East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  Trepassey was a fishing community of some six hundred souls, all Catholic, who eked out a living on the “lean and bony” shore. It was a bleak place; the life was so harsh that all the energy of the townsfolk went to maintaining their precarious existence—there was nothing left over for amenities of any kind, either inside or outside their houses. Literally the only spots of color inside the houses, as Amelia noticed, were the religious pictures, which hung “everywhere.” Indoor plumbing didn’t exist, and most families, including the Devereauxes, didn’t even have a bathtub. Each wooden house, enclosed by its picket fence, stood starkly on its rocky piece of land; not a flower, not a shrub, not a tree punctuated the landscape. The shoreline was black gravel, occasionally interrupted by a sand beach.

  The men went off fishing for weeks at a time, leaving the women to tend to the livestock and run the life of the island community. Most families, including the Devereauxes, kept a milk cow, chickens, and a few sheep. Fresh vegetables and fruit were almost unknown. The rocky land was so poor that except for a few hundred acres with adequate topsoil, nothing grew, and so those precious acres had to be devoted to subsistence crops—hay, potatoes, turnips, radishes, and cabbage.

  The biggest excitement for the villagers was watching who got off the twice-weekly train from St. John’s. Not that any of these things at that point made any impression on the fliers; the flight up from Halifax had gone beautifully, taking half an hour less than the five hours Bill Stultz had predicted, and buoyed up, they expected to be off the next day.

  They had planned to spend that first afternoon refueling the Friendship and get an early start the next morning, but as they proceeded with the refueling, the northwest wind began blowing down the harbor, stirring up such a sea, it became impossible to load the gasoline safely, so they had no choice but to wait and finish the next day.

  Amelia walked to the telegraph office located a few houses down from the Devereauxes, where telegraph operator Mike Jackman lived and worked, and sent George Palmer Putnam a telegram. “Good trip from Halifax. Average speed 111 miles per hour. Motors running beautifully. Trepassey Harbor very rough. Three hundred gallons of gasoline were loaded today. Everybody comfortably housed and happy.”

  The Boston Evening Globe, coming out only hours after the plane landed, told the world in inch-high headlines running straight across the front page: “Boston Girl’s Plane Landed at Trepassey, NF, at 12:55.”

  In it Amelia gave a slightly awkward interview.

  The flight from Halifax here was really delightful, and I feel proud of being the first woman successfully to make the trip.... Really a delightful idea is this trans-Atlantic flight.... Gliding through the air at almost two miles a minute with the boisterous ocean beneath and the air above is thrilling but that is the bright side. The dangers, terrific contest with the storm swept Atlantic fogs, rains are the reverse side of the picture.... I am entering the contest with confidence in both the plane and the men in charge and for the issue I trust in Providence. I think the best and most delightful way to come to Newfoundland is by seaplane.

  By the next morning they realized that, Commander Byrd notwithstanding, Trepassey Harbor was a very bad place for them to be. They would get to know the configurations of Trepassey Harbor well—the long narrow sliver of water, the inner harbor one and a half miles long protected from the sea by an elbow of Powles Peninsula, at its narrowest less than a half mile wide, at its widest a mile. Facing the town across the harbor on the western shore were hills 360 feet high. At the head of the harbor the hills rose to a height of 120 feet. It was so narrow that the Friendship could take off only on a southwest course, going down its length. That morning they awoke to find the wind still from the northwest—no good for them, since they needed a northwest wind once they were airborne, not before. But at least it was clear and they could see about them; there would be many mornings when the hills wouldn’t be visible; twenty-one out of the thirty days of June, Trepassey Harbor was fog bound.

  Byrd had undoubtedly picked Trepassey because it was the only harbor on the Avalon Peninsula—itself the closest point to Europe—with which he was familiar. He had been to Trepassey in 1919 with the navy’s three huge Curtiss flying boats, the NC-1, 3 and 4 which had started out from Trepassey Harbor to make the first transatlantic crossing by air (in hops because they were heavy and had a range of only fourteen hundred miles), guarded by sixty-five warships strung across the ocean in case they went down. Those planes had had problems taking off, and but for the swells, they would have been towed out of Trepassey Harbor, around Powles Point, and into nearby wide Mutton Bay, where they would have been able to take off into the northwest wind.

