Soon, even vital navigating was proving difficult:
Holding my log-book in my left hand with the little finger crooked round the control-stick, and my other elbow touching the side of the fuselage, I found it impossible to write. This drove home to me that the vibration was not only severe, but dangerous. The whole fuselage was shaking, with a quick short period, and the rigging wires, which should be taut, were vibrating heavily. Why? It was not the motor, because the exhausts were firing with a steady, even bark. I decided that it must be the propeller. I thanked heaven for a following wind and perfect weather; if the seaplane struck bumpy air in this condition God help us.
Half an hour later it was clear that his latest fix was wrong. ‘I knew that there was a mistake, either because of the blast of wind on top of my head, the roar of the motor, the salt air, or my weariness’, and then as an afterthought, ‘or perhaps anxiety about the seaplane’s breaking up’. He consoled himself with a light lunch in the shaking cockpit:
I pulled a tin of pineapple through the hole cut in the seat of the front cockpit, and my mouth watered as I cut open the tin. The juice was like nectar. I cut the slices across with my sheath knife, and ate the chunks with a pair of dividers.
The pleasure did not last long: ‘The vibration was breaking things. I felt despair. The dashboard airspeed indicator, the compass seating, and now both altimeters broken. How long could the aircraft stand the strain?’
So there he was, 250 miles away from anywhere, his life dependent on a plane that had already lived a hard life, had flown him more than half way round the world, and was now shaking itself, and him, to bits. Worse, Madame Elijah was now her own life-raft, the real one jettisoned on Norfolk Island, and this particular life-raft didn’t float. Now more problems, bad problems: on the horizon clouds were forming and then becoming darker. They looked less than an hour away; they darkened and spread and shaped up for a squall. He had no option but to fly straight into it because the turn-off waypoint lay directly beyond it. How he must have dreaded the punishment he and Madame Elijah were soon to endure. Then the even worse thought: being unable to tell how deep the squall lay and if his vital sun sights lay behind it.
Luckily the squall was short and sharp. That was the good news. The bad news: behind the squall lay drooping clouds and an obscured sky. Next followed more extraordinary flying and skating on the thin ice dividing courage from foolishness:
I spotted a patch of wintry sunlight on the sea lying away to the north. I swung off course and set off through spits of rain to chase the sun-patch. The seaplane was now plugging dead into wind, yet the sun-patch which had appeared close enough at the start seemed to keep its distance. Afraid of the gap’s closing before I reached it, I opened the throttle, and sat tense waiting for an explosion from the propeller flying to bits, followed by a runaway roar from the motor.
I pushed the throttle wide open. Several times I had a glimpse of the sun at the edge of the cloud, and at last I thought I was in position, and turned sharply to take the sight broadside on. But as I lifted the sextant, the shadows raced over the plane, and on again. Angry, I turned sharply, and set off again at full speed. Nothing else seemed to matter. I adjusted the sextant to what I estimated would be the right angle, and held it ready. I put the nose down, the speed rising until there was a shrill note in the rigging wires. I turned with a vertical bank, and got a single shot while still in the turn, pulling the seaplane out of its sideways dive just above the sea.
As any pilot will confirm, all of the above should be impossible, even in ideal conditions. Out at sea, solo, exhausted from fighting a failing plane, anxious, with no life-raft; it defies all limitations.
He was now in dull rain, flying westwards, working the slide rule in the cockpit. He transposed the result onto his home-made rolling chart, all the while looking up to keep Madame Elijah straight and level. He put his position 21 miles short of the turn-off point. What trust could he put in that last, miserable, sketchy sun-shot? But there was no more sun. ‘Fifteen minutes after the observation, I reckoned that I had reached the turn-off point. I turned, and headed SSW, changing course by nearly 70 degrees to Lord Howe Island’. Or Davy Jones’s locker.
Now he was flying on blind trust. Either his workings were correct or he would die. He noted the squall had given up a large wind shift and he was now flying into a 40 mph wind. His speed across the angry-looking sea was only 40 mph too. More calculations, adding forty minutes to the flight. No need to worry about drift now, the island and the wind were on the nose. There was enough fuel but would she hold up? Only now did Francis recall: ‘I bitterly regretted not taking my rubber boat’.
He resigned himself to triumph or death, reached forward for something to eat, when
a distinct, clean-cut land showed ahead and a few degrees to the south, a dagger of grey rock thrust through the surface. A hot flood of triumph and excitement swept through me. I could have smashed things with excitement. Then, good God! There was an enormous black bulk of land right alongside me. I stared astounded. It was little Lord Howe Island emerging from a dense squall cloud. It looked as big as Australia it was so close. What I had spotted was a rock off the south end of it.
He soon found the lagoon landing spot but even here the waves had build to a white horse swell. Now throttling back to land, the vibration grew even worse. He was being so badly shaken that his sight lost its focus on the waves, when suddenly a downdraught pushed Madame Elijah onto them. He landed without even knowing it.
