Chapter XI: Part THREE: The Last Flight (2)

That night AE lay on her bed and tried to relax from the day’s work, the weeks of flying, the hours of anxiety, the months of tense preparation that had gone into the flight. Her leg jumped as muscle tensions eased. On the tile roofs outside rain began to fall and splatter. It became a tropical downpour, sudden, heavy, and unremitting--like the ones she had known in Honolulu. She feared the Fortaleza airport might turn into a sea of mud. Luckily, the hop to Natal was short, and the fuel load would be light. The Electra should be able to get off. Amelia turned her head into her pillow and fell off to sleep. There was no need to worry. Even in blackest times sleep was a gift she cherished.

At four fifty the next morning they were off for Natal; fortunately the field had drained beautifully, and the runway was more than adequate for take-off. Natal was only two hours away, and they hoped to get an early start across the South Atlantic. Off the left wing and far out to sea rain squalls chased black clouds. Amelia set the automatic pilot and pulled out her log.

She wrote, then crossed out what she had written, then started to write again. This did not seem to be a day for composition:

Par One

==Last night was not long enough for two tired fliers.==

==Despite going to bed immediately after==

==Fr== Fred Noonan and I rolled out of bed at three

forty-five after an incredi

It shines on the engine cowls and into the cockpit

Have cover for radios

Get clock I can see at night

Check props

Amelia put down her pencil and looked out to watch the progress of the black squall line out at sea. It was moving closer. She would have to race it in.

Down along the edge of the coast and on a tip of land the Natal airport was unmistakable. The long intersecting runways were a sure landmark. Amelia nosed the plane down and dived for the field. The rain squall was right behind her.

The Electra was just rolling to a stop and turning into the taxiway when it hit. Long whips of rain lashed the wings and cracked along the fuselage. AE stopped; she could not see out ahead from the cockpit far enough to taxi any farther: the rain relentlessly hit, spread, and streamed down the windshield.

From the hangar along the parking ramp mechanics noticed the difficulty. They rushed out to the Lockheed and pushed the plane up to the ramp and into the hangar. Once inside, Amelia felt guiltily dry as she watched the rain gather in small puddles about the feet of the mechanics. They were soaked to the skin.

To cross the South Atlantic from Natal, AE deferred to the experience of the French. She checked with the crew of the next plane scheduled to leave on the flight across. They told her they preferred to leave very early in the morning, because the worst weather could be expected during the first 800 miles. Amelia decided to leave very early in the morning--soon after midnight. If weather prevented then, they would leave the next afternoon and fly all night to make an African landfall in the morning.

At three fifteen on the morning of June 7 the Electra stood ready for the take-off. Amelia fretted: the only runway marked by lights in the black night could not be used because of a strong cross wind. For an upwind take-off the run would have to be made across a grass field. Flashlights in hand, Amelia and Fred walked in the grass, looking for obstructions and for any landmarks that could serve as guides.

The Electra came through splendidly; as it had so often before, it sprang easily into the air.

In the blackness of the night, inside the cockpit the instrument panel glowed. A glimpse at the bright dials pointing at the correct numbers cheered Amelia. She flew by the instruments she believed in, had learned to believe in from experience. On such a night it was the only way. And it was up to Fred in the navigation room to pass up the right headings to fly by. This was her third crossing of the Atlantic, she reflected happily; Africa, her third continent to be spanned, and her second leap over the equator. She hoped Fred was again too busy to think about dousing her with water.

For the first half of the 1,900 miles across the ocean the Electra bucked head winds averaging 20 miles in velocity. AE set the throttles ahead just far enough to average a ground speed of 150 mph. The dial of the indicated air speed inched forward to 170. She wanted to nurse the engines, whatever the wind and weather, for the long, hard pull around the world.

Ahead she noticed jagged mountains of clouds building up with towering peaks, and below them dark downward-streaking geysers of rain. There was no way around them. She would have to plow through.

The rain was hard and heavy. Mixed with oil from the propellers, it spattered and smeared brown and black against the windshield. Amelia could feel the weight of the rain on the wings against the pressure of the wheel in her hands. The Electra buffeted and surged in alternating downdrafts and updrafts. Then, as suddenly as the thunderstorm had hit, she was through it.

At six forty-five she crossed the equator and reported her position to Natal radio. At six fifty the left engine, then the right, started to miss, then to catch again. Too much oil, Amelia guessed. She looked out to the left and saw a plane streaking across the sky. It was an Air France plane. She would have liked to talk with it, but she knew it had only telegraphic key, and she in the cockpit only voice telephone. The Electra’s key for transmitting code was back in the navigation room with Fred; and even if she shouted back at him, he could not hear her over the noise of the engines. With all its modern devices, the “flying laboratory” lacked an intercom between pilot and navigator.

Locking in the auto pilot, she placed the stenographer’s pad on her knee. She scrawled hastily: “Gas fumes in plane from fueling made me sick again this morning after starting. Stomach getting weak, I guess.” Then she added later: “Have tried getting something on radio. No go. Rain, static. Have never seen such rain. Props a blur in it.” Fred had crawled up from in back to sit in the right seat. “Fred dozes,” she observed. “I never seem to get sleepy flying. Often tired but seldom sleepy.”

