by P Fitzsimons
As the twilight began to descend, the ‘dream rays lit up a dream city of snowy battlements on the far horizon. The dying sun painted a path of gold across the ocean…’14 At this point, Smithy would have loved nothing more than to suck on a cigarette—inevitably someone else’s, because though a heavy smoker he was never known to buy his own15—but, of course, having a naked flame anywhere near so much petrol was out of the question, and he had to ignore the craving.16
Finally, after a long and arduous day, the sun, chased by the Southern Cross for the last half of its journey across the skies, at last made its escape and sank into the Pacific for some merciful rest, but not before giving out a last golden burst of blazing light that Smithy would record as, ‘a spectacular and glorious sunset as I had seldom seen before’.17 It seemed to him, in a philosophical moment, to be ‘a background of beauty greater by far than anything conceived by the world’s masters of painting’.18
At 8 pm they had been aloft for just over eleven hours. Like the lights of a Christmas tree being suddenly turned on, the stars burst forth from the velvet sky, gladdening the heart of Harry Lyon, who now had a smorgasbord of twinkling signposts from which to get his bearings. Though it had not been previously planned, Kingsford Smith decided to take the plane up to 4000 feet in the hope of flying over and above whatever storm the night might bring on their course to Hawaii—a course now illumined a little by the silvery full moon, which had wonderfully risen a short time after the sun had gone down.
In the back, Jim Warner felt his spirits—which had been highly troubled by the thought he was on the exact path taken by all the Dole flyers who had died—lift markedly at the sight of the moon. To his mind, it was just like meeting an old friend after a long separation.19 He gazed for a moment at the lovely moon shadow the Southern Cross was making on the cloudy landscape below, and then got back to his work. At least he and Lyon were nothing if not busy.
While Lyon was endlessly taking readings with his sextant, consulting his compasses, scribbling out calculations on his notepad and plotting their position on the map tacked to the table, Warner had his headphones on and was listening to weather reports, receiving messages or tapping them out, all the while listening carefully to make sure that they were ‘on beam’—directly on line with the radio signal from Crissy Field. Though it was not easy for ‘the boys in the back room’ to communicate with the pilots up front—as the passageway between the cockpit and back cabin was almost entirely filled with a petrol tank—after some experimentation they had developed a simple method. With the circular tank fitted into the otherwise rectangular fuselage, there was just space enough for a long stick to be fitted. Thus, when Warner wanted to send a message forward he would scribble it on a piece of paper and attach it to a clip on the end of the stick. Then, by poking the stick through the gap he could prod Kingsford Smith’s shoulder to get his attention.
When, in turn, Smithy wanted to get a message to the men in the back he would attach his own scribbled piece of paper to the stick and shake it, at which point they would pull it back into their little cave to devour.
A fair measure of these messages were bright banter. None was Smithy’s private fears and anxieties. Yet the truth was that as night fell, so did his spirits. Was everything all right? What effect was the terrific vibration of the three thundering engines having on the rest of the Southern Cross? How much of the lifeblood of the plane, the oil, were those engines soaking up? And then there was the petrol, always the petrol. Wild, coursing numbers jumbled, tumbled, rumbled through his head—of distance to travel, fuel consumed, fuel still on hand and time remaining—and sometimes it seemed to him they wouldn’t even get close to Hawaii. In bad moments he wished he was thousands of miles away from any aeroplane engine, instead of huddled under three of them. His legs were cramped, and his bad foot hurt. And he was dying for a cigarette.
The Southern Cross droned on…20
Long-distance flying at night was an entirely different art from flying during the day. At 10 pm, Lyon lay down on the floor and jammed opened the door at a 45-degree angle and dropped out a floating flare. This flare was so designed that the moment it hit the water a white phosphorous blaze appeared and remained visible for at least twenty minutes. By keeping his eyes set upon it through his drift meter, long after they had passed over, it was a relatively easy matter to estimate how much the wind was pushing them off course, and therefore what their ‘rate of drift’ was. On this occasion, Lyon was able to tell his pilots that the wind was pushing them just a little to the south, and so they altered course a couple of degrees to the north. Ideally, that would neutralise the wind drift and they would again be flying exactly on course.
