmer Putnam couldn’t have produced better quotes if he had been there to dictate them to her. By the time she sent her second dispatch to the Times her first was on the front page under an eight-column, three-line head: “Amelia Earhart Flies Atlantic, First Woman to Do It; Tells Her Own Story of Perilous 21-Hour Trip to Wales; Radio Quit and They Flew Blind over Invisible Ocean.”
On her first morning in London she awakened to an avalanche of editorial praise from American and foreign newspapers. As an aviator she was commended for her “unquenchable determination to go on attempting the hitherto unachieved, no matter how great the dangers” and for her intent “to render service to commercial aviation, not to make a sensation.” As a woman she was acclaimed for “a feat none of her sex had accomplished, though many had attempted it.” She had not failed “to bring home to everyone the fine spirit of audacity shown by her sex in this age.”
Criticism was minimal, the most cutting in the Church Times: “The voyage itself … is a remarkable achievement made possible by the skill and courage of the pilot.… As the Evening Standard has properly pointed out, ‘her [Amelia’s] presence added no more to the achievement than if the passenger had been a sheep.’ ” In the French newspaper, Liberté the public received more criticism than Amelia: “… the palpitating interest of the world in these great adventures comes from the taste for agony and death which all humanity shares, from that dark frenzy which pushed the Romans to watch the bloody spectacles of the arena.” Deeply hurt by these comments the neophyte celebrity kept her feelings to herself and fibbed to reporters, “… from first to last my contact with the press has been thoroughly enjoyable.”
That first day in London Amelia was besieged with invitations, business propositions, requests for autographs, cables of congratulations and even a proposal of marriage from a Kent farmer, “provided she was well off, financially.” By mid-afternoon she was exhausted in spite of aid from Railey and two secretaries. Help arrived in the person of her sponsor, who had decided Amelia was not only a “suitable person” for the flight but charming enough to be a houseguest. Amelia was moved from the hotel to the Guests’ Park Lane mansion, where shopkeepers were summoned to provide her with a wardrobe before she was dispatched in a chauffeured car on a restful, solitary ride around London. The limousine was a seven-passenger Lincoln from Ford of England, “placed at the disposal of Miss Earhart during her stay.” Mr. Ford also sent her a congratulatory telegram from Detroit. In the ensuing eight days Amelia would be introduced to London society, have tea with Bernard Shaw, and dance with the Prince of Wales. She had entered the world of the rich and famous.
At dinner that night she met Lady Mary Heath who had recently flown an Avro Avian, a small, single-engine plane, from Cape Town to London—eight thousand miles. Mary Heath wanted to sell the plane. On June 26 Amelia bought it with credit extended by G. P., who already held Amelia’s contract for a Putnam’s Sons book on the Friendship’s flight.
On her second day at the Guests, her hostess took her shopping and introduced her to H. Gordon Selfridge, the American owner of a Mayfair department store. It marked the beginning of a continuing friendship with Selfridge and with his daughter, Violette, and her husband, Vicomte Jacques de Sibour, both of whom were avid pilots.
Next to befriend Amelia was one of the most influential women in England, Lady Nancy Astor. The former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, she was the first woman to become a member of Parliament, a seat she held from 1919 until her retirement in 1945. Nancy Astor was not interested in aviation. She wanted to hear about Amelia’s work at Denison House. Amelia was charmed by this beautiful, witty social activist and advocate of women’s interests. A paradoxical feminist who disapproved of bobbed hair and bachelor girls, a divorcée before her marriage to Viscount Waldorf Astor, Amelia’s new friend was a staunch supporter o
f marriage and family. She also sought pensions for women, employment of women on the police force, reform of legitimacy laws, and improved labor conditions for both sexes.
Lady Astor arranged a number of meetings with Amelia. At a luncheon given by the Women’s Committee of the Air League of the British Empire she dropped her disapproval of bobbed hair and asked Amelia to remove her hat so the guests could see her “tousled golden curls.” Lady Astor also took her friend to tea at the House of Commons and the Olympia horse show. “Everyone I have talked to in England thinks this girl is a great credit to womanhood and to her country,” she told reporters. “She has charm, intelligence and above all, character.” Amelia, who discounted mass admiration, was delighted.
On Wednesday, June 27, nine days after landing at Burry Port, Amelia was driven from Lady Astor’s town house to Wimbledon to see America’s greatest woman tennis player, Helen Wills, win a match. From there she went on to Southampton to sail on the next day for New York on the S.S. Roosevelt with Stultz and Gordon.
Amelia had seen very little of either of the two men while they were in England. Removed from his natural element—the air—a grounded Stultz was a drunken Stultz. He also made awkward statements to the press. On his first day in London he said that if he had to return to New York by sea he would insist it be on an American ship because he doubted the safety of foreign vessels. The sea-going English were not pleased. On another occasion Stultz inadvertently insulted the heir to the throne. After a flight with Gordon to Le Bourget in France, they were forced down on the return trip by gales on the coast and missed an appointment with the Prince of Wales.
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