Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (57 page)

‘Harry!’

Smithy, asserting his authority, told Lyon to get a grip and Ulm that he wanted the Americans to come on to Australia. And that was that. An uneasy peace descended, as both men bowed to Kingsford Smith’s wishes and Ulm agreed that a fresh contract would be drawn up.
⁵⁶

The following morning, Ulm organised that contract and then cabled reports of his adventures to his newspaper contacts in Australia. (And to judge by a newspaper report appearing the following day, Ulm had rather changed his view of Lyon. ‘If we were given all the navigators in the world for the next flight,’ he told the
New York Times
, ‘we would look for Lieutenant Lyon.’
⁵⁷
) Meanwhile, Smithy flew the
Southern Cross
, with only a small amount of fuel on board, out of the tiny Albert Park to a beach on Naselai Island in the Rewa River Delta, about 20 miles to the north-east, where he was joined by Ulm, Warner and Lyon in the afternoon.

This beach was essentially the Fijian equivalent of Barking Sands—a long, firm, flattish stretch that would allow the
Southern Cross
to gain sufficient speed to take off even when fully loaded. Alas, when the Fijian government steamer
Pioneer
attempted to land twenty-five drums holding some 900 gallons of petrol on that same beach, the sea proved too rough for the steamer to get close to the shore, and it was reluctantly decided to leave it to the many willing locals to individually wrestle and roll the drums ashore with their wooden canoes as the frothy waves burst around them.
⁵⁸

In the meantime, the aviators were offered the chance to spend a comfortable night sleeping on the steamer, just with one little…ah…rider: one of them should stay ashore with the plane, which was a rather less comfortable prospect.

‘My election to this post,’ Jim Warner later recorded drolly, ‘was practically unanimous. I won by the majority of something like seventy-five per cent.’
⁵⁹

That night, Warner was initiated into the Nakelo village and drank of the sacred yangonna ceremonial drink, also known as kava.
⁶⁰
They proved to be a very gracious people.

We are the people of the Nakelo village, who live on the island of Naselai. Our sacred ancestors came here 40,000 years ago. Our legends tell of magic and powerful things, but never anything as magic or as powerful as this
Wanga Vuk
, bird-ship, this thing that can even stay up in the night, suspended from the top part of the moon and putting a shadow on the rest.
⁶¹
As near as we can see, the man with the big smile, who is laughing all the time, is the chief who controls this bird-ship. His name is ‘Smizzy’ and he is a good man who comes in peace. All the white men seem to look to him. We like him. Our chief Ratu Avakuki, is very proud because this Smizzy has accepted a gift of a walking stick from him.
⁶²
And now it is for us to farewell him and his men, as they depart in their bird-ship across the seas…

Finally, on mid-afternoon of Friday, 8 June 1928, at a time when the tide was low and their beach airstrip was near its widest, all was in readiness, with the only quibble being that as a long-time mariner, Harry Lyon was of the view that leaving on a Friday was bad luck.
⁶³
He was ignored. Before the flyers left, however, a ceremony of farewell took place. With the crew making ready to get into the
Southern Cross
, the crowd suddenly made way.

Coming through the grouped natives appeared a vision of loveliness—four comely and bare-breasted young Fijian women, with hibiscus and frangipani flowers in their hair, each bearing a wooden bowl of the local drink of yangonna, which—despite the fact that it looked like brownish, muddy water—the flyers were invited to drink. As was explained to them by chief Ratu Avakuki, this was part of a ceremony dating back centuries, and was designed to ensure their safe passage to their destination. It was only given to visiting chiefs. (What he didn’t explain was that as part of the process of preparing this drink from the root of the yangonna plant, those same young maidens would have chewed upon pieces of it, then removed them from their mouths and placed them a ceremonial bowl, before water was added.)

Deeply moved by the offering, the four Western men drank the yangonna—it made their tongues and lips feel numb—and then, through an interpreter, Kingsford Smith thanked the locals for their kindness and assured them they would never forget them.
⁶⁴

‘Thanks for your hospitality and enthusiastic welcome,’ Kingsford Smith called out to them, even after boarding the plane and preparing to depart. After the engines were started, making a thunderous noise the gathered locals had never heard before—like three storms all at once—they could see ‘Smizzy’ listen intently before he nodded his head to the other one sitting beside him.
⁶⁵
All was good.

And then, this time with plasticine stuffed into their ears to try to deaden the noise,
⁶⁶
they were off! The
Southern Cross
lifted off Naselai Beach on the button of 2.52 pm, leaving behind the magical green isles of athletic and friendly men, stunning women, palm trees, endless beautiful beaches and timeless hospitality. On that beach, the locals stayed staring, unspeaking, until the last speck of the plane disappeared in the distance.
⁶⁷

Next stop—the Australian mainland!

Though this was undoubtedly the least challenging part of their journey in terms of navigation—as instead of seeking out a dot in the ocean as previously, this time they
were
the dot in the ocean, heading to a massive target that they simply couldn’t miss so long as they kept heading broadly west—there remained a huge distance to travel in a plane that had already received a fair old workout in the previous five days. By Lyon’s calculations, Brisbane was on a bearing of south-west by west 236.25 degrees, 1756 miles away, but after what they had already been through, this seemed only about half as daunting as the Honolulu to Suva trip had been. As Smithy wrote in a note to his co-pilot Ulm, ‘It is really remarkable how one’s air mind expands. A few years ago a seventeen hundred mile flight over water was enormous. Now it is the shortest of our three hops.’
⁶⁸
Practically nothing!