Just before midnight came their first genuinely heavy weather, as their relentless bird suddenly charged into heavy rain clouds and they were buffeted from side to side in complete blackness. To get clear of it, Smithy ‘took ‘er up’, climbing even higher, to 4800 feet, to escape the whole mess and…
And always it was the same thing when you surfaced from a storm like that. Just lovely! After being pummelled from all sides, with lashing rain and wind, all of it in evil and threatening darkness, suddenly you burst through…and all was calm…with the most active thing happening being the winking of the stars above, saying ‘welcome back’.
Which was greatly cheering, to a point…It wasn’t long, however, before Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s previous sense of total isolation, of being in a small craft alone on a vast planet, returned. They were nothing less than downright lonely.
Just before two o’clock in the morning, though, at last, they saw exactly what their eyes had been straining to see: a light, a light in the darkness! It could only belong to a ship. Someone must be alive down there!
And so they were. As the Southern Cross flew closer, what had appeared to be one small light turned quickly into many lights, grouped tightly together, the outline of which framed the rough shape of a steamer. Yes! The vision of that craft in the night was like a friendly hand stretched out to them in the wilderness.21
Excitedly, Kingsford Smith signalled for Ulm to take the controls, and circle the craft, while he manned the specially installed searchlight fitted with a Morse key, designed to flash pulses of light when he pressed a button in the cockpit. Using the skills he had learned in the Signal Corps all those years ago, he bumped out the letters in Morse code—dah dah dah, dah dit dah, dit dit dit, dah dit dah dit—as in O K S C, which in turn stood for OK Southern Cross.22 The ship, ploughing through the waves below, flashed back in return its own name, SS Maliko. While the flashing lights between them were essentially fun in the darkness, the serious work was done by the two ‘brass pounders’, the radio men of the two craft, with Warner soon telling them that he had received an exact fix from the Maliko on where they were and the news was fairly good. They were only a few miles to the north of their appointed course and the adjustment was easily made.
It felt strange to the men on the Southern Cross how instantaneously they had established such a strong sense of communion with the men below in the middle of the ocean, men whom they had never seen, were not seeing now, and would never see in the future. But for the flying crew, who for hours had been feeling like an insignificant speck all alone in the universe, the bond they felt was powerful.
And yet in only thirty seconds their ship in the night slipped backwards and they were alone again, although immeasurably cheered by the brief encounter. Yet, less than half an hour later James Warner poked a note forward saying that he had been in radio contact with another ship, the SS Manoa, and that they should shortly see it up ahead, and sure enough…
Once more, a similar scene played out, with messages winking back and forth in the blackness, and then they were on their way again, at three o’clock in the morning. (This time Warner had the presence of mind to find out from the Manoa radio operator just who had won the big baseball game the previous afternoon, and he was joyous to hear that the wonderful New York Yankees had done
it again, and beaten the Washington Senators 4–0!23)
In Longueville, Mr and Mrs Kingsford Smith sat through the night, with family and friends, glued to the wireless, anxiously waiting to hear the latest information. And, of course, they were not the only ones. All across the western seaboard of Canada and the United States, together with Hawaii and aboard many ships that were within range of the Southern Cross’s transmitters, radio professionals and hundreds of amateur radio ‘hams’ were listening in to the Morse code transmissions from the plane and even marking out on maps where they reckoned it to be. Those messages were also picked up by the La Perouse Receiving Centre near Sydney, where they were decoded and relayed to local radio stations.
Shortly after the dawn of 1 June 1928 seeped over the horizon, Lyon informed the pilots via the message stick that they were just 375 miles from Honolulu. They had made it through the dark night, and their optimism began to rise that they were in fact, maybe, going to make it! As the sun continued to rise a splendid vista of the marvellous world of the cloudlands they were traversing revealed itself, complete with canyons, cliffs, foothills, mountains and vast shimmering plains stretching away to never-never land.
