AE on Norwich Island Part 11

Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island

Part 11

July 10^th, 1937

She awoke with a spotlight in her eyes.  Scrambled into a sitting position, arm shading her eyes.

They were here!  A ship, right offshore, had a spotlight trained on her, and a boat was grounding on the beach, just below the gravelly slope! 

“Oh, thank god!” 

She struggled to get up, found herself too weak, fell back again, let the relief wash over her.

“Oh, thank god, thank god, thank god….” 

But she didn’t believe much in God.

“Maybe I do, now….”

Footsteps on the scree, the coral rubble shifting and scratching.  She looked up into the face looking down at her, full of concern.

“Sam?”

He nodded, smiling, and then another face came into view next to his, then another and another, and more. 

She gaped at them.  GP?  Gene? Jackie? Mommie?  Muriel?  Little David and Amy?  Her mind grappled with what she was seeing, seemed to slide sidewise.  Fred’s face drifted into view, his eyeball hanging….

She woke with the morning sun, reflected off the water, burning her eyes.  In her hammock. No spotlight.  No boat.  No ship.  No rescue party.

She retched.

Perhaps an hour later, she swung out of the hammock, careful not to put her foot in what she had thrown up.  Half-digested booby, and other stuff that might be more-digested booby.  Her mind began to clear.  It cleared faster when a crab pinched her toe.

“Ouch!” 

She jumped up, took in the scene.  A dozen or more hermit crabs were crowded around, eating her puke.  The sun was hot on the top of her head.  Where was Fred’s helmet?  She found it, stuffed it down over her unruly, unwashed hair. Without its curl, would people even recognize her in the news photos?

She shook her head; she could try the curler again once she got a fire going. But first…

She stepped out of the trees and scanned the horizon.  Empty. 

Forced back tears.  Be logical, think it through.

“The ship couldn’t have been more than a hundred miles or so away – probably closer.  Suppose it makes fifteen knots….”

Yes, it should certainly be here by now.  Unless there had been a weather problem.

“But it’s clear as a bell.  The weather’s fine.”

But she wasn’t really sure of the Corsairs’ range.  Maybe the ship was farther away.  Maybe there were other islands in the area that the planes’ crews had to look at before returning to the ship. 

“Maybe they’ve had fuel problems, or……”

Right.  Or they’d been attacked by giant squids, or great white whales.

“They’re not coming.” 

They’d zoomed around over her camp, surely seen it, but for some reason dismissed it, flown away to search someplace else.

“But even if that’s true, they’ll still probably come back.  Maybe this was just a first check, a recon.  The best thing to do is sit tight.”

As if there were any choice.

“Look on the bright side.”

She began to gather firewood. 

“You know they’re searching, and you know they’re close.  It’s only a matter of time.”

Her stomach convulsed again, but she didn’t throw up.  Probably nothing left. Dropped the wood; staggered over to the zippered bag and rummaged through it.  Alka-Zane, good old Alka-Zane.  She chewed a couple of tablets, not wanting to use the water needed to dissolve them and feeling too weak to go to the trouble anyway.  Went back to her hammock; the crabs had almost finished. 

“Good for something.”

She lay back, rested, and…

…snapped back awake to find the sun dropping low in the west.  Her stomach felt stable, if tender, and she was actually hungry.

She had to go quite a way to collect enough wood for a decent fire.  She was going to have to move her camp.  Stomach growling, she dispatched another booby.  It was sitting on an egg.  She looked at the egg awhile, then left it alone.  Another booby – the dead one’s mate? – came fluttering down and stumbled around the egg, squawking at her.

Back at camp, she got the fire started, set up the still, butchered the booby and spitted it to cook. Heated up the curler and worked on her hair, without much enthusiasm. Used a piece of driftwood to scrape out words in the smaller rubble near the base of the scree-slope, six or seven feet high. 

HELP AE

All on autopilot, every few minutes scanning the empty horizon.

 July 11^th, 1937

She woke slowly, groggily.  It had been an upsetting night, sleep punctuated by the sound of crab clatter and troubled by questions.  What kinds of ships carried Corsairs as floatplanes?  Battleships, certainly, but anything else?  How fast did such ships travel?  Where might they have come from?  Were they looking for her, or on some other mission?  Had the world forgotten her, given her up for lost?  How much fuel did they have?  How long could they search, if they were searching?  Where else might they be searching?