Fred stirred, woke up, and looked about. He got up from the seat and crawled back to the navigation room to see if he could get a fix. The haze was too thick. He studied his other instruments, then made an estimate. He jotted on a card:

3:36 change to 36°
Estimate 79 miles to
Dakar from 3:36 P.M.

then sent it up ahead to Amelia. She read it, shook her head, then added at the bottom in pencil:

What put us north?

Amelia disregarded the advice of her navigator. Although Fred’s directions indicated a turn to the right, she turned left: it seemed better to her.

Forty-five minutes later she found herself over St. Louis. She was north instead of south, and 163 miles off course to Dakar! She decided to let down and make a landing. It was too late to turn around and go back.

To hit a continent, such a refusal to follow directions was of no grave consequence; to hit an island, however, it could prove fatal.

The flight across the South Atlantic, Amelia was careful to note, took thirteen hours and twelve minutes. That was one hour and sixteen minutes less than it had taken for the solo hop across the North Atlantic.

4. _Africa to India_

Far from the customary skies was Africa and its smells. To Amelia’s sensitive nostrils the aromas of South America had been the lush and pleasant ones of fruit, fish, meat; in Dakar, as in St. Louis, the odor was the strong one of people.

The big bare feet of the natives she found extraordinary. She walked through the teeming streets, her eyes focused to the riot of color, her ears tuned to the comic opera of sound. Splashes of bright yellow, red, and green marked the native garments. The women wore Mother Hubbards and slung their babies on their backs or held them at their breasts. Amelia went over to one of the market stalls and bought a large bag of freshly roasted peanuts, her only West African export.

At Dakar, the Electra was scrubbed and washed, oiled and greased; the engines were given a forty-hour check, and a faulty fuel-flow meter was repaired.

The flight so far had been over the charted Pan American route to Natal and the Air France course to Dakar. Ahead, however, inland across Africa, lay regions rarely, if ever, flown over. Exactly what course they would fly, pilot and navigator were undecided. But they would have to leave soon, for tornadoes to the south and sandstorms to the north had been predicted. They would have to find a way somewhere in between.

The schedule for crossing Africa was a strenuous one. It meant flying the distance of 4,350 miles in at least four separate legs--a daily flight, in comparison, from New York to St. Louis. Where neither pilot nor aircraft was replaced, or replaceable, and this fact coupled with the thousands of miles that lay behind and ahead for the same pilot and plane, the flight became an ordeal of endurance and courage.

Amelia carefully studied the situation: the navigation aids were only two--contact and celestial. She could fly contact by following her map and identifying landmarks with the corresponding symbols on the sectional; but the African maps were pitifully inadequate, even when supplemented with pilot reports at each stop on the way. There were no radio beams to home in on, nor were there any lights at the landing fields they planned to stop at for refueling. For Fred, although he could, if it were clear, make position fixes from the sun and the stars, navigating over Africa was more difficult than finding his way over any ocean.

“Our flights over the desert,” Fred wrote to his bride of one month, “were more difficult than over water. That was because the maps of the country are very inaccurate and consequently extremely misleading. In fact, at points no dependence at all could be placed on them. Also recognizable landmarks are few and far between, one part of the desert being as much like another as two peas in a pod. However, we were lucky in always reaching our objectives. In all the distance I don’t think we wandered off the course for half an hour, although there were times when I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on the accuracy of our assumed position.”

Despite the difficulties Amelia blithely set out. They would push through somehow: there were, after all, countless places for an emergency landing if anything went wrong or if they lost their way.

On the morning of June 10 they took off just before six o’clock. The course was due east over the Senegal and Niger to the Sudan. Some 1,140 miles, seventeen hours, and fifty minutes later they sighted the upper reaches of the Niger River and landed at Gao. There the ubiquitous gasoline drums marked “Amelia Earhart” awaited them like squat silent sentinels. The months of planning in spotting the fuel were reaping their rewards. George, to Amelia’s soaring satisfaction, had done his job well. The rest was up to her.

The next leg was 1,000 miles long. The following morning, again before dawn, they left Gao for Fort-Lamy, flying over the Niger River for 170 miles then crossing endless stretches of barren desert land to Zinder. Then below lay spread out the broad valley of the Yobe River with its long brown tendrils and sprawling swamps. Now in the shifting pattern of land and water, for as far as her eyes could see, Amelia watched Lake Chad come into full view. She ran her eye over the shining surface but was unable to find any shore lines. Islands in the great lake had in outline the shapes of fantastic creatures out of storyland, with large fat paws and broad flattened heads.

As a little girl in Atchison, Amelia would climb into the old buggy in the barn with her sister Muriel and her cousins, the Challisses, and lead expeditions to imaginary lands. The map of Africa had been her favorite. Names such as Timbuktu, Senegal, Khartoum had stirred her dreams.

For Amelia in the cockpit of her own plane, the world of her childhood imagination was coming to life. Yet she missed seeing Timbuktu. If she had known about it beforehand, she could have visited the fabled town, for it lay but 400 miles up the Niger River from Gao. But the pressure of having to meet her schedule prevented the side trip. Someday, Amelia kept telling herself, she would return and make a leisurely trip, when she had time really to see and do.

