Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (43 page)

It was admirable to have set off, but could this young fella
possibly
make it all the way to Paris, when so many others had failed? Lloyd’s of London, which had initially posted odds of 10 to 1 against any team winning the Orteig Prize that year, thought it so unlikely that Lindbergh would do it—and so dangerous that he even try—it refused to offer odds for him at all.

It was a mark of Lindbergh’s
in
experience that by the time he had flown across Long Island Sound to the mouth of the Connecticut River, just over 35 miles of the Atlantic beneath him, this was the longest stretch of water he had ever flown over. He was pursuing the Great Circle route he had minutely planned out, which turned on the fact that the shortest way between two points on the planet, just as a piece of string goes around a globe of the world, proceeds in what appears to be a curve on a flat map. This required him changing compass direction every hour, which was exacting but necessary. Thus, after Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts fell away behind him, he set off for the lovely green mass of Nova Scotia and the white tips of Newfoundland before embarking on the truly big leap, 2300 miles to hopefully the southern tip of Ireland, then England, then France.

Just before night fell he came around a granite peak and down to buzz low across the harbour township of St John’s, Newfoundland—and let the world know he was still going. The citizens of that tiny town stared skywards, open-mouthed at this vision. Onwards Lindbergh flew and shortly thereafter was stunned to see icebergs. Around them stretched a green, rough,
cold
-looking sea that somehow seemed both intimidating and hungry. And then the long night descended. If all went well, it would be many hours before he would again see the light. If it went badly, eternal blackness would be his lot.

As he flew, he had no idea, of course, of the reaction of the world as it followed his path. That night in Manhattan, at the Hotel Commodore, 1200 powerful industrialists were gathered for a black-tie dinner. Before proceedings began, one of them stood up and offered an impromptu benediction: ‘I am proud to live under that flag,’ he said, pointing to a small star-spangled banner on the table. ‘I am thinking of a young American boy who left this morning for Paris with a sandwich in his pocket. May God deliver him there safely.’
²²
These words were cheered to the echo.

Across America, people huddled around their radios waiting for news, or prayed for his safety, even as print journalists churned out millions of words in paeans of praise. One of them was Will Rogers, the syndicated columnist, most renowned for his humour. But on this occasion he began his column: ‘No attempt at jokes today. A slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of Supreme Being that has a following. If he is lost, it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.’
²³

Charles Lindbergh was lost. Or at least he momentarily thought he was, as he glanced at his compass and seemed to be 30 degrees off course. Then he remembered. A particularity of many places in high Arctic latitudes is that ‘magnetic variation’—the difference between ‘true north’ and the direction in which the compass needle indicates is north—can vary from nil to 90 degrees, as the compass needle aligns itself with the Earth’s lines of magnetic force and other influences such as large iron ore deposits. The magnetic variation at St John’s, Newfoundland, was at that time 20 degrees west, but could change by as much as one degree per six-tenths of a mile, meaning the American pilot had to be extremely vigilant in consulting his charts and changing his heading to keep properly on his Great Circle route.

Another challenge was making allowance constantly for the strength and the direction of the wind that was hitting him. It was for this reason he generally kept to a low altitude so he could see the waves beneath and judge from the way the foam blew off the top of them that strength and direction.

Here and there he was spotted. Five hundred miles west of Ireland, the steamer
Hilversum
saw the
Spirit of St Louis
, and promptly reported its position. So too, the steam collier
Nogi
spotted him and gave a fresh position. He was still out there. Still going! Stock exchanges in Amsterdam and Berlin gave updates together with changing stock prices. In Tokyo the latest news on Lindbergh was posted on bulletin boards situated in the main street.

Far over the Atlantic, the
Spirit of St Louis
never missed a beat and kept arrowing eastwards. With generally good weather and only one or two squalls here and there, Lindbergh’s greatest enemy was sleepiness. Forty hours without sleep. Forty-two…forty-four…it would be so easy, so wonderfully easy…just to close his eyes and let go…let go…and
NO!
With a start he would come to, put his head out the window into the icy slipstream and for as long as two minutes at a time, he wouldn’t feel sleepy anymore. And then it would return…the drowsiness…the heavy lids…the mild hallucinations of phantoms filling the cockpit with him. Time and again, he had to slap himself hard to return to full consciousness, to try and banish the demons from his mind.

‘Alone?’ an editorial of the New York
Sun
asked on his second day of flight. ‘Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave, when Adventure leads the way, and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company for him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise?

‘True, the fragile bodies of his fellows do not weigh down his plane; true, the fretful minds of weaker men are lacking from his crowded cabin; but as his airship keeps her course he holds communion with those rarer spirits that inspire to intrepidity and by their sustaining potency give strength to arm, resource to mind, content to soul.

‘Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?’
²⁴

All talk of the ‘Flying Fool’ had long ago vanished, and Lindbergh was now nothing less than the ‘Lone Eagle’.

Perhaps nowhere in Australia was news of Lindbergh’s progress followed so ravenously as in the offices of Interstate Flying Services. For Lindbergh was doing to the Atlantic Ocean what Smithy and Keith Anderson had long dreamed of doing to the Pacific Ocean. Conquering it. And to Kingsford Smith’s delight, Charles Ulm shared much the same dream!

