Atlantic Laboratory

I

TIME is up. The loud speaker is expelling firm round syllables from its electric throat.

‘Calling passengers for the Clipper! All aboard for Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, Canal Zone, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Argentine! All abo-o-o-o-ard!’

The words sting in our ears. Against this fabulous roll call of a continent, against adventure, what chance has a mere egg to hold the stage? We abandon breakfast without a second thought. Visions dance upon the air — pampas and leafless desert wilderness, jungles, the pure, cold spires of the majestic Andes. ‘ All abo-o-o-o-ard!‘

We sidle up the gangplank. Our shoes touch the yielding carpet of the empress of the air — the Clipper. The interior is one sumptuous shine. Lustre debouches from the woodwork, the ceiling, from the silk of forty-five upholstered chairs. We are a poor relation in our venerable traveling clothes.

Propellers whirr, four blinding spirals lashing at the air, flinging down a cataract of sound. . . . We are in the air, high over the toy parade of cars that crawls along the causeway for a Sunday at the yellow beach. The great hotels, so squat and undistinguished from this angle, pass beneath our keel. Some ragged lines of surf . . . and we head straight out over the smiling sea.

Breakfast in Miami — lunch in Cuba — dinner in Jamaica. Jules Verne would have recoiled before such a schedule. And to-day is but the warming up, the dress rehearsal for to-morrow, when we shall span the longest oversea hop in the world for passengers and mail — Jamaica to Barranquilla, on the far-off northern rim of South America.

Our spirits soar with the altitude, and at the prospect of two thousand miles of sea awaiting us — the rich and raucous Caribbean. For a magic instant we are transformed. We are Lindbergh; or we are Cook; or we are swashbucklers, adventuring with Long John Silver through a chapter of forgotten schoolroom fiction. Our eyes are on the cloudless curve of the horizon to the south — our course is to the tropics.

The members of the crew reflect another mood. They are as unemotional as the interior of a watch. The pilots are invisible up in the cockpit; the purser is concentrating on documents which will ensure our clearance out of foreign ports. Forward, we can just see the radio operator scribbling on a pad, earphones sinking a little groove across his hair. The flight mechanic is coming down the aisle, cocking his head to catch the blended engine note. His hair is gray, his horn-rimmed glasses give an expression most benign. A pontifical figure, one that we find hard at first to reconcile with the care and welfare of more than two thousand horses raging on the wings. He offers us a gentle, church-door smile and strolls back to the bow, pleased with his Sabbath progress at two miles a minute.

Land has vanished. The last dark pencil line of Florida has slipped behind. We are embalmed, like a small insect in a limpid bowl of blue. The sky is flawless. Here and there a reef formation stamps a purple patch beneath the sea. The reefs string out toward the Bahamas. Eastward, over the horizon, lies the island where, more than four centuries ago, Columbus first set foot on land in the New World. San Salvador, or Holy Saviour, he christened it. For a while our fancy plays around the picture of that little caravel, questing in this lovely but deceiving sea the Indies of Marco Polo as a gift for Isabella.

II

Land comes gradually into view again. The water is shallower, the color more intense. We roar past an outlying lighthouse ... a few islands . . . and now our shadow, lightly as a dragon fly, chases a ong the palmdecked checkerboard of Cuba. The roads are threads of red, woven across vivid green. Small farms and huts are strewn like breadcrumbs in between the palms. Thatched roofs . . . tobacco fields . . . sugar . . . the lumbering progress of a bullock cart.

We bump along on the hot air for half an hour, crossing the slender waistline of the island, until we meet the sea again. We lose height, circle, swing down low over the harbor. Tang! We strike, flinging back rainbow spray, panicking fish, exulting like a schoolboy in our speed and power and style. Before us is the quay of Cienfuegos. We taxi alongside. The hatch slides back. We greet the Caribbean.

The Customhouse of stone is cool and welcoming, and echoes with lilting Spanish. Roses in yellow vases are blushing on the baggage counter. A uniformed official plucks one from a bowl and yields it, smiling, to the lady passenger, while we, diverted, entertain a thought of Ellis Island rosily reblooming under the influence of Latin chivalry.

Lunch is spread on trestle tables. Iced beer is pressed upon us while the minutes tick relentlessly along, checked by the captain. Lunch disappears. The lady passenger is happily aware that she has the attention of the port. We know a pang, a pity that so natural an art must dissipate itself on one who, after all, is destined to depart in thirty minutes. . . .

III

The air is cool and pleasant at a thousand feet. Lazily we watch the mountained coast of Cuba, a bluegreen panorama, scalloped with curving bays and fluted headlands. We wing contentedly along.

Now we are over open sea again. Cuba is out of sight, and all the world immaculately blue. Schools of flying fish spring from their sapphire caves, skim, glint, dive, and are lost again, ephemeral and lovely as a legend. We fall into a reverie, and from the reverie fall asleep.

