July 4 (a Friday in 1919) brought with it a beautifully wonderful sunrise and a very welcome reprieve from the rough winds of the night’s stormy weather.
The fog still obscured a view of the sea, although the occasional break did occur which revealed bluish-green patches of water and large number of icebergs.
General Maitland remarked that the airship liner of the future will be immune from the risk of hitting one of those floating ice mountains. It must be remembered, a mere seven years earlier, the Titanic had struck one and sunk with a terrible loss of life.
Shortly before 1 PM a celebration broke out in the control car. From the log book:
Land in sight. Hooray! First spotted by Scott on starboard bow. A few small rocky islands visible for a second or two through the clouds and instantly swallowed up by them. Altered course S.W. to try and get a closer look at them. Eventually make them out to be north coastline of Newfoundland. This is quite the most thrilling moment of our voyage — great excitement on board. Whether or not we now succeed in getting through to New York, we have at any rate successfully accomplished the first stage of our adventure, and are the first to bridge the gulf from east to west by way of the air.
However, not all was bliss. Mineola Field on Long Island was still many miles away and the airship’s progress was reduced to a crawl due to strong head winds. And to make matters worse, the R-34 was running out of fuel.
More to come, so stay tuned!
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Must have been so exciting for these men, seeing land at last. I love the excerpts from the log book 🙂
I should think so. They’d just done something that had never been done before. A very historic flight.