  But Byrd had been too preoccupied with getting a place on one of the planes to assess the qualities of Trepassey as takeoff point. He had been in on much of the navy’s planning for the crossing and desperately wanted to be a part of it, but he had been refused permission (several times) to go: “But soon after our arrival Towers handed me a radio from Captain Irwin which specifically directed that I should not accompany the expedition.” His energies while at Trepassey were directed toward trying to change his orders. For Byrd, each day of delay at Trepassey had not been a problem to be analyzed but a day of opportunity—another day to change the navy’s mind. The Friendship crew would pay the penalty For them each day was a new trial to be endured. Amelia would enter in her log, “All of us are caged animals.”

  That first morning dawned clear and cool, a welcome change after sweltering Boston. Stultz and Gordon worked on the plane, repairing the radio, which had been cutting out, and the oil tank, which had developed a small crack. They managed to put some gas in the tanks, but the wind was gusting to thirty knots, and by afternoon, when Bill had finished closing the crack with cement and adhesive tape, the northwest wind was “a howling gale.”

  Telegrams were pouring in “every few minutes” for Amelia. One was a gallant cable from her mother, wishing her daughter success and regretting that she was not one of the party. Some unsettling ones had to do with an article that had appeared in the Boston papers to the effect that her family had recently fallen on hard times and that Amelia was flying the ocean to recoup the family fortune. Before the day was out, using the opportunity presented, Amelia cabled George Putnam:

  PLEASE GET THE POINT ACROSS THAT THE ONLY STAKE I WIN IS THE PRIVILEGE OF FLYING AND THE PLEASURE OF HAVING SHARED IN A FINE ADVENTURE WELL CONDUCTED WHOSE SUCCESS WILL BE A REAL DEVELOPMENT AND PERHAPS SOMETHING OF AN INSPIRATION FOR WOMEN.

  George saw to it that the cable itself was included in the next day’s news stories.

  The fliers knew there was a spoiler on the horizon, knew that delay might open a window of opportunity for others. Amelia viewed herself—naturally, since she was flying in Amy Guest’s plane with Amy Guest’s pilot—as a lucky substitute for her benefactress. Mabel Boll saw things very differently. Even though her negotiations with Commander Byrd for the Fokker had never been finalized, and even though Bill Stultz had flown down to New York especially to tell her that he was withdrawing from her enterprise, as far as Boll was concerned, Amelia was in her plane with her pilot, and she was determined to get even. The moment she heard about the Friendship taking off from Boston Harbor on Sunday, she set to work doing what she did so well—getting publicity She called The New York Times so speedily that the same edition that broke the story of Amelia’s flight the day after she took off, on the streets that Monday, June 4, even as the Friendship was winging its way from Halifax to Newfoundland, carried her story as well. The one column head had run: “Miss Boll, in Tears, Finds Herself, Left.” “I can’t understand it,” she told the Times. “Wilmer was down here only a few days ago and I asked him when he was coming back to fly the Columbia. He said in just a few days.”

  But Mabel already had a pilot, and a good one—Canadian war ace Oliver Le Boutillier, and she appeared to have won over Charles Levine again—her plane was the Columbia. Nor had she overlooked the Herald Tribune,
which reported that “Miss Boll challenged her woman rival from Boston to a race across the Atlantic.” (The Boston Globe carried essentially the same tale.) By the next evening, when Amelia was going over the telegrams in Trepassey, the Newfoundland paper in St. John’s had picked up the story. The real news was that the only thing stopping the Columbia was that it had been raining so much that the long narrow runway at Roosevelt field, the only runway long enough for the heavy plane to take off from, was too soft to be used.