Cranes, maribou storks, blue herons abounded about Lake Chad, as did many other birds she could not identify. She watched the shadow of the Electra, like a strange black flying fish, glide over the surface of the water. Once across the shore and over jungle, she looked for the elephants and crocodiles which had meant Africa to her ever since she had been a little girl in bloomers, but she could see none. Yet through the haze that now began to rise from the hot land like steam from a kettle she caught now and again the sight of a hippopotamus. The cockpit became hot and stuffy, and Amelia opened the windshield for a breath of outside air.

According to the pattern of early take-offs and landings for the African hops, it was just before noon when they approached Fort-Lamy for a stopover. The sun was high; its rays direct and glaring. As she came in on a long glide for the touchdown, Amelia held the throttles more forward than was usual: she needed a faster landing speed to compensate for the thin, hot air with its weak lifting power on the wings. Thick beads of sweat bubbled, broke, and ran down her face and neck. Her eyes smarted from the sting of the salt and she tried to blink the drops of sweat away. Her hands were wet and slippery on the wheel and throttles, and quickly she brought back one hand then the other to rub it dry against the leg of her trousers.

The Electra rolled swiftly over the ground. Gently Amelia touched the brakes until her plane came to a stop. Hoping for cooler air, she slid back the cockpit hatch. The inside of the plane was like an oven turned up to broil, but the hot outside air only added more heat to it. Quickly she taxied the plane and parked it. The bright metal wings sizzled in the sun; AE climbed out of the cockpit, skipped on tiptoe over the hot metal, and jumped to the ground. Fred swung open the door of the fuselage and climbed out. Pilot and navigator looked at each other: they were soaking wet, each separately chafing at the neck and waist from collar and belt. Amelia removed the kerchief from about her neck and wiped her face dry. She looked at the Electra: it sagged at one wing. The oleo strut of the left landing gear had just collapsed.

The landing gear was not repaired until 1:30 P.M. the next day. Because the heat was well over 100° AE and Fred decided to make that day’s hop a short one. They flew to El Fasher, only a few hours away. Fortunately, there was a strong tail wind, but Amelia felt as if she were riding a bucking bronco. The heat from the hot, dry sands below rose in strong convection currents that buffeted and pitched the Electra like a ship in a rolling sea. Fred felt as if he were back to his days of sailing ships. They were both happy to get to El Fasher, but not for long. When they crawled out of the plane, men with guns were waiting for them--disinfecting guns. As a health measure, pilot, navigator, and plane had to be thoroughly sprayed. Amelia and Fred submitted and squirmed.

One day at El Fasher was enough. Although the next day was Sunday, it was not a day for rest or prayer. The thirteenth of June, like any other day on the schedule, was marked for a flight, this one into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Khartoum.

The land flown over was for Amelia the bleakest and most desolate in all of Africa. There were no rivers, no native villages, not even one identifying contour line on the map. As far as Amelia could stretch her hand over the course line there was blank space beneath.

Unable to fly by contact, she locked in the auto pilot and studied the romantic-sounding names on the map. Qala-en Hahl, Umm Shinayshin, Abu Seid, Idd el Bashir, Fazi, Marabia Abu Fas: as she pronounced them, each in turn rolled from her lips and tongue in twisted vowels and consonants. What wonderful sticklers they would make for crossword puzzles!

As they approached Khartoum, Amelia was struck by the orderly way in which the city was laid out. She learned later that Kitchener had used the Union Jack for the blueprint. The city was situated on the banks of the Nile, 1,350 miles south of Cairo and several hundred miles west of the Red Sea. They remained in Khartoum for only two hours, time enough to refuel but not time enough for any sight-seeing.

From Khartoum they set out for Massaua, in Italy’s Eritrea. From above AE noticed an occasional grouping of colorfully striped tents; they marked stopping places along the endless camel trails across the desert. The blowing wind wrinkled and scalloped the waste of land.

Two hundred miles out the Electra bisected the Atbara River. Across the river sandy plains gently rose to foothills, the foothills to lush green mountains. As it approached the foothills, the plane hit bumpy, contrary air currents. The flow of air coursing down the slopes of the mountains tangled with the strong convection currents rising from the ground. Amelia fought to hold her plane steady, but it pitched and tossed. She added throttle and climbed to 10,000 feet, but the buffeting continued. To the left and about 3,000 feet below her wing she caught sight of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea; to the right, a range of peaks that towered to 14,000 feet. She weaved in and out and across to the other side. The eastern slopes came suddenly; sharp and abrupt, they angled quickly down into a broad, flat, sweeping valley. For the next 30 miles the land continued flat all the way to the Red Sea.

As she had found the Blue Nile and the White Nile to be neither blue nor white, but green, so now Amelia discovered the Red Sea not to be red, but blue. She was gradually seeing the world, or at least its rivers, in its true colors. She lowered flaps and landing gear and began her letdown.

Standing at the end of a bay formed by two coral islands and the mainland was Massaua. Late-afternoon shadows lengthened over the port. Mounds of salt about the town, like sand dunes she had seen at Cape Cod, glittered in the slanting rays of the sun. Two small clipper ships, some freighters, and countless other smaller craft rode the tide in the harbor.

After she had landed, Amelia soon discovered why Massaua was one of the world’s great exporters of salt. The blistering sun, causing temperatures often in excess of 120°, could evaporate hundreds of gallons of salt water in pans set out along the shore and leave thick layers of salt.

