East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  The next day, June 8, they flew the 163 miles south to Dakar, the capital of French West Africa. There they were taken in hand by the governor-general. They ate his French food. (“Where Frenchmen are, there is also good food ... the meals were delicious.”) They attended a reception in their honor given by the Aero Club. Local mechanics fixed a broken fuel meter. They spent the night in the governor-general’s mansion. Weather reports showed threatening tornadoes in their path the next day, so they laid over and then altered course slightly north for Gao on the Niger River, a flight of 1,140 miles, which they made in 7 hours and 50 minutes, at an average speed of 143 miles per hour. They slept in the open desert at Gao because it was so hot and both liked the experience “immensely.” Dakar had been another day lost, but Amelia was in no hurry.

  The morning of June 11, flying low enough to be enveloped in the steam rising from swampy forests, they flew down the Niger, following the French Air-Afrique route marked by beacons. They spotted a herd of hippopotami in the Chari River and flew on to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, 989 miles distant. There the heat was so intense, the ground crew waited until after sunset to refuel the plane. The next day they took it easy, their destination El Fasher in the Sudan, only 690 miles and a three-hour flight away. El Fasher was truly exotic—the airfield was surrounded by an eight-foot thorn hedge to keep the animals out, their lodgings were in a former sultan’s palace, and no one spoke English.

  Flying over Africa, Amelia’s thoughts strayed back to Bogie, the game she had played as a child in the barn with her cousins and sister. Senegal, Timbuktu, Ngami, El Fasher, Khartoum—places whose names had seemed so mysterious and exotic and tantalizingly far away when she was a young girl dreaming up trips in the old carriage—now lay beneath her as she flew eastward almost straight across Central Africa. Those “imaginary journeys full of fabulous perils,” had a hold on her mind: she was living out her fantasy.

  Once they left behind the rivers and recognizable landmarks, Fred found the navigating difficult because the African maps were so inaccurate. He finally gave up on maps altogether, yet his navigation skills were so good, they were never more than half an hour off course, according to Amelia. They continued ever eastward across Africa, stopped briefly at Khartoum, junction of the Blue and White Nile, then crossed the Red Sea.

  Amelia was certainly feeling well as she prepared to leave Africa, for on the last stop there, in Assab, she mentioned that she was so hungry, she felt “as hollow as a bamboo horse.” By the time they left Africa, they had been the guests of the governors of Senegal, French West Africa, and French and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, as those countries were then called. The only serious problems they had encountered were linguistic, and with Amelia’s French and German, and Fred’s Spanish and Portuguese, they muddled through. Wrote Fred, of Africa, “We had a glorious time.”

  England was waxing rhapsodic at Amelia’s progress. The Daily Telegraph proclaimed her the spiritual descendant of Sir Francis Drake: “The air, it seems, is breeding such a race of men and women as the civilized world has not known since the sixteenth century.”

  The flight from Assab was longer than it should have been because the Sultan of Muscat had refused them permission to fly over Muscat, on the southeastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula, which meant they had to fly out along the edge of the Gulf of Aden. Amelia and Fred could see desert in the interior, treeless, parched, dry river canyons, and mountains and hills along the shore. The manual mixture control lever for the starboard engine jammed, which meant Amelia could not regulate the flow to that engine; to compensate and to economize on fuel, she reduced speed. As a result, averaging 147 miles an hour, they took a little over thirteen hours to travel the 1,920 miles to Karachi. Still, long flights were becoming routine.

  In Karachi, waiting for them, was Jacques de Sibour with a supply of new maps and relevant data. Jacques was later quoted as saying that Amelia exhibited in Karachi a “whole attitude almost frighteningly different from what he had known.” Unfortunately that brief observation merely adds a spot of mystery; without defining what her new “attitude” was, it is a tantalizing but not helpful piece of information, particularly as the reports Amelia was filing each night about this time indicate the activities and observations of a fit person. The first morning in Karachi, she rode a camel, likening the first moments to the first symptoms of a flat spin. Fred, too, was in good spirits. Watching the camel’s antics, he shouted, “Better wear your parachute.” Amelia went “cameling” a second time. She and Fred were checked out by British doctors who found their “robust healthfulness beyond question.”

