Famous Flyers and Their Famous FlightsWright, Jack
History
Famous Flyers and Their Famous Flights
Wright, Jack
Adventure stories; Aeronautics -- Juvenile fiction; Air pilots -- Juvenile fiction; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile fiction
“On Sunday morning they left Moose Factory, for their 750 mile jump to
Churchill Harbor, in Manitoba. The weather wasn’t very good for
flying—gray and stormy, and the country was gray and flat. All in all,
it wasn’t a very pleasant leg of their journey, and there was almost
nine hours of it. I’ll bet they were glad when they flew into Churchill
Harbor, and saw the whole town waiting for them. There were only 2,000
people in the town, but then, that probably looked like a pretty big
crowd after all that flying over country without seeing anybody or
anything. And those 2,000 made up for it by being awfully noisy.
“Baker Lake is 375 miles from Churchill, and that was the next stop.
Just three and a quarter hours after they’d left Churchill Harbor, they
got into Baker Lake. Everybody was waiting for them, and everybody in
this case was made up of Eskimos. There are only about six white people
in the whole place, but they were out, too, and took charge of the
Lindberghs when they landed that night. So far so good.
“The Lockheed up to now was working perfectly—the trip was going off as
scheduled—just as all of Slim’s trips go off as scheduled. From Baker
Lake the going was to be harder. The next stop was Aklavik, on the
MacKenzie River. Aklavik is pretty far north, just about 130 miles
within the Arctic Circle, and the route called for a jump of over 1,000
miles across this cold country. But Slim and Anne made it. They did that
1,000 miles in eleven and a half hours, which was some going. They had
the Aurora Borealis with them, because the farther north they went, the
brighter the lights grew, and flying at night was as easy as flying by
day.
“Aklavik may be cold, but it was warm to the Lindberghs. Slim and Anne
saw a lot of things they’d never seen before, and they had what you’d
call their first real taste of the arctic. There were all the people you
read about up there—Mounties, and Eskimos and fur trappers, who’d
trekked in from miles around to see the Lindberghs land. Eskimo kids
trailed them around and grinned when they were spoken to.
“They had a lot of time to look around, too, because they had to stay at
Aklavik for three days. The weather grounded them, but on August 7th,
the sky cleared, and they were off again, now for Point Barrow. Nome was
next. But before they got to Nome there was trouble.
“They’d started out from the Point in the morning, and flew all day. All
they saw was packed ice for miles around. A thick fog was raising.
Finally at 11 o’clock that night the fog grew so thick that the Colonel
and his wife thought it would be best just to sit down and wait for the
fog to clear. So that’s what they did. They sat down in Shismaref Bay,
on Kotzebue Sound.”
At this point Bob paused significantly, and waited. He had pronounced
both words without hesitation of any kind, and he was waiting for the
praise that he felt was due him. There was a strange silence. So Bob
said again: “They sat down on Shismaref Bay, on Kotzebue Sound.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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