The Caprices (23 page)

Position

I
N MARCH OF
1521, Magellan sights the islands. At first, his hands clawed around a telescope, he thinks Saipan to be a sleeping monster. Who else would inhabit this liquid hell where no breeze blows? The crew is starving, eating leather straps and sawdust, hunting rats through the dark, rotting carcass of the ship. They have survived fourteen months of hardship and a mutiny; here, on this sheet of glass that Magellan has called “Mar Pacifico,” they fear that they will meet their maker, or the devil himself. The crew has wondered at Magellan’s defiant health. They call him “Spawn of Satan” and point to his clubfoot as proof. For someone whose progress on land is slow and labored, Magellan has no equal on the water. He lowers his telescope and blinks, then raises the telescope to the horizon again. The pope has divided the earth in two. The East has been given to the Portuguese, the West to the Spaniards, and he, a Portuguese, is sailing in the name of Spain. He will learn that the West never stops, keeps winding round and round, and the earth belongs to whoever is strong enough to take it.

Magellan’s ships, the
Trinidad
and the
Victoria
, draw closer to Saipan.

In the distance, Magellan can make out flat white planes—triangles—shifting across the surface of the water. Could this be the sun refracting, coursing to the left, then right, drawing closer then angling quickly away? Could this be his mind, at last succumbing to his strange diet of leather and rat meat? Maybe these shifting sheets are from the past, a pleasant image heralding his death, because these are sails and the darting movements are boats gliding over the glassy surface of the sea. Sails. As a youth he had owned a small skiff. At the edge of the world, has he encountered the past? Has he wound back to 1495, when, as a youth, boats had been a joy and diversion?

The men are loud, spirited. Their joyful shouting is a strange sound. They have been silent for so long. Magellan is not being lured into the past, nor is he hallucinating. They have reached land and the sails belong to the fishing boats of Chamorro natives. Magellan closes his eyes, confident that when he opens them again he will see his sleeping monsters revealed as islands. Soon he will be navigating his way into the shallows, looking for a place to anchor.

Despite the welcome relief of food and water, there is not much to recommend Saipan. Even the Chamorros are supposed to have been stranded there on a canoe trip from Indonesia, their landing an accident of poor navigation, their decision to remain a mystery. Magellan names the islands “Islas de las Velas Latinos” because of the triangular shape of the Chamorro sails. Magellan registers Saipan in history, much as three billion years earlier, the island registered itself on the surface of the Pacific.

In the seventeenth century the islands are renamed the Marianas after an Austrian princess. The native population is all but wiped out by the Spaniards. Beyond this naming and slaying, there is nothing remarkable about the Spanish occupation of Saipan. In 1899, Spain, facing bankruptcy, sells the Marianas to Germany for four and a half million dollars. The Germans are getting a bargain. They see the value of these desolate islands
strung across the Pacific, hard pebbles scrubbed by salt waves. Guam. Tinian. And Saipan. Isolated. Ignored. Saipan’s very value is that it is nowhere. Saipan interrupts. It is not the Pacific.

There is much use for something that is Not The Pacific.

Saipan is an island of foreign aggressors, warriors wanting something better, a refueling stop on the way to what is worthy of conquering. The Germans show their hand in the Great War and, after years of battering Europe, lose Saipan (a slap on the wrist), and before Saipan can be allocated to some other deserving European, Japan has claimed it. Japan, the gnat, the least worthy member of the League of Nations, is also looking to conquer. The Meiji Diet has its eyes fixed on China. As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Saipan is outfitted with a sugar refinery and a fishing fleet staffed with Japanese and Korean labor. These two industries support a significant civilian population. Sharp spears of sugar cane bristle on the island’s back and the natives are armed with nothing more than the broad blades of industry. The fish bubble up from the depths and are netted. Women bear children. Tidy huts are erected beneath the shade of palms bordering the sandy, swept grid of streets.

