"We Are Glad To Be Here."

CLXXXI

The World in 1937, showing air and sea routes. Note that New Zealand appears on the map twice

Things seemed to improve. 

The reception given to the Pan American Clipper II in Pago Pago easily rivaled the excitement that had erupted when the original Pan American Clipper had first reached Guam in 1935. The Samoans didn’t even care that the Pan American Clipper II didn’t have a single piece of mail for them; most Samoans had no mainland connections anyway. 

But the crowds were incredible. It seemed that every Samoan had found their way over to Pago Pago to have a look at the Clipper in the bay. Estimates were that the crowds exceeded the population of Tutuila, the main island. And of course the crew was feted by the Territorial Governor and his staff, and entertained with native Samoan dancing. Yes, it was Guam all over again. It made Ed wonder if their reception in Auckland would be anything like the Clipper’s reception in Manila.  

The flag of New Zealand, adopted 1902, was the first national flag to include the stars of the Southern Cross

They would soon find out. The Pan American Clipper II  lifted off from Pago Pago, headed south for Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, 1,797 miles away. It arrived there on the 29^th of March, 1937, at 9:03 A.M., just three minutes behind its estimated schedule.

As the Clipper overflew Auckland prefatory to landing, Frank Briggs uttered an exclamation. Every spot along the city’s waterfront was black with people. 30,000 crammed the docking area on the shore of Mechanics’ Bay alone. It was the largest turn-out Ed Musick would ever see.

 

The reason was simple: Ed and his crew had broken the lonely archipelago’s long history of geographic isolation. New Zealand’s nearest geographic neighbors are small Pacific islands some 600 miles to the northwest. Australia is more than twice that far. As nations go, New Zealand has the shortest history of human habitation anywhere --- the Maori people, a Polynesian group, arrived in New Zealand around 1300 C.E. British Europeans followed relatively not long after, around 1650, and the country was officially colonized by Great Britain in 1840. To the south there is nothing but Antarctica.

New Zealand today

The arrival of the Clipper changed New Zealand forever, bringing it fully into the family of nations. The Clipper’s reception in Auckland far exceeded anything that Ed Musick had seen before, even the celebration and official holiday of festive, noisy Manila with its swarms of well-wishers and hero-worshipers. Ed and his crew soon found out that stalwart Kiwis had traveled from South Island and from the Out Islands just to be where the Clipper was, to be part of the history of their lonely island nation. Grateful New Zealanders renamed the arm of land that separated Mechanics’ Bay from the South Pacific. They still call it Musick Point.

Musick Point in Auckland NZ

Ed was led to a reviewing stand and to a microphone amid a crush of humanity. Asked for a few words, a clearly overwhelmed Musick reverted to character and gave everybody “a few words,” indeed: 

“We are glad to be here.”

The crowd erupted in cheers.

“We are glad to be here.”

The 1937 flight of the Pan American Clipper II had unexpected consequences. Even more so than the pioneering flights of the Alameda-to-Hong Kong route, the long isolated flight of the Pan American Clipper II to Auckland seemed to prove to everyone but the most inflexible naysayers that flying vast distances was a safe, even routine, endeavor, not a stunt. Aviation had reached its childhood’s end a decade after Lindbergh.  

The Pan American Clipper II got a hero’s welcome in Auckland Harbor

It was personally, professionally, and remuneratively gratifying to Juan Trippe that the adolescence and adulthood of aviation had Pan American Airways writ large on the side of its best aircraft.. Just as importantly, the flight changed the trajectory of New Zealand’s relationship to the rest of the British Empire. Always something of a red-headed stepchild, New Zealand, though peopled largely by Britons, had usually been treated as an Imperial afterthought, Australia’s appendix, as it were. The Clipper’s appearance in its skies, flying the American flag, tilted New Zealand out of its British orbit and into the American orbit, at least in international affairs, a relationship that has lasted nearly a century. The shift of New Zealand toward “the Colonials” finally caused British intransigence over the North Atlantic route to crack --- Provision H was finally junked as London came to realize that its far-flung Imperial possessions wanted contact with the rest of the world, not just an All-Red Route. American hegemony in the air was just what the master of Pan Am had wanted all along.  Juan Trippe was finally about to get his plum.

Although there was no mail carried aboard the Pan American Clipper II, a number of prominent philatelists, including President F.D. Roosevelt, reserved and received special First Day Covers franked in Auckland. These are among the rarest of stamp collectors’ fondest dreams. Note Ed Musick’s signature