The NC-1 with Bellinger and his crew was picked up on the morning of Saturday, May 17th, by a Greek steamer, the _Ionia_, and brought into Horta. Towers with the NC-3 tossed about for nearly sixty hours at sea and was not picked up until the following Monday, when the public had begun to fear for his safety. On Tuesday, May 20th, the NC-4 hopped off for the shortest leg of the flight, 150 miles from Horta to Ponta Delgada, where the fuel and supplies for the machines were. With favoring winds at her back, and with the lightest load she had carried, she covered the distance in one hour and forty-four minutes, an average speed of 86.7 nautical miles an hour, or more than 99 land miles. This was a new record for the seaplanes on the ocean flight. Meanwhile Harry G. Hawker and Lieut.-Commander Mackenzie Grieve, the Sopwith team waiting so long at St. John's for a chance to fly, stimulated in their daring attempt by reports of American successes at the Azores, took-off on their flight straight across on the afternoon of Sunday, May 18th. All through that night he flew, when his engine began to give signs of overheating, due to a clogged water-filter. Early the next morning, about half-way across, Hawker decided that there was no chance to make the land, and began looking through the fog for a chance for a safe landing. By zigzagging on the steamship courses for about two hours, with his engine hot but running well, he picked up the Danish steamer _Mary_, and pancaked on the water about two miles ahead of her. Because the little tramp steamer had no wireless, the world was kept waiting a week, before word was signaled to land that Hawker and Grieve were safe. With the Sopwith team out of the race, it became evident that Commander Read and the NC-4 would actually win the honors for the first flight. On the morning of May 27th he started over his well-patrolled course of eight hundred miles, and, after a little less than ten hours of flight, brought his machine into the harbor before Lisbon, Portugal. Americans had crossed the ocean in the air, and the enthusiastic Portuguese capital turned out to do them every honor. Read, however, rather than linger, pushed on again May 30th, in the midst of the celebration for his triumph on the last leg of his course to Plymouth, seven hundred and seventy-five nautical miles. Engine trouble, the first since the machine had left Chatham, developed, and at the end of two hours he was forced to land at the mouth of the Mondego River, about a hundred miles on his way. The trouble was a water leak. It was quickly repaired, and he started again, but decided to put up at Ferrol, Spain, two hundred miles farther on the course, for the night.