East to the Dawn (37 page)

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:

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.