East to the Dawn (41 page)

In point of fact they were only a mile off course and didn't know it. The fog was so thick that it had obscured the land beneath them. The Friendship had flown right over Ireland, passing over Valentia and Dingle Bay, their first checkpoint in Europe as it had been Lindbergh's. When they sighted the
America
they were already over the Irish Sea, which was why the ship seemed to be going the wrong direction.

Now Bill, really worried, kept the
Friendship
at five hundred feet, flying just beneath the fog, so that they could continue to see the sea. They began to see small craft but, like the
America,
apparently going in the wrong direction. They kept thinking they saw land (a common occurrence; Lindbergh mistakenly thought he had seen trees) and kept being disappointed. Bill was at the controls, and Slim, beside him, was gnawing at a sandwich, when out of the mists he saw a blue shadow. He looked at it for a while, then pointed it out to Bill. The sandwich flew out the window as Slim realized that this time it was land.

Bill thought it was an island off the Cornwall coast, “as I could see from the map that it was not Ireland.” He was under a great deal of pressure to set down—the
Friendship
was so close to being out of gas, the engines were sputtering unless the plane was flying level, and even then the port motor was coughing a bit, according to Amelia. So he couldn't fly over land in his seaplane—he had to follow the coast, where he could set down.

Just then Bill saw what looked like a break in the coastline. He followed it, peering through rain and a leaden sky up to what turned out to be a bay, and past a factory town they would learn later was Burry Port, Wales. Then he circled back, dipped around the Burry Port Copper Works
chimney stack (passing, according to one observer, only a few yards from it), and then landed. Bill wrote, “I picked out the likeliest looking stretch and brought the Friendship down in it.”

They tied up to a buoy near some railroad docks.

It was lunchtime when the
Friendship
landed, but because of the steady drizzle, there were not many people about. Workers looking out their windows saw the plane tied up to Number 10 buoy, but it took a while for the townspeople to react. Eventually Ernest Bevan, an accountant at the Crown Colliery who had seen the plane fly by and circle back called up Cyril Jefferies, junior clerk at the Great Western Railway Company, whose desk was in front of a huge window overlooking the water and who could plainly see the craft. He was at that moment staring excitedly at it out his window and suggested Bevan get help to the plane. Just then railway official C. H. Owen walked in and, taking charge of the situation, called Norman Fisher, head of the Frickers Metal Company also nearby, who had a rowboat tied up at the docks, and told him to get out to the plane; Fisher grabbed one of his employees and finally did just that. It was dead low tide and rather a long row; Jefferies, watching them make their way slowly out, had time to eat his sandwich, dig up some newspaper accounts of the flight (he had not been aware that the Friendship had finally become airborne), and walk to a spot on the beach opposite the plane—at low tide, it was more mud flats than anything else—before Fisher reached it.

By the time Norman Fisher arrived, Amelia, Slim, and Bill, who had been waving to attract attention (according to Amelia, for nearly an hour), had closed the plane's door. Fisher knocked on the side of the plane, perhaps too timidly; there was no response. Possibly exhausted and still deaf from the sound of the engines (possibly Amelia still was wearing the ear stoppers given her by Marie Byrd), they didn't hear the knock. But after a few minutes the door finally opened, and a long conversation ensued. Fisher was explaining to the fliers that the island they had seen was Lundy Island at the entrance to the Bristol Channel, and that they had landed on the coast of Wales, not the coast of Cornwall or Ireland. Not that they really cared by that time exactly which shore they had reached. “No one,” Bill said later, “was more thankful than I was to see the Welch coast.... I saw the estuary which I now know to be Burry Port, and after circling to make sure everything was clear I landed on a strip of water and fastened up to a buoy.”

Having doffed the flying suit he had been wearing over his everyday clothes, Bill set about making himself presentable, then went off in the boat, stunning the waiting Cyril Jefferies when he alighted on dry land, who observed, “He was dressed in a grey trilby, at a nonchalant angle, a
light macintosh coat, and a dark double breasted suit, just as if he was going for a stroll down Broadway. His appearance enhanced my respect for him. The normality of his appearance suggested the coolness of a man of courage.”

Under the circumstances, Bill's aplomb was all the more remarkable, considering he had gone ashore in search of two things—a telephone to notify the group waiting for them at the Imperial Airways slipway in Southampton that they had landed, and another more pressing one, fuel for the plane. Not altogether surprisingly, the
Friendship's
three Whirlwind engines had not been as efficient as the one Whirlwind engine that had powered the Spirit of St. Louis. As Bill admitted in his first interview, “I came ashore to see about gasoline. At the moment I have not enough to let us rise again.”

The
Friendship
was out of gas.

11

Golden Girl

• • • • Amy Guest was waiting impatiently with her family in London. She had a lot riding on the outcome. It was her dream, her creation, that the world waited upon. She had chosen Byrd, she had set the standards for the woman who would take her place, she had passed on all plans, including the choice of the Fokker. And she had extended herself financially. Not only had she bought the plane and financed its refitting and new equipment, paying the agreed-upon sums to the pilots, paying the living expenses for Amelia, Slim, and Bill for the duration of the adventure—picking up the tab in Boston, in Halifax, in Trepassey and (hopefully) in England—her commitment extended to paying for the transportation, hotel and peripheral expenses of Hilton Railey and his assistant, now into their ninth day of waiting in Southampton, where the
Friendship
was expected to land. And she would have to get them all home.

