Shortly after twelve o’clock Fred sent up a card clipped to the end of the fishing pole. Amelia read: she was too far south of course. She swung the plane into a corrected heading. Through the haze she could not distinguish between sea and sky. She looked at the indicated air speed: the needle pointed at 150 mph. She was nursing the engines for the long trip.
Through the mist the island of Puerto Rico came into view. Amelia followed the coast line to San Juan. As the Electra closed in on the city, she spotted the airport and began her letdown for a landing. She lowered flaps and gear and eased into a long glide into the wind. Anchored off the near end of the runway was a four-masted schooner. Amelia skipped over the masts and rounded out in a three-point touchdown.
After she had taxied to the parking ramp, she suddenly realized that she had forgotten to eat any of the sandwiches placed on board the plane. Breakfast had been pre-dawn and 1,000 miles ago. She was hungry; and from the abrupt release of tensions, tired.
Friends waiting at the airport came to the rescue: Mrs. Thomas Rodenbaugh with food and Clara Livingston with rest. At the Livingston plantation, twenty miles from town, Amelia turned in at eight o’clock. The sound of the surf outside the window, “charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / of perilous seas,” surged over her and drowned her in a deep sleep.
For the 3,000-mile stretch, south and east down the coast of South America to Natal, there were only four satisfactory airports; between them, the grim alternatives of ocean or jungle. The first stop was to be Paramaribo, 1,000 miles away.
At four the next morning Amelia bounded out of bed, determined to make a dawn take-off. But occasion conspired against her. Repair work on the take-off runway would necessitate a shorter run to get airborne; to get airborne, she would have to reduce the fuel load; to reduce the fuel load, she would have to forego Paramaribo. She would have to push through to another, closer stop.
“Push through,” she wrote. “We’re always pushing through, hurrying on our long way, trying to get to some other place instead of enjoying the place we’d already got to.”
As she had skipped from place to place as a little girl, and from job to job and interest to interest as a young woman, so now she skimmed over the world to touch and go. “Sometime,” she said, realizing that her schedule prevented long visits, “I hope to stay somewhere as long as I like.”
By the time the Electra was ready for take-off the sun was in full view above the horizon. The leg would have to be a short one; strong head winds had been predicted. Once in the air Amelia watched the green mountains of Puerto Rico change to white clouds and blue sea. From 8,000 feet the little clouds looked like white scrambled eggs. Far into the distance, and dead ahead on course, the hazy outline of the land mass of Venezuela came slowly into focus.
South America, the second of five continents to be flown over, was a complex of densely timbered mountains, valleys of open plains, and thickly tangled jungle. Amelia, looking at her first jungle, shuddered at the thought of the Electra having to make a forced landing—“the getting away would be worse than the getting down.”