Amelia had forgotten to eat, as she had done so often before during these daily flights. She was starved for food; she felt “as hollow as a bamboo horse,” she said to one of the Italian officers who had greeted her when she arrived. The officer did not know how to translate the remark for his bewildered colleagues, but he understood her meaning, laughed, and nodded. Food had been prepared for them.

To prepare for the long flight across Arabia--it was a distance equal to the one she had flown over the South Atlantic--Amelia now flew the Electra 335 miles south and east down the coast of Eritrea to Assab, where the runways were longer and where a large number of gasoline drums had been stored for her.

The next morning, and well before daybreak from across the Red Sea in Arabia, they left Assab. It was June 15. Their destination, Karachi, India, lay 1,920 miles away. The flight would have to be non-stop, as the Arabian authorities had forbidden the Electra to land in their country; in fact, they had even refused the right to fly over their country. And, Amelia reflected, from what little she saw of it, their country was as forbidding as their refusals.

One hour and fifteen minutes after take-off they had passed over the southern entry to the Red Sea and had reached the English possession of Aden. From Aden, Amelia snaked a course along the southern Arabian coast. Flying at an altitude of 8,000 feet, she could see the blue of the Arabian Sea and the abomination of desolation which was the shore. Beyond the coastal mountains stretched the bare and endless sands of the desert. Of all places to make an emergency landing, Amelia thought, this was the worst. She reached into the cubbyhole to the right and behind her, and pulled out her Arabian credentials. “To Whom It May Concern” they began. Amelia hoped they would never have to concern anyone, because among other things the credentials begged for clemency for the fliers in the event they went down. AE wondered what would happen if she and Fred encountered the wrong nomadic tribe.

Amelia glanced at her instruments, then her eye stopped at the fuel gauges. The left engine seemed to be using too much gasoline. She reached for the mixture-control lever to lean out the fuel. The lever would not move; it was jammed. AE quickly analyzed the possibilities of a forced landing: neither the Arabian Sea nor desert was inviting, nor did she want to try to make it back to Assab; they would have to try to push through to Karachi. She eased back on both throttles.

Ahead was the Gulf of Oman, and across the gulf, Gwadar. At Gwadar she looked at the chronometer; it was five o’clock. Karachi was only two hours away. She hoped that by flying at a lower rpm she might make it.

The fuel supply lasted. When they reached Karachi, the chronometer for elapsed time since take-off had clicked off thirteen hours and ten minutes. It had been one of their longest flights. Weary, AE walked away from the plane.

“There’s a phone call for you,” someone said to her.

“Oh, yes,” Amelia answered flatly. Probably some newspaperman, she thought.

“It’s from New York. Mr. Putnam is on the wire.”

AE rushed inside to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

“How do you feel?” GP asked from 8,000 miles away.

“Fine. A little tired, perhaps.” The connection was good.

“How’s the ship?”

“Everything seems O.K. There’s been a little trouble with the fuel-flow meter and analyzer, but I think they’ll cure that here.”

“How’s Fred?”

“Fine....”

“Having a good time?” George asked.

“Oh, yes,” AE answered. “It’s been very worth while. We’ll do it again, together, some time.”

“O.K. with me. Anything else?”

“Well, I’ll cable tomorrow an estimate of when we should get to Howland. Good-by.... See you in Oakland.”

Amelia hung up the telephone and walked away slowly. GP was a most considerate and understanding husband, and when their friends had their little jokes about George’s role as the “forgotten husband,” he was always good-humored. After the Atlantic flight, she remembered, her Unknown Husband was decorated. Friends and well-wishers had gathered in her hotel suite in New York. The rooms were crowded with floral bouquets of congratulations.

A woman friend of AE’s went from bouquet to bouquet untying ribbons of various colors, and from them she fashioned a rosette. She walked over to George, who was sitting in one of the easy chairs.

“Stand up, husband!” the woman said. The husband obliged. She fastened the decoration to the lapel of GP’s coat. “For distinguished service in self-effacement beyond the line of marital duty, I hereby bestow upon you the ‘Order of the Forgotten Husband.’”

A flash of laughter cracked across the room. GP smiled uneasily, then laughed with the others.

“And,” added AE from the side line of spectators, “for having a sense of humor, too.”

Then, later, he organized other forgotten husbands of women fliers into the Forty-Nine Point Five Club. The women had formed an international organization of licensed women pilots and called themselves the Ninety-Nines. AE was the first president of the group. Not to be outdone, GP proposed a new trophy from the 49.5’s. It was an endurance prize to be awarded to the first wife who stayed home the longest. The trophy: a cut-glass baby bottle with crossed silver safety pins. The award was never made. There was no one who qualified.

Amelia kicked up the dust at Karachi as she remembered the telephone conversation with GP. Certainly she had never qualified for the trophy, but she would give it an honest try if she ever got home from this long trip. There was another continent to fly over, and another after that; not to mention the Pacific Ocean, which was more than equal to both of them put together.

For the present, however, the chance to ride a camel could not be foregone. Amelia and Fred rose to the occasion--literally. The way the camel swung up from the ground, nose-diving forward then lurching backward, Amelia, ensconced between the humps, felt as if she were going into a flat spin.

“Better wear your parachute,” Fred called over to her.

