CCVIII
Amelia
Earhart and Fred Noonan arrived in Dakar, French West Africa (now Senegal) on
June 8, 1937. Their arrival marked the beginning of the third stage of the
Worldflight, the journey across Africa. It also marked the first time that they
would be leaving Pan American Airways’ international airspace.
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Dakar,
French West Africa, in 1937
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Having left what might be
considered familiar territory, Earhart decided to become cautious. She chose to
lay over at Senegal for nearly a full two days of time. A broken fuel gauge was
replaced and the fuel lines flushed. The Radio Direction Finder, which had been
giving Fred and Amelia some intermittent trouble, was fixed. The engines
received a thorough 40-hour overhaul even though their last overhaul had been
in Fortaleza, and she’d flown only about half those hours since. But French
West Africa was literally a terra
incognita within which a forced landing could be deadly even under the best
of conditions.
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The Sahel
in 1937. Today, due to climate change and the expansion of the Sahara, the
Sahel is even more uninviting than this photograph promises
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The region over which the Lockheed
Electra was due to fly was known, then and now, as the Sahel, a long narrow
band of semi-arid brush country that stretches across the width of north
central Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Nile. Lying just
south of the vast Sahara Desert, The Sahel is a climatological transition zone
between the barrens of the Sahara and the savanna country of the Sudan region.
Historically, the Sahel was the
home of the great, decentralized Empire of Ghana and the vast Empire of Mali,
both of which existed before the year 1500, and throve before the Sahara
encroached upon them. They survived on trade, particularly the slave trade
between the Berbers and Moors in the north and the Guineans in the south, or
the Arabs and West Africans, east to west.
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Djinguereber Mosque, built in
1327 in the legendary but real metropolis of Timbuktu, Mali, was once one of the greatest
universities in the world. Timbuktu was renowned for its library which held
otherwise-nonexistent texts in Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese,
and other languages. Muslim extremists have tried to destroy the building
recently due to its cosmopolitan and multiculturally diverse history
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The indigenous people of the region
have always been semi-nomadic herders and horsemen, largely intolerant of
strangers. By the 19th Century, the French had colonized the whole
of western and central Africa, but French colonial power was mostly centered in
the few towns like Gao and Timbuktu, which had long ago been the great cities
of the Sahel’s empires. Many of the natives had never seen a European, much
less an aircraft. When Earhart and Noonan traversed this airspace, there was
little to see, even in the towns. The
bush was desolate, any given point deserted for years. Even the French military
maps of the region were exercises in creative guesswork over cartography.
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Amelia
dressed in native garb in Senegal
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Fred Noonan, who was used to
overflying the trackless and ever-changing Pacific found the Sahel to be “the
hardest navigating I had ever done.”
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Engine
maintenance in French West Africa, 1937
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Existing annotations to the charts
like, “Two trees spaced 400 yards apart mark the intersect of the 24th
Meridian” were more challenging than useful, especially when the two trees in
question were passed by overhead at 200 miles per hour, could be lost in glare,
or be rendered indistinguishable from the dun-colored earth during a noontime
sun.
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The Sahel
in the dry season
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