AE on Norwich Island, Part 3

Amelia Earhart on Norwich Island

Part 3

July 2^nd, 1937, ca. 4 pm local time

She woke with a start out of a vivid dream. Paul, dear Paul, in the Burbank hangar, lecturing her about radio navigation. Yes, yes, of course she needed to understand, but…

Where was she? Oh yes. Shook her head.

“Oh my…”

It was growing dark.  Fred was sitting up, looking stonily out at the ocean.  She followed his gaze. The Electra was still there, the kite was still flying. OK.

But what was in her pants, tickling her legs?  She jumped up, swatted the legs of her slacks.  Three or four tiny crabs fell out, hardly bigger than grasshoppers, each sporting a miniscule seashell on its back.  Heavens!  There were dozens of them crawling around her, and five or six bigger ones, one as big as her hand.  Hermit crabs, with bright red legs and pincers, wearing mollusk shells of different kinds.

“Quite a welcoming committee, eh?”  Fred spoke without looking at her.  Always the gentleman.  She pulled down the zippers on her slacks, groped around and found a couple more crabs.  Threw them as far as she could and zipped both legs back up.

“OK, that’s all of them, I think.  Are you….”

“I’m OK… fine.  Just a bit dinged up on the head, and feel like the wrong end of a three-day drunk.”

She scrambled up.  “Need to look at your head.  You got a pretty bad bump.” 

“Well, it’s going to be hard to do in the dark.  We ought to get a fire going.”

“Yeah – a nice big one.  All we need is dry matches.”

“Luckily,” -- he bent over, dug in his pocket – “I am never without my commemorative Pan American Lighter.”

“Bless you.  You stay put; I’ll find some burnables.”  She kicked a couple of crabs down the rubbly slope.

There was part of an old lifeboat half-buried in the beach not far from where they had been lying. From the shipwreck; it retained the “Nor” in Norwich painted on it. They piled driftwood up around it, used her Javanese sheath knife to peel shavings off a stick, piled them up and got them alight with his lighter.  Added sticks until they got a small fire going, then built it up.  By the time the boat itself was burning, it was full dark.  Sparks from the fire whirled up into the blackness of the night and seemed to merge with the spreading blanket of stars.

 “Ouch!” he said, “Too close to the fire.”

“Hold still a minute longer.”  She turned his head, examined the wound.  The cut above his left eye wasn’t too deep, and it had bled clean, but there was going to be a huge bruise, and the whole area around it was swollen and tender.

“I guess you’ll do for now,” she said, letting him back away from the fire.  “How’s it feel?”

“Just generally sore, and kind of – I don’t know, delicate, I suppose.  Wouldn’t want to do any handstands.”

“Well, you don’t need to.  Think we have enough fire to last the night?”

“Maybe we should stand watches, make sure it keeps going.  We don’t want Itasca not to see us.”

“Good idea.  How long do you think they’ll be?”

“Well, it depends on how good a fix they got on our signals – do they know whether we’re north, south, east or west of Howland?  If they at least know we were on the LOP, they’ll be able to eliminate east and west, and it only makes sense that given the choice, we’d fly south.”

“How did we miss it?  Why couldn’t we see it?”

“Wish I knew – though it hardly matters now.  Maybe all the cloud shadows, or the morning sun on the water.  The bigger question is, why couldn’t we make radio contact?”

“Yeah. I only heard them a couple of times, and I couldn’t get a minimum.”

“Right. It’s nuts. We should’ve been able to. I just don’t know…..”

It’s really your fault, she thought, looking at him staring out to sea, his face red in the firelight.  You know that.  You’re the goddam navigator, and you navigated us wrong. 

No, no, that wasn’t fair; it was her fault too.  Why hadn’t she been able to hear Itasca until right at the end?  Had they understood her instructions about transmission times and frequencies?  Had she made things unnecessarily complicated, or misled them, or…..

“We shouldn’t have put so much faith in RDF,” Fred said, tossing a squirming crab into the fire. 

“What choice did we have?”

“Not much, but – I don’t know, I just should’ve known better.  It’s like – I never quite trust the bubble octant, always try to check with my old sextant.  Old ways are the safe ways.”

