AMELIA EARHART PART 2
CONTINUED FROM AMELIA EARHART PART 1
From Dakar, Senegal, the duo dogged their way east in a series of shorter hops, in a whirlwind of H. Rider Haggard receptions at the aerodromes of the French and Dutch and in their governors’ mansions tucked between sloping dunes and grand hotels where surprisingly large populations of white people conducted chorus with dry martinis, club sandwiches, and spry native servant boys. Gao, Fort La’my, Al Fashir, Khartoum, Massaw, and Assab took them through French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Eritrea.
In Gao Fred is photographed looking wistfully at an empty glass. Amelia stands surrounded by British consular staff and smiles wanly, wishing it away.
Cheerful but careworn, the tone of Amelia’s correspondence from Africa is that of a woman who was not the exuberant girl she had always been. She posed for the photographs, shook hands with the men and lady dignitaries, and took in the sights, but it seems to have been all part of a job.
Yet not all was what met the eye. ‘A tall angel with blue eyes in desert garment and pith helmet,’ she gushed in her private notebook, in reference to the commanding officer in Gao, as Fred loped from building to building in search of a high-stakes card game. ‘Natives in blue and white,’ continue the madly scribbled lines, ‘dark women washing at river, black boy in loincloth, free free!’
The black boy in a loincloth had to wonder:
Free free?
Who was free free?
Who was free free from what what?
All of course excellent questions.
In Assab Amelia’s good friend the Viscount Jacques de Sibour surprised Amelia (and Fred) with a rendezvous. As he passed through the crowd of Italian air force officers with a flourish of his teak and crimson cape, Fred thought with a quizzical look:
Who was this Viscount Jacques de Sibour?
Why was he dressed up like Dracula?
No, seriously. What the fuck was he wearing? Was that a codpiece?
Why was he not perspiring like crazy, like me after half a fourth of gin?
How did he know Amelia Earhart?
Should George Palmer Putnam be informed?
All across Africa George had maintained correspondence with his ‘lady bird’, asking many questions via telegram, e.g.:
HOW IS FRED QUERY
WHAT DOES FRED DO AT NIGHT QUERY DOES FRED HAVE A FEW HIGHBALLS BEFORE BED
DESCRIBE FRED NAKED STOP HA HA LITTLE JOKE KIDDO
DESCRIBE THE LODGE SHIT IM DRUNK DESCRIBE LODGINGS STOP ROOMS CLEAN CONFORTBLE ETC QUERY HOW MANY ROOMS STOP TWO FOR YOU AND FRED
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKY FUCK QUERY
SAY YOU LVE ME LOTS
In the end Fred kept his own counsel.
ACCEPT TRIBUNE PHONE TEN AM EDT TOMORROW, George ordered Amelia in a typical telegram, GIVING STORY RAPIDLY OVER PHONE CONVERSING ME LOVE GPP.
Many radio specialists at the time across Africa and India were probably wondering:
If George Palmer Putnam was more concerned with publicity than with his lady bird’s safety.
About George’s personal life in 1937. About the woman he would marry in 1938 and the circumstances of their acquaintance and courtship.
If Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had things under control.
If they had their shit together, or what the fuck.
The duo spent two days in Darwin, Australia, then made the 1,207-mile flight to Lae, Papua New Guinea, where they would stage their longest and most improbable dash across 2,556 cannibal-ridden and unpopulated shark-infested Pacific Ocean miles to the dime-sized yet banana-shaped Howland Island. It would be like trying to skewer a grain of rice with a lawn dart from a distance of fifty yards in the dark.
YOU’LL PROBABLY JUST LOSE THE DART, RIGHT?
In Lae we come to everyone’s all-time favorite Amelia Earhart reference to Hamlet, in this airy telegram to George:
DENMARK’S A PRISON AND LAE ATTRACTIVE AND UNUSUAL AS IT IS APPEARS TO TWO FLIERS JUST AS CONFINING. George got the telegram and then had to ask:
TO BE CONTINUED…
FROM THE AMELIA EARHART SPECIAL
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Colin ‘Raddy’ Gee is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. His collection of short stories and novellas The Penult is now available from LEFTOVER Books.
Image created on Stable Diffusion
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