Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (53 page)

Not all of the crew were exuberant, however. Noting the several planes accompanying them for the first few miles, most of which had newspaper photographers on board, Jim Warner couldn’t help himself. ‘If we do go down,’ he told Lyon, ‘those photos will make some nice mementos for our friends.’
⁸

As Charles Kingsford Smith at last turned away and focused solely on the flight ahead, strong emotions flooded through him. Finally, all the worries, all the problems, the fierce squabbling, the desperation and disappointments were behind them. They were on their way!

Charles Ulm felt much the same and was truly exultant that they were actually setting out on fulfilling a dream they had been separately and jointly nurturing for years. Ulm, though, would acknowledge at a later point that he felt a rather strange presentiment a couple of hours after leaving ‘Frisco. From the cheery farewell, and the first lot of sunny skies above and sparkling blue below, they had to climb up over a mountain of slightly forbidding cloud. Looking down upon that formation, into its amazing valleys and ridges from 2000 feet on high, Ulm was suddenly struck by a haunting sense of their complete isolation.

And isolated they truly were. Every second was taking them further away from land and they were still about a dozen hours from the halfway mark, when they would at last be heading
towards
land and their first stop-off point. Strangely, beneath them on the ocean there had so far been no sign of any vessels even though they were flying above what were meant to be fairly busy shipping lanes. Were they indeed on the right course? In the cabin, Harry Lyon checked and rechecked his calculations. Allowing 3 degrees for the southerly drift of wind, he had them on a course of 242 degrees, at the beginning of their Great Circle route to Honolulu. (A curiosity of Harry’s style was that he did not keep those calculations in a leather-bound book, like other navigators, but, once done, would scrunch them up and throw them out the window!)
⁹

Might this trip be easier than they thought, after all their hard work to get in the air? Might it simply be a matter of pointing the plane in the right direction and letting her rip, giving lie to the local Californian betting agency that had offered odds of 11 to 1 against their even reaching Hawaii?
¹⁰
After all, they had passed soon enough through the slightly threatening cloud, and if anything, things were now almost
too
perfect. In a very odd kind of way, the monotony of the blue sea below them, the blue vault above, and the ear-splitting bark of the engines, almost began to
oppress
them.
¹¹

Now back down to some 1000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, their mighty aeroplane flew on. Both Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm were generally delighted with how she was performing. (And a ‘she’ the
Southern Cross
definitely was. A beautiful, protective creation that was going to see them through on this life’s journey, and look after them whatever hard times might be coming.)

Meanwhile, Lyon was also giving them updates as to his estimation of how far they had travelled and at one o’clock San Francisco time, told them they had already covered 350 miles of their first hop. They had just over 2000 miles left to go to Hawaii…

And thar she blew. Seemingly from out of nowhere, they flew into a storm that reduced visibility to nearly nothing and rocked the craft from side to side and up and down, almost as if they were zooming along a terrible aerial road filled with shocking potholes, sudden gullies and sharp corners. With all four of them perched atop wicker chairs that were not attached to the fuselage, with no seat belts, bad bumps could see them airborne in their own right and many curses ensued. Happily, they were soon through it and beneath them a sunny sea quickly appeared again, a shimmering, vivid turquoise so calm that ‘not a single fleck of foam marred the endless mirror’.
¹²

By now it was 4.30 pm San Francisco time and they had been flying for just over seven and a half hours.
Still
there was no sign of any shipping, which remained a cause of slight concern, but it wasn’t as if there was anything they could do about it. Lyon continued to assure them that they were on course, and they were still connected to the rest of the world by the gossamer thread that was the radio beam coming at them from ol’ ‘Frisco, some 620 miles behind. (Funny, was it
really
only that morning that they had left that magic city in California? Somehow, it seemed extremely difficult to comprehend that that world and this world of aerial wonder could be connected, just by them and eight hours’ flight.)

At 6.40 pm Honolulu picked up a Morse message from the
Southern Cross
: ‘It’s getting dark now. One notices a steady flame pouring out of the exhaust. Engines doing their duty royally, making one feel safe as the pyramids of Egypt.’
¹³
(This message clearly had not come from Smithy, as he had been inside those pyramids and had not felt safe at all.)

As the twilight began to descend, the ‘dream rays lit up a dream city of snowy battlements on the far horizon. The dying sun painted a path of gold across the ocean…’
¹⁴
At this point, Smithy would have loved nothing more than to suck on a cigarette—inevitably someone else’s, because though a heavy smoker he was never known to buy his own
¹⁵
—but, of course, having a naked flame anywhere near so much petrol was out of the question, and he had to ignore the craving.
¹⁶

Finally, after a long and arduous day, the sun, chased by the
Southern Cross
for the last half of its journey across the skies, at last made its escape and sank into the Pacific for some merciful rest, but not before giving out a last golden burst of blazing light that Smithy would record as, ‘a spectacular and glorious sunset as I had seldom seen before’.
¹⁷
It seemed to him, in a philosophical moment, to be ‘a background of beauty greater by far than anything conceived by the world’s masters of painting’.
¹⁸

At 8 pm they had been aloft for just over eleven hours. Like the lights of a Christmas tree being suddenly turned on, the stars burst forth from the velvet sky, gladdening the heart of Harry Lyon, who now had a smorgasbord of twinkling signposts from which to get his bearings. Though it had not been previously planned, Kingsford Smith decided to take the plane up to 4000 feet in the hope of flying over and above whatever storm the night might bring on their course to Hawaii—a course now illumined a little by the silvery full moon, which had wonderfully risen a short time after the sun had gone down.

