AMELIA EARHART FIN
FROM AMELIA EARHART PART 2:
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:
Since when did Fred Noonan fly airplanes?
Describe Lae in more detail, please.
What makes it attractive?
What makes it unusual?
Perhaps Amelia was making reference to the Melanesian Pidgin English spoken in eastern Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin. As one of her last rational acts on the planet she purchased a dictionary of the local dialect from a Lae bookstore and buried her tousled red head in a pidgin translation of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Radio operators everywhere since have wondered:
Could this choice of reading material be at the root of the series of contradictory and almost incomprehensible radio messages she exchanged with George P. Palmer, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s man on Howland Mr. Black, and the sea-going vessels Itasca and Ontario?
For example:
WONTEM SAMTING TU?
MI SAVE LONG BOLUS BILONG, 7.5 MHZ BUSH LIKLIK I?
GOD I LIKLIK SPIKI ON NOISY VOSE KHZ 500?
Preparations for the flight from Lae to Howland Island were extensive and bizarre, and had been going on for quite some time. The U.S. Department of the Interior had PAVED A RUNWAY on Howland Island especially for Amelia and Fred and posted their man Mr. Black on the Coast Guard cutter Itasca nearby. His Japanese-American secretary, Midge, a secret regional operative for the Japanese imperial service, scribbled the following questions in her diary that night:
Does the U.S. Department of the Interior also have a sinking feeling that Amelia and Fred are going to need all the help they can get?
A 20000000000 dollar macadam runway in the middle of the Pacific Ocean just to pull off a one-time publicity stunt? So George can ghostwrite and publish a book with Amelia’s name on it?
What is this really about? Is it about boosting the morale of the American public, quagmired as it is in an American depression in the days before television?
Does the U.S. government really expect the Japanese to buy that one?
Does the U.S. government really expect that the Japanese navy will NOT interfere with this bald-faced piece of espionage if the opportunity comes up?
Thanks to Midge, we now know that Mr. Black and his cronies arrived with eighteen crates stuffed with state-of-the-art radio equipment capable of transmitting on 500, 6210, 3105, 500, and 425 kHz, in addition to top-secret high-frequency direction finders. For reasons of top secrecy, the direction finders may or may not have ever been set up, and Amelia was never informed of their existence. Possibly to make up for this egregious stupidity, Captain Thompson of the Itasca said his ship would send up smoke signals.
SMOKE SIGNALS?
Well what color were the goddamn smoke signals going to be?
White for ALL CLEAR and black for TURN AROUND AND GO BACK TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED MILES TO PAPUA NEW GUINEA?
White for a dot and black for a dash?
Would the sailors all wave their arms and shout, too?
Meanwhile, at Lae: Amelia, Fred, and personnel on the ground ran tests and made final preparations. Mechanics worked on the twin engines, checking both propellers and lubricant. Amelia put hot chocolate into a thermos. Fred ran some New Guinea rum through his liver. Amelia took the Electra up half-fueled to test the directional loop antenna but was unable to get a bearing on the equipment at Lae. The ground crew were already a day behind schedule. RADIO MISUNDERSTANDING AND PERSONNEL UNFITNESS, Amelia wired George in ameliation. George was asking himself:
How difficult can it be to work a radio? I paid good money for that radio.
Did my lady bird even try to get the radio equipment to work? Was she on the right frequency?
By UNFITNESS does AE mean HUNG OVER?
By PERSONNEL does AE mean FRED?
God damn, thought George, arm squeezed tightly around his new girlfriend.
IN ADDITION FN HAS BEEN UNABLE ACCOUNT RADIO DIFFICULTIES TO SET HIS CHRONOMETERS, continued the message.
I’ll bet, thought George P. Putnam.
At 9:42 on 2 July 1937 the ground crew folded Fred into the back of the Electra and Amelia climbed into her cockpit. The aircraft had been fully serviced, with oil and filters changed, propellers greased, spark plugs on both engines spat on, and gas pump and batteries shipped shape. The Electra was carrying her full capacity of fuel: so much in fact that there was no space for lifeboats or reflective S.O.S. kites, or S.O.S. flares, or extra water, or cases of gin, or the Bible in Tok Pisin. On his back splayed across the navigator’s table Fred Noonan groaned weakly, looked around without recognizing where he was, and let his head loll back in a stupendous blackout.
THE END
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.
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