Taken from Crow’s Nest in the July 1930 issue of The Bermudian.
There’s never a dull moment in Bermuda life at present now that the Island has been discovered by the bird-men.
When, a few months ago, Captain Lon Yancey, Bill Alexander and Zeh Bouck , made the first successful airplane flight between New York and Bermuda, we all gasped. It was deemed quite a feat and so it was. But, only a few days ago, Roger Q. Williams, who was Yancey’s comrade on the flight to Rome, went him one better by making the 1,560 mile round-trip non-stop journey in seventeen hours. Accompanied by Errol Boyd and Harry P. Connors, Williams navigated the Trans-Atlantic monoplane, Columbia, to their tiny goal far out at sea and back again in the span of a single day. The world seems to be moving at a pretty fast pace!
We picked up a Metropolitan daily one day recently and saw where William Beebe, who is doing some marvelous research work at Nonesuch Island, Bermuda, entered a steel ball and was lowered to a depth of 1,426 feet in the water where, gazing through fused quartz windows, he saw marine life at a depth at which it was never studied before.
The world admires courage even though there are times when it takes the form of what we are almost tempted to call fool-hardiness. Consequently we were not at considerable space to the feat performed by Eric Johnson and Florence Smith who sailed from Bermuda to New York in at Belmont Manor, and Johnson, twenty-four, a brunette and a graduate of the University of Maine, where she majored in Biology, for the past two years a waitress at Belmont Manor, and Smith, a twenty-one, blond, and a carpenter by trade. Set out from Bermuda in their frail little craft and, after seventeen days at sea, reached their destination. The feat was made all the more remarkable by the fact that neither of them had any knowledge of navigation or seamanship. All they had to go by were a full moon and a pocket compass. Captain Walter Bernard, a marine superintendent of the Army transportation service, who received them on their arrival in New York, said: “The safe arrival of these babes of the sea was a miracle, no less.”