  The next morning, Wednesday June 6, it was again sunny clear, and brisk; the wind was still blowing from the northwest, although not as hard, and was occasionally beginning to veer south. Amelia, Bill, and Slim went aboard Friendship at eight thirty A.M., finished refueling the plane to seven hundred gallons, and tested the radio by successfully raising nearby Cape Race. Following that, they made a tour of the harbor in a motorboat to figure out the best place to start the takeoff. Then they heard from Dr. James Kimball at the Weather Bureau in New York—there was heavy rain, dense fog, and east winds off the English coast; they couldn’t start. Blocked, they took the rest of the day off, getting to know the tiny house well as they began to spend unwanted time in it. Upstairs there were three very small bedrooms—one for the Devereauxes, one for Amelia, and the third that Bill and Lou shared. Downstairs there was the kitchen and living room. The ceilings were so low that when, out of boredom, Amelia lay on her back on the downstairs couch and carefully stretched her long legs straight up, she could plant the soles of her boots on the ceiling.

  As she found out, wrecks were an integral part of Trepassey life. The small luxuries, the few bits of silver in the homes, even some of the furniture, came as a result of shipwrecks caused by the turbulence of the great polar current that dipped in close to the Trepassey shore as it swept westward around the island. English mariners came to call that stretch of Avalon the fatal iron-bound coast. The French knew it as a place of death and called it so. Trepassey is a corruption of the French verb trepasser, which means “to die.” Through the passage of time and their incurious nature, the townspeople had completely forgotten where the name came from. If Amelia had only known, as the days dragged on and she felt as if it were the end of the world, she would have remarked on its appropriateness.

  Late in the day Frederick Ryan, the New York Times reporter who had arrived on the scene, told them of Mabel Boll’s preparations—that she was planning to take off from Roosevelt field the next morning. What made it worse was that they all knew that the Columbia was virtually unbeatable. Not only had Bill Stultz just flown it down to Cuba with Mabel Boll and Charles Levine eight weeks previously, but it was the plane Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine had flown nonstop 3,911 miles from Roosevelt field to Eisleben Germany Not only did the Columbia have a greater range than the Friendship, but as Stultz admitted to Ryan, it was faster. If they were to start at the same time, Mabel Boll would easily beat them across. The only consoling thought for Amelia, Bill, and Slim was that although the Columbia had flown nonstop from Long Island to Germany, it couldn’t this time because Le Boutillier was taking a co-pilot, Captain Arthur Argyles—and with two men and Mabel Boll in it, the plane was too heavy to go the direct route to Europe. It too would have to refuel in Newfoundland, giving them a twelve-hour lead.

  The news, naturally, galvanized them. In spite of not altogether reassuring weather reports from Doc Kimball, they held a ten P.M. press conference at which they announced that they would rise at six the next morning, put an additional 200 gallons of gas aboard (bringing them up to 900 gallons), and make a start at about nine. Amelia’s suggestion that they “get out of this trap and into the next harbor” at four A.M. when the wind died down, fell on deaf ears. Her last entry in her log: “perhaps we may make it.” And so they went to sleep on their third night in Trepassey. In London Amy Guest, horrified at the turn of events, was reduced to having someone state on her behalf, “The Friendship’s flight is in no sense a stunt. Safety is the governing consideration.” It didn’t sound very convincing.

  Byrd, Guest, and Putnam had made careful and elaborate plans to ensure that the Friendship would have the most extensive weather information it was possible to assemble. Dr. James Kimball of the New York Weather Bureau was in charge of the effort. He collected weather data from ships at sea and from weather stations in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, the Arctic, Greenland, and the Grand Banks. In addition, England sent him information covering the eastern Atlantic and Europe. He took all this data and, standing at his high desk in the Whitehall building in lower Manhattan, sometimes watched by George Putnam, plotted it out on an outline map of the North Atlantic. Each day when he had assimilated all the information, he sent it on to Trepassey. Bill and Amelia then took this data and in turn plotted it out—the storms, the winds, the low and high pressure centers—on Stultz’s navigation chart. But Kimball was more than weather report coordinator; as the person who knew more about weather patterns than anyone else, he was in a real sense in charge of the expedition. It was he who had picked the takeoff day for Charles Lindbergh and Commander Byrd. As Amelia wrote “We shoved off only when he said go.”

