4. Africa to India
Far from the customary skies was Africa and its smells. To Amelia’s sensitive nostrils the aromas of South America had been the lush and pleasant ones of fruit, fish, meat; in Dakar, as in St. Louis, the odor was the strong one of people.
The big bare feet of the natives she found extraordinary. She walked through the teeming streets, her eyes focused to the riot of color, her ears tuned to the comic opera of sound. Splashes of bright yellow, red, and green marked the native garments. The women wore Mother Hubbards and slung their babies on their backs or held them at their breasts. Amelia went over to one of the market stalls and bought a large bag of freshly roasted peanuts, her only West African export.
At Dakar, the Electra was scrubbed and washed, oiled and greased; the engines were given a forty-hour check, and a faulty fuel-flow meter was repaired.
The flight so far had been over the charted Pan American route to Natal and the Air France course to Dakar. Ahead, however, inland across Africa, lay regions rarely, if ever, flown over. Exactly what course they would fly, pilot and navigator were undecided. But they would have to leave soon, for tornadoes to the south and sandstorms to the north had been predicted. They would have to find a way somewhere in between.
The schedule for crossing Africa was a strenuous one. It meant flying the distance of 4,350 miles in at least four separate legs—a daily flight, in comparison, from New York to St. Louis. Where neither pilot nor aircraft was replaced, or replaceable, and this fact coupled with the thousands of miles that lay behind and ahead for the same pilot and plane, the flight became an ordeal of endurance and courage.
Amelia carefully studied the situation: the navigation aids were only two—contact and celestial. She could fly contact by following her map and identifying landmarks with the corresponding symbols on the sectional; but the African maps were pitifully inadequate, even when supplemented with pilot reports at each stop on the way. There were no radio beams to home in on, nor were there any lights at the landing fields they planned to stop at for refueling. For Fred, although he could, if it were clear, make position fixes from the sun and the stars, navigating over Africa was more difficult than finding his way over any ocean.
“Our flights over the desert,” Fred wrote to his bride of one month, “were more difficult than over water. That was because the maps of the country are very inaccurate and consequently extremely misleading. In fact, at points no dependence at all could be placed on them. Also recognizable landmarks are few and far between, one part of the desert being as much like another as two peas in a pod. However, we were lucky in always reaching our objectives. In all the distance I don’t think we wandered off the course for half an hour, although there were times when I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on the accuracy of our assumed position.”
Despite the difficulties Amelia blithely set out. They would push through somehow: there were, after all, countless places for an emergency landing if anything went wrong or if they lost their way.
On the morning of June 10 they took off just before six o’clock. The course was due east over the Senegal and Niger to the Sudan. Some 1,140 miles, seventeen hours, and fifty minutes later they sighted the upper reaches of the Niger River and landed at Gao. There the ubiquitous gasoline drums marked “Amelia Earhart” awaited them like squat silent sentinels. The months of planning in spotting the fuel were reaping their rewards. George, to Amelia’s soaring satisfaction, had done his job well. The rest was up to her.