At this time Ulm, who had not long before divorced his wife, Isabel, was boarding with a woman by the name of Mary Josephine Callaghan at her home in Lavender Bay, and often after work Smithy would drop him there on his way home to Kuranda, sometimes popping in for a drink. Since Ulm had joined their aviation company, things were looking up a little, even though they hadn’t, in fact, beaten Major Brearley for the Adelaide–Perth mail tender. This upturn was in part courtesy of their new partner having organised a week of taking joyriders aloft during festivities for the opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra, during the first week of May. And so, of course, as the beer flowed free, Lindbergh’s attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean prompted Kingsford Smith to share with Ulm his own ambitions. Ulm confessed he would love to do the same thing—not least because completing such a challenge would automatically put their aviation business into the big time.

What they needed, they decided, was to do some ‘Big Feat’ which should bring them what they wanted: fame, money, status. Something like…flying around Australia in a record time! This was the very plan that Smithy had tried to push with West Australian Airways, to no avail, four years earlier, but now there was no boss to stop him. If they could pull it off, it would give them the credibility they craved, and the experience at long-distance flying they needed to make an attempt at crossing the Pacific.

At the time, the record for the round-Australia journey was held by E.J.Jones of the Department of Civil Aviation, who, back in August 1924, had—together with Lieutenant Colonel Brinsmead as his passenger—flown the 7500 miles in twenty-two days and two hours. This had neatly halved the previous record of forty-four days, which had been set a few months before.

Now, Smithy and Ulm reckoned it was time to halve it again. They began to make plans, even while Lindbergh was still in the air and had just emerged from his first dark night.

An island?
Land?
No, fog. Fogginess of mind, fog over the sea—the thing is that it faded as he approached. And then so did another island. And many more. And then one of the islands didn’t fade. It really was
land.
‘It is like rain after a drought,’ he wrote, ‘spring after a northern winter. This is earth again, the earth where I’ve lived and now will live once more…I’ve been to eternity and back. I know how the dead would feel to live again.’
²⁵

Checking on his maps, he worked out—as the people below ran out of their houses and waved joyously up at him,
it was Lindbergh and he was alive!
—that after crossing an entire ocean in twenty-six hours of flight, he was less than 3 miles off course to the south, and above the Three Sisters near Dingle Bay on the south-western coast of Ireland, three small but easily identifiable peaks. Originally, Lindbergh had hoped to get within 50 miles of it.
²⁶
The American swooped down lower to get a closer look.

Now, this village was in an extremely isolated part of the world, a place where aeroplanes were little more than a rumour and an unlikely one at that, t’be sure, t’be sure. That very day, as a matter of fact, a young lad by the name of Hugh Curran was walking along a road near his house in the tiny hamlet of Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, thinking about a scary story his teacher had told him the day before at school. Apparently in ancient Gaelic times, a giant eagle would swoop down from out of the skies and pluck young kids who had behaved naughtily. And then it would take them away and
eat
them. It was at just that moment that Hugh heard a sound he had never heard before—a roar coming from above. He turned around and saw that very eagle swooping down from the sky,
screaming
, and coming straight for him! If only he had not been naughty!

Oh, young Hughie.

Screaming himself, Hughie ran as fast as his little legs could carry him and dived into a ditch filled with water, crying, hoping against hope that the eagle wouldn’t spot him. And amazingly, it worked! For within just a few seconds the giant bird of prey had flown on, and when a minute later he carefully lifted his head from the ditch, he saw only a disappearing speck in the distance.
²⁷

A few phone calls from the people of Dingle Bay, and the news flashed around the world—Lindbergh was still going! Now, Lloyd’s of London relented a little and offered odds, but still quoted his chances as 10 to 3
against
his getting there.
²⁸
In Paris, those sitting at Café de la Paix, on one of the corners of the Place de l’Opéra, were stunned to notice that the revolving electric sign at the top of the Selfridge building, which sat across the street, was reporting in letters 6 feet high that
l’Américain
Lindbergh, had been spotted off the Irish coast and was heading their way! The word began to spread…

Lindberrr! Il vient! Il vient!
(Lindbergh is coming!)

Up in the
Spirit of St Louis
, Lindbergh knew that the promised land, France, and its capital, Paris, were just six hours away and he felt a sudden surge of energy as his fatigue faded. Two hours after leaving the Irish coast, England appeared and almost as quickly disappeared beneath his wings.

Nigh on two decades earlier, Louis Blériot had tootled across the English Channel coming from France, at roughly 30 miles per hour. This time, going the other way, Lindbergh and the
Spirit of St Louis
streaked over at a little more than three times that speed, and he was soon soaring over a France falling dark. Even in the midst of his euphoria at having arrived above the land of his destination, he began to worry that he hadn’t had time to get a French visa, didn’t speak a word of the French language, and had no French money. Perhaps he could borrow some. He would have to find someone to help when he landed.

Soon enough, far ahead, the famed ‘City of Lights’, Paris itself appeared, looming larger with every minute, rising over the horizon in much the same way the sun came up, and shining almost as brightly. And there was the Eiffel Tower! Charles Lindbergh took the
Spirit of St Louis
around it a couple of times in celebration. And then it was time to land.

But where was Le Bourget aerodrome, which he had been told was just a few miles to the north-east of the Eiffel Tower? He could see a black spot about where Le Bourget should be, a black spot surrounded by swarming bright lights, but it didn’t look like an aerodrome, which always had perimeter lights evenly spaced. Still, he went closer for a look. And then he realised. Those lights were not the lights of a factory or some such as he had first thought, but headlights, the lights of
tens
of
thousands
of Parisians who now surrounded the aerodrome and were there to greet him. Rivers of lights leading to the airfield showed how many Parisians were eager to get there. Stunned, Lindbergh brought his majestic aeroplane down from the heavens, touched, bounced and then came back to mother earth solidly, rolling to a halt at exactly 10.24 pm—thirty-three hours, thirty minutes and thirty seconds since he had left New York.