  That Thursday June 7, dawned clear and warm, 60 degrees in Trepassey, with a perfect wind for takeoff, west-southwest—perfect flying weather. Kimball had wired them that the transatlantic weather was good enough for them to start, so for the first time since they had arrived on Monday, they could positively look forward to resuming their journey. But thoughts of a nine A.M. start evaporated when Bill noticed that the right-hand float was lying deeper in the water than the left. Slim went out to check and found fifty gallons of water in it. It took until noon to plug the leak, pump out the water (at seven pounds a gallon, that would have been a deadly 350 pounds), and finish loading the gasoline.

  By then, the eagerly awaited southwest wind had died down and the water was almost a little too smooth, but highly charged, spurred on by the specter of the Columbia, they decided they would attempt a liftoff anyway. They hadn’t been able to take off from Boston Harbor with themselves plus Lou Gower and only five hundred gallons of fuel. Aboard they now had nine hundred gallons—an additional 2,800 pounds. Would they be able to lift this heavier load? They went ashore, quickly ate what they hoped would be their last Trepassey meal, refilled their thermos bottles, packed up some sandwiches, and said brief good-byes to local residents and reporters. Amelia notified Mike Jackman to send off a telegram if they actually became airborne. At 12:22, all motors turning over, they started. The big trimotor gathered speed and roared off down the harbor for more than a mile but never got close to liftoff. Three times in the light wind they tried, three times the pontoons remained glued to the sea. Not willing to give up, they announced they would try again later, at four o’clock, when the wind was expected to freshen. But the wind didn’t freshen, and finally, defeated, they taxied back to the mooring. They went ashore fearing the worst, but encouraging news awaited them: the Columbia had indeed taken off from Roosevelt field at six fifteen that morning, but it ran into bad weather, got lost in fog, and finally was forced to turn back, landing at noon. It was reported that when Boll returned to Roosevelt field, she stepped from the plane weeping.

  Later yet in the day, back checking over the plane, the fliers found a leak in the oil tank. They dismantled the tank, and took it to the shop of local carpenter Joseph Hewitt, who soldered closed an inch-wide hole, caused, they thought, by a dory boat hook. In the end they couldn’t consider it an altogether bad day—in fact, they considered themselves lucky, for they realized that if they had succeeded in becoming airborne and started out for Europe, they would have run out of oil and crashed in midocean.

  That same day the St. John’s afternoon paper, The Evening Telegram, carried news of the German aviatrix, Thea Rasche. The Bellanca she had bought, a twin of the Columbia powered by a Wright Whirlwind engine, was being delivered to her at Curtiss field on Long Island, “and within the next three days,” she informed the Newfoundland paper, she
would take off and fly to Berlin.

  On Friday Amelia appeared cheerful, Times reporter Ryan said—they were all looking forward to getting a long night’s rest, their first, really, because finally “they think everything aboard their craft is in the finest condition.” They seemed unfazed by evening weather reports of no change for the better over the Atlantic, which meant they probably wouldn’t start till Sunday figuring the weather would hold up Boll as well.

  Thea Rasche’s new Bellanca arrived at Curtiss field, and respected transatlantic pilot Clarence Chamberlin took it up for a test flight and declared it “handled very well.” Fraulein Rasche reiterated her plan to fly to Germany by way of Newfoundland as soon as she could.

  Saturday June 9. It was still cold, in the forties. The little wind there was came from the east; a dull, foggy day. The Friendship swung idly at its mooring.

  George Putnam tried to lighten the situation with a telegram: SUGGEST YOU TURN IN AND HAVE YOUR LAUNDERING DONE.

  To which Amelia replied, THANKS FATHERLY TELEGRAM NO WASHING NECESSARY SOCKS UNDERWEAR WORN OUT SHIRT LOST TO SLIM [GORDON] AT RUMMY CHEERIO AMELIA.

  The next evening Kimball reported that from Cape Race across the ocean a series oflow-pressure areas extended nearly to the coast of Ireland, with fog, storms, and easterly winds all the way across the great circle route. As night fell in Trepassey, the wind veered west, and fog rolled in. They thought the fog was just their bad luck—they didn’t realize they were in one of the most persistently foggy areas of the world, or that June was one of the worst months, fogbound most of the time. Mariners knew that the fog brooded over that stretch of shore almost “incessantly” in summer, but Byrd had not consulted with mariners.