The purser sits beside us and we wake from the pursuit of dream fish with a jolt. He points. Clouds, in the dying flare of afternoon, patch the horizon. Jamaica? The purser nods.

Jamaica. Peaks, alpine summits, pinnacles, mountains that sway down wildly to the sea. Nothing is flat. Nothing is even reasonably sloped. The smallest fields reel down the mountain sides at cubist angles, and shacks and houses list alarmingly. The last range opens as abruptly as a pair of gardening shears, forming a triangle with the cloud roof above. We slip through the gap. The bow falls. We glide down over Spanish Town and Kingston and come to rest on the enameled surface of a lagoon.

An evening in long wicker armchairs, under a ring of glistening cocoa palms. The moon is full and opulent. The silver-plated waves steal to the beach in rivulets of light. The crescent fronds, like shining scimitars, quiver and whisper in the trade winds’ breath. . . .

Ice tinkles a reminder of an empty glass.

‘Boy!’

Another minute and we are again in converse with Calliope, upheld by the pronounced poetic influence of old Jamaica rum. . . . The night is complete.

IV

Breakfast under the stars, and Negroes with Oxonian accents dispensing coffee, which, we note at the first shuddering gulp, is entirely as British as the accent. Our fellow Argonauts are dour. A look of loathing greets attempts at conversation.

We drive through Kingston, where the streets, though dark, are not inactive at this early hour. People are about. Native women, tall and supple, balance enormous bundles on their heads. Men are off to work on bicycles. Shops are open. We drive past churches that are open, too, bright altars shedding light into the shadowed town. The bare feet move so noiselessly, the scene is so unreal after the cheerful hubbub of Miami, that we are put in mind of misty figures gliding into position on a stage. Our headlights fall on cactus hedges and trim roads; all — even the wild hibiscus, the unruly palms — conforms to the neat pattern of a British colony.

The alien asphalt ceases. We turn off on a coral track that leads to the lagoon. The deck house on the raft hums with activity. Cargo, baggage, bills of lading, ocean clearances, passports. Cameras to be sealed. Port officers, immaculate in whites and topees, work by the flickering light of oil lamps. But it is dawn already. In the distance twinkle the red and green navigation lights of the Clipper.

She turns toward us, emerges in the Pennell manner, steel-cut against the fire-colored sunrise. The raft rocks as she roars by, the thunder echoes to the mountain tops.

We gaze at the historic heights. Cloud-capped as now, they must have looked down on the scummy wooden hulls of Morgan and of Blackbeard, have seen the ornate bows of Spanish prizes big with loot. What testimony could they not reveal, what documents of passion, courage, treachery?

The Clipper rushes by again, still warming up. The past is dead; even the action of to-day is but in preparation for to-morrow. For when air history is written the Caribbean will go down as the training school, the Alma Mater, of the future superflights across the oceans.

One bell — crew aboard. Two bells — passengers. Next stop, South America, across the Spanish Main.

V

We are off! We move, a trivial pin prick on a giant chart, across five hundred miles of open sea. Small beer, perhaps, to a transatlantic airman, yet in a measure we shall duplicate his first few hours of flight. Navigation, wind estimation, course and position, must be worked out in the same way. If there develops the smallest hindrance in the flow of fuel, if one of our four engines sounds the merest trace of asthma, it will be dealt with as carefully as if Le Bourget were indeed our goal, not Barranquilla.

Not even an isolated freighter is in sight. Not a buoy, a bird, not even driftwood — nothing to overtake and prove to us that we are really making speed. The eye flounders over unnumbered leagues of sea. There is a wind. We do not feel it in the comfort of the cabin, but down below we see the whitecaps riding on the waves. It is hard to gauge our height. Our eyes balk anew, deprived of some familiar object, some measuring stick to fix our calculations. Are they big waves far away, or are they small waves close beneath? Are we a hundred or a thousand feet above the Caribbean?

We take the chart and notice that our little pencil track of progress has arrived at the edge of Bartlett Deep. Five miles of jet-black depths, almost the bottom of the world. What unimaginable monsters grope their way down there along the buried shore line of Atlantis, nightmare creations to upset even a Beebe in his bathysphere?

And right across our course lies the old sea lane of the Plate Fleet, homeward-bound for Cadiz, laden with treasures from the Aztec and Incan empires. This was the route Cortez took, and Hawkins and Balboa. Here, too, passed the shipments, the first cargoes bought and paid for in blood.

Gold moidores! Even the syllables are rich, romantic. The purser shakes his head. He regrets that such shipments have passed out of fashion with the times. Still, if we would care to walk aft and see his cargo —?

