The Lonely Sea and the Sky

by Sir Francis Chichester

  On 9 January, 1930, I was up before dawn, bursting with impatience to get started again. The night duty officer said he had not slept a wink, because he was worried about seeing me away safely. I was not properly sympathetic, having slept like a log myself. A mechanic and I pushed the Moth out of the hangar in the dark. I christened my fourth propeller by smashing on the boss a bottle of the best cognac I had been able to find (I felt that champagne was not strong enough). I started the motor, and waited impatiently. The duty pilot arrived at the double to say that I could not start because of a sand-storm at Syrte. I objected; but they refused to let me start, so I went back to my room and had another sleep. At 8.30 I asked them to get another report. Conditions at Syrte were improving, and they reluctantly let me leave. I was in the air fifteen minutes later.

  It was thrilling to be setting off on the 12,000-mile flight alone, to be heading into unknown adventures. For the first 2,000 miles I should be flying over, or near, desert, nearly the whole way. On the coast, there were occasional patches of vineyard and olive grove beside the deep blue fringe of the Mediterranean; otherwise, the brown desert stretched to the southern horizon. At El Agheila, 500 miles from Tripoli, I flew into a sand-storm with a fifty miles an hour wind from the south-east. The Moth sailed along through the murky sand­thickened air, drifting thirty-five degrees to port. The air grew thicker and thicker with sand, until I was down to 200 feet in order to keep a small patch of ground directly beneath the plane in view. I was fearful of its getting thick enough to kill all visibility, and I wondered how I should have got on at night if I had run into such a thing with no blind-flying instruments, because the air was bumpy. Fortunately the sand-storm lasted only for 100 miles, and I flew into the clear at Ghemines.

  I landed at Benghazi after eight hours in the air to cover 570 miles, and I spent an interesting evening with Chaffy, the British consul, Andre, the Swedish pilot, and a local farmer named Bazzan. Andre had lost his aeroplane in an unusual way. He had landed in a sandstorm south of Ghemines, and was holding on to his plane in a gale to prevent its being blown over, when suddenly the sea broke through a sandbank and gradually submerged the aeroplane until Andre had to swim to dry land. Bazzan was an interesting man who had a farm near Benghazi. His farmhouse was square, and a man with a machine­gun kept watch all night at each corner. He said that the Italians had been bombing some Arabs just 10 miles from Benghazi the day before. Unbelievably gruesome stories were told of what happened to pilots who fell into Arab hands. I wonder if Bazzan has survived the Second World War? In the morning Chaffy told me that my wife had died in New Zealand. This was a sad affair, which I could not understand, because although we had been separated for some years, I knew that she was perfectly well when I left New Zealand.

  I left Benghazi at 6.35 with a good tail wind. After 550 miles I crossed into British territory at Es-Sollum. Although I was glad to have cleared the Italian territory after all the gruesome stories I had heard, and could now, presumably, survive a forced landing without being killed, the terrain immediately seemed less interesting. I had said that I would land at Mersa Matruh, which I reached at noon, but I reckoned that if I did I should be unable to reach the RAF airfield at Abu-Sueir, where a cousin of mine was stationed. I still had more than 300 miles to go, and I should be losing one and a quarter hours of daylight through flying east. By the time I reached the Nile Delta I had been flying for eight hours. The engine beat had drummed itself into every nerve of my body. I found myself squirming every few minutes to try to find a fresh part of my body to sit on. It had taken me an hour and twenty minutes to pump the contents of both the bottom petrol tanks up to the top tank between the upper pair of wings. While working the pump with my hand, I had to keep my feet absolutely steady on the rudder bar. My buttocks were sore and aching.

  During the flight I had eaten dates, biscuits, cheese, sardines and tinned fruit, but by now I was too fatigued to eat anything. My brain was weary of so much country. It was like sitting on top of a mountain and watching the view for eight hours on end. From the air, the Nile Delta looked deadly dull, sliced up into countless tiny plots. I was glad when the desert reappeared, like a vast flow of lava invading the fertile delta. When close to Abu-Sueir I saw a tall column of black smoke rising from the airfield. Later, I learned that they were burning the debris of two planes that had collided there, killing four pilots. I landed after nine and a quarter hours in the air to cover 917 miles. When I taxied up to the hangars a small crowd of men stood motionless thirty yards away, as if I had arrived from Mars. This seemed strange after the Italian airfields. However, I clambered out of the cockpit, waddled over to them in my heavy flying-boots, and persuaded someone to look for my cousin.

  My cousin Pat was a burly man who had been heavyweight champion of the RAF and was known as 'Firpo'. He had a gruff voice and a hug like a bear.

  Next morning a telegram from Cairo arrived, ordering me to return there to clear Customs because I had not landed at Mersa Matruh. I had to sign that I had received this order. I detested having to turn back and retrace my route. I took off thinking, 'I'm damned if I'll go back,' and I set off towards Jerusalem along the trail of Moses when he fled from Egypt, (later I was reprimanded for this, and ordered to apologise in person to the Egyptian Prime Minister the next time I visited Cairo).