Francis’ route map across the Tasman Sea, as seen at the Lord Howe Island Museum
These islanders had been expecting him and soon two launches were circling the seaplane. Their helpfulness and generosity was equal to that on Norfolk Island and Francis soon found himself, mightily relieved, being looked after in one of the islanders’ houses, while Madame Elijah found herself, equally relieved I would have thought, comfortably beached on the shore.
The squall returned during the night and at dawn Francis awoke with a start, not from the usual nightmare, but from the terrific noise of the gale blowing through the iron roof. After the usual island breakfast of bacon and eggs and whisky and soda, spent looking at the swaying palm trees in the first morning light, he and his host, Phil Dignam, went down to work on Madame Elijah.
‘Isn’t that where we moored the plane?’ Francis asked him.
‘Yes!’
‘I don’t see her’, Francis said.
They walked on. ‘Ah, there she is!’ said Francis uncertainly. A little closer, he added: ‘She looks queer to me.’
‘She looks queer to me too’, said Dignam. They could not make out why through the dawn mist.
‘Sunk!’ Francis said, though not yet believing it himself. At last they could see only too clearly: the tail of the seaplane was slanting above the surface, like a big fish diving into the water. ‘We dragged out a boat and rowed across. She had been carried off the beach and flipped in the squall. The entire seaplane, except the tail and the float ends, was under water.’
It was clearly a disaster. As daylight broke they waded out to see how badly she was damaged. Badly. Both wings were torn, the engine and front half of the fuselage was upside down and lying in sea water, the cables were all snapped and the rudder flapping about listlessly. Waves were washing past her, bouncing her on the bed with every ebb and flow.
Madame Elijah turning turtle in the night
Francis was full of conflicting feelings: clearly distressed at seeing his partner wrecked, almost humiliated; yet also relief at not having to make the next leg the following day. He had already determined that overnight, knowing that he had been very lucky she didn’t fall apart on the crossing from Norfolk Island. Then depressed again at the thought that having starting off across the Tasman by aeroplane with such a flourish, the very thought of creeping in to Sydney in a miserable steamer was humiliating. ‘I felt that I would rather sail the rest of the way in a dinghy; it would not matter how long it took, or how I f
inished the passage, if only I could finish it as I had started – solo’.
‘Solo’ always had the last word with Francis.
Nine weeks later, when he finally did take off, he reflected that these had been the happiest nine weeks of his life. And having relived most of the weeks of his life, I can confirm that they certainly were; well, if not the happiest (he had yet to meet Sheila) then the most fantastical and limitless. These weeks had also demonstrated his great motto for life: ‘There is no such thing as an impossibility.’
To repair Madame Elijah; how impossible it must have seemed. He had already written her off, along with the whole enterprise. The island’s population comprised barely forty adults and only two of them were mechanics. There were no cars, only the two diesel-engined launches that had come out to meet him. The only tools the mechanics had were related to these diesel engines. There were no electricians and no electricity. There was not much knowledge of outside life either, just the monthly visits from the Sydney steamer.
But that very self-sufficiency, another of Francis’s favourite graces, was to prove to be a more valuable skill than all the specialist skills put together. Day by day, he and the islanders convinced themselves that the impossible might, after all, be possible:
I had expected men who had never seen an aeroplane before to be bamboozled when asked to unscrew rigging-wire turn-buckles, or wing-root bolts, or to slack off control-cables, or airspeed indicator tubes. But it was the quickest and slickest salvage job I have ever known. One stream of people carried pieces to the shore, while another came back for more. The seaplane was dismantled in twenty minutes, and I was the only person who lost anything – some shackle pins that I pocketed before realising that there was a hole in my borrowed pair of shorts.
In two hours they had built a beach workshop from local materials and laid out in careful piles inside it all the parts salvaged from the wreck. Amazingly, the skeleton of the workshop so hastily built still stands, albeit with re-clad panels and roof – and on it is a brass plaque commemorating Madame Elijah’s rebuild. Francis reflected on this strange new paradise in which he found himself: looking out from the workshop, a paradisiacal view onto an aquamarine lagoon edged by swaying palm trees standing on shimmering white sand; inside the workshop, strangers, now friends, working as a team in ingenuity to repair the opposite of paradise, the ruin of his beloved Madame Elijah.
In the workshop two men named Kirby and Keith helped me to dismantle the motor. We managed everything until we reached the crank-case. The propeller boss had to be drawn off the shaft before the crank-case case could come away, and this required a special tool, which we lacked. Kirby walked off, and came back with a gadget he had made himself, of two iron strips and some long bolts. With this he drew off the propeller boss, and freed the crank-case.
The engine rebuild was the easiest part of the restoration. They stripped down every single part, cleaned and oiled each one and put them all back together. If any nut, screw or washer was left on the bench, they knew that they must have missed a part and would have to strip it back till the omission was found. They didn’t omit anything and in three weeks the engine was rebuilt, fired up and passed off as fit for duty.
