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[Christine Schulte]

Charlie, thanks awfully for your long and careful explanations - I really appreciate it and I think I finally get what you're saying: The numbers in Betty's notebook  or in the "281" message may not make sense to a person who looks at this from an armchair perspective like I do, or to Betty or the average person in the street in 1937, but they make sense to someone who is proficient in "Navigationalese" and would have told a Navigationalese-speaking person in 1937 that they were on an island that could only have been Gardner/Nikumaroro.

What you say about "hearing" code and about how a person who is experienced in copying code "hears" slow crude code makes me think of someone learning to read. My daughter is just learning to read and when she practises reading aloud it's a lot like you describe it. It's all painfully slow and some of the letters or combinations of letters are mispronounced but I still get a very clear idea of what she's reading and would probably be able to copy down a sentence correctly. Is that a better comparison perhaps?

Bruce, thanks for the "Log Jam" link, that's actually very close to what I wanted to say.

Jeff, there's unfortunately a huge lot of things that we'll never know even if the Electra is found some day. His Majesty's toilet paper may yet be shown to have  survived several decades in tropical sea water but how about if somebody wrote on it and the writing didn't keep?  And I think I'll need to reconsider my personal pet theory about FN... Before the era of antibiotics and tetanus vaccinations people often seem to have deteriorated very fast even if they had relatively minor injuries by today's standards.

Thanks for recommending the book, Ric - very amazingly, the local university library has a copy. Come to think of it, Elly Beinhorn flew around the world in 1934 and Lufthansa started scheduled flights to Brazil in the same year. I think I'll make a detour to the reading room and see if I can find out something about how they communicated.

I really appreciate all of you taking the time to explain things to a dummy like me! It must be frustrating at times, thanks for your patience.

[John Balderston]

Like this one in particular?
This item is the original radio log of Amelia Earhart's last communications with the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca. Also included are notes and edits to the log by the radioman Leo G. Bellarts. The last communication occurred on 8:43 am on July 2. 1937, as indicated on the log.
http://research.archives.gov/description/6210268

Or is it just the same as this?

http://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,479.msg5989.html#msg5989

Scott, from Ric's description in the link, the Itasca radio logs are essentially the same item, except that National Archives holds the official (smooth) version of the log, and Chief Bellarts' grandson held the original draft (assume he sold it).  Researchers have analyzed both versions of the Itasca radio log. 

New information may be contained in the Naval Radio Station Wailupe log and perhaps in the NRS Heeia and/or CIU logs.  These may be included in the Crane Naval Security Group holdings that were declassified and transferred to the National Archives relatively recently.  Best, John

[Charlie Chisholm]

Charlie, you make a strong case that Earhart and Noonan knew where they were and that the only piece of information they lacked was the name of the island.

They may have known or suspected they were on Gardner, if indeed they had a map showing that.

But in the radio reports they never mention Gardner (at least that we know of), but they do give all kinds of other indications of their location, such as 281 mi from the equator, on a reef SW of Howland, a modified LOP that nearly crosses Niku, repeating Norwich City over and over again (if that's what they did). It points to them not knowing or not being sure of which island they were on. But by giving those other indications, they would be found regardless. Go 281 miles south of the equator and fly that latitude across the area and you find Earhart. Follow the new LOP southwest from Howland and you find Earhart. Look up Norwich City and you know where Earhart is. Give them the incorrect name of the island you think you might possibly be on, not so much chance of being found if you get it wrong.

Something as simple as the incorrect shape of Gardner on an old map may have given them some doubt as to the exact island they were on.

But of course, because of the vagaries of propagation, only a small portion of what they transmitted was probably heard by anybody. We are lucky to have the ones we do, and they do seem valid - there are simply no other reasonable explanations (that we know of) to explain some of the things in the radio logs. Like the call sign for the Hawaii AM radio station written in Betty's Notebook - that's a very strong indication she actually heard that call sign, probably transmitted by Earhart. Hard to explain otherwise.

Since we don't have records of everything they transmitted, it's possible they transmitted the name Gardner and nobody recorded it.

[Ric Gillespie]

Since we don't have records of everything they transmitted, it's possible they transmitted the name Gardner and nobody recorded it.

That's true but it seems to me that if you know you're on Gardner Island you're going to include that in every transmission you send instead of obtuse references to the distance from the equator or the name on a shipwreck. 

Any purveyor of antique nautical charts should be able to tell us what charts of the South Central Pacific were in use in 1937.