The tide was low.  The broken-off, inverted landing gear stood upright on the reef edge, like a squat, big-headed sentinel illuminated by the sunlight flowing in over the island.

“Didn’t they see that?” 

No, probably not.  It wasn’t very big, and when the Corsairs flew over, the tide had been high; it wouldn’t have been much exposed, and obscured by the crashing surf. 

“But – my sign……”

They should have seen her “Other end” sign, and Fred’s shirt waving.  If they weren’t too high. And the remains of her fires, and even maybe her camp, back under the trees. 

But would they have recognized all that as something current, something recently lived in?  From their altitude, in the time they had to look?

“Surely…. Benefit of the doubt.”

Innocent until proven guilty; surely they’d assume it was her camp until they proved that it wasn’t.  But…

“All that circling and diving…..” 

Had they been trying to attract her attention, if she was there, and when they didn’t, concluded that she wasn’t?

“They couldn’t be so careless!  Stupid!” 

But maybe they could have been.

She squirmed, feeling a cramp. A period was coming on, damn it. But at least it meant she wasn’t pregnant.

“That’s a plus.”

Ignoring the cramps, she went through her morning chores – firewood collection, still operation, washing up – forever glancing out at the open sea and at the mocking landing gear. 

“Just get on with it, Electra – since you’re gone, be gone!  Get out of my sight!”

By noon, it was steaming hot.  She wandered the reef, aimless, in the shadow of the Norwich’s bow.  Wearing Fred’s helmet to keep her head from burning.

“Heavens, they’ll think I’m Amy Johnson!”

In the shadows, in a tide pool, she found a big clam, the size of both her hands.  Ought to make a good meal, but how to open it?  Found another pointed bar, pried and pried and finally got it loose from the coral.  The work was good; focusing on it blocked out everything else.  Carried the big mollusk back to her camp.  Built up the fire again.  Cleaned off her baking sheet griddle to grill the clam meat on.

“Now, how am I going to open you?” 

College days, Boston days, digging clams at Marblehead.  Sam, oh Sam, if only…..

“Right, clams.  Open by inserting knife in hinge.’”

She drew her Javanese knife, tried to insert it.  No luck; much too tight.

“Well, you’re not an Atlantic clam.  Pacific clam.  Speak a different clamguage.  All clammed up.”

Clamnation.  clamglomerate.  clambuscade….

“If I had the hand axe…”

But they had left the hand axe in Lae; unnecessary weight.

Not far away, sticking out of the scree – the top of a steel barrel, rusting to pieces.  Something about the way it came apart – why did it do that?  Broke into short segments, like elongated triangles, one sharpish end, the other blunt, 3 or 4 inches long.  She rose – god, she was tired and crampy – and picked up one of the fragments.

Clam up on edge, the lips of its shells pushed into the coral rubble.  Apply sharp end of wedge to the hinge next to the orifice.  Take a rock and hammer on the blunt end.  Wham, wham!   There!  She had broken through!  She pried with the piece of barrel rim, then with a longer piece of metal, and finally, yes!  The clam slowly came open!

Almost giddy with triumph – but how silly was that? – pulled the valves apart and cut out the meat with the knife.  There was quite a bit!  Laid the steel plate on the fire and tossed the clam meat on it, let it sizzle.  Used the steel straps like tongs to pull it off, and bit into it.  Smooth, sensuous, succulent.  Suddenly realized how hungry she was, wolfed the clam down and burped.  Grinned despite herself, giggled a bit self-consciously.  Looked around in case the Itasca’s crew or a Corsair pilot had sneaked up on her.

“Not at all ladylike.”

Drank the clam juice, tossed the empty shells down the slope, watched as crabs descended on them.

“I ate it all, you beasts.  I hope you starve.”

She had to move camp again, to a place with more firewood.  Moving would get her away from that big-headed monster on the reef, too.  Picking up her bamboo walking stick and donning Fred’s helmet, she poked her way south along the wall of low vegetation at the fringe of the beach.  Here was a gap in the shrubbery, into which a lot of driftwood had been driven.  It was almost in line with the Norwich; the big ship’s looming black bow dominating the view out from the gap.

