by Carol Baxter
Chubbie explained her predicament, saying that it had now been forty-eight hours since anyone had heard from her and that it was urgent she inform them of her safety. Cavill said that he owned a small sailing boat and was willing to brave the rough seas and take her to Nassau.
Mr Forsyth had spent too long being lord of all he surveyed. He refused to allow her to leave. It was too dangerous, he said. He would be the one blamed if anything went wrong.
Chubbie wouldn’t let him boss her around. She politely suggested that she should at least walk down to the beach with Cavill to see his boat. Forsyth grudgingly agreed, but insisted on accompanying them.
Cavill’s boat proved to be a twenty-footer powered by a single-cylinder engine. As they inspected the boat, he said to her, ‘Come and look at this. This is pretty nifty, don’t you think?’
She looked at him and saw that his eyes were fixed on her own, as if he were trying to tell her something. Grasping his meaning, she scrambled on board. He pulled up the anchor. Off they sailed, leaving Mr Forsyth standing on the beach, shaking his fists and screaming, ‘I forbid it! I forbid it!’
As she turned to face the sea, she saw a chilling sight. Her previous day’s crossing had been frightening, but at least she had known that only three miles of water separated her from safety. Now she was venturing into the frenzied waters of the open ocean. She wasn’t surprised that the mail-boat captains had refused to leave port.
As Cavill set his course, she clung to the main sheet. The boat cut through the waves, sending up sheets of spray that stung like nettles. Bruise-coloured storm clouds massed and dumped heavy raindrops, plump wet missiles that soaked through everything. Then another squall hit them, and another.
Once she had her sea legs, she left the main sheet’s protection and offered to assist him. As the water boiled around them, she helped him grip the tiller, and hung off the sides when necessary, and bailed.
Late in the afternoon, they reached an area where huge waves crashed over jagged reefs. For a couple of hours, Cavill attempted to navigate through six miles of surf. After darkness fell, he decided it was too risky to keep going in the dim moonlight. It would be best if they took shelter in a cove until dawn.
Using a log of wood he found on the beach, he built a fire in the boat’s grate and brewed an excellent cup of tea. Chubbie was amused at his resourcefulness, deciding it was a typical Australian characteristic. She gulped down the tea along with some bully beef and bread. She had barely eaten since Thanksgiving and her stomach ached with hunger.
They set sail again after dawn woke them, spending further hours battling the savage seas. At last, shortly after 3 pm, they reached Nassau. For the first time in three-and-a-half days, she was able to communicate with the outside world. She sent telegrams to her mother and Bill and Aerial Enterprises advising them of her safety.
As she waited for Bill to arrive in Nassau, she began drafting an account of her adventures. ‘The story of how I passed through this black ordeal fills me with retrospective horror as I chronicle it,’ she wrote. ‘That I am here, safe and sound, to write this narrative of the most dramatic encounter a lone woman ever waged in the air is as profound a mystery to me as it is to those who gave me up for lost.’
Chapter Thirty
Brave and courageous? Or foolish? In the days after her disappearance, when the world mourned her probable death, editorials and opinion pieces questioned her actions in flying across the strait that day.
Some saw the bravery. Others, believing she had been sacrificed to the sea, declared it a ‘needless death’, a ‘useless death’.
The editor of Charleston’s Daily Mail compared her actions unfavourably with those of America’s greatest male aviators, Charles Lindbergh and Richard Byrd. He claimed that these men had triumphed because they were fully conscious of the dangers and took the utmost precautions to guard against them. He obviously had a short memory. Lindbergh’s flight would have been judged the epitome of recklessness if he hadn’t successfully completed the crossing.
