Elusive Truths
Davy Crockett and Amelia Earhart are not alive and well on Atlantis. Or are they?
Television has transformed the historical mystery into a low-budget documentary full of hokey re-enactments and spooky music. Fat paperback bestsellers promise the secrets of the ancients--aliens, Atlanteans (as in Atlantis residents), or the Freemasons, depending on the book. For those who get their unsolved history from popular culture, every scientific answer is followed by a portentous ". . . or is it?" and the answer of choice is whatever's weirdest.
The mysteries that occupy historians, both professional and amateur, are rarely so cinematic. Real historical detectives are more concerned with the gritty, hairsplitting details of history. Even searching for Atlantis, as grand and quixotic as that may be, comes down to pragmatic concerns like raising funds and chartering submarines. There's paperwork to be handled, red tape to slog through, and hate mail to answer. Sometimes the results will have echoing ramifications, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but more often than not, the mysteries people care most about don't really matter all that much. "I don't think this has any redeeming social significance," says Tom King, an archaeologist searching for Amelia Earhart. "It's an intellectually engaging form of recreation." In other words, it's a mystery that can't be put down.
If Earhart hadn't disappeared, she'd be far less interesting. She wouldn't have been captured by the Japanese or frolicked on an idyllic tropical island. Conventional wisdom says she ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Finding her earthly remains is the full-time job of Ric Gillespie and Pat Thrasher of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), the nonprofit organization the couple founded 15 years ago to search for historic plane wrecks. Their theory is hardly romantic: Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed on the Pacific island of Nikumaroro (it would have been in the right place when they ran low on fuel), then died of disease or starvation. Thrasher and Gillespie, a former aviation insurance accident investigator, work out of a home office in Wilmington, Del., packed with Ameliana.
The results of four journeys to Nikumaroro and constant archive mining by TIGHAR members are tantalizing but inconclusive. There are the crumbling fragments of an Amelia-size woman's shoe, a sheet of aluminum that could be from her Lockheed Electra if only the rivet pattern were different, and a paper trail documenting bones found on the island in 1940. Gillespie is now an expert in bizarre esoterica: What he can tell you about 1930s Cat's Paw women's replacement heels could fill a book. The expeditions are grueling--Gillespie lost his corneas to equatorial sunlight--but Earhart is the sexy poster girl that keeps TIGHAR's 800-odd dues-paying members happy. And it has become a matter of pride. "There's just a chance we can come up with hard evidence," he says. The dream find is an "any-idiot artifact"--something any idiot could tell is hers, like a plane part with a serial number or a tooth packed with nice, DNA-rich pulp.
Lincoln's prose? If TIGHAR's work seems tedious, well, it often is. Most historians endure their share of tedium. Michael Burlingame, a professor of history at Connecticut College and an Abraham Lincoln biographer, spent months unraveling the authorship of the elusive "Bixby letter"--literally word by word. On learning that Boston widow Lydia Bixby had lost all five of her sons in the war, Lincoln ostensibly sent her a brief but exquisite letter of consolation. It extolled, among other virtues, "the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom." The 1864 letter, considered by Lincoln scholars to be a masterpiece on par with the Gettysburg Address, attained even greater fame when it was read at the start of the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
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