The cargo compartment is behind the smoking lounge. Burlap bags, crates, cardboard cases. Samples of cold cream going to Buenos Aires. Machine parts tagged for Santiago de Chile. Silk stockings and a lingerie shipment for Bogotá. Surgical instruments, a set of X-ray tubes, and drugs for Panama. A feature picture to be shown in the shadow of Pizarro’s tomb in Lima. Gramophone records. Typewriter ribbons. Cigars. Telephone diaphragms for Mendoza.

Case after assorted case, an average Clipper cargo. Nothing on the prosaic face of it to stop old Harry Morgan in his tracks and train his long bow-chaser at our hull. Walk the plank for a typewriter ribbon — who ever heard of such a thing? And yet some of these humble cargoes, for the most part samples, will circulate in the great world of business more millions than were dreamed of in the philosophy of piracy. That small case of engineering plans alone involves a twenty-milliondollar contract. The jars of cold cream may be traveling expensively, but the manufacturer in New Jersey knows what he is about. He will outcampaign his French competitor, getting his samples into Buenos Aires and taking his order weeks before the boat from Marseilles is in sight.

The rows of bulging mail sacks pick up other names, — Maracaibo, Guayaquil, Port of Spain, Trujillo, Antofagasta, Montevideo, Arequipa, Buenaventura, La Paz, Mollendo, — tentacles of Uncle Sam’s business reaching into more than thirty countries. Not only is the great network over which the sacks will fly owned and run by Americans, but it has brought us infinitely closer to the six billions of United States dollars — more than half the war debts — now invested in South America. The field is now days instead of weeks away, and so much easier to keep an eye on.

We return to our seats. How many political speakers, we wonder, making how many political speeches, would be required to stimulate the business of this one trip of ours? And how many bad bond issues might have been avoided if the republics had been four instead of thirty days away?

VI

Ahead of the ship appears a bank of vivid purple, like a bruise against the sky — a tropic rainstorm. As we approach, it draws out, widens across the sea. A scarcely perceptible pressure on the rudder, and we swerve a little, leaving it to one side. Momentarily a complete rainbow encircles us, a Brocken light wrapping us in unearthly radiance. It passes. All is serene again.

The purser brings a note from the captain. We are privileged to walk up front and peek through the door of the control room. The circular sweep of glass is like a big bow window, giving an unobstructed view ahead. In the cockpit, the bridge of this sky liner, the captain sits on the port side; the co-pilot, with the dual controls, to starboard. The dashboard is a staggering array of dials. All the engine instruments are multiplied four times. The navigation instruments are legion. The flight mechanic has a seat behind the captain, where he listens to his charges just above his head. They are running with the uneventful monotony of sewing machines. All cut and dried, efficient, prosaic. Yet as our eyes lift from these little man-made dials, and stare out at the utter emptiness, how puny seem such weapons to combat this bleak immensity!

Self-esteem drops from us. Suddenly we yearn for land — a stick, a stone, a tree, anything familiar. We feel forlorn, an unpleasantly long way from anywhere. There are no rosy-tinted glasses in the cockpit, no golden cargoes, no glamorous histories. There are Facts, black and white on the dials, and nothing else counts for this speck trespassing in an alien element.

The pilots sit there, cool and incurious. Their eyes are focused on the sky line. Our eyes are on it, too, and we see nothing. . . .

The radio operator beckons to the purser.

‘ Barranquilla calling! Says how many lunches shall we need?’

We walk back to our seats, feeling foolish. We had forgotten the radio.

‘Barranquilla in ten minutes!’

And there it is, dead on the bow, and no haphazard landfall. We swing down, engines throttled, toward a big brown river. Moored to the concrete quay we see the next links in the chain, the flying boats for Venezuela, Trinidad, and our own for Panama, Peru, and Chile.

Naked Indian children are sitting on a log, playing and splashing their bare feet in water, brown as they. We taxi past them, roaring like a dragon. But they are unimpressed. After all, what are planes to babies who have never known a world without them?

VII

The years will naturally bring new inventions, lending the Clippers fleeter wings and slashing hours off the prevailing time-tables. But the operation of this Caribbean service as it is to-day can hardly be improved, for its schedule, even in hurricane seasons, stands in the log books of the past few years at exactly 100 per cent. Such records seem to be without value for headlines, yet this young and vigorous link between the two Americas is as compelling as any of Uncle Sam’s enterprises.

Like any good show, the performance to the eye is effortless. The passenger is not concerned with ways and means. He calls for ice water and gets it, regardless of the fact that the large water cooler in the cabin is carried at the expense of a fare. He has to do a lot of sitting. He requires comfort, so his seat is stuffed with toy balloons, semiinflated — the most resilient surface ever to come in contact with that part of his anatomy. Simple, but it took months of research in the Miami laboratories, eliminating scores of substances, to bring about the toy-balloon solution.