Just a few hours later, not long after 8 am, from a height of 1250 feet, they saw it. Way off on their port bow, in a slightly surprising direction—but who were they to argue?—there were cliffs rising from the sea and disappearing into cloud.
You bloody beauty! In the cockpit of the Southern Cross, a broadly grinning Kingsford Smith and Ulm shared a triumphal handshake, before Smithy nosed the plane over towards the cliffs. In the rear, however, Harry Lyon was not nearly so exuberant. Having spent four years trading in these parts, he knew the islands well, and was troubled that he didn’t recognise this landfall at all. Sure enough, as they drew closer the cliffs suddenly popped up further out of the sea and drifted away…
With a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs, the men realised that the whole thing had been a mirage! What they had been seeing was merely what they wanted to see in the cloud formations, instead of what was actually there. It was deeply disappointing, and a lot worrying, but there was nothing they could do but proceed on their original course based on the setting that Lyon gave them, with their eyes scanning the horizon all the while, willing land to appear and trying to work out what was real and what was not. In the back, Jim Warner was becoming more than a little skittish, as his wandering mind kept returning to the Dole flyers. In the hope of easing his concerns, he passed a note to Lyon asking whether they were lost.
YES, Lyon scrawled back.24 Of the radio beam that had meant to be coming to them from Wheeler Field in Hawaii, there was nothing—because of a problem with the batteries in their receiver. Christ Almighty.
At this point Warner sent out a lugubrious radio message to the world at large:
I guess we really are lost. Radio ‘A’ battery down. Please get ship with receiver to get our bearings on my 740 wave. Will keep going so that they can track us.25
And then, mercifully, they really did see it: land. Real land. There!
Just before 10 am local time, Kingsford Smith knew that he had the island of Molokai off his port bow and steered towards it…only to have it disappear on them again! What had appeared to be an island again was in fact no more than the shadow thrown by a wayward cloud. Despite everything, they were still out there in the middle of the ocean, totally alone, totally dependent on finding land. Soon.
Though they continued to sight mirages here and there, generally they kept to their course and, just before eleven o’clock, were rewarded with a vision of high land that didn’t recede when they approached it, but simply grew bigger and more impressive. What they were staring at was a mountain, a high peak, poking above the clouds. This time there really was no doubt.
A note came forwards from Lyon: How high is that lump of land?
About 12,000 feet, Ulm replied with his pencil.
It was, obviously, Hawaii’s highest point, the mountain of Mauna Kea—two words which, in the local language meant ‘white mountain’, courtesy of the fact that its summit was so high it was regularly snowcapped, even in such tropical climes. Now being able to determine exactly where they were, in no time at all—just a little over thirty minutes—they were able to have Maui on the port beam and Molokai on the port bow. Hawaii was at their mercy!
And this time there was no mistake. A bevy of planes had come out to greet them and escort them above the beautiful, fresh greenery of the island—where a patchwork of sugarcane plantations looked like massive garden lawns, amid which the waving people were happy ants—to the landing ground of their dreams. At last, at 12.17 pm, the Southern Cross touched down at Wheeler Field, a spot situated 22 miles from Honolulu, and, far more importantly, 2408 miles from San Francisco! They had been in the air for twenty-seven hours and twenty-five minutes, and were on course to do exactly what they had set out to do—conquer the previously unconquerable Pacific Ocean.
When Smithy had brought the plane to a stop and turned all three engines off, the strangest thing happened—a sudden sense of unreality for all of them. For while those roaring engines had indeed been halted, the roaring engine in their heads just wouldn’t quit. As they clambered out of the plane, people were talking to them, excitedly crowding around the bleary-eyed and unshaven new arrivals from the heavens like hot children round cold ice-cream, and throwing traditional leis around their necks,26 but for the life of them none of the crew could hear what they were saying.