In the late thirties, Japan refuses America access to the Marianas. A fortress like none that has ever been known is being constructed. One forward-thinking Japanese writer, Kinoaki Matsuo, writes, “The islands are scattered like stars across the routes of the United States Navy either perpendicularly or horizontally. It will be impossible for the U.S. Fleet to reach her destination.” One thousand islands scattered like beads across the Pacific combine to create a fortress calculated to stymie the American fleet. But what is the assumed origin of the U.S. Navy? What is the destination that will lure its shining ships through this net?

What is Japan planning?

On the first of June, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fredrick Noonan, take off from Miami, the first of many departures on their epic journey. Earhart is to be the first woman to
circumnavigate the globe, the first aviator to do so at the earth’s waist. Their plane is a modified Lockheed Electra 10E. The airplane has recently been rebuilt after a botched landing on Luke Field near Pearl Harbor during her first attempt at the globe. This is an omen. Earhart has now decided to go east rather than west. She feels the need to make the trip, but admits that she hopes it is her last journey. She refers to the circumnavigation as a “stunt.” Her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, is priming his great printing machines for the journey’s completion and has arranged for his wife to write a series of articles for the
Herald Tribune
to be cabled from her various destinations. Earhart perseveres. She breaks a record: first aviator to fly from the Red Sea to India. She plows on. Rangoon. Bangkok. Singapore. Bandoeng. In Bandoeng, she is forced to her bed as a result of dysentery contracted in India. She lies for days sweating, exhausted. On June 27, Earhart rises from her bed. She slides her feet into her stout moccasins, rakes her hands through her hair. The mirror reveals her as a middle-aged woman in need of a vacation, not the stout-willed aviatrix she has come to rely on. Her jacket weighs heavily on her shoulders.

In Darwin she carefully packs the parachutes to be sent back to the United States. She wryly remarks to Noonan that they will be no use over the Pacific. Noonan agrees. They need more room for fuel. Coordinates of the Pacific Islands are not reliable, nor is the weather, worrisome for Noonan. He has been groping through the skies using celestial navigation. Cloud cover confuses and extra fuel is necessary to right mistakes. Noonan announces this loudly, which amuses Earhart. She knows what the extra fuel is for, what the secondary purpose of their journey is. The Electra screams off the runway bound for Lae, New Guinea.

On Lae, Earhart writes her last article for the
Herald Tribune
. Pictures taken show her to be sickly and tired. These glossy pictures will be bound within
Last Flight
, the rotted pit at the heart
of the book. The stage is set for the ill-fated leg of the journey. She has traveled twenty-two thousand miles and has seven thousand left to complete the circumnavigation. Her destination is Howland Island, a speck in the ocean, with an elevation of less than ten feet. The Coast Guard cutter
Itasca
is positioned off Howland Island to act as radio contact. Radio communications in the area are poor and the
Itasca
has been flooded with commercial radio traffic connected with the record-breaking aviatrix. At 00:00 Greenwich Mean Time, the Electra soars upward.

Earhart is cruising northward of her accepted coordinates. She has arranged with American intelligence to swing over Truk, an island on the eastern end of the Caroline chain. Reports submitted to the League of Nations reveal unprecedented supply deliveries to this desolate rock and the American navy is suspicious. What is Japan doing? Earhart plows on into unfriendly territory. She picks up her radio and nervously transmits her coordinates, which are far to the east of her true location. This is to confuse the Japanese, listening in, from knowing her true purpose. Where is she flying in the deepest night? Where does the sea separate from the sky? Where is the comfort of the line of horizon?

Aviator. Wife. Writer. Woman. Does she need also to be a spy? A soldier of intelligence? Earhart is no stranger to war. She has seen its work. She has nursed boys lying on their cots, watched new blood pumped back into thirsting veins, seen the elbows heal into smooth nubs. She has observed the boys in their wheelchairs learning to navigate the hospital corridors, trying to find their way home. Earhart knows that after conflict, there is no true restoration.

At 19:30 the
Itasca
receives a transmission: “KHAQQ calling
Itasca
. We must be on you but cannot see you . . . Gas is running low . . .”

And then at 20:14: “We are on a line of position 157 degrees–337 degrees—we will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles,
wait listening on 6210 kilocycles—we are running north and south.” Which puts the Electra approaching Howland from a northeasterly direction. Lae, New Guinea, lies in the southeast.