The passenger, mildly thrilled, boards the plane, hears a lot of noise for a lot of time, sees a lot of sea, and is uneventfully delivered at the other end. He spans a sea as surely as in an ocean liner, although there is no slowly moving deck, no spacious chart house to work from, no sextant sight, no sounding. The plane changes position at over a hundred miles an hour. Any error must be magnified fivefold. Her height, her lateral drift, her forward speed, are subject to constant variation. When the plane leaves Jamaica, the compass bearing of Barranquilla is known, but the strong trade winds thrust erratically across the course — to what extent it is hard to discover. The pilot cannot heave her to, like a ship, and think things over. In addition there may be local disturbances and wind shifts. Nevertheless her exact position is known at every moment of the flight. No third rail brings a commuters’ train to town more methodically than does this system bring its planes to port.

In the new technique of ocean flying, accurate weather data are the first provision. The Caribbean is completely ringed with powerful radio stations, linked to the Pan American central office in Miami. In a split second it makes contact with its meteorologists in Cuba, Haiti, Porto Rico, along the Antilles to Trinidad, across Venezuela to Colombia and Panama. The radio loop continues up the Mosquito Coast of Central America, through Mexico, and coils back by way of the government stations on the Gulf to Florida.

Next — a supplementary measure — the plane carries a map showing the name, position, course, speed, and call letters of every ship afloat that day on the Caribbean.

Finally, most important and most expertly handled of all, is the method of safe conduct across the seas by radio direction finders. These are devices which enable the operators ashore to determine the precise direction from which a signal comes. Both terminals of the Caribbean crossing, Kingston and Barranquilla, are equipped with them. Every fifteen minutes the radio in the plane calls both stations. It follows up the message with a string of dashes lasting twenty seconds. Thus the operators ashore may check the precise direction of a call and flash back to the plane the bearing from which its signal has been heard. Between the two ruler edges of these bearings, conducted by these invisible lines, the captain flies his course. For good measure, there are three types of compass and a drift indicator in the cockpit.

The distance traveled along the base course is calculated by time. When the bearings are flashed to the plane from shore, the radio man looks at his chronometer, calculates the plane’s latitude and longitude, the compass course to port, giving the information to the captain, and then by radio to Miami. Thus the Chief Operations Office in Miami can follow the progress of the plane, minute by minute, until it hears the final signal, ‘Now landing!’ The pilot may make detours, go around storms fifty or even a hundred miles wide but instantly there will be new radio lines leading straight to port.

It is the most accurate feat ever to be accomplished in aerial navigation. The theory is not new, but practice is something else again. Only experience, trial and error, eliminations, adjustments, create a system which will satisfy a great pioneer airway.

Starting from scratch, science has conquered the Caribbean. Now for the Atlantic!

VIII

From the nature of these flights and problems, the Pan American service has come to be known as the Atlantic Laboratory. The air service to Europe is no longer a pipe dream. On the basis of this Caribbean experience, the first North Atlantic air line can be placed in operation within a year or two.

Six transocean-type transport planes, capable of flying across either the Atlantic or the Pacific, are now well under construction in the United States. Over the inter-American routes, each will be able to carry fifty passengers in addition to mail and express. As highspeed mail planes, they are designed to have an operating range of three thousand miles — 30 per cent greater than the longest open-sea stretch on either the Atlantic or the Pacific. Each will be equipped with four huge engines and will cruise at a speed of between two and three miles a minute. These air liners represent revolutionary improvements in design and construction, developed to provide American leadership on the great world trade routes of the air.

Via Newfoundland and Greenland — along the route recently made the subject of a preliminary survey by Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh — it may be possible to fly mail to Europe within twentyfour hours. The schedule would be somewhat longer on the southern haul, touching the Azores and Portugal. These air liners will be the last gasp in design, but before they are launched on the Atlantic beat they will spend months on the test block of the Caribbean.

Thus there is nothing sudden about the transatlantic mail. It is the logical outcome of years of preparation. It is so logical that the men who have had to solve its problems are unexcited at the prospect. So are the veterans who will fly the ships. And to the meteorologists who for years have presided over the rigorous Caribbean schedules, to the radio experts who have perfected the wonders of direction-finding technique, — to all those, in short, who have worried out a thousand details of navigation, design, and maintenance, — the advent of the new service can scarcely seem a miracle or even a sporting chance.

Passengers of the future, peering through the gathering dusk at the flash of the first airway beacon in Ireland or in Portugal, will owe their accurate landfall to the Atlantic Laboratory.

Before long our radios will be tuned in to an international hook-up, while announcers bring to us news of the first round trip of the transatlantic service. We shall hear about its value to business and to banking, of the revolution in travel between the New World and the Old, of regular passenger schedules which will take us to Europe in a day. There will be front-page news, speeches, receptions, ticker tape — all the fanfare of a big achievement.

And this it will be, not an achievement merely of one big thing, but the coördination of a thousand little ones, contributed by men of whom the public has never heard.