“You took sightings! You said we were 200 miles out! We dropped the smoke bombs! We had good dead reckoning!”

“Yeah, but I maybe the octant was off. Maybe the sextant, too. Maybe the wind was stronger than we thought during the night, pushed us south. So we were advancing the LOP from…” He started to gesticulate to illustrate what he meant, stopped and grabbed his head, groaned. She gripped his shoulder, held on. 

“Don’t blame yourself.  There’s plenty to go around.  And don’t worry; I’ll bet Itasca will be right out there in the morning.  I’ll wade out in awhile and see if I can raise them.  Should bring down the kite for the night, anyway”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.  No point in – in crying over spilt milk.”

“Look to the future.”

“Right.  Itasca will come, and then, well….”

“Then we’ll get the ship off this reef and carry on!”

She wiggled into a more comfortable sitting position in the gravely beach, looked out at the reef, the Electra, the surf, the in-rolling swells, their backs silvered by the rising moon. When, oh when, would Itasca appear? Pulled off her shoes and socks to air her wet, wrinkled feet.

“Now I wish I’d kept a dime novel to read – something to pass the time.”

“Um-hmm. Waiting makes time slow down. Theory of Relativity.”

“I don’t think that’s quite it.”

“Well, it’s relatively accurate.”

“You’re feeling better.”

“A bit. I think. A night’s sleep will probably fix me up.”

Unready to sleep, she poked through the rubberized bag, looking for something with which to pass the time. Looked at her Swiss shoes and put them back in the bag. Better to save them, let her heavy oxfords contend with the coral. Pulled out her curling iron, its electric cord dangling. Noticed Fred looking at her and waved it at him.

“If there were current bushes around here, I could fix my hair.”

“Wrong voltage, I think; it’d probably blow every fuse on the island. I’ve never seen you use that thing.”

Oh well. Another cat out of the bag. She grinned sideways at him.

“What a revolting development! I’ve used it every few nights, actually, when we’ve been in hotels; I have little transformers to take care of the different voltages and plug configurations.”

“Clever. But do you really need it?”

She sighed. “Yes, sadly, my hair’s naturally pretty straight. I… well, I’d curled it just before the Friendship flight, and – well, curly hair kind of became my signature. Now people would be shocked if I showed up with it straight.”

“So you need to use it before Itasca gets here?”

“I don’t think so.” She peered up at her forelock; it looked pretty curly. “Provided they don’t waste any time. And if need be, I suppose I can heat the iron in the fire, as it were.”

Fred stirred the fire with a stick, threw it in. Sparks spiraled into the growing dark.

“It’s really important to you, isn’t it?”

“Important..?”

“To always look nice.”

She grimaced. How many times had she explained this? To other women, to G.P., to Gene, to herself?

“Men… No offence meant, Fred, but it’s a hard enough struggle getting men to accept the idea that women can fly airplanes, without trying to sell the idea that it’s OK not to look pretty and feminine.”

“Yeah, I can understand…”

“No, actually, I don’t think you can. It’s jake for a man to be rugged and rough; that’s how everyone – both sexes – expect men to be. But not women. Both sexes think women should look delicate and soft.”

“Well…”

“Even I want that. I insist on it! We don’t have to give up being feminine in order to fly, or drive, or do anything else that men do.”

“Umm. How about fighting wars?”

“I think… I think we fight too many wars – we’re too ready to go to war – but if we have to fight another one, then yes, I think women should have the same opportunities and responsibilities as men.”

“Hmm.” He lay back and looked up at the stars. “That’d make life different in the trenches. And in the Navy.”

She lay back too, watching the sky, dusted with stars. Millions, uncountable. The Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. So bright here in mid-ocean, a thousand miles or more from the nearest source of earthly light. Sat up again – there was work to be done before sleep.

“It’d be a challenge, but I think we could overcome it. Get some sleep, Fred. I’m wide awake so I’ll take the first watch.”

