Alone Over the Tasman Sea

Day

Introduction

Those who know Alone over the Tasman Sea put it on their shelf somewhere near Childer's Riddle of the Sands, Masefield's Bird of Dawning and Lawrence's translation of the Odyssey, all books that come down every now and then to be read again. For the things of which Francis Chichester writes are the things of man's old quest and spirit; danger and adventure and achievement, the sun and the wind, the many-laughing waves and the steady thunder of the seas on island beaches.

It is England's habit to produce men like Chichester in every generation, especially when she needs them most and sometimes even when she appears least to deserve them. Little is known, his biographer may say, about his early days except that he played football for Marlborough (second fifteen); but in 1919, at the age of eighteen, he sailed for New Zealand and, in preference to lazing in deck chairs, worked in the stokehold as a trimmer for most of the voyage. In New Zealand he farmed, felled trees and sawed timber, learned to ski in the Southern Alps, worked for a year in coal mines and gold diggings, and travelled in an old Ford selling a farmer's magazine. Then later, having saved some money, he started with Geoffrey Goodwin the first joy-riding company in New Zealand, engaging ex-Royal Flying Corps pilots to fly two Avro Avjans and take up six thousand passengers in little more than a year. In 1929 he sailed for England again, giving himself nine months in which to qualify as a civilian pilot, buy an aeroplane, and learn enough about airmanship, night-flying, meteorology, navigation and the other things he would need to know to fly that aeroplane back across the fourteen and a half thousand miles to New Zealand. In the England of those days, when a trip in a, sports car to Brighton was the finest flowering of many adventurous spirits, and when adulation was lavished on the smart weekend set lounging in the cocktail bars of flying clubs, he was already beginning to show as a man of a different temper.

By the time he got to Brooklands to start flying lessons it was already June, and three of the nine months had gone in travelling and in a hospital at Los Angeles; and while he was having great difficulty in learning to land—since youth he has had to view the world through strong spectacles—his business in New Zealand slumped so badly that paying for his lessons and buying an aeroplane and oil and petrol became a serious problem. However, he went solo and bought a De Havilland Moth. In October he set out to fly round Europe, and the names of the great traveller-cities of the world began to appear in his logbook—Paris, Lyons, Milan, Venice, Zagreb, Lemberg, Warsaw, Berlin, Leipzig, Dessau, Brunswick, Rotterdam, Antwerp. Then, back in England with this self-imposed apprenticeship in route-flying finished, he laid plans to challenge Hinkler's record to Australia; and in December he set off, at two-thirty in the morning from a frost-bound aerodrome, six months after he had first gone solo. Again the string of names—Pisa, Tripoli, Benghazi, Alexandria, Gaza, Baghdad, Basrah, Bushire, Jask, Karachi, Nasirabad, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Batavia, Darwin; and in January 1930, Sydney.

A few months later, in New Zealand, the idea of the flight described in this book began to take shape, and with it many new problems of which the air pilotage textbooks did not at that time treat. He was therefore driven back on the old seaman's manuals of navigation to unravel the mysteries of the chronometer and the sextant and spherical trigonometry. Norie, which was conned to destruction by sea-apprentices when the frigate-built Indiamen entered Blackwall with yards and gunports squared, bunt-jiggers bowsed up for a harbour furl, and stun'sails rigged out to the mark. Lecky, with such interesting contents-page titles as The Dutchman's Log; the Mariner's Creed; How Wrecks Occur; Big Ben and his two Chums; Sun the World's Timekeeper; Fog and Floating Ice; Sextant the Seaman's Sure Friend. Raper, who says somewhere that in navigating among the coral reefs of the Feejees … the lookout, when placed half-way up the rigging on these occasions, sees better than from the masthead, where the eye is dazzled by the glare. From these and similar books, borrowed from a cargo-steamer mate or bought in an old bookshop in Wellington, Chichester learned his first astronomical-navigation. He finally pinned his faith in Raper, because he was a great man on position lines; then he devised a method of running down a position line that is still used in the Royal Air Force. He borrowed a small brass sextant made for artillery work that had been taken off a captured German officer, and practised with this by taking shots of stars reflected in a bowl of wafer, and by taking sun shots while running up and down the beach. Then, with his 1839, thousand-page Raper stowed under the seat in case he should need to use its tables, and with the pocket sextant to take sun shots while he held the aircraft control-column between his knees, he set off on this flight in which one error in the estimations or calculations would have meant the end. The aircraft was the same wooden Moth in which he had flown from England, but this time with floats fitted, and with extra tanks to permit him to carry enough petrol to bridge the one and a half thousand miles in three stages, each of five hundred miles, mainland—Norfolk Island—Lord Howe Island—Sydney. Norfolk Island is a squat rock dumped in the Pacific … no larger than a New Zealand sheep farm; Lord Howe is only five square miles in extent. He reached each island in turn, but while he was preparing for the last stage of the flight the seaplane was wrecked in a night gale. The refusal to be beaten that runs through every chapter of this book drove him to strip the wreck down to the last nut and bolt and, with the help of a few islanders, rebuild it again. Weeks later he flew on through a great tropical storm of blinding rain, waterspouts and high winds, using navigation instruments, chart-plotting, log-keeping, all in the open cockpit of a plane vibrating so harshly that he could not write if his elbow touched any part of the fuselage. It was a flight that the best R.A.F. pilots would think hard about to-day before they would essay it; in 1931 it was unique.