After the ride, or rather the swing aloft from extended rubber pads, AE went to the post office to have the “covers” canceled for her subscribing philatelists back home.

Out at the airport, the largest AE had ever seen, mechanics from Imperial Airways worked around the clock getting the Electra back into top-flight condition. Two instrument specialists on loan from the Royal Air Force repaired the troublesome fuel-flow indicator and the jammed mixture-control lever.

5. _India to Australia_

Two days later, on June 17, the Electra was pronounced ready; and on that same day they left Karachi for Calcutta, 1,390 miles directly across India to its eastern border.

Shortly after take-off low clouds formed and sped by beneath the wings but were soon outrun. The waves of sand of the Sind Desert now whipped into little whirlpools; then, driven by a strong wind from the south, they became a sandstorm of unabated fury. Amelia climbed higher in escape.

Ahead there was no storm, and she could see ridges that grew from the ground rising to foothills and then to mountains. They were like “sharks poking their backs through a yellow sea.”

Over Central India aids to contact flying became a surfeit of plenty: well-mapped railroads, rivers, and mountains were easily identified. By such landmarks her way was made easy.

But it was not so in the air. Large black eagles dived out of the sky toward the Electra. They soared and swung and spun about the plane, giving Amelia many moments of fretful anxiety. If they flew into the propellers, they would be chopped into bird-and-feather burger which could choke off the Wasp engines. That she missed them was a miracle of purblind fate and wide-eyed flying.

Below, the mountains had descended into plains. Mosaics in neat squares of brown, green, and gold were laid out as if on a vast floor, the squares joined by silver-and-gold inlay that reflected the sky and the sun.

In the distance the Ganges River sparkled, and beside it the city of Allahabad stood out against the white brightness of the encircling countryside. Beyond the city mountains green with luxuriant growth rose sharply into towering magnificence. Rainstorms engulfed the peaks. Amelia plowed through.

Air currents from off the mountains lifted the Electra an added 1,000 feet into the air. AE jammed the control column forward, trying to hold down the nose of the plane. Sheets of rain smashed down on wings and fuselage and lashed back from the props against the cockpit windows.

Once over the tops, the mountains quickly became plains that would continue for the next hundred miles all the way to Calcutta. Low clouds now scudded by and the weather cleared, revealing a quilted patchwork of gray, green, and tan rice fields.

More towns and an increasing number of railroads indicated that a big city was at hand. AE watched factories and mills and many villages grow thicker as she approached the heart of the city.

Harbor, docks, many intersecting streets, and countless white buildings bright in the sun: these were Calcutta. As she reached Dum Dum airport, another squall line moved in and broke across the Electra just as Amelia began her letdown for a landing. Rolling down the runway the plane sent up sheets of spray. Then as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped, and the sun shone as before. It was 4:00 P.M.

Four hours later Amelia was sound asleep. The long, hard flight had exhausted her; her eyes, tired and sore from the constant strain of watching ground, wings, and instruments, had closed as if from an involuntary reflex action.

Because of the Honolulu crack-up and the consequent change in plans that turned the flight to a west-to-east crossing at the equator, the monsoon season, which they had hoped earlier to escape, was now upon them. For India, it meant that the winds, beginning in June, would sweep in from the Indian Ocean in the southwest, carrying with them rains heavy, violent, and destructive. For the Electra, it meant cross winds and downpours, for its course lay directly in the path of the monsoon. For Amelia, it meant one of the supreme tests of her skill, courage, and endurance.

During that night of June 17 the monsoons began. When Amelia and Fred reached the airport in the morning, the ground was wet and soggy. A take-off would be risky at best; but the forecast was for more rain, which would make a take-off impossible. Amelia decided to chance the risky.

She revved up the engines. Slowly, as she added throttle, the Electra began to roll and gain speed. Tail up and at full power, the plane sloshed through the mud and strained to become airborne. The end of the runway loomed ahead; in a desperate move, AE pulled back sharply on the control column. The Electra broke from the mud, then began to settle, but finally held. Amelia pulled up the gear; the wheels, still spinning and slinging mud, rose into the wells. As the plane rose in a steep climb, the underside of the wings and fuselage just cleared the treetops at the edge of the field. The Lockheed had done it again.

Difficult and dangerous as it was, the take-off was but the beginning. The worst was yet to come. The sky was a dull metallic gray, and in it leaden clouds heavy with rain crowded about the plane. AE felt that they were grim harbingers.

Through occasional holes in the clouds Amelia saw scattered chunks of land that looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They marked the mouths of the Ganges. From the hot land, steam rose as if from a giant cauldron. In a constantly moving pageant, rice fields dotted with workers, grass houses, and green trees sped by.

The weather clearing ahead, Amelia recognized the two unmistakable landmarks of Akyab: two golden pagodas and many volcanic islands. Beyond the city was the airfield with two runways and one hangar. She wanted to refuel and push on to Rangoon that same day, but the monsoon proved a superior foe.

At Akyab, while the Electra was being refueled, AE checked the weather reports for the way ahead. They were dire and discouraging. Amelia decided she would have to try to get through somehow.

