The Maiden Voyage

LV

The Hindenburg's "Maiden Voyage" was not her maiden voyage.

 

A magazine article about the Hindenburg's "non-maiden voyage" to Rio

In reality, no "maiden voyages" really are maiden voyages. Just as no new car ever comes with an odometer set to zero, no new ship has ever been put into passenger service without shakedown flights. The Hindenburg, which first left its hangar on March 11, 1936, had many such flights, and propaganda flights, and even a transatlantic passenger crossing to Rio de Janeiro between March 31st and April 4th, before she set sail for New York on May 6th. But since the Sunset Run to New York was her primary route, the flight to New York is considered her "first" flight. 

Passengers bound for New York who arrived at the gleaming new Frankfurt airship port on May 6th were amazed at her size, especially in comparison to the Graf Zeppelin so many knew so well. The Hindenburg was --- and still is --- the largest aircraft ever to fly. At 804 feet long she was fourteen feet longer than the still-operating passenger liner Mauretania of 1907. At a top speed of 85 miles per hour she could easily outrace the twenty-two time Blue Riband winner's top speed of 27.4 mph. At 135 feet in diameter, a passenger standing beside her would experience the same sense of size and mass as a passenger looking at the Mauretania from waterline to funnel top. 

The Hindenburg passing the Brooklyn Bridge on May 9, 1936 prior to landing at Lakehurst at the end of the Maiden Voyage.

Access to the Hindenburg was not via a cabin door in the gondola but through ramplike companionways, port and starboard, that dropped down from the hull itself. Passenger luggage too was handled by a freight elevator that lowered itself out of the hull and then raised itself back up, invisibly, "into the belly of the beast" as someone joked. 

Baggage was handled by Hamburg-Amerika skycaps who approached passengers deferentially to ask them their last names --- after all, the passengers on the Hindenburg were paying $400 for a one-way ticket, $750 for a round-trip fare. It was less than a top First Class ticket on the Mauretania, but only just. 

"Charteris," answered a slender man of 28, who was becoming world famous as the creator of The Saint.  The skycap slapped a sticker sporting a large "C" on Charteris' luggage. Alphabetical loading helped with organizing the cargo. 

Some names were tougher. Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, who seemed to be on every airship flight, gave her name, and after some thought, the skycap affixed an "H" sticker on her bags. "I'd've used a 'D'," one of his fellows said, and this sparked a lively debate among the ground crew. 

A luggage sorting sticker just like the one pasted to Lady Drummond-Hay's bags

A few passengers asked for Dr. Eckener. He was already aboard, not skippering this flight, but overseeing every aspect of it. It was "his" ship, and his presence alone inspired confidence, especially since there were rumors --- accurate ones --- that Captain Ernst Lehmann had damaged the ship on one of her earlier cruises.  

The passenger list was made up primarily of Americans and Germans with a few Britons, a Frenchman or two, and a Soviet citizen aboard. Leslie Charteris, one of the English passengers, might have invented The Saint but his wife Pauline would become renowned for inventing the house drink of the Hindenburg. It was a long flight east, fully 61 hours and 40 minutes. When the vodka ran out on the day prior to reaching New York, she eschewed a gin martini ("Gin makes me sin," she explained) in favor one one made with Kirschwasser --- Cherry Schnapps. It became known simply as a "Hindenburg." The bartender, not to be outdone, also invented a drink, a presumably powerful concoction named for the ship's engines, the "Maybach 12," but no one ever wrote down the recipe and so it is lost to history.  

 

Pauline Charteris' popular "Hindenburg" cocktail of cherry schnapps with a dash of vermouth

By far the hardest part of boarding was getting past the German Customs Agents who always seemed to think the passengers --- however wealthy --- were smuggling heroin. Some of the passengers remarked that the Customs men had become more dour since the rise of Adolf Hitler. In response, other passengers placed a warning finger to their lips. Such criticism was muted, as were remarks about the swastikas and the portraits of the Fuhrer, both of which were everywhere, even on the ship's tail. Depending on one's sensibilities, they were all you saw or you didn't see them at all, they'd become so ubiquitous. 

In any event, politics was a dangerous subject that could get you banned from the Third Reich. And you never really knew who your dinner companions were. Everyone assumed (and it was true) that agents of the Gestapo and the Abwehr (German Intelligence) were salted among the crew and passengers, just listening for anti-Nazi blasphemies.