The Tasman flight accomplished, the autumn of 1931 found him off by air again. Chinese and Japanese customs' stamps now follow the blue and red and violet stamps of Arabia and Persia and a dozen other countries in his log. Then, because he crashed in Japan and was severely injured, there is a gap until 1936, when the city-names begin to appear again. Sydney, Bangkok, Hongkong, Foochow, Pekin, Nankin, Rangoon, Calcutta, Cawnpore, Ambala, Jodphur, Baghdad, Benghazi, Tripoli, Tunis, London. This time, to get married and to return to New Zealand by sea.

Then, just before Munich, he saw the red light and came home, thinking that it would not be hard to get into the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot. Three times he volunteered, but he was not young enough and his eyesight was too bad for flying duties. His next move was to recruit the keenness of six other civil pilots like himself and to propose to the Air Ministry that they should be allowed to become the nucleus of a commando squadron which would go in low to bomb small enemy targets, such as particular buildings, in bad weather. It was a serious attempt to get into the war, but this too failed; so he went to work with an aircraft instrument firm on the development of navigation aids and, in his spare time, wrote article after article on his special subject. How he had now come, through years of study and of flying at his own expense, to be a leading writer in England, and in the English-speaking world, on air navigation may be sensed from the titles of some of these articles. 1938: Bombing by star navigation, What can the air sextant do? 1939: Bombing by super-navigation, A square deal for the navigator, Long-distance and night navigation, Raiding by celestial navigation (four long articles). 1940: The echo altimeter, Transatlantic flight navigation, Star curves, Factory versus bomber, The need for research, The Mark IX sextant, Bombing unseen targets. During these years he also produced a number of textbooks on astronomical navigation, and many navigators now working with our Pathfinder and heavy bomber squadrons, and in the aircraft keeping watch and ward on the long sea routes, read them with profit during the first years of the war.

In 1941 Chichester was commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant and went into the Air Ministry. There he worked for two years, helping to revise the air-navigation training syllabuses and writing lecture notes for R.A.F. navigation instructors and for cadets training for operations. These notes are the work of a first-class navigator, navigational thinker and teacher, and they are used in R.A.F. and Dominion air schools all over the world.

There is much of the Elizabethan in Francis Chichester. He was one of the first to navigate by air the seas that Drake was the first marine navigator to enter. He also belongs to the Elizabethans by descent, for a John Chichester married Thomasine Raleigh in 1365 and, as you may read in Westward Ho!, the Chichester daughters in the Armada times lined the road to greet the seamen returning from the West Indies. Now he is flying again, this time with senior R.A.F. officers when they do their advanced day and night navigation exercises at the Empire Central Flying School. I think the early navigators and captains would be well satisfied to know that one of their breed has added to the lustre of their trade.

August 1944

F. D. TREDREY

Chapter I

IMPULSE

I wanted to fly the Tasman; and a dirty stretch of water I knew it to be, breeding a vicious type of young storm that rampages up and down for days before the meteorologists get wind of it. None dirtier for the long-distance pilot unless he include a turn round Cape Horn in his flight. And though it may be less wide across than most oceans, it has the considerable disadvantage for any aeroplane which falls into it of not being traversed by great steamer routes.

Then why fly it? demanded a friend to whom I confided the project.

Because I want to continue from Australia the flight round the world which I left off there a few months ago. And what is the sport in flying round the world if one's plane is unable to fly on to the track to be followed, but has to be carried there?

Though really I had a strange feeling that I must attempt the ocean flight whether I wanted to or not. This seemed as if I considered it my destiny. That could not be, for I definitely did not believe in destiny. Man was master of his fate—that was the great thing about him; he could do whatever he wished, or refuse as he liked. So the reason for feeling myself bound to make the attempt must be simply that if I jibbed, I should have no rest or peace of mind. And yet, was that sufficient cause? No, the incentive must be that no man had yet flown this ocean solo. And that solo ocean flying was undoubtedly something new under the face of the sun—since only one solo ocean flight at all had been completed. There was something strange and wonderful in the thought of man spanning an ocean in that way by himself. It held the lure of the unknown.