  Another, stronger indicator of Amelia’s good health and the pleasure she was taking in the trip is a recording of her telephone conversation with George, who telephoned her in Karachi on June 15. The conversation was mechanically recorded in the office of The Herald Tribune, from whence it was placed.

  George asked her how she felt, and Amelia answered, “Swell! Never better.”

  The plane, too, was fine, she told George, except for a problem with the fuel flow meter and analyzer, which she expected would be fixed in Karachi.

  He wanted to know how long she would stay in Karachi—two days, she thought. Where was she headed? “Probably Calcutta.” Was she having a good time? “You betja! It’s a grand trip. We’ll do it again, together, sometime,” she replied. The enthusiasm is unmistakable and genuine. Fred, too, “is fine.”

  Slightly over halfway around the world, Amelia was now on the home stretch and seemingly on schedule. She was obviously relieved to be where she was, pointing out that “Karachi airdrome is the largest that I know.” It was the main intermediate point for all the traffic from Europe to India and the East, so Imperial Airways (British), KLM, Air France, and Pan American all were there, and their mechanics as well. The engine parts from Pratt and Whitney were there as specified. She had the Karachi post office stamp the covers. She even had a telephone conversation with George. Everything was going like clockwork.

  It is from Karachi that we have a detailed description of the cockpit—Ameliagave its exact size in feet and inches, the layout of instruments, and so on, in response to a reporter’s casual question.

  Fred felt upbeat, too. He was having a wonderful time, as his letters show. In a letter to his wife he praised Amelia as “a grand person for such a trip. She is the only woman flier I would care to make such a trip with because, in addition to being a fine companion she can take hardship as well as a man, and work like one.” It seemed as if Amelia had chosen the perfect person to accompany her.

  She was sending George a steady stream of notes penciled on pages ripped out of her logbook or from a scratch pad, then stuffed into any old envelope. Most of them concerned chores for him to do concerning the flight—little courtesies like writing, on her behalf, to those who had been hospitable to her. That showed discipline, for every evening, no matter how long the day, after seeing to the maintenance of the Electra and to the refueling (the gasoline had to be inspected) and after the socializing, Amelia then had to make sense of the day and telephone or cable her story to the Herald Tribune. She also kept a log of the trip. Not all her notes to George concerned the tasks at hand. From India she wrote, “I wish you were here. So many things you would enjoy.... Perhaps some day we can fly together to some of the remote places of the world—just for fun.”

  From Karachi Amelia and Fred flew to Calcutta, 1,390 miles distant. On that flight they were surrounded by black eagles, “giving its pilot some very bad moments.”

  About this time, Amelia made a telephone call to George. As it had been arranged ahead of time, George asked Gene Vidal and Paul Collins to wait for it with him in his suite at the Hotel Seymour. Paul made notes of what he heard—of both sides of the conversation.

  This conversation has caused great puzzlement and confusion about the actual state of affairs on the Electra. “I’m starting to have personnel trouble,” Paul heard Amelia say, to which George replied, “Stop the fli
ght right there and don’t take any chances.” To which Amelia answered, “I have only one bad hop left and I am pretty sure I can handle the situation.”

  Paul was sure he heard right, that Amelia had without doubt said “personnel trouble.” Both he and Gene were amazed at the clarity of the telephone connection and the conversation. “We could both hear plainly what she was saying to her husband.”

  George, naturally worried, asked Amelia to call him when she reached New Guinea. Gene and Paul concluded that Fred had started drinking again.

