¶ The London “Daily Mail” had offered a handsome prize of ten thousand pounds for the first successful dash across the Atlantic Ocean. Having this as a powerful incentive, two intrepid flyers, Major Harry G. Hawker and Commander K. Mackenzie Grieve, were striving to be the first to span this dangerous trail with a non-stop flight. ¶ On the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1919, while the populace of Newfoundland’s capital were sunk in slumber, these two men trundled forth their frail Sopwith biplane and launched it over the turbulent sea, a desert of water that would menace them for thousands of miles. According to available records, they soon had the ill fortune to be caught in a series of storms. In Hawker’s own story of the flight, he states that after these will-o-the-wisp squalls had been overcome, the cooling system began to clog. In a few moments, the temperature of the water spurted to the boiling point. ¶ By diving quickly several times, Hawker managed to free the flow momentarily, but this expedient soon proved useless as the trouble became more acute. With its cooling agency crippled, the engine balked. Hawker declared that when the motor had gone dead, they suffered some nerve-racking seconds as the sea came toward them at a smashing speed. ¶ But Grieve climbed to the forward part of the ship, near the gasoline tank, and furiously worked to bring life back to the stilled engine. Despite Hawker’s best efforts to check the fall, they were dropping steadily and, according to his statement, were but twenty feet above the sea when the cylinders spluttered. Only ten feet when the motor took up its full load again. ¶ Knowing that their only hope was to sight a vessel, they searched frantically for one through the gathering dusk. At last when things seemed rather bleak, a Danish freighter, the “Mary,” was espied by the anxious airmen and after twelve hundred arduous miles of flying, they landed to be rescued by this good Samaritan of the sea. ¶ Soon after, another team of aviators, Alcock and Brown, took off from the same soil, and sixteen hours from Newfoundland, they were circling over Clifden, on the west coast of Ireland. Many a son of Erin’s Sabbath peace was rudely shattered as this great Vickers-Vimy bomber came droning out of the sky to bury its nose deep in an Irish bog. The “Daily Mail” prize of ten thousand pounds was theirs, and an appropriate trophy, commemorating this feat, was also presented to Alcock and Brown. ¶ Others still followed the path of the North Atlantic, even though the incentive of the prize money had been removed. Admiral Sir Mark Kerr, Captain Boyd, Chamberlain and Levine, and De Pinedo were but a few of those who followed in the wake of the triumphant Alcock.