Scrambled over the driftwood – a lot of firewood here, though much of it too heavy to move – and aha!  There was another coffee cup, tossed up amid the flotsam.  She dusted the sand off it and set it up on a log to retrieve later.

Behind the driftwood barricade she entered a sort of linear clearing, its long axis parallel to the shore.  The land rose gently to the northeast, became grassy, and terminated in a vine-covered stone wall.

“Stone wall?”

She walked up to it, parted the vines with her stick.  Yes, a wall, built of dry-laid coral slabs.  Perhaps three feet high; she looked over its top. It was the face of a platform, extending off into the vegetation.

“Like in Hawai’i, except those are basalt.  Called….Heiau?” 

Yes, that was it, heiau – temple platforms, that used to have thatched buildings and exotic, snarling tiki gods on them, carved like totem poles but much nastier looking.  Used by the ancient Hawaiians…..

“Human sacrifices…….”

Had the local people had such rituals?

“Well, at least it shows that there’ve been local people.”

The island must be capable of supporting a population.

“If you can dig wells, probably.”

And surely they would build their temples near where they could find water, and maybe their wells would still be usable. 

She spent the afternoon – a hot, scratchy, crampy afternoon – grubbing around the platform in the brush, but found no well, no water.  The platform itself was more or less rectangular with a couple of wing-walls, all built of natural coral slabs.  From its top she had a good view out through the brush to the beach around the Norwich.  Looking around, she could imagine thatched buildings, tiki poles, a fireplace, and perhaps this big stone was an altar.  A bare-breasted maiden stretched over it, awaiting the knife.  What if she were the maiden?  Shuddered.

“Bushwa, Amelia; you’re wasting time.” 

She found her way off the platform, back to the gap in the brush, returned to camp.  The sun was dropping behind that damned landing gear, and no ship was in sight.  She started dragging her supplies and clothes and tools down to what she had started to call Platform Camp.

---------------

Notes

“Sam, GP?  Gene? Jackie? Mommie?  Muriel?  Little David and Amy?” Sam Chapman, AE’s erstwhile fiancé; Gene Vidal; Jacqueline Cochrane; Amy Earhart; Muriel Earhart and her children David and Amy.

“Alka-Zane.” One of several stomach medicines manufactured in the 1930s and later by the Warner-Lambert Company. See http://tighar.org/Publications/TTracks/12_2/obj14.html for discussion of a probable Alka-Zane cap found on Nikumaroro.

“But at least she wasn’t pregnant.” According to photographer Albert Bresnik, AE told him in May of 1937 that she thought she might be pregnant. See Sound of Wings pp. 253-4.

“My god, they’ll think I’m Amy Johnson!” In 1930, British flyer Amy Johnson piloted her open-cockpit plane “Jason” from London to Darwin, Australia, arriving “burnt red from the sun” See Turbulent Life, p. 107.

“…digging clams at Marblehead.” Marblehead, Massachusetts was Sam Chapman’s home town, and AE visited there to swim and picnic on the beach when she was living in Boston. See East to the Dawn: 135.

 “…they had left the hand axe in Lae.” I do not know this to be the case, but it seems plausible.

“…short segments, like elongated triangles…” We have recovered two such items at the Seven Site, associated with clam shells apparently scarred by their use. See http://ameliaearhartarchaeology.blogspot.com/2012/09/artifacts-of-seven-site-clam-shuckers.html

“Called….Heiau?” See  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiau. Aerial photos taken by the New Zealand survey party in early 1939 appear to show something rather airplane-shaped in the Nikumaroro bush at this location (roughly 4^o39’38” S, 174^o32’34” W), but it is far too big to be the Electra or any other plausible airplane. If it was anything – and the area has been thoroughly searched by TIGHAR teams with negative results – I suspect that it was a complex of prehistoric platforms, subsequently taken apart by the Nikumaroro colonists to re-use the coral slabs of which it was built. Similar platforms have been recorded elsewhere in the Phoenix Islands; see Anne DiPiazza & Eric Pearthree, Sailing Routes of Old Polynesia: The Prehistoric Discovery, Settlement, and Abandonment of the Phoenix Islands. 2001, Honolulu, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Press.