  Even though they had reversed direction, the delayed start of the flight had still left them at risk of being caught by monsoons, which started in June and ran through October; now, just as Amelia and Fred were making their way from India to the South China Sea, the monsoons hit. It was June 17. “We hoped to squeeze through before they struck their stride,” wrote Amelia. They just missed. In Calcutta it had rained all night, turning the field to mud. But advised that more rain was coming, which would render a takeoff totally impossible, they left at dawn with only a partial load of gasoline so that the plane would not be too heavy—and even then they only just got off the field. They flew only the 335 miles to Akyab in Burma. There the monsoons hit them hard, so hard the rain beat patches of paint off the wings. Badly wanting to put that weather pattern behind them, Amelia took off but was forced by the rains to turn back. Fred, using dead reckoning, got them back over the Akyab airport “after two hours and six minutes of going nowhere.” They had to spend another night there. They took off the next morning, June 18, for Bangkok, necessarily flying at eight thousand feet to stay clear of mountains, but after flying blind for two hours in heavy rain, they called it quits and decided to settle for Rangoon, half the distance. The sheets of water lost their force near sea level, and the sight of mere clouds caused Amelia to burst into poetry—so happy was she to see some break in the unrelenting rain—and quote Longfellow:

  The hooded clouds, like Friars,

  Tell their beads in drops of rain.

  She put down in Rangoon as the sun’s rays touched the golden roof of the great Shwe Dagon Pagoda on the outskirts of the city.

  Austin C. Brady, the American consul, put them up and lent them his car; the Standard Oil representative acted as their guide. Amelia visited the pagoda. She had time to note the condition of women in the Burmese city: that although men and women were segregated in streetcars, there were many women in business, and they had had the vote for many years. It was all very pleasant, but Rangoon was only four hundred miles from Akyab; they had fallen behind schedule by another day.

  Singapore was the next stop, a flight of just over twelve hundred miles, made without a hitch. She collected twenty-five dollars from the pilot of a KLM airplane for beating him to Singapore. (They had taken off at the same time from Rangoon.) That was followed by a flight to Bandung, in what was then called the Netherlands East Indies.

  An hour after their arrival in Bandung that Monday, June 21, Amelia received a telephone call from New York, presumbably from George. Unfortunately the only knowledge we have of what was said is Amelia’s version, which she sent off to be printed as part of her daily story in the Herald Tribune.

  She and George spoke about the arrangements being made with the navy and the coast guard for the overwater flights from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, and from Howland to Honolulu: “There were details to settle about radio frequencies, weather reports and the like,” she wrote.

  Unfortunately it was George who was seeing to all these details for Amelia. As energetic and efficient as he was, when it came to radio frequencies and direction finders, he didn’t really know what he was talking about: he was a publisher, a promoter, not a pilot. In the past Bill Miller, who was a pilot, had taken care of all weather and communications details with the coast guard and the navy, but Gene was no longer at the Bureau of Air Commerce, so they no longer had Bill Miller to ask the right questions, no one who knew the intricacies of radio communication and could make sure that there was no snafu. Amelia thought everything was settled and organized, but it wasn’t, as she would later find out.

  Some minor instrument adjustments had to be made on the Electra, so Amelia and Fred planned to stay in Bandung an extra day to take advantage of the expertise of the KLM mechanics, who were familiar with the Electra’s instruments because their Dutch Douglas DC-3s were equipped with similar ones. The hotel was good; Amelia’s room was “filled with flowers.” Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing. They walked on the rim of a volcano, were entertained by yet another American consul-general, took a three-hour car trip to Batavia (Jakarta) to visit some close friends of Fred’s, and flew back to Bandung on a local airline. While in Batavia, Amelia telephoned New York to say that KLM mechanics had “licked a small trouble with my fuel regulator.”

  Wednesday at 3:45 A.M., the usual time they started, Amelia was warming up the engines to take off and noticed that one of the instruments refused to function. It was not until two that afternoon that they got off, reaching Surabaja at sunset. But, Amelia wrote, “certain further adjustments of faulty long-distance flying instruments were necessary.” There were no good mechanics there, so she turned back to Bandung. They remained there in total from Sunday, June 20 to Saturday, June 26.

  When George talked with Amelia again, she told him she believed she would get off the following day, and be in Kupang by evening. As a result, he announced, from Oakland, that Amelia would reach Howland Island Sunday, Hawaii on Monday, and be back in Oakland on Tuesday, June 29, or Wednesday the thirtieth. He had lined up various broadcasts, and Amelia was supposed to be the speaker at the dinner concluding the Institute of Technology program at Purdue on Friday, July 2. But although Amelia took off as expected, that was the day she had to return because of instrument malfunctions.

