The History and Romance of Air Mail Stamps — John Shaqi
The History and Romance of Air Mail StampsBruechig, Emil
History
The History and Romance of Air Mail Stamps
Bruechig, Emil
Air mail stamps
¶ All these pioneering flights, with their attendant narratives of death
and danger, are recorded on the air mail stamps of Newfoundland. The
’planes they used, and the routes the fliers followed are pictured for
all time on these mute bits of postal paper.
¶ After Lindbergh had made his Atlantic voyage, he hopped off on his
famous Pan-American tour. And as he flew from country to country, he
left behind a trail of philatelic mementos of this venture. Costa Rica,
Panama, and Cuba, to mention but a few countries, issued special stamps
to honor his visits.
¶ Exploration, too, has been immeasurably aided by the airplane and one
case in point is the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition of 1925, a polar trip
which has been chronicled by a Norwegian set of air mail stamps.
¶ Their journey started on the afternoon of May 21, 1925, when two
Dornier-Wal flying-boats rose from the waters of Kings Bay, Spitzbergen,
and headed for the North Pole. With motors roaring in unison, the flight
got under way auspiciously.
¶ After traversing six hundred miles, the navigators calculated that
their position should be directly above the North Pole, but a strong
wind had been blowing, which had driven them unawares over a hundred
miles off their course.
¶ In landing their ships, however, through the jagged fissures of open
ice, both ’planes were damaged. Amundsen, Ellsworth and the crew
realized that their only hope of salvation lay in repairing at least one
of the ships. A couple of weeks passed before this task was
accomplished, and only completed in that length of time through almost
superhuman endeavor.
¶ To effect a take-off, a smooth plateau of ice had to be found and
small scouting parties discovered a large floe for this purpose, but it
was a half mile from their ’plane. And between that broad field of ice
and the Dornier-Wal, there rose a high ridge, and a bit further on, a
deep chasm gouged across the trail.
¶ But to this handful of men, necessity was a taskmaster that bade them
conquer all the hazards that an angry Arctic hurled against them. With
nothing but primitive tools, Amundsen’s party hacked a passage through
the fifteen-foot thickness of the ice-ridge, a passage wide enough to
accommodate the great wing-span of their craft.
¶ At last, all perils were overcome and the crew piled into the ship,
dumping every unnecessary article from the ’plane to lighten the load.
The motors were started. With a surge the ship moved forward—it
bumped—it swayed—it traveled 300 meters—then 400—and at last it tore
itself from the ice and flew!
¶ That evening the adventurers were picked up by a cruising steamer and
returned safely to their homeland—leaving another Arctic adventure
behind them.
¶ And so we can see, in a never-ending panorama, the story of flight on
air mail stamps. Twenty-eight hundred stamps have been issued,
approximately, and one by one they add color and zest to this
adventurous story.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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