One Summer: America, 1927

time-consuming, uncomfortable in bad weather and sometimes seriously perilous. Fog was a frequent and dreaded danger in the days before radar. Most ships had a long record of unnerving near misses. ‘There were many more close calls on the Western Ocean than passengers ever heard about,’ writes John Maxtone-Graham in The Only Way to Cross . Collisions were not uncommon. On 15 July of this summer, just as the Leviathan carrying Byrd and his team was sailing nearby, the Holland America liner Veendam struck – essentially ploughed through – a Norwegian freighter, the Sagaland , near Nantucket at 4.40 in the morning. The Sagaland sank quickly with the loss of one life. The Veendam escaped serious damage and no one aboard was reported injured. It was nonetheless a sobering reminder of how dangerous ocean travel could be, for the ships collided in clear weather.
    For all these reasons, knocking even a day off the crossing was an appealing proposition, which explains how it was that on 1 August Clarence Chamberlin accepted an invitation from the United States Lines and reboarded the mighty Leviathan withthe intention of trying to take off from its upper deck in an aeroplane. A rickety 114-foot-long runway had been erected to facilitate the launch, but whether that would be enough was anybody’s guess. No plane had ever taken off from a ship at sea, and Chamberlin himself thought his chances of success were only slightly better than even. Shortly before his takeoff someone asked him if he knew how to swim. Chamberlin grinned and admitted that he did not.
    Happily, swimming proved unnecessary. In a lull between rainstorms, Chamberlin climbed into a Fokker biplane and shot down the creaking runway and into the void beyond with just enough speed and lift to stay airborne. He circled the ship, gave a casual wave and headed for Teterboro, New Jersey, where he delivered 900 pieces of airmail and posed bashfully for pictures. Inspired by Chamberlin’s example, the owners of the new passenger liner Île de France , launched that year, installed a catapult that could fling a six-passenger plane down a shorter runway and into the air, and for a few years passengers who were daring, wealthy and in a hurry could reach shore a day or so sooner than their fellow passengers.
     
    As August opened, Charles Lindbergh was coming to the end of the second week of his long tour of America. So far he had had just one hitch, but it was quite a serious one. After Boston he had flown on to Portland, Maine, but had been unable to land because of fog. He circled for nearly two hours but then, running low on fuel, he had to look for somewhere safe to land. He grew separated from an escort plane and came down on Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Luckily, a man named Harry Jones offered pleasure flights for tourists from the beach – it is just possible that someone had told Lindbergh about this before he took off, in case he did run into trouble – and Jones had a hangar there with tools, which he was happy to let Lindbergh use.
    Almost at once a crowd collected as word got around that Lindy had landed on the beach. People crept up to the hangar and watched him working. ‘He never looked at the crowd, nor did hebetray the slightest consciousness of an audience,’ wrote a young woman named Elise White, who was present. By the time Lindbergh finished tinkering with his plane, the crowd had grown so large that he needed a megaphone to address it. He asked the people to clear a space so that he could depart, but instead they pressed forward to look at the plane more closely ‘and he threw the megaphone down in disgust’, related a slightly startled Miss White. This was not the Charles Lindbergh that they had read about.
    It’s easy to understand Lindbergh’s frustration. His plane was a sensitive instrument and the possibility of some witless gawker damaging it was a real and constant concern. The sight of people pawing his plane or leaning on it or waggling its moving parts was naturally horrifying to Lindbergh. He now essentially fled. Within moments of people coming forward, he was in the plane and proceeding with it on to the beach, trusting that people would scatter as he advanced. Luckily, they did. Lindbergh taxied to the far end of the beach, turned the plane into the wind and raced forward. ‘It moved smoothly over the sand and in no distance at all – hardly more than a hundred yards – it was in the air,’ wrote Miss White. ‘He