by Thomas F. King
Readers of Amelia
Earhart’s Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? (Altamira 2004) may be interested
in the results of this year’s return expedition to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix
Islands, Republic of Kiribati. The expedition, like all our work in pursuit
of the elusive aviation pioneer, was sponsored by The International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR); information on the work and our ongoing
analyses can be found on TIGHAR’s
website, www.tighar.org.
To recap briefly: We
hypothesize that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, when they disappeared on July
2 1937, made their way to Nikumaroro and landed safely, but were not seen by
the search planes that flew over a week later, and eventually died on the
island. We’ve found a variety of pieces
of evidence supporting this hypothesis – airplane parts in the ruins of
Nikumaroro’s colonial village, anecdotal accounts of wreckage and human bones
being found, a detailed official British government account of the discovery of
a partial human skeleton and a woman’s shoe at the southeast end of the island
in 1940, our own discovery of a woman’s shoe from the 1930s, and so on.
This year we had two major goals on the island we fondly
call “Niku.” One was to look at a
portion of the old colonial village (1938-1963) where we’d found plane parts in
the past, and where the village carpenter shop stood before it blew away in a
storm in about 1990. The other was to
give serious attention to the “Seven Site” at the other end of the island,
which we think is where a partial human skeleton was found in 1940 along with a
sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, a woman’s shoe, and other interesting
artifacts; we think this may have been Amelia Earhart’s skeleton. Our physical anthropologist, Kar Burns, was
also to carry out a taphonomic experiment – putting out the remains of a pig
and seeing how fast and in what directions the coconut crabs and strawberry
hermit crabs took its parts away. Biologist/forester
Josh Gillespie was to identify key tree species to allow construction of a
general vegetation map. Finally, we
wanted to do some detailed topographic mapping of the reef where we think
Earhart landed her Lockheed Electra, to permit detailed hindcasting of tidal
conditions there at the time she would have landed. Remarkably enough, we got all these things
done.
We flew to Nadi in Fiji on July 14th, and from the nearby port of Lautoka embarked on the motor-sailor Nai’a
for the five-day trip to Niku. We were
16 in all – the basic TIGHAR team, a videographer, and the representative of
the government of Kiribati. The trip was uneventful but for various cases
of seasickness; the weather was good but the swells were pretty high. We landed as usual in the ship’s inflatables,
going ashore every morning and returning to the ship in the evening. Gary Quigg took charge of work in the
village, while I ran the Seven Site project. As it turned out, members of the ship’s crew helped a lot on both projects;
they said they were bored aboard, as it were, and wanted some shore time.
The village work involved clearing largish areas of coconut
deadfall, metal detecting, mapping and excavating test units. Suffice it to say that Gary’s crew were able
to define and pretty definitively survey the carpenter’s shop and the debris
field created downwind when it blew away, and they collected a number of bronze
bushings and other parts that just might have been salvaged from an
airplane. These are currently being cleaned
and catalogued at TIGHAR Central in Wilimington, DE and sent out for various kinds
of analysis.
At the Seven Site, we first had to clear a lot of scaevola,
a nasty shrub, in a way that wouldn’t mess up the site surface. We accomplished this using a lot less of the
traditional tools (bush knives and chainsaws), in favor of long-handled
pneumatic loppers powered by dive tanks; they worked remarkably well (See airphoto). We then undertook a variety of excavations,
metal detecting, and surface scanning for teeth and bones using a solar-powered
daylight ultraviolet scanner designed by team member John Clauss. We also did kite aerial photography (KAP) to help document the site in its environment
(hence the photo below), and used a robotic total station to update and correct
the site map prepared in 2001. The UV
scanner worked but didn’t get us any teeth or bones. The total station strained our technological
competence but gave us what we needed, and the KAP worked great, as did our state-of-the-art PVC sifting screens. We excavated several fire features that will
help us (we hope) figure out what sort of person was camping at the site – lots
of fish, bird, and turtle bone for dietary analysis. And we found some things – a zipper, a snap
perhaps from an article of clothing, part of a small pocket knife, a piece of beveled
glass that may be from a small mirror – that aren’t easily associated with use
of the site by Gilbertese colonists and U.S. Coast Guardsmen, the two groups
known to have been there at various times. One of the fire features, too, contained the broken and mostly melted
remains of two bottles, one of them apparently a heavy brown bottle similar to
Benedictine. Lots of analysis to be done
there, too.
And the crabs duly carried away bones, posing for time-lapse
photography, while the total station made it possible to obtain detailed
elevation and topographic data on the reef.
So as usual, we didn’t exactly find what we went out looking
for, but we did find other stuff, and we actually did pretty much everything we
planned to do. We then sailed
uneventfully to Apia, Samoa,
flew to Nadi, and then flew back to the States. Good weather the whole time (130 degrees f. recorded on the Seven Site,
but a pleasant breeze) and it was great to have one more visit to the island.
We’re grateful as always to the financial sponsors who made
the trip feasible, to our faithful shipping sponsor Federal Express, and to the
various people and corporations who donated equipment and services – Brooks
Leffler and David Wheeler for KAP technology, the Sokkia Corporation for total stations, Stihl Inc. for chain
saws and hand tools, and Focus Design for screens.
Analysis of the material and data we brought home will take
awhile, but results will be forthcoming on the TIGHAR website and in other
media.
The Seven Site under excavation, after much lopping
Sunrise over Nikumaroro
What we had to dig through – typical coral rubble
“soil.” The PVC screens, however,
donated by Focus Design (http://www.focusdesign.org/),
were wonderfully durable despite their light weight.
What a fascinating story. It sounds like this mystery is closer to being solved.
Looking forward to the update. I'll have to go check out tighar.org next.
Mike
Posted by: Mike | May 08, 2008 at 10:22 PM