This is the last the world will hear from Earhart.

For sixteen days eight U.S. Navy ships and sixty-four aircraft comb 138,000 square miles of the Pacific at a cost of four million dollars. Nothing of the aircraft or of the pilot and navigator is ever found.

Saipan has a new resident.

Pia is ten years old when the American woman appears on the island. Pia thinks that she does not look dangerous, limping, her blunt short hair illumined around the edges by the sun. The woman has no shoes and her feet are long and narrow, not like any feet Pia has ever seen. They are white like polished stone. The woman walks between two soldiers, defeated. Pia hurries to catch up with the woman. She walks a cautious distance away, parallel with the party’s advance, whistling at the birds in the trees, her interest suddenly caught by the barking of a dog. But always watching the woman. The woman stops. She squats down and takes deep breaths. Her face is gray, not like a living person’s. She says something softly to the guards, then to Pia’s surprise, waves her over. Pia cautiously walks across the street.

She is scared of this woman. Why is she here? Why are the soldiers guarding her?

The woman smiles, but she is in pain. Pia approaches, and then she sees the burns, flaking blackened skin, the whole left side of the woman’s face puffed with fluid. There are bubbling blisters all down the woman’s left arm. Pia thinks that she is two women sewn together up the middle—one wiry and hard like the bark of a tree, the other slippery and scaly like a fish. She is scared. The woman has something in her hand that she is holding out to Pia. She nods her head, offering, offering, but the child is scared. She presents the woman with her round face, baked
brown like bread. Her hair hangs heavily at her shoulders. There is something defiant to the set of her mouth.

Can she read? Earhart wonders. Does she work in the fields? Does she have toys or brothers or a dog, like some of these thin animals tied to the stilts of the houses? The ring came easily off her finger—a gift from her husband, but she has no use for rings, or fingers for that matter. In the instant that the plane plunged into the flat blue sea, she admitted her life was over and now does not know how to think of these days that are left. She knows that her wounds are infected. She knows that her dysentery is dissolving her strength. She knows that the tea and unguents that she has been given are inadequate to restore life. She holds the ring out to the child, wisely turning her head to present the half that was not burned in the crash. The child steps forward and then hustles quickly the final steps. She takes the ring—a platinum setting with a perfect pearl, round like the earth—off Earhart’s hand, hopping back to a safe distance. The child smiles, looks up at the guards, who are very serious but young and familiar. The child stammers out a few words in Japanese and the soldiers respond, but the child is not satisfied with the answer. Her thick brows come together and finally she says, “
Gracias
,” with the intonation of a question.

The American woman smiles and says,
“De nada.”

From her final room Earhart can see workers dismantling the remains of the Electra. She sighs heavily. Her days, drifting in and out of consciousness, are spent trying to relay psychic messages through the radio lines. She imagines the radioman on the
Itasca
picking up the signal.

“It’s Earhart. These coordinates . . . She’s on Saipan. She says the Japanese are geared for war. Truk is plated with armor, fitted with guns. Prepare. Prepare . . .”

And then they lose the signal as Earhart drifts out of range.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bomb the American fleet where it bobs innocently in Pearl Harbor. In this action the pride of the American navy is destroyed, the remaining ships mobilized—tempted—through the string of islands. The Japanese army is suddenly everywhere. One by one the nations fall. Indonesia. Malaysia. Singapore. The Philippines. The Co-Prosperity Sphere widens, a stain tingeing the Pacific a brilliant red. Saipan now boasts troops, guns, and battleships bobbing off the coast. The civilians pack their things into rattan bags, boxes, waiting calmly for the ships that will bear them to Japan. But as the war progresses, an element of fear enters the island. The Americans, once thought to be pathetic, harmless, are now a threat. The soldiers, battle hardened and exposed, tell tales of murder, cannibalism, and rape. Mothers hold tightly to their children’s wrists, waiting to be delivered from the island, combing the horizon for the transport ship. Here on Saipan they are served up to the enemy. They sharpen bamboo spears. Machetes, once used for harvesting sugar cane, are drawn across whetstones. The song of blade and stone is heard in every house.