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NAI'A returned to Nikumaroro, a remote atoll in equatorial Kiribati, in August and September 2001 for the third TIGHAR Expedition with NAI'A in the controversial quest to uncover the sacred remains of lost aviator and icon, Amelia Earhart. NAI'A first carried the TIGHAR team to Nikumaroro in February/March 1997 for the most extensive and, as it turned out, most courageous expedition up until then.
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July 1999 saw the dedicated archaeologists and researchers back aboard NAI'A and ashore on "Niku" to gather more clues and compelling evidence of plane wreckage, habitation and human remains. Earhart, the famous and now mysterious female aviator, disappeared in 1937 while flying the last leg of her record-breaking attempt to circumnavigate the globe as a solo pilot in a Lockheed Electra. Theories about her fate (and that of her navigator, Fred Noonan) have abounded - everything from a simple crash into the sea after running out of fuel to dramatic capture by the Japanese and cruel confinement in a wartime prison.
But The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) believe they can prove conclusively that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed successfully on this tiny atoll where they likely perished after rescue attempts failed to locate them. For full details about TIGHAR's fascinating Amelia Earhart theory and their scientific and archaeological research, explore http://www.tighar.org.
What TIGHAR must find to win this very public quest is an aircraft part with a serial number - and Amelia's bones. After years of diving, digging, sifting, reading, interviewing and working, the team is so close, they believe, to putting the Amelia Earhart mystery to rest, that they have begun negotiations with government representatives of the Republic of Kiribati for the rights to any discoveries. If a "smoking gun" is uncovered and Amelia's true story is finally revealed, there will be a whole new controversy over the permission to exhibit and preserve such monuments to one of America's great heroes, and one of the world's great women.
The 1997 expedition was funded by ABC television's Turning Point. And documentaries about the quest have screened on ABC and the Discovery Channel several times since. We gained a fascinating and intimate insight into the whole Amelia Earhart mystery as well as the many controversial claims to its solution. The TIGHAR researchers were genuinely dedicated and incredibly knowledgeable. But the search itself was tedious and brimming with the unfulfilled hopes and expectations of the patient and adventurous volunteer members who found themselves a long way from home and in the middle of a very angry sea.
Nikumaroro is the embodiment of remote. Four to five days sailing from Fiji, it is a pretty spec of green and white amid endless blue. Niku may have looked like an idyllic Pacific Island. Strangely alluring, but she proved merciless and secretive, hot and harsh. Perhaps a team member neglected the ritual of respect to the island's traditional Goddess? Upon arrival, visitors must try to hide their odor and alien nature by falling to their knees and rubbing the sand of the beach over their faces. This Goddess likes her privacy, it seems. Chief archeologist for the expedition, Dr Tom King, summed up many sentiments of the group when he said that each time he leaves Niku, "It's like breaking up with an old girlfriend - again!" King will keep on coming back here until he finds the missing Amelia link. It's not only a personal obsession and his life's work, it's a competition to be right and prove TIGHAR's critics wrong.
Thick tropical shrubbery was constantly cut away to create pathways for exploration and to reveal a dynamic forest-floor of rotting leaves, the debris of long-gone settlement, sandy soil and the ever-present earthmovers of the atoll, the coconut crabs. If only they could talk. King, along with several other team members, had a bizarre knack for rewriting famous songs to tell their story. And each night after the daily reports were delivered and important decisions made, exhausted and demented by the heat, folks would turn into outrageous Broadway performers and deliver their day's hilarious musical creations. According to Gary Quigg, a theatre manager at home, "The songs keep us from going insane as we're sifting for hours through the dirt looking for what we don't even know!"
As divers, our first job was to set moorings for NAI'A off the outside
reef. Not only did the reef drop away pretty sharply, but also we
were limited by needing an area close the landing and protected from
the ocean swell. We set two moorings - a normally boring task were
it not for the hundreds of big-eye jack, black tip, white tip, gray
reef and silver tip sharks that surrounded us in 150-foot visibility!