No sooner had she leveled off from her climb out of take-off, and turned into her course heading, than a head wind, full of rain, hit the Electra squarely on the nose. It was the heaviest rain Amelia had ever seen. Sheet after sheet, thick and concentrated like shovelfuls of gravel, flung back from the props and slapped against the windshield. The Electra heaved and churned through wave after wave, through wall after wall of water. Amelia could not see out from the cockpit and had to fall back completely upon her instruments.

For two hours she pitted herself and her plane against the storm, trying to break through the monsoon. Finally exhausted, her legs and arms heavy as lead from fighting stick and rudders, she relented, and retreated from the encounter. Reluctantly, she turned out to sea, nosed down to the tops of the waves, and headed back to Akyab.

For her navigator Amelia had nothing but praise. “By uncanny powers,” she wrote later, “Fred Noonan managed to navigate us back to the airport, without being able to see anything but the waves beneath the plane.”

When they returned to Akyab, the weatherman at the airport told them that the weather would probably not improve for three months. Amelia wondered if she and Fred would not have to set up light housekeeping and wait things out. She talked things over with him. They decided that they would try again.

The next day, the nineteenth, they set out, hoping this time to reach Bangkok in Siam. Amelia, quickly realizing that yesterday’s tactics of trying to fly under the monsoon would not work again, now climbed to 8,000 feet, hoping to top the mountains and somehow plow through. She was determined to make it.

She set her eyes on her instruments and flew her plane blind. Through the tossing and pitching of the plane and the pounding of the rain she brought the Electra through. She worked her legs constantly, trying to hold the rudders. Hands gripped to the wheel, her arms pressed forward then pulled back on the control column; the plane now rolled left, now right. Her legs and arms began to ache and then to stiffen as she fought to keep the nose up, the wings straight and level.

The instruments were her only guide, her only hope. She flew the little yellow plane on the artificial horizon before her, and held the pointer on the compass heading by flying the needle and ball of the turn and bank indicator. Never far from her right hand were the engine throttles, set evenly forward and registering 150 mph in the white quadrant of the air-speed indicator. Out of the corner of her eye she kept constant check on the altimeter and the rate of climb. Again for two hours she worked and sweated and fought.

She broke out into the clear, the victor. Below her were plains, brilliant in the morning sun. She pressed back in her seat and heaved a heavy sigh. It was a blessed relief to see the earth again. Through the plains meandered the Irrawaddy River.

Clouds appeared again; and Amelia, carefully choosing the openings of light among them, skillfully skirted her plane this way and that between them for the next 50 miles.

Far in the distance, about twenty miles in from the sea and near a wide river, she saw a great golden pagoda pointing brightly above the dark shadows of a city. It was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, AE quickly determined from her map, and that meant Rangoon. She grinned happily: she was dead on course.

They landed to refuel and with the intention of leaving immediately for Bangkok. But the Electra had not rolled to a stop when a heavy downpour engulfed the airport, making a take-off out of the question.

Amelia and Fred made the best of the delay by sight-seeing. The first tour was a short motor trip on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay. The fliers, in a sudden release from their tensions, could not restrain themselves from singing snatches of Kipling’s “The Road to Mandalay,” although they shuddered to think of the number of tourists who must have done exactly the same thing on the same road.

After finishing the line--“Where the flying fishes play”--Amelia turned to Fred.

“That’s it,” she said to him.

“What is?” Fred asked.

“_Flying_ fishes,” she answered. “See?” Amelia explained: “That’s what aviators are--ought to be--if they’re silly enough to squash around aloft at this season.”

Fred agreed. He had never known at sea storms like those of the last two days.

They then went to see the golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the same that had guided them into the city from the air. Fred refused to go inside, but Amelia kicked off her shoes, climbed the long flight of steps to the top entrance, and entered to see the many Buddhas and to watch the white-robed men at their priestly tasks.

On the morning of June 20 they were off for Bangkok. They crossed the upper half of the Gulf of Martaban to Moulmein, then flew across the north-south range of mountains that marked the dividing line between Burma and Siam. From the height of 8,000 feet Amelia looked out beyond the right wing and back to Rangoon: like the prow of a ship, the city divided the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea, creating the wide Bay of Bengal on the right side and the smaller Gulf of Martaban on the left.

Since take-off, clouds had begun to form. What had been gentle sheep-backed formations far into the west now grew and changed into forbidding anvil-shaped thunderheads; in the east, flanking the range of mountains, clouds broke and scattered, baring to Amelia’s view green foothills that gradually sloped and diminished into broad, thickly snarled jungle. As she looked at the heavy undergrowth, Amelia hoped she would never have to pancake the Electra anywhere below.

They cut across the Mae Klong River. In the distance were plains backed up by mountains. Slowly a ragged outline on the horizon became the sharp needle points of Buddhist temples and the peaked roofs of tiled buildings. It was the city of Bangkok. Through the city AE could see from above how the Mae Nam River continued its tortuous course from the mountains in the north to the Gulf of Siam in the south.

Hoping to make Singapore before nightfall, they landed at Bangkok only to refuel and be on their way again.

Back in the air, Amelia stretched the sectional map across her knees and studied the way ahead. Singapore lay on an island to which pointed the long 900-mile finger of the Malay Peninsula. To reach it, she would have to cut across the Gulf of Siam, then proceed on a course east of the Malay coast, and finally head directly south.

