One Summer: America, 1927

turned dire. Dense fog settled over the eastern Atlantic and blanketed the North American seaboard from Labrador to the mid-Atlantic states. At Ambrose Light, a floating lighthouse off the mouth of New York Harbor, the keeper reported that thousands of birds, lost on their annual migration north, were sheltering bleakly on every surface they could cling to. At Sandy Hook, New Jersey, four searchlights endlessly but pointlessly swept the skies, their beams unable to penetrate the enshrouding murk. In Newfoundland, temperatures plunged and a light snow fell.
    Unaware that the flyers had jettisoned reserve supplies at the last moment, commentators noted that Nungesser and Coli had packed enough food to sustain them for weeks, and that their plane was designed to stay afloat indefinitely. (It wasn’t.) Many people took hope from the fact that two years earlier an American aviator, Commander John Rodgers, and three crewmen spent nine days floating in the Pacific, presumed dead, before being rescued by a submarine after failing to fly from California to Hawaii.
    Rumours now put Nungesser and Coli all over the place – in Iceland, in Labrador, scooped from the sea by any of several passing ships. Three people in Ireland reported seeing them, which gave some people heart while others reflected that three sightings was not many in a nation of three million. Sixteen people in Newfoundland, mostly in or around Harbour Grace, reported hearing or seeing a plane, though none could give a positive identification, and other, similar reports drifted in from Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire and as far south as Port Washington, Long Island.
    A Canadian trapper came in with a message signed by Nungesser, but on examination the message proved to be suspiciously illiterate and in a hand quite unlike Nungesser’s but very like the trapper’s own. Messages in bottles were found, too, and were still turning up as late as 1934. The one thing that wasn’t found was any trace of the White Bird or its occupants.
    In France a rumour circulated that the US Weather Bureau had withheld crucial information from the Frenchmen, to keep the advantage with the American flyers. Myron Herrick, the American ambassador, cabled Washington that an American flight at this time would be unwise.
    It was altogether a wretched week for French aviation. At the same time as Nungesser and Coli’s flight from Le Bourget, another ambitious French flight – now forgotten by the rest of the world and hardly noticed even then – got under way when three aviators, Pierre de Saint-Roman, Hervé Mouneyres and Louis Petit, took offfrom Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, and headed for Brazil. When just 120 miles from the Brazilian coast, they radioed the happy news that they would be arriving in just over an hour, or so a correspondent for Time magazine reported. That was the last anyone ever heard from them. No wreckage was ever found.
    In nine months, eleven people had died in the quest to fly the Atlantic. It was just at this point, when nothing was going right for anyone, that a gangly young man known as Slim flew in from the west and announced his plan to fly the ocean alone. His name was Charles Lindbergh.
    A most extraordinary summer was about to begin.
     
    fn1 The Vickers Vimy hangs in the Science Museum in London, but few notice it. A monument to Alcock and Brown, at Heathrow Airport, wasn’t erected until thirty-five years after their flight. When I checked out Graham Wallace’s classic account of the trip, The Flight of Alcock & Brown, 14–15 June 1919 , from the London Library, I was the first person in seventeen years to do so.

M AY
     

T HE K ID
     

     
    ‘In the spring of ’27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky.’
     
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City

C HAPTER 1
     

     
    TEN DAYS BEFORE he became so famous that crowds would form around any building that contained him and waiters would fight over a corncob left on his dinner plate, no one had heard of Charles Lindbergh. The New York Times had mentioned him once, in the context of the coming Atlantic flights. It had misspelled his name.
    The news that transfixed the nation as spring gave way to summer in 1927 was of a gruesome murder in a modest family home on Long Island, coincidentally quite close to Roosevelt Field, where the Atlantic flyers were now gathering. The newspapers, much excited, called it the Sash Weight Murder Case. The story was this:
    Late on the night of