  Before leaving that morning, I had checked over my motor and had found that the compression in No. 2 cylinder was bad. Evidently a valve seating there was defective. When I landed at Gaza to refuel before crossing the desert to Baghdad, I found that this cylinder was pretty bad. It would have to be fixed that night at the latest. After leaving Gaza I made a mistake in navigation which gave me a shock; when I reached the Dead Sea, with its still surface deeply bedded in hill land, I was 18 miles too far south. A mistake like this could be serious when over the desert, and I could not puzzle out the cause of it. I flew on and picked out Ziza. There were only two or three shacks there, but I could see the scars made by aeroplane tail skids. I altered course to head into the desert. I looked for the wheel tracks of a convoy that had motored through, because I had been told that I would see these, and also some furrows ploughed in the sand here and there beside the track for guidance. Also, there were emergency landing-grounds spaced 20 miles apart along the route, and marked with the letters of the alphabet.

  The track came down from Amman to the North, and I was to strike it 20 miles east of Ziza. I concentrated on watching the ground, but after 20 miles I had seen no sign of a track, and on looking round could see nothing in any direction but brown sand and desert, and a few hills far away on the northern horizon. Every mile I covered without spotting signs of anything I grew more anxious. Some 33 miles from Ziza I was wondering if I must turn back and start afresh, when I suddenly sighted a square building. I turned at once and flew over it. With no windows or doors, it was like a solid block of stone. I circled it, and found some tail skid marks in the sand but I could not find the letter C which should identify the first landing-ground. I found two wheel tracks, and began following them. I had to twist about to follow the faint tracks, and concentrated on keeping them in sight. The landing-ground D ought to have shown up 73 miles out, but there were no signs of it. After 85 miles and still no sign, I began to get worried. I had to determine the direction of those tracks. This was difficult, because the aeroplane was drifting hard to the left or north in the strong southerly wind, and the track was swinging from side to side through an arc of sixty degrees. I decided that we were flying in the direction of 110 degrees. 'Good Lord,' I thought, 'I should be headed 84 degrees. I'm probably headed for Mecca !'

  I told myself that I must keep cool, for a desert was no place in which to lose one's head. I began reasoning things out as I flew along, and finally reckoned that I must be 30 miles south of the correct route. I ought to retrace my path and start afresh, but I hated turning back. I turned north, and headed across unmapped desert. I dropped down close to the ground and watched it so closely that I think I wo
uld have seen a rat on it. I crossed dry depressions, dry watercourses, dirty black hills and sandy mud, all dull, bare and lifeless. I was excited and thrilled; this was the stuff that life was made of.

  My funny-looking map attempted only to map a strip within five to 10 miles of the track, with bits of hills hachured in here and there. I doubted if the map would be any help to me. However, according to my mental dead reckoning, I should arrive at some hills marked on the map with a watercourse running through them, with the track 3 or 4 miles on the other side. I flew up to some hills that answered the description. Then, suddenly, there was the track – quite different this time. Several wheel ruts showed clearly. I wanted another check; the landing-ground D should be a few miles back. Sure enough the D turned up as expected. I turned right about, and set off for Baghdad singing a song about Antonio. I saw no sign of animal or plant life of any kind, until 200 miles from Ziza I came across an Arab caravan with a flock of sheep. I wondered how they could exist. I had an extraordinary sense of freedom and a feeling of well-being flying low over the desert. I landed at Rutbah Wells after six and three-quarter hours in the air to cover 526 miles (without counting the diversion), a speed made good of only 75 miles an hour. Rutbah Wells was a romantic spot in the middle of the desert, a large square fort with buildings backed up inside to the high walls. There were camel caravans inside, and a squad of Iraqi infantry. Here, the track which I had followed, and which they said was rarely used, joined the motor-coach route between Baghdad and Damascus. There was an Imperial Airways mechanic stationed at Rutbah, and I finally coaxed him to help me grind the valve of my dud No. 2 cylinder. We pushed the Moth through the barbed-wire entanglements into the fort and drew her up to the window of the mechanic's room, so that he could fasten an electric inspection lamp to a blade of the propeller from a switch in his bedroom. We took off the manifold and piston head to find the exhaust valve badly pitted. I produced a new one that I thought would take less time to grind in. It began to freeze. We finished the grinding, and put the cylinder back, but the compression was worse than before. We tried to puzzle out what could be wrong. I was tempted to leave it, in the hopes that it would get right when the engine was warmed up next day; it was getting late, and I was very tired. However, I decided that we had better take it off again. The valves looked and seemed all right, and we fitted them back once more. We filled the cylinder head up with petrol and the valve seatings held the petrol, so they simply must be all right. This time the compression was excellent.

  When I got to bed at last in an Iraqi officer's room I lay listening to some delightful music. I could distinguish flutes, quietly tinkling bells and some outlandish instruments that I had not heard before. When I was having breakfast at 5 o'clock next morning I asked the manager, Fraser, who had played this music last night. 'Music?' he said. 'There was no music here.'