She looked out from the cockpit. The day was clear and the visibility unlimited. She found it hard to believe that she was flying over the fabled world she had so often set out for, riding the old buggy in the Atchison barn, or lying on the floor in the parlor looking at one of Grandfather Otis’s big geography books. She loved the sound of the names, Siam and Cambodia, and she picked out others at random from the map--Bang Saphan, Lem Tane, Koh Phratnog. Yet there were two of them below: Siam to the right, Cambodia to the left.

Nevertheless, Amelia shook her head, as she had failed to see Timbuktu, so had she missed seeing the famous Taj Mahal in Negra, which had not been far off the Karachi-Allahabad leg. It, too, would have to wait for another time. Now, there was too little time and too much to see.

She now followed a valley across the mountains, then swung down the western coast from Alor Star in Malay. The clouds over the peaks were beginning to grow: cumulus into cumulo-nimbus, cumulo-nimbus into great thunderheads.

A deep green jungle unfolded below, with an occasional scar that marked the cut of a road across the undulating hills and flatlands.

After six hours of flying Amelia sighted Singapore. Letting down from altitude, she passed over countless ships in the great sprawling harbor, then continued over the vast city to the airport. At 5:25 P.M. the Electra touched down.

Amelia and Fred had dinner with the American consul general and his wife. After dinner the fliers begged to be excused, and turned in. At 3:00 A.M. they were up and on their way back to the airport, eager to get on to their next stop, Java, which lay on the other side of a third crossing of the equator. It was the morning of June 22.

The Electra soared into the air. Over the sea along the coast of Sumatra, then across the southeast point of the island, Amelia guided her plane into the world down under of the Southern Hemisphere.

In quick succession she noted the jungle and swamp of a long chain of islands; then sudden and abrupt, the volcanic mountains of Java, imperious and proud, which rose out of the mist to dominate the surrounding sea below them. Like suckling pigs, tiny islands lay along the mother shore for their nourishment.

Amelia landed at Bandung and taxied the plane to the hangar. According to plan, the Electra was scheduled for a complete going over. The plane in the hands of the mechanics, Amelia and Fred decided to get a closer look down into one of the volcanoes they had flown over.

In a borrowed car they drove up the mountain to the rim of the crater at 6,500 feet. For the first time on the long trip they felt a chill and put on their flying jackets. The sulphur fumes from the volcano were strong and sickening; they reminded Amelia of the strong gas fumes in refueling that sometimes made her ill. Nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from looking down into the crater. It was pointless to drive to the top and not see what she had come to see. She bent over the rim and looked down: a pool of bright green water glittered softly hundreds of feet below.

At 3:45 the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June, Amelia and Fred climbed into the Electra. They hoped to fly this day non-stop to Australia. AE started the engines. She watched the instruments closely as the needles moved up in response; then, as in Miami when they first started out for the world flight, one of the important engine instruments failed. Something had gone wrong; but without the instrument operating correctly there was no point in proceeding.

It was not until two o’clock that afternoon that they heard they could now move out. Because of the late start, they decided to fly only as far as Surabaya, 350 miles away. On the way, what had been failure of engine instrument for Amelia now became failure of navigation instruments for Fred Noonan. He could not get his most important long-range instruments to function properly. Reaching Surabaya, they turned around and flew back to Bandung. To go on without aids for the difficult navigation that lay ahead, especially over water, would make the rest of the world flight extremely dangerous.

Before they left Surabaya to retrace their steps, AE was called to the telephone. It was GP, calling from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his United plane was refueling before continuing on to California. George had heard from Amelia that there had been some difficulty with the plane.

“Is everything about the ship O.K. now?” he asked.

Amelia, refusing to worry her husband concerning something he could do nothing about, held back the truth.

“Yes,” she said abruptly; then softly added: “Good night, hon.”

“Good night,” GP answered. “I’ll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”

When the Electra landed in Bandung, Dutch technicians were hastily called to work on the faulty navigation instruments. While they worked, Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing in the close-by city of Batavia.

Pilot and navigator had made an agreement not to do any shopping; they did not want to add any weight to the plane. Six pounds, they reminded each other, equaled one gallon of fuel. But Amelia broke the pact to buy a knife. She purchased it--a handmade sheath knife at a metalworker’s shop--for her friend John Oliver La Gorce of the National Geographic Society; she wanted him to add it to his extensive knife collection. She jammed the knife under her belt. She wanted to carry it all the way to Washington, D.C., and make an official presentation of it to her friend.

It took two days to repair the Electra. On Sunday morning, June 27, Amelia and Fred left Bandung, hoping again to reach Australia. But what had been the conspiracy of instruments now became the conspiracy of time. For every fifteen degrees of longitude crossed, they would lose one hour; and the day would grow shorter the longer and farther they flew east.

For this reason they had to land, after only five hours of flying, at Koepang, on the island of Timor. The flight from Java to Timor had been for Amelia an experience in extremes, as the lush tropics became arid wastes--and rich abundance, monastic sparsity.

Except for a fuel shed at Koepang there were no other storage facilities. Amelia and Fred pulled out the cloth covers from the back of the fuselage and covered the props and engines. Then with the help of some of the natives they turned the Electra into the wind and staked it down to the ground.