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

Notes

“Paul, dear Paul, in the Burbank hangar, lecturing her about radio navigation.” Paul Mantz was one of AE’s most devoted advisors, sufficiently close to her that his wife named her in her divorce suit (though there is no evidence of an affair; see Sound of Wings pp. 222-3). He said he tried hard to prevail upon AE to prepare herself better for the flight, particularly the Lae-Howland leg, but she deliberately and duplicitously evaded him. See Sound of Wings pp. 254-5.

“Hermit crabs” Strawberry Hermit Crabs (Coenobita perlatus) inhabit Nikumaroro in tremendous numbers, and try to eat anything that is not moving much.  Coconut or Robber Crabs (Birgus latro) also go through hermit phases, and behave similarly. My TIGHAR colleagues and I have had multiple experiences with both species. See http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Expeditions/NikuV/gallery/Taphonomy/gallerytaph.html .

“She pulled down the zippers on her slacks.” In photos taken during the World Flight, AE is pictured wearing slacks with zippers on both thighs.  Zippers were fairly new in women’s clothing and even newer in men’s, but AE designed and wore zippered outfits, and the contemporary work of prominent women’s wear designer Elsa Schiaparelli featured prominent use of zippers.  See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-hall/amelia-earharts-fashion-l_b_341283.html and  http://fashiondesigners.about.com/od/Couture-Fashion/a/Elsa-Schiaparelli.htm

“I am never without my commemorative Pan American Lighter.” This is speculation on my part.

“…used her Javanese sheath knife…” In Batavia (now Jakarta), AE bought “a sheath knife – a lovely hand-wrought thing bought at a metal worker’s little shop.  ….. I plotted to wear this Javanese purchase at my belt over the Pacific and then offer it to my favorite Geographer” (J. O. LaGorce of the National Geographic Society). See Last Flight p. 125.

“If they at least know we were on the LOP…” LOP means Line of Position; the line, perpendicular to the airplane’s course, that Noonan plotted at the time of his last navigational sighting, probably shortly after sunrise, and then advanced by dead reckoning until he calculated that they should have been over Howland Island. If they did not see the island they would fly up and down the LOP until they did. The LOP would have been oriented toward 337 degrees to the north and 157 degrees to the south. One of AE’s last generally accepted pre-loss radio messages reported that they were flying on these bearings (See Finding Amelia: Chapter 10).

“I couldn’t get a minimum.” AE had been using a rotating loop antenna to establish the direction from which Itasca’s signal – during the perhaps brief period(s) when she received it – was coming. Such an antenna received the strongest signal on its edge, the weakest (minimum) signal when facing the transmitter. One rotated the antenna until the incoming signal was minimized, and then knew that the antenna was facing the transmitter. At 8:03 am local time, Itasca heard AE say “received your signal but unable to get minimum.” See Finding Amelia p. 150. There has been intense debate about just what caused this problem and what AE should have done about it. See https://tighar.org/wiki/Failure_to_communicate for discussion, and http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Forum/FAQs/navigation.html for pertinent navigation basics.

“I never quite trust the bubble octant, always check with my old sextant.” The state-of-the-art bubble octant was Noonan’s major tool for establishing his position (See Sound of Wings pp. 241-2), but he reportedly carried a nautical sextant as “a preventer,” which I take to mean that he didn’t quite trust the octant. See http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/52_NumbersGame/52_NumbersGame.html for discussion.

“We dropped the smoke bombs!” Aviators crossing oceans in the 1930s dropped smoke bombs and observed the movement of their plumes to help judge wind direction and speed, and hence the airplane’s drift off its plotted course. This was a critical part of dead reckoning navigation.

“Pulled out her curling iron.” AE’s hair was not naturally very curly; she cultivated her tousle-headed look See East to the Dawn: 97-8 and http://patch.com/michigan/grossepointe/amelia-earharts-closely-guarded-secret

“To G.P., to Gene,” “GP” was AE’s routine way of referring to her husband, George Palmer Putnam. “Gene” was Eugene Vidal, father of future novelist Gore Vidal and head of the Bureau of Air Commerce in the Roosevelt administration; a close friend of AE’s and reputed to have been her lover. See East to the Dawn pp. 278, 288, 294-5; Sound of Wings p. 262.