[Charlie Chisholm]

That's true but it seems to me that if you know you're on Gardner Island you're going to include that in every transmission you send instead of obtuse references to the distance from the equator or the name on a shipwreck.

So you don't think any of the radio reports are genuine, because the word Gardner does not appear?

I still submit it's possible they didn't know for sure which island they were on.

Even today, the first thing people give are lat/lon, not the name of the place they are at.

[Ric Gillespie]

So you don't think any of the radio reports are genuine, because the word Gardner does not appear?

On the contrary.  I'm convinced that the post-loss messages that we've listed as "Credible" are genuine.  (Remember, I'm the guy who worked with Bob Brandenburg for 12 years to create that catalog.)  What I'm saying is that I don't think they knew the name of the island.

Even today, the first thing people give are lat/lon, not the name of the place they are at.

If I asked you where you live you would give me lat/long?  Especially in a situation where the strength and clarity of voice communication is poor, if you have the option, are you going to give a string of numbers or a one-word description?

[Ted G Campbell]

Guys and Girls,

Question for the navigation grurus out there:

Is it easier and/or more accurate to reference your location as a distance from the equator as opposed how far you may be from your original target i.e. Howland?

What I am asking is; would it be easier (and more accurate) to determine your location relative to the equator as opposed to determining and reporting your location relative to Howland, e.g 3xx, 4xx or 5xx miles south?  Maybe FN figured he didn’t have a very good coordinate location for Howland (he missed it) but he did know where the equator was located and thus a fixed point of reference from Garder to the equator i.e. 281 miles is what was reported.

Ted Campbell

[Charlie Chisholm]

What I'm saying is that I don't think they knew the name of the island.

Sorry, my bad - I thought you were arguing they did know the name of the island because they had maps and a good idea of their position.

If I asked you where you live you would give me lat/long?  Especially in a situation where the strength and clarity of voice communication is poor, if you have the option, are you going to give a string of numbers or a one-word description?

I would give the one word answer if I was confident of my location. If I was not absolutely confident I knew where I was, I would state the readings on my equipment, as well as any other obvious clues around me, like landmarks.

What underlies my view that they likely did not know their exact position "for sure" is the fact that a few hours earlier they definitely did not know their position, or they would have landed on Howland. And from that "lost" position, they then traveled 300 some-odd miles by dead reckoning over open ocean with unknown winds. As GLP has pointed out many times, it's not as easy as it seems. If it were, many early aviation pioneers would have landed where they said they would, but many of them landed many miles, if not hundreds of miles from where they thought they would be. Given all that, I would not be confident of at least my longitude, and I would not have been confident of some of the maps, many of which were based on old information that was incorrect.  New reefs were continuing to be found into the 30's if I remember correctly, and as recently as a year or so ago, the last known phantom island was removed from atlases - it had been on the maps since the early 1800's and only recently removed, because it does not, in fact, exist.

They could figure latitude with relative ease, hence sending 281 miles from the equator would make sense. Longitude was the problem, as evidenced by their failure to reach Howland. They may not have been confident of their longitude, so telling the world they were on Gardner, when they felt that might not be true, would be a mistake. Better to identify latitude, general direction, the fact that it was a reef, landmarks, etc. That's all they really had that they could be reasonably confident in.

[John Ousterhout]

Names of islands depend on the scale of the map they're on. I've given previous examples of small islands about the size of Gardner that were not named on maps known to have been used by Fred.  Even the shape of Gardner was not clearly shown on maps of the time, so I would not expect even an experienced navigator to have known what island he was on, unless he'd been there before.  The large scale maps of the era that I've seen do not list small island names.  Since we don't know what maps Fred had, we cannot say what he had to work with if/when he landed on Gardner/Niku.

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

They may not have known the name of the island but there's a strong possibility that they knew the name of the group of islands they were in, The Phoenix Islands.
That said, when you return to looking at the 281 morse message you won't see anything that comes even close to stating Gardner Island, not so Phoenix though.

[John Ousterhout]

Fred's map of the Eastern Atlantic may offer a clue, if it was similar in scale and detail to the map of the Pacific he used.  If I recall correctly, the markings for the Cape Verde islands only named the larger islands.  The smaller islands, roughly the size of Gardner (Iheu Branco and Ilheu Rasu), were shown but not named.

[Ric Gillespie]

I would bet Ric's logic is spot on - that they could have determined 'where they were' in terms of position, at least in relative terms of latitude, but may have not know 'where' in the sense of being able to name the island.  I'll have to keep looking, but somewhere I think there is a chart that shows Gardner at the time - and that it was not terribly accurate in graphically describing the island.