Yes…no…what? Delighted. To Jim Warner, everyone sounded like a whole lot of quacking ducks.27 In the end all they could do was to keep nodding their heads, read their hosts’ faces the best they could, keep smiling and try to catch a word here and there in the hope that the shattering noise in their heads would soon stop.
For all that, the warmth of their reception was astounding. The next day was filled with both receiving overwhelming hospitality and expending considerable effort to get away from it, so that they could as quickly as possible be on their way once more. Women fluttered flirtatiously around them while complete strangers clapped them on the back like long-lost brothers and begged to buy them a drink, and they practically needed a social secretary to sort out all the invitations they received. Most invitations had to be refused, as the pressing thing was to get the Southern Cross in shape so they could take off again. And yet, the morning after arriving, Kingsford Smith and Ulm happily agreed to make time for the local press to have their photos taken in bathing suits on a sunny Hawaiian beach, while Warner and Lyon looked on in their hot suits, the latter swearing darkly under his breath. Were the pilots the only ones who had flown to Hawaii, excuse me, or had he and Jim been on the same flaming plane?28
But back to the work of getting away. While it was one thing to land on the relatively short Wheeler Field with tanks that were nearly empty, it was always going to be out of the question to leave from there because with full tanks a much longer runway would be required. For the moment, though, while they rested at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel right on Waikiki Beach, army mechanics worked on the Southern Cross and put just 700 gallons back into the tanks, which was just a little over half of its capacity. This allowed them to easily take off the next day and fly 90 miles to that part of the Hawaiian archipelago that Keith Anderson had reconnoitred for them the previous year, Kauai Island, where more fuel awaited them.
In Australia, meantime, there was a veritable bushfire of coverage for the journey of the Southern Cross as blow-by-blow front-page accounts covered nigh on every paper in the land, and no detail was too obscure or minute to include as a ravenous public devoured it all. Maps showed the plane’s route, feature articles focused its technological aspects such as fuel tanks, wireless sets and generator, and every message the airmen had sent over the radio was faithfully recorded, as was every utterance they had said in the public domain since landing.29 In Arabella Street, it wasn’t worth Catherine’s while closing the door as the stream of journalists an
d friends and relatives was so constant it was close to an unbroken chain and…
Elsie, can you get some more tea at the corner store, because we have run out again!
The coverage in places like America and Europe for the flight was, while not as extensive, certainly comprehensive. The New York Times, which rather fancied itself as at the centre of the aviation world, was particularly focused on the flight.
That night the crew slept in the grand home of one of the Kauai residents, and in the wee hours of the morning were roused and taken to their plane, at one end of Barking Sands beach. The moon was still bright, the air languidly muggy and, most importantly of all, the weather was clear.
After Smithy had warmed up the engines—enough to heat the oil so it would flow more freely and lubricate the engines for the stresses of take-off and to produce full power, but not so much that more fuel than necessary was consumed in the process—they were ready. At Smithy’s instigation, one man stood 3500 feet down the 4000-foot long beach, to give him a good indication of just how much distance he had to play with for take-off.
Ready?
Ready.
And now. With all three engines at full and terrible throttle the Southern Cross started slowly lurching down the beach in the moonlight, as all those who had helped them stood back and covered their ears.
Barking Sands was so named because of the curious sound made by the sands when stepped upon—Arf! Arf! Arf!—but never in all its existence had it borne the kind of weight it did then. At first, it seemed that this time the men really had overloaded the Southern Cross, as the plane and the beach simply refused to part company for anything more than a little hop, and the take-off had to be aborted. Finally, however, at 5.22 am on Sunday, 3 June 1928, the Southern Cross, laden down with just under 1300 gallons of fuel, started whizzing along the beach with sufficient speed—Aaaaaaaaaaaarf!—that some 3400 feet along30 she was airborne. Just. The nearly full moon, preparing for a partial eclipse on the next night, lay low on the western horizon and surveyed benignly this newcomer to the skies.31