During those precious minutes underwater, Rob and I fought for control
of the ABC crew's new digital video camera as mantas tumbled and circled
in a feeding frenzy around us! A huge green turtle followed and the
hard coral was magnificently unblemished. Our few short dives on the
outside were among our most exciting times underwater ever.
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| Van Hunn and friends. |
Back in the lagoon, we searched for hours every day under the guidance of TIGHAR's chief diver, Vann Hunn, an ex-fighter pilot with the patience of a saint. Vann and I would swap roles either driving the skiff along search grids or being dragged under the water while holding a "manta-board" that allowed a certain amount of steering and maneuverability. The problem was that the lagoon was so silty, you literally could not even see your hands on the manta board let alone Amelia's plane in the distance. Not a minute passed when I was not imagining myself lifelessly impaled on Amelia's rusting propeller beside her skeleton in the cockpit. We rammed into a lot during our days searching that lagoon - coral heads, sharks, turtles and mostly the soft marshmallow-like bottom - but we did not bump into a Lockheed Electra. Still, we only covered maybe one tenth of the lagoon!
Expedition leader, Ric Gillespie, responsible for the mood and the mechanics of this magical mystery tour, handled every challenge with grace and humor but dogged determination. He hacked through scrub and dug in the dirt with the others for any piece of aluminum or human debris that might be the definitive piece to "finish this thing once and for all". But when our second cyclone developed, it was time to give in to mother nature as she sided with Niku to teach us about the ocean's power.
With the NAI'A captains, Rob watched the weather brewing, as seasoned sailors are wont to do. With his experience and skill driving skiffs in hellish seas, his daily task of just getting people from NAI'A to shore and back safely developed into a somewhat death-defying procedure. As the first cyclone hit our home in Fiji, we felt the effects on Niku in the rising swells. We hoped in time it would mellow out. But unable to pass safely to shore with breaking waves along every side of the atoll, we kept intermittent contact with five gallant researchers stranded on shore, continuing to work while rationing food, water and radio batteries.
Rob broke the news; "It's going to get worse before it gets better. Sorry everyone, but we've gotta get out of here." Rob, Rusi and I grabbed our wetsuits and fins and headed for shore to get the tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear and skiffs out. We watched the waves nervously and waited for our chance to zoom in between swells, swim ashore and then hike to the lagoon. We then had to drive the skiffs through a rocky narrow channel behind the fringing reef but still pounded sideways by huge waves. We made it.
Long since cast from the now dangerous mooring, and her mast already buckling from the pressure of the previous days' wind, NAI'A turned toward Fiji and straight into the eye of a hair-raising storm. A storm that changed direction twice rendering our navigation plans useless. A storm that sent waves crashing through our salon windows and kept our terrified passengers below (except for the seasick ones who lashed themselves to the dive deck for fresh air!) And a storm that hammered us relentlessly for three frightening days until we reached the small port of Funafuti in the hardly-heard-of nation of Tuvalu.
NAI'A weathered the cyclone well and everyone was safe if a little shaken. Most TIGHAR members opted, unwisely as it turned out, to wait in Funafuti for a plane back to Fiji rather than go to sea again. But the calm after the storm brought us on NAI'A a divinely sunny three-day sail home amid bow-riding pilot whales and dolphins. Meanwhile the TIGHAR members and ABC film crew remained stranded in dead-end Funafuti for a week waiting for an aircraft to be repaired to take them out of there. In Funafuti, tomorrow means much the same as next week.
However, all great tales have a twist. While stranded in Funafuti, TIGHAR members met a man and his daughter who once lived on Niku during the settlement scheme and told of a plane wreck on one corner of the atoll! After the ABC documentary screened, more evidence was revealed about an aircraft engine, fitting Amelia's engine specifications, being taken from Niku in the 70s. The plot thickened further with the chance discovery of documents that have transformed a Niku legend into fact. An interesting story about Nikumaroro's first settlers discovering a man and woman's bones was well known and oft quoted as convenient myth. But a TIGHAR historian pouring over Kiribati Government Archives discovered documents confirming that human bones, a woman's shoe sole and a sextant storage box were found by the first officers on the islands in the years following Earhart's disappearance and shipped to Fiji! The saga definitely continues.