How foolhardy was Chubbie’s venture? All she had attempted to do was to fly across a hundred-mile stretch of boat-dotted water during daylight hours on an air route regularly flown by passenger and mail planes, a route she had previously flown herself. The visibility was good—‘perfect’ according to local aviators who searched for her—so she didn’t need blind-flying instruments (as they later tried to tell the press). The weather forecasts didn’t predict the gale that eventuated, merely a strong headwind whose effects could be minimised at a high altitude. And while a radio would have been helpful once she landed and learnt her location, it couldn’t tell her or anyone else where she was while lost over the sea.
Of course, most of the condemnatory arguments focused on the statements she had reportedly made about her ‘premonition of death’ and her plane’s airworthiness, along with the poor weather conditions that many claimed should have grounded her flight. When she later heard the talk about her premonitions, she expressed her astonishment and dismissed it as journalistic fiction.
In all probability, a grumble of frustration and natural concern was sensationalised by a journalist eager for good copy.
She also dismissed the remarks about her plane’s airworthiness, reminding the press that it had carried her in record-breaking time more than 5000 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back—and also to a safe Bahamas landing. As for the poor weather forecast, it hadn’t in fact been unfavourable. Rather, the conditions had deteriorated during the crossing.
Locals in Key West and Miami supported her statement but, by then, few were listening.
Her resurrection had unleashed a new torrent of criticism, this time from some who had previously refrained from speaking ill of the seemingly dead. ‘We cannot ascribe much sympathy to Mrs Keith Miller,’ was the Jefferson City Post-Tribune’s harsh judgement, while Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle warned: ‘Luck such as hers does not always hold.’
Her reappearance also sparked a new series of questions. When an eighty-mile wind was blowing from the east at ground level and a forty-five-mile wind from the south at 3000 feet, how on earth had she been blown east to the Bahamas?
And what was this about wanting a fee for her story?
As she rested in Nassau, rumours began to spread that she had delayed giving a full account of her dramatic disappearance because Bill was demanding a fee for her story. The press and public didn’t like it. One moment the world was mourning the woman’s death; the next, she had popped up and wanted money to tell her tale. It was a slap in the face.
El Paso’s Evening Post was disgusted: ‘Before the thrill of the news that she was safe had ceased to vibrate, her manager was asking for bids. Lives have been risked in the hunt for her. The wires had tingled with the accounts of that search. The whole world had grown anxious. The news that she was safe was good news. But the details—they were withheld from the anxious world. For they were for sale. A typical sign of these commercialised times.’
But a bigger issue was also at stake, the article continued. What if searchers, who had previously been happy to risk their own lives, put a price on their services before they set off on a rescue mission? And what if the general public became calloused—what if they became suspicious that disappearances were merely income-generating opportunities—and ceased to be worried. It wouldn’t be ideal for any future missing aviators.
In fact, cynical eyes had already begun to narrow. And cynical brains had listed the oddities. Aviation experts were puzzled as to how she’d found herself east in the Bahamas when the prevailing winds should have pushed her north or west. Her friends and family had been adamant she’d be found alive and well. And the Nassau press had reported that she seemed ‘unmoved’ by her experience and that both she and her plane were uninjured.
The first allegation that her disappearance had been a publicity stunt was levelled by a journalist at a news conference Bill organised on the morning after she resurfaced. Horrified, Bill told
the pressmen that he would radio Chubbie to refuse all offers.
It was too late. The daggers of innuendo were now sledgehammers of open accusation. And, as Kingsford Smith had learnt, the press was more interested in sensationalism and sales than in truthfulness.
Under the heading ‘Without Wetting Her Feet’, the editor of Canonsburg’s Daily Notes began by expressing the public’s pleasure that Mrs Miller hadn’t perished. Then came the sting of its journalistic venom. The American people were wondering if they had been ‘taken in’ by a well-planned and cleverly executed publicity stunt. Her trip from Pittsburgh to Havana and back again would have generated $1000 in income and only a brief newspaper mention because the flight achieved nothing for the woman or for aeronautical science. When she disappeared, though, she gained press attention all over the world. And when she reappeared, she was urged to accept $5000 for her story. ‘Whether it was all by accident or design, the fact remains that the Australian aviatrix went through the “hazardous” experience without damaging her plane and without getting her feet wet,’ the journalist asserted, without bothering to check his facts. After reminding the public that she, by her own admission, was flying a ‘junkyard’ plane, the journalist concluded caustically, ‘It was a stunt flight from beginning to end and foolhardy in the extreme, and the questionable manner in which it is climaxed will mean extra dollars for the woman, at the expense of the warm-hearted sentiment of the American people.’
