"Strangers in a strange land."

CCXXXIII

Modern Lae has the busiest docks in Papua-New Guinea and is the nation’s industrial hub, but it is also a city of beachfront condos and trendy boutiques and restaurants

In its beginnings the town of Lae was a Papuan fishing village. It became an important missionary center during the period when Germany colonized northeastern New Guinea, and when the British-Australian colonial government took over control of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, they set about making Lae into a modern port city. An ambitious plan to dredge the harbor, build an aerodrome, and develop a modern infrastructure was begun in 1921 and was singularly successful. By the time Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan arrived at Lae on June 29, 1937, it was a bustling small metropolis. The discovery of gold and other minerals in the region in the 1920s had made Lae rich, and it had many Australo-British residents, all of whom dwelt on the east end of town near the waterfront. The native residents lived inland to the west.

Earhart and Noonan were of course most concerned with the airport, which was modern and fully-equipped. They needed it to be. Their next hop, from Lae to Howland Island, was a bruising flight of 2,563 overwater miles that would take nineteen hours. While not the longest hop of the Worldflight* it was the most technically challenging, carrying them over a vast stretch of untraversed ocean. Their arrival point was a two mile long coral rock covered in bird guano and scrub grass that rose barely ten feet above sea level. This flat, unwelcoming and tiny place would be easy to miss, a colorless gray-green sandpile in the midst of a huge gray-green blue ocean. The hardy colonists had built a day beacon, a radio tower, and a landing strip, but navigating the distance would tax Fred Noonan’s otherworldly skill set to its limits. Unlike the anticipated Howland-to-Honolulu hop, they wouldn’t have a powerful set of commercial radio signals to lock in on to carry them home. Unlike the now well-worn homestretch path between Honolulu and Oakland, familiar waters to both, there wasn’t the security blanket of the Lurline and other sea lane traffic or the comforting near presence of the China Clippers in the sky to rely on if they had trouble with the Electra. The Lae-to-Howland hop was oceana incognita.

During World War II, most of Papua-New Guinea except for a small area around Port Moresby was seized by the Japanese who used the harbor and airport facilities at Lae to defend the Solomon Islands against American Marines. This photo, taken by a U.S. Army Air Corps reconnaissance plane, shows the runway at Lae as it looked in 1943

Given the public’s fascination with Amelia Earhart’s disappearance (second perhaps only to the sinking of the Titanic) every possible aspect of the layover in Lae, her last successful staging stop, has been examined, analyzed, deconstructed and debated, and probably will continue to be forever. Speculation swirls around what A.E. and Noonan ate and drank in Lae, what equipment was aboard the Electra when they arrived and departed, how much fuel and oil the plane was carrying at its last liftoff, how much they slept while on the ground, whether they were arguing or comradely, the air temperature at liftoff, the condition of the radio and whether Amelia knew how to use it, and the quality of the charts Noonan had available, among every other possible detail.

The Electra taxiing at Lae. Was this photo taken on arrival on June 29^th at 2 P.M., or on July 2, upon departure, or was it a photo of the plane warming up or stepping down from a test flight on July 1^st?

Of her arrival at Lae, Amelia wrote:

After a flight of seven hours and forty-three minutes from Port Darwin, Australia, against head winds as usual, my Electra now rests on the shores of the Pacific . . . [T]he waters stretch into the distance. Somewhere beyond the horizon lies California. Twenty-two thousand miles have been covered so far. There are 7,000 to go [all over the Pacific Ocean].

From Darwin we held a little north of east, cutting across the Wellington Hills on the northern coast of Arnhem Land, which is the topmost region of Australia’s Northern Territory. The distance to Lae was about 1,200 miles. Perhaps two-thirds of it was over water . . .

Midway to New Guinea the sea is spotted with freakish islands, stony fingers pointing towards the sky sometimes for hundreds of feet. We had been told the clouds often hang low over this region and it was better to climb above its hazardous minarets than to run the risks of dodging them . . . [A] high mountain range stretches the length of New Guinea from northwest to southeast . . .  [I]t was necessary to clamber over the divide to reach Lae . . . As the journey progressed we gradually increased our altitude to more than 11,000 feet . . . Even at that, above us towered cumulus turrets, mushrooming miraculously and cast into endless designs by the lights and shadows of the lowering sun. It was a fairy-story sky country, peopled with grotesque cloud creatures who eyed us with ancient wisdom as we threaded our way through its shining white valleys. But  . . . that was healthier than playing hide-and-seek with unknown mountains of terra firma below . . . strangers in a strange land.

In 1937, Amelia Earhart learned what Allied bomber and fighter pilots were to learn about the island of New Guinea just half a decade later: “If there’s a cloud in the sky there’s a mountain inside it.”

*A.E. and Noonam never made the longest hop, the 3,100-mile flight from Howland to Hawaii