It was in Southampton that Bill Stultz found Hilton to report that they had landed in Burry Port and that Amelia was waiting aboard the plane. Hilton requested that Bill ask Amelia to remain aboard the
Friendship
until he could join them. Now Amy Guest, exhibiting her usual style, gave the nod to Hilton Railey to charter a seaplane from Southampton-based
Imperial Airways so that he and Allen Raymond of
The New York Times
could immediately fly to Burry Port.

Three hours after the
Friendship
landed, the Imperial Airways plane glided to a stop a few hundred yards away, and the two men saw Amelia seated cross-legged in the doorway of the plane, apparently oblivious to the clamor caused by the two thousand astounded inhabitants of Burry Port lined up at the water's edge, talking among themselves and staring at her.

They went ashore to find, as would happen again and again all over the world, that the assemblage only had eyes for Amelia. As she stepped on land, the crowd surged toward her—some to touch her flying suit, some to get her autograph, some to shake her hand, some just to see her up close. Fingers grabbed a corner of the bright silk scarf sticking out from under her flying suit, tugged it off her neck, and moments later the scarf was a souvenir being distributed among the onlookers. She was almost crushed. At which point the high sheriff of Carmarthenshire, Burry Port's three policemen, plus helpers, locked arms to form a ring around Amelia and slowly fought their way into the offices of the nearest building a hundred yards away, locking the doors behind them. They stayed there until more policemen and the motorcars Hilton Railey had arranged for arrived to take them to the Ashburnham Hotel, a ways outside the town, where they could safely spend the night.

The next morning they motored back, and quickly boarded the Friendship, bound for Southampton, their original destination. Carrying only the fifty gallons of gas Bill had put aboard the afternoon before, the big plane took off effortlessly, even with the added poundage of Hilton Railey and the
Times
reporter.

Southampton went wild when the
Friendship
came into view. The ships waiting in the harbor let loose their sirens, and as the fliers stepped onto the landing platform, there was again a wild outburst of enthusiasm among the eager throng, some of whom surged forward, almost pressing people into the water.

There on the dock amidst the various local officials—everyone from the mayor (who happened to be female) on down—waited Amy and Frederick Guest. There on the dock Amelia and Amy met for the first time. One can imagine them forthrightly shaking hands and congratulating and thanking each other, but the words are lost to posterity. Together they all escaped into waiting cars and were driven to London.

There the continuing tumultuous interest initially stunned Amelia. In her wildest imaginings nothing came close to the appalling furor the trip had created; she could find no place to hide. Even with Hilton Railey running interference, the first twenty-four hours in London were rocky
indeed. For a fleeting moment she was overwhelmed, bursting out, “I am caught in a situation where very little of me is free. I am being moved instead of moving.... It really makes me a little resentful that the mere fact that I am a woman apparently overshadows the tremendous feat of flying Bill Stultz has just accomplished. But having undertaken to go through with this trip I have to go through with it.” Reporters even managed to gain entrance to her room at the Hyde Park Hotel that first morning, catching her, as they carefully noted, wearing a too-large borrowed silk frock as she plowed through the mountains of telegrams and cablegrams. Escape became imperative. At this juncture Amy Guest again stepped into the breach, offering Amelia forthwith the hospitality and privacy of her home, and so Amelia moved into her house in Mayfair.

Part of Amelia's outburst of course was due to exhaustion. As the world marveled at the sheer nerve of the exploit, without ever learning about the crucial role Amelia had played in getting the plane off the ground in Trepassey, it also conferred fame upon her without appreciating the amazing grit, the unusual tenacity that enabled her to write about it. All anyone knew was that they couldn't get enough of her. What was helping to fuel the excitement was Amelia's personal achievement: she had scooped the world press. Even though fighting exhaustion, Amelia didn't collapse in the plane in the three hours she had waited for Hilton in Burry Port. She had a ten-thousand-dollar contract with
The New York Times and The London Times
for her story, and showing remarkable composure, clear-sightedness, and detachment, she had written the first installment of the story of the flight while she waited—an incredible achievement for someone who had barely slept in over twenty-four hours. So that by the time they arrived in London, the newspapers were full not just of the facts of the achievement and the profiles of the participants—her story under her own byline was running simultaneously in
The London Times
and
The New York Times.

She had truly hit the ground running. “I have arrived and I am happy—naturally. Why did I do it?” was how Amelia opened her first article. Then she went into details of the trip, and plainly and carefully stated the obvious before everyone forgot: that she had been merely a passenger and that the men deserved the credit. And each day for the next several days, no matter how full her schedule, Amelia wrote a sequel. The second article started with a wonderful hook. “Some day women will fly the Atlantic and think little of it because it is an ordinary thing to do”—in its day a totally mind-boggling notion. The articles were all anyone could hope for—readable, accurate, and informative.