  It was wretchedly cold, and the motor would not start. The mechanic and I took turns at swinging the propeller, and got worn out at it. The motor would fire once, but had not enough power to overcome the friction of the frozen oil. It was not until 7.30 that it suddenly started with a roar, and I took off. Yesterday's unique feeling of isolation was now lost because the desert was crowded. In the first 100 miles I saw two motorcars and several Arab caravans, with black tents and flocks of sheep.

  At Baghdad the aerodrome manager, Phelps, was the most efficient I had come across. I told him that I would have been along three weeks earlier if he had been in charge of each of the airfields where I had refuelled. He had medical, Customs and police authorities waiting, who cleared me immediately; he fed me, had the Moth refuelled with forty-three gallons of petrol and two gallons of oil, wrote his name on the fuselage, and got me into the air again within fifty minutes of my touching down. He had also procured me a weather report that forecast a 35mph favourable wind at 5,000 feet, so I climbed up straight away to that height.

  The town of Bushire in Persia was already lighted up when I reached it. I found the airfield by spotting a hangar. A motorcar was moving slowly across the middle of the airfield, and as I flew over it low, to look at the surface, the car stopped and disgorged two or three women, who fled for their lives in different directions, leaving the car stranded. Had I been touching down as they thought I must surely have bowled over one of them.

  When I landed and taxied towards the hangars I had been in the air for eight and three-quarter hours to cover a distance of 772 miles at a speed of 88mph. As I switched off the motor my 8s 6d alarm clock sounded. The Imperial Airways mechanic was intrigued, and asked for an explanation. I said that I used it to tell me when it was time to land, but I fear he thought I was joking. After a short snooze I went off to the shore for a bathe. The sea water was like a soothing balm after the beating my nerves had taken in the open cockpit from the roaring exhaust. It was a clear moonlit night, and I noticed two goats standing on the edge of a large log, solemnly watching me. They remained motionless so long that I became curious to know why. After drying myself by a run up and down the beach I dressed and went over to investigate. I found that the goats were two wheels and the undercarriage of a DHA aeroplane, lying on its back and dripping petrol. I filled my cigarette lighter from the petrol. I found out that a Persian military pilot had flown this aeroplane into the top of the wireless mast an hour before I arrived. He nearly pulled off an excellent landing afterwards, but ran out of flat land and somersaulted over a bank on to the seashore. The aeroplane was wrecked, but he escaped.

  I was lent an old campbed and fell asleep listening to the same charming tune from my private orchestra. I slept comfortably till 5 o'clock when the camp-bed split in the middle, and dropped me on the floor with a bump.

  I got into the air at 6.15 a.m., and after 250 miles passed Qais Island, which Marco Polo visited in 1271. I refuelled at Jask at 1 o'clock after a 560-mile run. Then I flew on to Chahbar, where I landed after nine hours in the air to cover a distance o 740 miles at 82mph. Hackett, in charge of the radio station, was the only European there, and he was very pleased to see the first European for several months. He told me how Alan Cobham had landed on his flight out to Australia when his mechanic was killed by a pot shot from an Arab while crossing the desert.

  I got away at 5.20 next morning for a six-hour flight to Karachi, a distance of 430 miles. This flight was uneventful, except that I saw a huge school of porpoises in the sea off the coast, which made me long enviously for the peace of the sea. During the next five days I flew across India and down to Singapore. I was forty-two and a quarter hours in the air to cover 3,500 miles, an average speed of 83½mph Crossing India, I refuelled at Nasirabad, Jhansi, Allahabad and Calcutta. I spent the night at Jhansi, where I was lucky to find three RAF fighter planes on manoeuvres. I spent a delightful evening with the crews, and they provided me with a bath in a canvas camp bath, and a campbed in a tent. All this time the flying conditions were delightful. I enjoyed the flight, in spite of the motor, which was running increasingly rougher until it vibrated unpleasantly. This caused me to keep a constant lookout for a possible open space on which to land if the motor failed. At Calcutta an efficient mechanic called Woolland, working for the Aerial Survey Company, ground in the valves of the No. 2 cylinder that was causing most of the trouble. He, and some Indians helping him, worked all one afternoon and evening on the job. I was most grateful to have someone to do it for me. Fatigue was nagging at me again. It was not because of flying, but because of the unending negotiations and talk from the moment I landed up to the moment I took off again, apart from the few hours spent in sleeping. Each day my time on the ground was cut by about three-quarters of an hour because I was flying east.

  After Calcutta, I flew along the coast to Akyab. Here I landed in sheepskin thigh boots, a Sidcote suit (like a boiler suit of three thicknesses) and fur gloves. An hour later I took off in shirt sleeves after a roasting on the ground.

  I was beginning to find that the overloaded Moth required a much longer run for taking off in the hot air. I land
ed for the night on Rangoon racecourse. Several horses were exercising there when I arrived, and I circled the course for ten minutes to give them time to get clear.

  On leaving Rangoon at dawn, I flew over flat ground cut into tiny plots for 40 miles. The smoke from each hut had drifted away in a straight level line. There were hundreds of lines of smoke, from 1 to 5 miles in length, all straight, level and the same thickness, so that they looked like grey lines joining the huts as far as one could see.