Chubbie was appalled. From Nassau, she dashed off a letter to the press, saying, ‘As an experienced flyer, I feel ashamed to think I failed to reach my objective. Those who suggested that I might for publicity purposes do such a thing are despicable. I hope that my reputation as an aviator is good enough to refute such a claim.’ She said that the press themselves had asked Bill for a price for her story, rather than Bill offering to sell it to them, and she had ended up accepting one of the offers because she needed the money. And if the press could see her plane’s location and her blistered feet, they would have no doubt whatsoever that she was telling the truth.
Some locals came to her rescue. A Miami newsman told the world that Andros Island was hardly the spot for a publicity coup. ‘I can’t imagine publicist Steve Hannagan, for instance, trying to persuade Sadie Glutz, the only woman to hang by her toes from a parachute and now seeking a movie contract, to fly her plane over 200 miles of strange water and set down in a clump of mangrove roots, all for the benefit of newspaper space. No more can I imagine Mrs Keith Miller taking that chance for the opportunity of selling “my own story” of the adventure to the amalgamated press for $2000. Or for the dubious distinction of being known as a foolish flier and a worse navigator.’
Search leader Karl Voelter dismissed the charge with a single word: ‘Nutty!’ He told the press that he had travelled to Andros Island with Mrs Keith Miller and Captain Lancaster and had conducted his own investigation. Andros was a remote island with no communication facilities and no landing place, so it was the last place anyone planning a publicity stunt would have chosen. More importantly, the island wasn’t even marked on her maps. He knew because he had looked at them. So how could she navigate towards something that, according to her maps, wasn’t even there? He had tested the Bullet’s tanks and could report that the plane truly was out of fuel. As for her landing site, the only reason she had survived was because of her great skill as a pilot, a skill he could personally attest to because he had flown against her the previous year in the Ford Reliability Tour.
He didn’t mention that she had beaten him.
The press asked about the wind direction. He said that, yes, there had been an easterly rather than a westerly wind. But it was important to remember that she was a land pilot not a sea pilot. Seaplane pilots could easily understand how a land pilot slipped off course on an over-water hop, particularly during a gale-force wind. ‘Her story is perfectly plausible,’ he concluded. As a pilot himself, he could only shake his head in wonder at her survival. ‘The angels must have helped her.’
‘Have you noticed how Mrs Keith Miller has been dropped from the front page?’ wrote a snarky journalistic pen on 12 December 1930. ‘Getting lost is not so hot even in the Bahamas.’
The national press reports had petered out after the publicity stunt claims. At least she hadn’t faced the vitriol hurled at Kingsford Smith during the Coffee Royal Affair.
The press briefly mentioned a near-disaster when she eventually took off from Andros in the repaired Bullet. She had met up with Bill again when Karl Voelter flew him to Nassau in an amphibian. All three of them continued to Andros to inspect the Bullet’s damage then flew to Miami to obtain dope fabric, needles, oil and fuel. When they arrived back at Andros, the locals transported the goods ashore on boats. She and Bill lay under the wings for most of the night using torchlight to guide them as they stitched and doped the badly torn fabric. A low tide allowed her to take-off for Miami the next morning. During the journey though, one of the motor’s rocker-arms fell into the sea, crippling the engine. Her stomach churned for the entire trip to Miami.