Or was I driven by the challenge held out, Could I do it? like an itch that irritates the more, every time it is scratched. Or by the reward dangling in my imagination—the great moment of romping into Sydney from the east, having already flown to it from the west.

But, often, I thought the reason was fear. I suppose everyone is afraid of something: and that all fears, whether of incurable disease, of death, or merely of spiders, are equally terrible to their owners. Mine was the thought of heading across an ocean in a plane, and it was fast becoming a habit for that thought to give me the cold shudders. And every time this fear came to me, the thought bit deeper into me that I could not allow it to make me feel a coward and that I must exorcize it by experiencing it myself.

This was all very well, but to obtain an aeroplane capable of spanning the 1,450 (land) miles separating Wellington from Sydney was quite another question.

I was not able to buy one; I could not borrow, because for one reason there was not a plane in New Zealand with the range. And to beg would have affected me as it did the man in the Bible.

I must think of some other scheme—and quickly, if I wanted to fly that ocean solo before anyone else. Then one night, I awoke with an idea. I would raise the money by taking up passengers in my Moth, the same which had carried me from London to Sydney; and I think this scheme would have been a great success had not the passengers refused to be taken up. They liked flying in any other plane well enough, but not in mine. This puzzled me greatly until I came to hear their opinion of my Madame Elijah, of how she was held together partly by pieces of string and partly by odd pieces of wire—that she must inevitably fall to bits—and at any moment. I will not mention their opinion of the pilot, such as that he was blind in one eye and unable to see much out of the other, and that the phenomenal good luck which had enabled him to keep alive so far must inevitably break up, and at any moment. The day I heard all this, by a strange coincidence, I temporarily forgot the power lines bordering the field where I was landing the plane. The propeller chewed its way through all three—11,000 volts—with a grand flash like lightning. This cut off the town's supply of electricity, and my own supply of passengers, except for the priest, the local undertaker, and the usual brave souls ready to risk death with me provided there was no charge. Furthermore, the electrical authorities demanded payment for repairs to their power line although I explained that it should be charged to general expenses as what the insurance companies call an Act of God. Who did I think I was? they demanded.

I was extremely angry at the remarks passed on my aeroplane. I considered it thoroughly sound, though both motor and plane had flown over 33,000 miles in England, Europe, New Zealand, and from London to Sydney. Confound it, I thought, I'll prove her sound; she shall be the plane to carry me over the Tasman.

But the question was how to make a plane with a 950-mile range cross a 1,450-mile ocean. Though three petrol-tanks were already fitted, I wrestled with the possibility of adding a fourth till I could see a way of increasing the range to 1,270 miles. I thought there might even be a slight chance of piling on tankage for as much as 1,430 miles. But certainly not for an inch further. And that range, it seemed to me, fell just short of my requirements.

But one day, a friend lent me a globe, and it was placed beside the looking-glass where my eye strayed to it while shaving. Three hours later, a search party arrived to find me, razor in one hand, globe in the other, having discovered two small islands in the North Tasman.¹ I was almost ready to believe they had been especially dumped there for my plane. Norfolk Island was 481 miles from the north end of New Zealand; Lord Howe Island 561 miles from Norfolk Island; and Sydney 480 miles from Lord Howe Island. A line drawn through all four places resembled a rainbow curve in shape. I was excited. For how could a blundering flight straight across be compared with a delicate picking of one's way from island to island as stepping-stones? There was something strangely stirring in the mere thought of flitting to an island from out of the blue.

One or two difficulties arose. I could not find out if Lord Howe Island was inhabited. Nobody seemed to have heard of it. At last I dug information out of an old encyclopaedia that it was of 3,200 acres and had 120 inhabitants. But as neither it nor Norfolk Island had ever seen a plane before, there could be no landing-places, and from charts I secured, they both appeared too hilly to provide even a level field. Nor could I find out if this were so or not. It took four days by steamer to reach Sydney from Wellington, and another week doubling back to Norfolk Island. Even then, the obscure steamer which made the island trip, only did so once a month. I could obtain no information of any use to me. A good thing too, as the fox said when unable to reach the grapes … the information was sure to have been sour. I thought of my feelings had I arrived at the island to find a layman's idea of an aerodrome to be a plantation of tall trees, encircling a field too small for a boy's kite-flying.

I was stumped—till the idea occurred to me of exchanging the wheels of Elijah for a pair of floats and alighting in the sea.

Good heavens! exclaimed the experts, whoever heard of flying a long distance by oneself in a seaplane? What about mooring? And as for a Moth seaplane to cross the Tasman—why! rigged as a seaplane, it is only a toy. For another thing, it will never be able to rise from the water with half enough petrol.