The next morning, again before dawn, they climbed wearily into the plane. The Electra rolled down the grass runway and jumped into the air from the steep cliffs of the island. Over the Timor Sea the head winds were strong, and it was not until three and a half hours later that Amelia sighted the bright emerald sea on the northern coast of Australia. They landed at Port Darwin.

Again, as it had happened before in arriving at a new country, Amelia and Fred had to be fumigated. For the last time they stoically submitted to the spray guns.

At Port Darwin they unloaded their parachutes and sent them home. Over the Pacific a parachute would be of no use whatever. Gracefully declining all invitations, Amelia and Fred parted for their separate rooms to turn in early for much-needed rest. The next stop was Lae, New Guinea, only a few hours away from Australia, but an eternity away from home.

6. _New Guinea to Howland Island_

The flight from Port Darwin to Lae, on June 30, was a flight of seven hours and forty-three minutes of the same day. The flight from Lae to Howland Island, however, was a flight into yesterday. For Howland lay one day earlier across the international date line. By the flight to the other side of the 180° of longitude there was one day to be gained; but to get to the great divide, there were two hours to be lost. And two lives.

In March, before she had cracked up in the earlier try for Howland from Hawaii, AE had written: “It is much better not to let fatigue of any kind creep into the early part of any expedition, for it cannot be eliminated later.”

Now she was weary and tired from a fatigue that could not be eliminated. Twenty-two thousand miles of flying in only forty days had taken its unremitting toll upon her and Fred.

Amelia wanted to be home by the Fourth of July and before her thirty-ninth birthday on the twenty-fourth. She considered the 7,000 miles that lay before her and wrote in her logbook: “Whether everything to be done can be done within this time limit remains to be seen.” And before she left Lae to begin the longest leg of the world flight--the 2,556 miles to Howland, she hastily scribbled: “I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”

AE hoped that the old difficulties with the navigation instruments that they had had at Surabaya would not return now to plague them on the long over-water flight. For on the leg to Howland the aids to navigation were limited.

The vast Pacific ruled out immediately the case for pilotage: except for islands few and far between there were no landmarks she could follow. The small size of Howland, for all practical purposes, discouraged the time and distance plotting of dead reckoning. There remained celestial navigation, with radio as an aid. For Amelia to be able to hit her target, the weather would have to be clear enough for Fred to be able to take his fixes from the stars at night and from the sun during the day. Once over the ocean and more than 500 miles out she would no longer be able to contact Lae by radio.

To get a radio bearing from Howland, she would have to fly all night and never waver from her course until early the next morning. Then she could home in on signals from the Coast Guard Cutter _Itasca_, which lay anchored off Howland. With the Electra’s loop antenna and the ability to receive from a strong sending station, she felt that her chances were good.

Nevertheless, Amelia wished now that she had not ordered the 250-foot trailing wire antenna to be removed from her plane before they left Miami. Gladly on the long over-water leg that faced her would she go through the trouble of reeling out and reeling in: if she had the long antenna she would be able to contact and to receive from the _Itasca_ from distances much farther out than the loop antenna permitted.

And, as if in fateful conspiracy, Amelia did not know that there was yet another aid to get to Howland. She did not know because no one had told her. A high-frequency direction finder had been obtained from the Navy and installed on the island of Howland; but neither Commander W. K. Thompson of the _Itasca_ nor Richard B. Black, the field representative of the Department of the Interior, had advised AE that the direction finder had been set up to help her.

This lack of foresight and coordination was but the beginning of a chain of incidents that linked finally to tragedy. Fred Noonan, in trying to set his chronometers, found that he could not calibrate them correctly because of radio difficulties on the Electra’s 50-watt set. With his chronometers reading slow or fast, he knew he would not be able to obtain accurate celestial fixes. An error of fifteen seconds on the precision instruments would mean a mistake of one mile in his position computations, and an error of one minute a mistake of four miles.

Such position errors, taken into account in giving AE headings to fly by, might add to the difficulties of the navigation. For a mistake of one degree in following the compass could take them one mile off course for every sixty miles flown, more than forty miles off course for the Howland leg.

Despite these serious problems, Amelia set out to find in the 7,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean the small speck of land that was Howland Island.

On July 1 the Electra stood poised several thousand feet from the edge of the cliff that marked the end of the runway. The plane was fully loaded with 1,150 gallons of gasoline, enough to fly under ideal conditions the full range of 4,000 miles. A contrary wind, however, which blew across rather than down the runway, coupled with an ominous black squall line, conspired to keep the Electra earth-bound for the day.

Amelia and Fred repacked the plane, discarding every scrap that was not absolutely needed. AE kept the bare essentials needed for travel; and Fred, a small tin case which he had picked up in Africa and which, Amelia was careful to note, “still rattles, so it cannot be packed very full.”

Restless and disappointed with the day’s delay, pilot and navigator did more sight-seeing on the island, but with half a heart. They could not wait to be off and homeward bound.

At ten o’clock the next morning--the second of July on Lae but the first on Howland--the Electra roared down the 3,000 feet of runway. In the cockpit Amelia watched the tachometer and the air-speed indicator: the rpm dial moved forward, and the air-speed needle crossed the red quadrant into the green, then across the green into the white. The plane broke cleanly into the air 150 feet short of the edge of the cliff that dropped to the sea. Amelia pulled up the gear and climbed to 8,000 feet, the cruising altitude.