After the repairs were completed in Miami, she flew off for Washington via a refueling stop at Jacksonville. Few spectators were watching when she sped down Jacksonville’s runway on 14 December. Her plane rose thirty to forty feet into the air then faltered.
Trainee pilots were always told that if their engine quits on take-off they should continue in the same direction rather than attempt to change course. Chubbie looked ahead and saw a fence and a huge row of trees. A second runway headed off at a right-angle from her own. She booted the rudder and silently implored the Bullet to respond quickly. A moment after it turned, her plane hit the ground.
‘Thus ended the jinx plane,’ summed up Pennsylvania’s News Herald. ‘The plucky little woman can be thankful she’s alive.’
The plucky little woman was reminded how lucky she truly was when she heard that Claire Fahy, the Powder Puff Derbyist with the ‘acid-ruptured’ bracing wires, had died the same week after her own plane fell out of the sky from a similar altitude.
In the aftermath, Chubbie had to return to Pittsburgh by the humble train. She still held President Machado’s letter to Pittsburgh’s mayor and was determined to deliver it as a matter of pride. She also needed to negotiate with Aerial Enterprises, who were baulking at paying her.
As soon as she received a mutually satisfactory payout, she headed back to New York to seek medical attention. There she was diagnosed with kidney damage caused by the crash and was admitted to hospital for treatment.
Most of America’s press showed little interest in the humiliating ending to her previously celebrated flight. Only one of the three news services even mentioned—albeit briefly—the Jacksonville crash.
It was a heartbreaking reminder that fame can blossom slowly—and yet wilt very quickly.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was America’s litmus test, a daily indicator of the robustness of its economy. In September 1929, it had reached a healthy high of 381 points. A month later, the stock market had collapsed.
As the Dow bounced around throughout 1930, other indicators provided a more graphic gauge of the country’s economic woes. Only one in thirty had been unemployed in 1929 when Herbert Hoover became president, backed by a huge swell of public support. A year later, that figure had risen to one in twelve. Chubbie and Bill were not alone in their struggle to find work.
In October 1930, as Chubbie set her transcontinental records, the Dow plunged below fifty per cent of its 1929 peak. While her reputation was being trashed after the Bahamas incident, the Dow dropped to the forty per cent mark.
It was not an ideal time to have the public turn against her.
Despite her mortifying experience and the serious economic downturn, Chubbie’s dreams hadn’t diminished. As she recovered from her injuries, and as the Dow clawed its way back up to the fifty per cent mark, she continued making plans and seeking sponsors for a solo Atlantic flig
ht.
In April 1931, she was devastated to hear that Ruth Nichols was about to tackle the arduous passage herself. But when Ruth crashed before leaving Canada, Chubbie had no time to reactivate her own plans. The window of opportunity determined by the weather was narrow. Moreover, sponsorship was proving increasingly difficult to obtain. The Dow was falling again and the American people were questioning the value of pilots risking their lives—and taxpayers’ money when things went amiss—in activities that did nothing to alleviate the national suffering.
As the summer sun tried to warm America’s cold worried soul, Chubbie was invited to join the Redpath Chautauqua speaking tour, a popular adult movement aimed at educating, entertaining and spiritually enlightening its audiences. A large tent was erected outside each circuit town for a week and the locals would flock to hear musicians, comedians, lecturers and religious evangelists. Two or three acts were scheduled for each day of the six-day program, with each act moving to the next town immediately after it performed.
Chubbie was to tell her ‘thrilling story of adventure’—her tales of the Red Rose’s flight and her Bahamas disappearance—on the fifth afternoon of each six-day program. Afterwards, she was supposed to give an exhibition of aerobatics and then fly to the next town; however, this plan had to be abandoned because the makeshift landing fields proved too small.
Just as the tour commenced, Keith lodged divorce papers. He had repeatedly asked her when she was returning home, a question she had always evaded. Eventually he demanded formal notice that she preferred her career to married life. She told the press that she was still very fond of him, so she had given him the notice he required.