  Biographers have speculated that the purpose of the Bandung layover was for Amelia to recuperate: from exhaustion, from stomach ailments, from whatever. But from reading Amelia’s account, and more to the point, from reading a letter Fred wrote to Helen at this time, the picture that emerges is of the two of them being no worse for wear. The letter to Helen is seven pages long, and Fred makes no mention of Amelia begging off a shopping or sight-seeing trip, no mention of her being other than a good companion. Besides the sight-seeing trip to Batavia, Fred wrote, they both made several sight-seeing trips “to nearer places.” They both had had problems digesting the twenty-one courses of the rijst tafel but nothing serious. The climate was excellent; the days not too warm, the nights cool. “We had a most enjoyable time,” he wrote, even though they spent considerably more time in Java than expected, due to some minor, but important, instrument adjustments to be made.... Took off once and got as far as Surabaya—about three hundred and fifty miles—only to have the instruments fail again—so returned to Bandung. They are functioning perfectly now, thank goodness for the Dutch mechanics.

  Amelia, too, felt that the instruments were finally fixed for good. She placed a call to George from Surabaja to tell him; she caught him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the United Airlines plane he was flying west had put down to refuel; it was on the ground only twenty minutes. George included only the end of the conversation in his book, stating that it was “the last conversation” he had with her.

  “Is everything about the ship OK now?”

  “Yes. Good night, Hon.”

  “Goodnight.... I’ll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”

  Amelia and Fred took off on Sunday, June 27, planning to refuel at Kupang, on Timor Island, and continue on to Port Darwin in Australia. But their start was late, and the day short. (Flying directly east meant they lost almost two hours of daylight each day.) They landed at 12:07 P.M. After dealing with customs and the local greeting committee, inspecting the plane carefully, and refueling, so much time had passed that Amelia, deciding that prudence was the better part of valor, decided to spend the night and get an early start the next day. Facilities were quite primitive on the island. The
re was no hangar for the plane, so they staked it down and put covers on the engine and propellers. There was no hotel, either, but there was a government guest house where they could stay, staffed by native cooks who set before them an “astonishingly splendid lunch,” as Fred wrote Helen. As usual they went sight-seeing, to get the feel of Kupang, “perched as it is on cliffs with winding paved roads,” then returned to the guest house for tea, bath, and a rest. Advised that Amelia and Fred would be leaving before dawn, the staff set to work to provide an early dinner, which was announced as Fred was closing his letter to Helen. “I hear the dinner gong—or its equivalent—and Amelia is calling—so I must close.”

  The next day they were driven out to the field at five A.M. Amelia, it was noted, thanked everyone gracefully for the help they had given her; the Electra took off at six thirty. They reached Port Darwin, their destination in Australia, in 3 hours and 29 minutes. As they approached Port Darwin, Amelia and Fred kidded each other about a small boat they saw in the distance, which Amelia insisted was a pearl-fishing lugger. Fred replied (via a scrap of paper), “Once aboard the lugger and the pearl is mine.” They landed just after ten A.M.; it was Monday, June 28. Australia was a new landscape, observed Amelia, “endless trees on an endless plain.” She began thinking of the long flight facing them over water. Their parachutes would be useless, she decided, and arranged for them to be shipped back to the United States.

  A telegram from Jean Batten, Australia’s top flier, was waiting for her; Amelia hoped finally to meet her, but because of time constraints it couldn’t be arranged. She also received a query from the Australian government direction finding wireless station. They wanted to know why there had been no radio communication from the Electra to them. Amelia informed them that her DF receiver was not functioning, whereupon airport personnel arranged a ground test and discovered that the fuse for the DF generator had blown. They replaced it, ran a ground test that was satisfactory, according to A. R. Collins, Aircraft Inspector and officer-in-charge of the airport, and advised her to inspect the fuse in the event of further trouble.