One Summer: America, 1927 Read Online Free PDF

and relief shining on her cheeks.
    Soon, however, it emerged that the two news stories were not justmistaken but sadly imaginary. Nungesser and Coli had not arrived in New York at all. They were in fact missing and feared lost.
    An enormous ocean manhunt swung into action at once. Naval ships were dispatched and merchant vessels instructed to keep a sharp lookout. The navy dirigible USS Los Angeles was ordered to search from the air. The passenger liner France , en route to New York from Le Havre, received instructions from the French government to take a more northerly course than normal, despite the risk of icebergs, in the hope of coming across the floating White Bird. At Roosevelt Field, Rodman Wanamaker offered $25,000 to anyone who could find the missing aviators dead or alive.
    For a day or so people clung to the hope that Nungesser and Coli would at any moment putter triumphantly into view, but every passing hour counted against them, and now the weather, already grim, turned dire. Dense fog settled over the eastern Atlantic and blanketed the North American seaboard from Labrador to the mid-Atlantic states. At Ambrose Light, a floating lighthouse off the mouth of New York Harbor, the keeper reported that thousands of birds, lost on their annual migration north, were sheltering bleakly on every surface they could cling to. At Sandy Hook, New Jersey, four searchlights endlessly but pointlessly swept the skies, their beams unable to penetrate the enshrouding murk. In Newfoundland, temperatures plunged and a light snow fell.
    Unaware that the fliers had jettisoned reserve supplies at the last moment, commentators noted that Nungesser and Coli had packed enough food to sustain them for weeks, and that their plane was designed to stay afloat indefinitely. (It wasn’t.) Many people took hope from the fact that two years earlier an American aviator, Commander John Rodgers, and three crewmen spent nine days floating in the Pacific, presumed dead, before being rescued by a submarine after failing to fly from California to Hawaii.
    Rumors now put Nungesser and Coli all over the place—in Iceland, in Labrador, scooped from the sea by any of several passing ships. Three people in Ireland reported seeing them, which gave some people heart while others reflected that three sightings was not many in a nation ofthree million. Sixteen people in Newfoundland, mostly in or around Harbour Grace, reported hearing or seeing a plane, though none could give a positive identification, and other, similar reports drifted in from Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, and as far south as Port Washington, Long Island.
    A Canadian trapper came in with a message signed by Nungesser, but on examination the message proved to be suspiciously illiterate and in a hand quite unlike Nungesser’s but very like the trapper’s own. Messages in bottles were found, too, and were still turning up as late as 1934. The one thing that wasn’t found was any trace of the White Bird or its occupants.
    In France a rumor circulated that the U.S. Weather Bureau had withheld crucial information from the Frenchmen, to keep the advantage with the American fliers. Myron Herrick, the American ambassador, cabled Washington that an American flight at this time would be unwise.
    It was altogether a wretched week for French aviation. At the same time as Nungesser and Coli’s flight from Le Bourget, another ambitious French flight—now forgotten by the rest of the world and hardly noticed even then—got under way when three aviators, Pierre de Saint-Roman, Hervé Mouneyres, and Louis Petit, took off from Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, and headed for Brazil. When just 120 miles from the Brazilian coast, they radioed the happy news that they would be arriving in just over an hour, or so a correspondent for Time magazine reported. That was the last anyone ever heard from them. No wreckage was ever found.
    In nine months, eleven people had died in the quest to fly the