One Summer: America, 1927

barnstorming at county fairs and working as a spotter of illegal stills for the government. The same age as Lindbergh, he was small and slight (he weighed just 108 pounds) and had a nervous-looking face, but then he had a lot to be nervous about. He was proposing to fly 4,600 miles – further than anyone had flown before – over ocean and jungle, into a realm far beyond the range of reliable maps and weather reports.
    He packed as if he didn’t really expect to make it. He took with him fishing tackle, rifle and ammunition, quinine, mosquito nets, surgical kit, spare boots and much else that would only be of use if he crash-landed in the jungle. For his short-term needs he packed twenty sandwiches, four pints of coffee, a pound of milk chocolate and two gallons of water. On 25 August, he took off.
    Aviation experts quoted by the Associated Press said that it would take him at least sixty hours to reach Rio. Before he had even cleared the Caribbean he was lost, and dropped a message to a Norwegian freighter, the Christian Krohg , asking for directions. The message bounced off the deck and into the sea, but amazingly a Norwegian seaman dived in and retrieved it. The message said: ‘Point ship to nearest land, wave flag or handkerchief once for each 100 miles. Thanks, Redfern.’
    The ship obliged and Redfern with a snappy salute departed. It was the last anyone ever saw of him, though for years afterwards missionaries and other visitors to the interior of Dutch Guiana passed on reports of a white man living among the Indians. According to these reports, the Indians treated the man as a divinity because he had dropped in on them from the sky. The white man, it was said, had taken a wife and now lived in contentment with the natives. Several expeditions plunged into the jungle to try to find Redfern. At least two men lost their lives in the quest, but he was never found. In 1938, at the request of Redfern’s wife – that is, his one certain wife, back in America – Redfern was declared officially dead by a court in Detroit.
     
    Scarcely less improbable, but miraculously more successful, was a flight undertaken by Edward F. Schlee, a Detroit businessman, and William S. ‘Billy’ Brock, a cheerful, conspicuously portly former airmail pilot. They set out to beat the round-the-world record of 28 days, 14 hours and 36 minutes made the previous year by two other Detroit men using aeroplanes, trains and ships, but this time they intended to do it exclusively by air.
    Schlee, the son of German immigrants, had been an engineer for Henry Ford, but in 1922 he left Ford and opened a petrol station. Then he opened another. Within five years he had more than a hundred petrol stations. He also owned a small airline called Canadian American Airways, through which he employed Brock. Schlee was thirty-nine years old in the summer of 1927, Brock thirty-one. Brock had already been in the news that summer for dashing by air from Detroit to the Black Hills to deliver a new collie to Grace Coolidge, the president’s wife, after her previous pet ran off.
    Although neither Brock nor Schlee had any experience of distance flying, they set themselves the ambitious goal of circling the world in just fifteen days. Their plane was a Stinson Detroiter powered by a Wright Whirlwind engine. They took off the day after Redfern, and for the next two and a half weeks their exploits gripped the world – largely because they were so constantly and thrillingly operating at the very edge of their competence. They successfully flew the Atlantic – a notable achievement in itself, of course – but had no idea where they were when they got to the other side. Passing over a beach crowded with holidaymakers, they dropped a message asking the name of the locality. A man with a stick obligingly traced the name ‘SEATON’ in the sand and pointed to a Union Jack fluttering over the promenade. With their location fixed, they proceeded to a triumphant reception in London. They took off from Croydon just hours before Levine flew in, rather more erratically, from Paris, then made their way in stages across Europeto Constantinople before continuing on to Calcutta, Rangoon, Hanoi, Hong Kong and Shanghai. They were finally forced down by a typhoon on Kyushu in Japan. They had covered 12,795 miles in nineteen days, but were still 9,850 miles from home. Bad weather and the daunting breadth of the Pacific made them decide to end their quest while they were still