The fuselage was going to be more problematic:
I went over it carefully. The plywood covering the fuselage was tacked and glued to the framework. If salt water had destroyed the glue, the plane might as well be made of cardboard. As far as I could tell, by pricking it with the point of my knife, the glue was unweakened. I decided that the fuselage could be used again, if every bolt, wire, fitting and tube were removed, cleaned of rust and salt and repainted.
That night Francis sat down with Phil Dignam and made a list of parts they would need to order from Sydney. Everything not made of wood or easily bendable metal had to be shipped in: all the instruments, magnetos, wires, paint, dope, glue, everything – plus, of course, blueprints from de Havilland’s rep in Sydney. On the list were four new wings and ailerons. The list was over twenty pages long. Dignam asked Francis’s least favourite question: ‘What about the money?’
Francis and Eileen Wilson repairing Madame Elijah’s wings
The list was crumpled up and rethought. The wing spars were undamaged. The island’s carpenters were willing – but building a workshop in two hours was not the same skill as building a wing containing four hundred pieces and tolerances of down to fifteen hundredths of an inch. Francis was optimistically dubious. Dignam’s way was island style: ‘She’ll be right, mate.’ Francis had no option but to go with the island flow. The list was reduced to fourteen pages. (Phil’s great-granddaughter, Kate, still lives on the island. I had hoped that she might by some miracle still have the snagging list in an old drawer somewhere, but she doesn’t.)
They set to work on the different sections, doing as much as they could before the steamer arrived. Francis became Chicko. He was loving the madness, the impossibility, the ingenuity of it all. Lord Howe Island became a heaven:
Then began a strange, but strangely happy period of my life. I began to find the island the most attractive spot imaginable. I settled into life on the island, fishing and enjoying being a member of one of the friendliest communities I have ever met. As far as I could see the island was communistic in the Biblical rather than any political sense.
The islanders were happy, lovable people, the men interesting and the girls charming; the island itself a paradise. The beach of white coral sand was a romantic spot in the white light of the full moon with the lagoon at hand. Sometimes at night, the beauty would swell one’s heart. The still air was pure, and strangely clear…
Talking of romance, Lea Petherwick tells me that her grandmother, Joyce, had it that ‘while the husbands helped Francis with his plane, Francis helped himself to the wives’, including a reputed fling with her great-aunt, Jenny.
Amazingly enough, in view of time and tempests, Thornleigh, Phil Dignam’s house where Francis stayed, still stands. No longer owned by Kate’s family but by a holidaymaker from Sydney, it is looked after by Brendon Cong, who is kind enough to allow a neighbour to show me around. It’s threadbare now but would have been substantial enough when Francis stayed there. Then it was part of a small farm, as the island had to be largely self-sufficient; now it is a smallholding with free-range chickens clucking around. The outbuildings have turned to corrugated rust. The new owner plans to restore the farm as a tourist attraction; meanwhile, nearly all the food is flown in daily from Sydney.
Thornleigh, Francis’s Lord Howe Island home for nine weeks
Some other of Francis-era descendants are still on the island. Larry Wilson is the son of Roley Wilson, who was effectively Francis’s foreman. Roley’s niece, Eileen, who was in charge of sewing up Madame Elijah’s skins, has a granddaughter, Tas, on the island. Bill Retmock is the son of Charlie Retmock, who was in charge of painting and doping the skins. The communistic aspect of island life ceased when the New South Wales government stopped subsidising the kentia palm crop. Now the island’s population has grown tenfold to 400, all servicing tourism. Madame Elijah might have been the first plane to land here but now three forty-seater prop planes arrive every day from Sydney or Brisbane. What remains of Francis’s version of paradise is a modern version of paradise – providing you can live without mobile telephones, meaningful internet access or any semblance of a budget.
The steamer arrived with the new parts and Francis was the only one who knew what went where. ‘I had to think day and night. It was not a question of making as few mistakes as possible; I mustn’t make any mistakes.’ With the work now in full flow came another realisation: the season was changing. His love of island life cooled with the certainty of the coming winter westerlies. Now his mind was turning back to Sydney and completing the flight. But that brought fresh worries, largely self-inflicted.
For reasons not clear even to himself, he had decided to fly directly to Sydney, 480 miles over water, rather than to the nearest landfall, Macquarie, only 3
65 miles over water. Maybe he felt like applying some fresh self-flagellation after the nine weeks in paradise:
My stay on the island was nearing its end. It had been the happiest nine weeks of my life, perhaps because I knew it was a crazy, dangerous flight which I had to face, the most foolhardy I had ever attempted; to fly across 483 miles of ocean, with a seaplane and engine which had spent a night bumping on the bottom of the sea. I dreaded the idea of the flight.
But apparently not enough to make it as problematic as possible…
Slowly Madame Elijah was starting to look her old self again. They had rebuilt four wings and two ailerons, painted them first with oil and then with dope-resisting paint, taped and covered them, applied serrated tape along the line of the ribs, applied seven coats of dope to the surfaces, fitted the automatic slots and replaced the fixtures and fittings, struts, rigging wires and aileron controls. It was an amazing achievement from a team that had never even seen an aeroplane before, or even read a technical drawing.
Never Fear Page 12