In the back, Jim Warner felt his spirits—which had been highly troubled by the thought he was on the exact path taken by all the Dole flyers who had died—lift markedly at the sight of the moon. To his mind, it was just like meeting an old friend after a long separation.
¹⁹
He gazed for a moment at the lovely moon shadow the
Southern Cross
was making on the cloudy landscape below, and then got back to his work. At least he and Lyon were nothing if not busy.

While Lyon was endlessly taking readings with his sextant, consulting his compasses, scribbling out calculations on his notepad and plotting their position on the map tacked to the table, Warner had his headphones on and was listening to weather reports, receiving messages or tapping them out, all the while listening carefully to make sure that they were ‘on beam’—directly on line with the radio signal from Crissy Field. Though it was not easy for ‘the boys in the back room’ to communicate with the pilots up front—as the passageway between the cockpit and back cabin was almost entirely filled with a petrol tank—after some experimentation they had developed a simple method. With the circular tank fitted into the otherwise rectangular fuselage, there was just space enough for a long stick to be fitted. Thus, when Warner wanted to send a message forward he would scribble it on a piece of paper and attach it to a clip on the end of the stick. Then, by poking the stick through the gap he could prod Kingsford Smith’s shoulder to get his attention.

When, in turn, Smithy wanted to get a message to the men in the back he would attach his own scribbled piece of paper to the stick and shake it, at which point they would pull it back into their little cave to devour.

A fair measure of these messages were bright banter. None was Smithy’s private fears and anxieties. Yet the truth was that as night fell, so did his spirits. Was everything all right? What effect was the terrific vibration of the three thundering engines having on the rest of the
Southern Cross
? How much of the lifeblood of the plane, the oil, were those engines soaking up? And then there was the petrol, always the petrol. Wild, coursing numbers jumbled, tumbled, rumbled through his head—of distance to travel, fuel consumed, fuel still on hand and time remaining—and sometimes it seemed to him they wouldn’t even get close to Hawaii. In bad moments he wished he was thousands of miles away from any aeroplane engine, instead of huddled under three of them. His legs were cramped, and his bad foot hurt. And he was
dying
for a cigarette.

The
Southern Cross
droned on…
²⁰

Long-distance flying at night was an entirely different art from flying during the day. At 10 pm, Lyon lay down on the floor and jammed opened the door at a 45-degree angle and dropped out a floating flare. This flare was so designed that the moment it hit the water a white phosphorous blaze appeared and remained visible for at least twenty minutes. By keeping his eyes set upon it through his drift meter, long after they had passed over, it was a relatively easy matter to estimate how much the wind was pushing them off course, and therefore what their ‘rate of drift’ was. On this occasion, Lyon was able to tell his pilots that the wind was pushing them just a little to the south, and so they altered course a couple of degrees to the north. Ideally, that would neutralise the wind drift and they would again be flying exactly on course.

Just before midnight came their first genuinely heavy weather, as their relentless bird suddenly charged into heavy rain clouds and they were buffeted from side to side in complete blackness. To get clear of it, Smithy ‘took ‘er up’, climbing even higher, to 4800 feet, to escape the whole mess and…

And always it was the same thing when you surfaced from a storm like that. Just lovely! After being pummelled from all sides, with lashing rain and wind, all of it in evil and threatening darkness, suddenly you burst through…and all was calm…with the most active thing happening being the winking of the stars above, saying ‘welcome back’.

Which was greatly cheering, to a point…It wasn’t long, however, before Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s previous sense of total isolation, of being in a small craft alone on a vast planet, returned. They were nothing less than downright lonely.

Just before two o’clock in the morning, though, at last, they saw exactly what their eyes had been straining to see: a light, a light in the darkness! It could only belong to a ship. Someone must be alive down there!

And so they were. As the
Southern Cross
flew closer, what had appeared to be one small light turned quickly into many lights, grouped tightly together, the outline of which framed the rough shape of a steamer. Yes! The vision of that craft in the night was like a friendly hand stretched out to them in the wilderness.
²¹

Excitedly, Kingsford Smith signalled for Ulm to take the controls, and circle the craft, while he manned the specially installed searchlight fitted with a Morse key, designed to flash pulses of light when he pressed a button in the cockpit. Using the skills he had learned in the Signal Corps all those years ago, he bumped out the letters in Morse code—
dah dah dah
,
dah dit dah
,
dit dit dit
,
dah dit dah dit
—as in O K S C, which in turn stood for
OK Southern Cross.
²²
The ship, ploughing through the waves below, flashed back in return its own name, SS
Maliko.
While the flashing lights between them were essentially fun in the darkness, the serious work was done by the two ‘brass pounders’, the radio men of the two craft, with Warner soon telling them that he had received an exact fix from the
Maliko
on where they were and the news was fairly good. They were only a few miles to the north of their appointed course and the adjustment was easily made.

It felt strange to the men on the
Southern Cross
how instantaneously they had established such a strong sense of communion with the men below in the middle of the ocean, men whom they had never seen, were not seeing now, and would never see in the future. But for the flying crew, who for hours had been feeling like an insignificant speck all alone in the universe, the bond they felt was powerful.

And yet in only thirty seconds their ship in the night slipped backwards and they were alone again, although immeasurably cheered by the brief encounter. Yet, less than half an hour later James Warner poked a note forward saying that he had been in radio contact with another ship, the SS
Manoa
, and that they should shortly see it up ahead, and sure enough…