Little did they know, however, just what kind of a workout remained…

For even as they started out from Fiji, the Pacific was conspiring to have one last shot at bringing the
Southern Cross
to heel. On the path ahead of them, the sun had been belting down all day on the ocean, causing a lot of hot moisture to rise into the air. As that vapour rose into the higher realms, and began to condense, the heat from that moisture was released, causing a hot updraft and a heavy in-rush of cooler air below, as a low-pressure cell was formed. The winds rushing over the hot ocean surface now increased the rate of evaporation, causing a greater hot updraft, a lower air pressure, and even greater winds, which then released more heat…and so on. A vicious cycle was created, and was soon not far off from turning into a full-blown cyclone.

Gloriously unaware, the
Southern Cross
flew on towards Brisbane. Not that everything was going perfectly, for all that. Just a couple of hours after they took off, a note came forward from Lyon: E.I.C. out of action.

Bastard
of a thing! And the worst of it, they realised, was that they had no-one to blame but themselves. While in Suva, they had received a long cable from the makers of the compass giving precise instructions on how their earth inductor compass should be serviced but…well…what with the speeches and their fatigue…and accepting the hospitality of the locals…they had clean forgotten about the whole thing. It was the only mistake they felt they had made on the trip so far, which was galling, but it was far better that it had happened at this stage rather than earlier on. For the moment, all they could do was to rely on their regular steering compass, though Lyon, for one, had little confidence that it would steer true given the inherent inconsistencies of using a magnetic compass for accurate headings for long distances over featureless water at night in turbulent air. Still, they could only keep going and hope that either Lyon could fix the compass, or their other methods of navigation would suffice.

As darkness fell, Kingsford Smith and Ulm managed, in the cramped cockpit, to get changed into their fur-lined flying suits as it started to get a bit nippy in the open-sided cockpit, before taking the
Southern Cross
up to above 4000 feet, which got them above the low-lying cloud and up into the starlit heavens.

At least for a while it did…for after only a short time at that height the stars began to disappear and the temperature to drop radically. The plane began to be buffeted from side to side and up and down as gust after gust of dirty wind hit them. Dead ahead, flashes of lightning whiplashed across the sky and illuminated what, to Kingsford Smith, looked perilously close to being the thunderclouds of doom. Those big clouds looked, in the vernacular of the times, ‘blacker than a crow’s arsehole’, and gave off a menace the likes of which Kingsford Smith had rarely seen before…and he had seen a few storms in his day. In no time at all, the plane was into the storm, being smashed by the screaming angry wind as sheets of rain pounded their rickety craft.

For Kingsford Smith the only way out was
up
, and the plane began to climb again the best it could. He was hoping, as ever, to break through to above the storm where the stars would once again twinkle merrily. This time, however, it was not to be, and all that was achieved was to make them all numb with cold. Certainly, the storm they were going through had a top, but it was a top that the
Southern Cross
was incapable of climbing above, meaning that the only way was to go through. ‘It was far worse than flying through the ordinary darkness of the night,’ he later recalled. ‘We were tearing through a black chaos of rain and cloud at 85 knots, and our very speed increased the latent fury of the storm until it became an active and violent enemy which seemed to rush on us in an endeavour utterly to devour us. This was a tropical deluge such as we had never experienced in our lives.’
⁶⁹

Despite the viciousness of the storm, however, and the pressing, crushing blackness, the saving grace was that the mighty Whirlwind engines never missed a beat, and the craft stayed intact! ‘Those three engines tore through calm and storm, through rushing walls of tropic storm, through tumbled clouds piled like mountain peaks, through a howling head-wind and through a hushed night sown with stars.’
⁷⁰

Those engines alone, however, would not have been enough to keep the plane aloft…In the cockpit, concentrating with an intensity that was almost otherworldly, Kingsford Smith was fighting and riding the storm the way he used to see jackaroos in the Northern Territory and Western Australia fight and ride wild bucking horses in an effort to tame them. While in the back of the
Southern Cross
both Lyon and Warner had abandoned all attempts to navigate and work the radio and simply tried to ride it out for the duration, and Ulm was so cold he could make only occasional entries in his logbook, every fibre of Smithy’s being was concentrated on his instruments.

For Smithy was doing what was called in the trade ‘blind flying’. In the middle of the turbulent blackness, the only thing he could see by peering out was the endless lashing rain cascading towards them, and the reflected light from their cockpit being flashed back to them from the whirring propellers. There was no horizon visible to give him any capacity to make the slight correcting movements to maintain stability, just as one does when riding a bike. Without that visible horizon, it was impossible to get any reckoning from their senses alone as to whether they were horizontal, descending, ascending, tilting, pitching or rolling—the only thing Kingsford Smith could do was to rely on reading his instruments. Without those instruments it would have been the rough equivalent of riding a bike blindfolded along a narrow plank.
⁷¹

‘Until a man can fly in a black void for hours,’ Kingsford Smith would later write, ‘seeing those instruments and nothing else, he is not a safe pilot to fly a plane over long stretches of water. A pilot flying blind must have immense faith in his instruments. He must train himself to realise that if the barometer of his senses disagrees with his instruments, then they are right and his senses are wrong…’
⁷²
And elsewhere: ‘Blind flying comes to this—that of the five senses, only one is of any use and that is the ability to see the instruments on the board.’
⁷³

Broadly speaking, his bank-and-turn indicator told a pilot if he was turning, the rate-of-climb meter indicated whether he was climbing or falling, the earth-inductor compass told him his course and the air speed indicator told him exactly that. In the cabin behind the pilots, with no such array of instruments, no seat belts or secure seats, Lyon and Warner were never certain at any moment if they were flying or falling, and all they could do was give silent thanks for Kingsford Smith’s ability to keep them aloft, for even this long.
⁷⁴
Neither man had any doubt that if anyone could get them through, then Smithy could.