I had heard it said that seaplanes occasionally could not rise at all from a glassy surface, even when empty of load. But never having been near one, I only half believed these tales. And the idea of blowing in and settling on the lagoon of an untamed island caught my fancy. I must learn seaplane flying at once. And over this, I had an undoubted stroke of good luck. For, when I approached the Director of Aviation,² he said: As you are now in the Territorial Air Force, you can do a course of seaplane, instead of landplane, training.

I proceeded to the Air Base at Auckland in my brand-new uniform and when not scheming to dodge the regulars for fear of awkward saluting problems, I spent the time hoping to be sent up for fifteen-minute periods of seaplane instruction. Once allowed out solo, I found that where landplane flying had thrilled, seaplane flying thrilled five times as much. There was something wild and free about it. Instead of artificial aerodromes to deal with, the seaplane must twist and turn in a tight-sided valley to settle on the floor of water like a dog turning itself a flat bed. There was the joy of skimming the steep tree-covered slopes, the cliffs, the promontories of harbour-arm; of the plane settling on to its water cushion, the give of the water and its drag on the floats taking to it; of choosing for oneself the best water on which to alight and the joy of depending on oneself alone for accurate estimate of wind, tide, and surface obstructions. But I was surprised to find that to fly a seaplane required more skill. It could not climb or manoeuvre as quickly; therefore the height of the cliff ahead must be taken into consideration; and water was usually land-locked, whereas an aerodrome was chosen for its flat approaches. With big floats, the seaplane lost flying-speed and stalled more easily, changing the lightness of an air-borne plane for the weight of a dropping stone; with the least excess of bank in turning, the floats caught the air, were forced outwards and tripped the plane on to one wing. Then, not only was it an aeroplane to fly, but a fast motor boat to handle and a delicate yacht as well. Once the motor was on, it could not travel through the water slower than a motor boat, and immediately the motor was off, it drifted back as fast as a yacht sailing—with wings to grip the air as much as possible, and floats to grip the water as little as possible.

As for forced alightings on the sea, it would weather as big waves as a canoe could weather, no more, no less.

I quickly found it necessary to keep alert the whole time, especially near the Air Base, where a group of power lines had been stretched across the harbour-arm as a sort of booby trap. But these were 110,000 volts, and I felt that 11,000 had been quite enough to manage. As I had to fly over or under them at each alighting and as they were not particularly noticeable from a plane, they dealt many a jolt to my ease of mind when, nearly into them, I suddenly remembered their presence. Who would be the first pilot, momentarily forgetful, whom they would catch and kill?

On the surface, there was the chance of running aground while turning, or fouling a launch or jetty, of being capsized through a gust catching under the weather-side wing-tips; and a-small accident which could be repaired at the cost of a few pounds with a landplane, might mean total loss with a seaplane: fouling a lee jetty—crunch! both lee wings crumpled: a wave lifts—crush! tail crammed between jetty-floor and water: wave drops away—zip! an iron bolt rips open the thin float-shell. The plane has sunk to the bottom of the harbour before a rescue party has had time to crank up the motor of its boat.

I began to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew. I should have no specially trained wading party to bring the seaplane ashore after every flight, to haul it up a specially constructed slipway. I should have to deal with men used to handling heavy boats, unaware of a seaplane's fragility. I must moor out every night, must effect the mooring by myself, must carry ropes, anchor, drogue; must take off with enough petrol to reach my objective, must, must, must … They were right, a Moth was a toy for a long-distance seaplane flight. There were so many other difficulties, too. Hadn't I better chuck it up?

I pulled out the chart of Norfolk Island. It appeared to be a squat rock dumped in the Pacific, walled up from the ocean by 300-foot cliffs; bare and grim and bleak, it had no sheltered anchorage; the deep-sea rollers must be forever lurching against it, snatching at it, pounding on it. And the whole was no larger than a New Zealand sheep farm. Ugh! what a place for a small seaplane. The project was impossible, I must give it up.

I turned to the chart of Lord Howe Island. This was shaped like a Cupid's bow with a coral reef for a bowstring. The lower arm of the bow went beyond the bowstring and there were two knots on the end of it. These were the mountains, Lidgbird, 2,500 feet, and Gower, 2,800. Yet the whole island was Only 3,200 acres, or five square miles in extent. I forgot everything and sat absorbed by the hour. Finger Peak, Sugar Loaf Passage, Look-out Mound, North Hummock, Intermediate Hill, Boat Haven, Smooth-water Lagoon, Fresh-water Creek—the sight of those names alongside the feathery drawings of hillocks and reefs and creeks set me afire with a slow, fierce combustion of excitement and desire to plop my Elijah, on to that lagoon, with its coral reef awash here, heavy surf here and boat passage at high water; and in the evening to stroll, rifle in hand, from the farmhouse with its clustered outbuildings, across the close-cropped pastures and up the slopes of