The attached chart is based on an 1872 survey and was the only map of Gardner's shape available in 1937.  HMS Wellington had done a more accurate survey in 1935 but it was not yet published.

[JNev]

The attached chart is based on an 1872 survey and was the only map of Gardner's shape available in 1937.  HMS Wellington had done a more accurate survey in 1935 but it was not yet published.

Not terribly accurate, is it?  If FN was working with that then I could see much room for reasonable doubt.  The lagoon is juxtaposed well enough, but the land mass distribution and shorelines are way off, and there is no southern passage to the sea.  This could easily be taken as a different island from Gardner by appearance during an overflight IMO. 

If I were using that (and I can't speak for Fred, of course) and thinking of how to communicate my whereabouts to the searchers, I'd be loath to gamble calling it 'Gardner' and possibly mislead the effort; if I could pin down my latitude and give it in easy terms ('equator 281 north') I think that is what I'd try to do.  Might say '281 SOUTH of equator - but who knows how / why 'north', and not much else makes any sense.

[Christine Schulte]

Any purveyor of antique nautical charts should be able to tell us what charts of the South Central Pacific were in use in 1937.

I seem to remember that some of the charts Fred Noonan used, with his notations on them, got sent back to the US. Somehow, I've always assumed these were part of a series and that if one took them and walked into a library or antique book dealers shop and said "Would you please get me the whole set", they'd just go and get it. If for some reason they couldn't find the South Pacific section, at least the chart Fred Noonan used would give scale, which in turn would help determine the approximate size of Nikumaroro, which would then tell if Nikumaroro would just be depicted as a blob with no distinct contours or in greater detail. Obviously, that's rather naive and it doesn't work that way. Did aviators in the 1930s use "custom-made" charts? Did early airlines have their "own" (private) charts (if so, are there maybe any of these perserved in the Pan Am archives, as Fred worked for Pan Am?)

(I'm just asking out of curiosity and to get a better picture of how things were done in the 1930s - if I'm "in the way", just ignore me please)

[Stacy Galloway]

TWO EIGHT ONE NORTH HOWLAND CALL KHAQQ BEYOND NORTH DON'T HOLD WITH US MUCH LONGER ABOVE WATER SHUT OFF

Again, the upthread responses are intriguing

For the purpose of my little 'at home Morse Code exercise', I'll continue to see what comes up. I hadn't considered "phoenix". I had considered lat and long which brings up some questions.

First, I'd like to clarify (as I tried to do earlier) that this is merely me saying 'what if'- I'm not trying to disavow professionalism or effort from 1937 (or anyone's experience in this matter).

The consesus here seems to be '281' is received as it was transmitted. So, for the purpose of discussion, why '281'? Why not 280 or 285? Would the celestial navigation have been so precise as to transmit '281 N'? And if '281' was indeed transmitted, where is the word 'equator'? Was it not received or was it transposed into something else in the message? Or is it implied in '281 N'?

How about the words 'beyond' and 'water'? And the whole phrase 'don't hold with us much longer'?

I truly am curious as to what folks think about these other phrases.

Also, since this thread is "The Most Perplexing Issues", I'd like to say that one of the most perplexing issues to me is who was or wasn't hurt during the landing.

An injured Fred changes the dynamic of future transmissions. Amelia would likely have been getting location information from written notes. Or, if she was getting info from an injured Fred, she would have had no idea of its accuracy. For instance, a person with a head injury can have lucid moments- but may not have accurate recollections during those lucid moments.

An uninjured Fred changes the directions of the post loss messages. Accuracy and location details would be present (from Fred's navigational skills). I would think extraneous details would be minimal. Even though its been stated that neither were proficient in Morse Code- Fred would have a familiarity with it due to his maritime experience.

If neither were injured or both were injured- that again changes the dynamic.

Either way, the '281' transmission happened a few days after the landing. Food and water may have been scarce. Injuries would have been getting more serious. Infections may have been setting in. The message could have been long and complicated or short and repetitive or a combination of both.

Many factors would dictate the contents of this message. Even the smaller details of 'writing' a message in Morse code to prepare it for transmission would be a factor. Details such as length of time to prepare such a message. Is there paper, pencils, a Morse Code chart for translation? Did everything get wet during the landing? How 'readable' were the charts, maps, etc...

I could go on and on. The '281' message is definitely perplexing.

Thanks everyone, for the fascinating discussion

LTM~ Who's looking for a pencil,
Stacy