On June 18 through July 2, 2015, I
was privileged to participate in the Betchart Expeditions/TIGHAR tour of
Nikumaroro (by way of Rotuma and Funafuti , and
with sponsorship by the Planetary Society, AAAS, and Sigma Xi). Betchart’s Bob
Nanson was the tour coordinator, and CEO Margaret Betchart oversaw the whole
shebang. We were ably assisted by TIGHAR researchers Art and Janis Carty, Tom
Roberts, Dawn Johnson, Joe Cerniglia, and for a time Barb Norris (who got
desperately sick early in the voyage and had to be evacuated, but seems to be
OK now), as well as by Frank Thomas of the University of the South Pacific and
Jaime Bach, a PhD candidate at the University of Montana who did her MA thesis
on Kiribati. We had 61 passengers from the U.S. ,
Australia , the U.K, and
elsewhere, and traveled aboard the MV Fiji
Princess out of Port Denerou, Fiji . The trip was coordinated with
TIGHAR’s Niku VIII expedition, but we had only a day and a half of overlap on
the island with the TIGHAR team.
I’ll admit to having been rather
terrified by the trip’s prospects; it was the first large tour cruise that we
know of to Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and I had real
doubts about our – and especially my – ability to get people (some of them even
older and less able than I) on and off the island, which of course involves
passage over a slippery, hard, sharp, surf-battered coral reef. I was also
concerned about people getting lost, expiring in the heat, and experiencing
other indeterminate catastrophes.
Happily we were not visited with
any disasters, and had a good four days at the island. We were blessed with
relatively calm weather, good management by Betchart, and excellent support by
the officers and crew of Fiji Princess.
As a result, I think we were able to give the passengers a pretty good trip,
and introduced them pretty thoroughly to the island and to TIGHAR’s Nikumaroro
Hypothesis on the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
Contributing to our ongoing work
to test that hypothesis, we accomplished several pieces of work:
1. We found what appears to have
been a warehouse for the Nikumaroro colony’s Cooperative Store, wherein we
found, of all things, what appear to be perfume bottles and French perfumed
soap jars. This suggests that the colonists, rather than Earhart, might have
been responsible for the cosmetic products we’ve found at the Seven Site –
something we knew in the abstract, but for which we’d heretofore had no
evidence.
2. We cleared and searched a 15x15
meter plot east of the Cooperative Store, finding two more aluminum hair combs
(one very fancy) and a teakettle out of which metal had been cut to produce
tabular blanks that could be made into things like combs. This demonstrated that
an airplane was not the only plausible source of such raw materials.
3. Biologist Rachel King (my older
daughter, say I proudly) did a quick but thorough look for edible and poisonous
plants, found a fair number of the former and none of the latter. This helps
flesh out the story of Earhart-on-Nikumaroro, assuming she was there.
4. Betchart naturalist Bob Nanson
looked over the fauna and provided some useful insights into (particularly) how
Earhart might have lived off marine and avian resources, notably bird eggs.
5. TIGHAR’s Tom Roberts and a
doughty crew loaned by the Fiji Princess
hacked their way into the Seven Site to assess its current condition and let
the passengers see where we think it likely that Earhart died.
6. TIGHAR’s Dawn Johnson collected
samples for use in testing the efficacy of forensic dogs in identifying bones
on the island.
7. TIGHAR member and Michigan State Representative Larry Inman and a small but
enthusiastic team waded through shoe-sucking bird poop to visit a lagoon beach
we called the Inman Site (because Larry identified it on TIGHAR’s Aerial Tour
of Nikumaroro as a candidate castaway campsite) and then hacked on across the
island to the sea in about half an hour. Our ability to do so suggests that had
someone walking down the windward beach wanted to, she or he could have
accessed the lagoon pretty easily. We found no evidence of a campsite, but on
the ocean side we did find the low-tide reef flat totally covered in sea
cucumbers – a hitherto unknown possible castaway food source.
8. Quite a few divers, snorklers,
and a glass-bottomed boat scanned the reef in the neighborhood of the putative
Earhart landing site, with negative results – but as one of my wiser colleagues
once said, negative data are positive data.
9. We brought back a number of
artifacts from the colonial village for analysis – the cosmetic containers, the
combs, and some possible if unlikely airplane parts. We’ll see what they have
to tell us; at the very least they’ll enrich our understanding of the village
and the role played by aluminum (aircraft-derived and other) in the lifeways of
its residents.
All in all, I’d call the trip a
successful venture. I’m grateful to the Republic of Kiribati for permitting it,
to Kiribati on-board representative Nina Jacob for facilitating it, to Betchart
Expeditions for making it happen, to Dawn, Tom, Barb, and the other TIGHARs who
worked tirelessly to oversee and handle the details, and to all the
participants who put up with high seas and my boring lectures in order to take
part..
Oh crap; they're back! Kiakia (fairy terns) watch our arrival on Niku. Photo by Joe Cerniglia
