The Crossing Point

CCXIV

Somewhere, at an unknown spot along the Red Sea coastline, perhaps very near to the site of Assab itself, the first of our immediate human ancestors took his (or her) first step off the shore of the continent of Africa, and, in company with friends and family, half walked, half waded across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait that separates Africa from Arabia. The seas were shallower then, 125,000 years ago, with much of the free water of the world locked up in great ice sheets in the north. The ice-free lands were gentler then, more verdant, more welcoming.  Did Amelia Earhart reflect on this thought as she winged south from Massawa in the most modern machine that man was capable of constructing? 

Out of Africa: The Bab-el-Mandeb. Eritrea lies to the west, Saudi Arabia to the east, the Red Sea to the north and the Indian Ocean to the south.  100,000-plus years ago, the area was a semi-submerged land bridge, and Man crossed from one continent to another in the first migration that would eventually carry him to all corners of the earth

Italy came late to the idea of a unitary nationalism. It was not until 1870 that the last of the Papal States, Rome itself, was brought into the Italian federal state by Garibaldi, and hence Italy came late to the Scramble For Africa.* Its subsequent colonies, among them Cyrenaica And Tripoli (modern Libya), Italian Somaliland (modern Somalia), Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) and Eritrea (modern Eritrea) were far less rich in natural resources than the immense colonial holdings of France and the United Kingdom.** 

Africa in 1914 on the eve of World War I. Eventually, Italy would seize Ethiopia, the only independent nation of the continent, by force. In 1919, Britain and France would divvy up the colonies of a defeated and shamed Germany

The region that became the city of Assab was initially purchased from the local tribal leadership in 1869 by a consortium of Italian entrepreneurs who sought to build a resort community along the shore for expatriate Italians. The Italian government took over control of the Assab enclave in 1882, but the city itself wasn’t incorporated until 1890.  

The provinces of Italian East Africa in 1936

The Horn of Africa today

European Assab (Assab Seghir) was a pleasant place for the 5,000 or so mostly Italian permanent residents, a fair number of whom had been born in Assab. A few resort hotels spotted the beachfront for tourists, interspersed with faux-Florentine villas for the wealthier residents and charming seaside bungalows for the less affluent. Cafes and restaurants lined the main street. The port (Assab Kebir) was always busy. Native Eritreans lived inland in a ramshackle warren of sandy backroads (Campo Sudan). Most worked for the European residents and tourists and had access to clean water and electricity, luxuries unheard of in the hinterlands.

St. Michael’s Orthodox Church in Assab

As she overflew the lands surrounding Assab, Amelia took time to note that what lay beneath her was the first cultivated land she had seen since Dakar. The ordered greenness was welcome and very overdue.

A seaside view of Assab

Until the rise of Mussolini in 1922, the Italians governed with a light hand (despite several failed attempts to occupy Abyssinia by force, a plan which finally came to fruition in 1936, just a year before Earhart and Noonan arrived in Assab).  Beginning in 1936, the Fascist government cracked down on dissidents, particularly native dissidents, and began industrializing what they now called “Italian East Africa.” 

Refueling in Assab

Still, the Italian officials in Assab were studiously polite to Earhart the famous American aviatrix, and gave her every assistance. The fully-outfitted airport near Assab had a surfeit of high octane fuel and aviation oil, and the engines were carefully disassembled, checked, and reassembled without problems.

Engine maintenance at Assab. Note the absence of the cowling

Earhart’s insistence on a “40-hour maintenance schedule” every twenty hours or so might have seemed compulsive. Perhaps it was, but it is also fair to remember that the unpressurized Electra flew at fairly low altitudes over realms’ worth of sand, much of which was constantly in the atmosphere. The grit in the sky could not help but foul the plane’s fuel lines, and especially the oil reservoirs which would have attracted free-floating particles like magnets. If she was going to push on across Arabia, a full maintenancing of the plane beforehand wasn’t just wise, it was mandatory.

 

Assab in the early 1950s

Amelia and Fred also decided to lay over at pretty Assab. Just in the last week they had traversed the entire continent of Africa at nearly its widest point, a distance of well over 4,000 miles without more than a few hours rest. The next leg of their journey would carry them over 1,900 miles without an intermediate stop. Both were badly fatigued, and this may have contributed to complexifying an error. When she had left Massawa, her flight plan had read “Karachi” but she had neither bothered to inform the Massawa authorities nor contact George about the detour to Assab. She did not try to (or perhaps was unable to) contact George while she was in Assab, either, and so the plane was marked “Overdue” at Karachi. British authorities sprang into action trying to find the supposedly-downed Electra in the worst place imaginable, The Empty Quarter. It was considered a hopeless task.  Intense anxiety gripped the interested world. George had many sleepless hours. All the while, an oblivious Amelia and Fred were enjoying the famed hospitality of the Italians of Eritrea.

 

In a very posed shot, but with authentic smiles, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan study a chart together. Note that it covers the Pacific leg of their flight from Howland Island to Oakland, California

*Germany too, became one nation only in 1871, when the German Empire was declared at Versailles (by way of humiliating the French) in the aftermath of their victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Germany too, got only colonial leftovers in Africa and Asia. It is perhaps unsurprising that both nations relatively soon thereafter adopted a virulent form of racial nationalism in Fascism.

**The Italians eventually discovered vast oil reserves in Libya, but the destruction of the Fascist State in World War II and the subsequent stripping of its colonies by the Allies precluded Italy from ever benefiting directly from the discovered petroleum.