Thirty-one May marks 80 years since 29-year-old Amelia Earhart took to the skies. In her new Lockheed L-10E Electra aircraft, she planned to be the first woman to fly around the world and the first to fly around the equator on a route of around forty-three thousand kilometres. Everyone believed in her. She had long been a more daring and successful pilot than her colleagues, but this time the stars were not in her favour. On the second day of July 1937, she disappeared to an unknown destination.
At least that was the case until recently, when all that was known for sure was that she should have refuelled on the small island of Howland, which was already difficult to find, let alone land on, but never made it there. On the morning of 2 July 1937, the radio operators on board the Itasca, the ship that was supposed to take her to that island in the Central Pacific, heard her clearly, but she did not hear them. At eight o’clock and forty-three minutes local time, her voice also went dead. No one ever heard it again.
They organised the most expensive rescue operation in American history. They searched the sea north-west of the Itasca, because its captain estimated that it must have run out of fuel and crashed somewhere. They found nothing.
Marine officials in Hawaii have assessed that it should be searched for southeast of Howland Island. The result was the same. The battleship USS Colorado, intercepting unidentified radio signals, concluded that it had landed somewhere on the uninhabited Phoenix Islands, some five hundred kilometres southeast of Howland, and began to investigate. They were left empty-handed.
The other ships involved in the search and the planes searching the area from the air also had to admit their helplessness. Could Amelia have changed course? The search was widened, but not a single trace of her was found. Sixteen days later, on 18 July 1937, the official announcement was made: the plane must have crashed into the sea and sunk without a trace. The distress calls they heard were misunderstood.
But Amelia Erhart was one of America’s most notorious women, and there was no way people would let her death go unexplained. One theory is that she was kidnapped by the Japanese and was living on Marshall Island, which was under Japanese control at the time. In 1949, her mother stated that she had always suspected that Amelia was connected to the government. US intelligence launched an investigation, but found no evidence that Amelia had ever stayed on the islands.
In 1960, three US Navy officers presented a list of people who had allegedly seen Amelia on Saipan. Again, she was a prisoner of the Japanese. Not long afterwards, Josephine Blanco Akiyama from California claimed to have seen Amelia and her navigator captured by the Japanese while she was still living on Saipan before the war.
Radio journalist Fred Goerner found out that Amelia was a government agent who was supposed to land on Marshall Island, but was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned on Saipan. She died of malnutrition and disease. Another theory is that she lived alive and well under a false name in New Jersey.
A third theory claimed that Earhart lost her head and made a mistake. When she finally reported to the radio operators, she was presumably lost and out of petrol. The radio operators confirmed that she was worried about finding Howland Island, but not that she was panicking or out of petrol.
Some believed that it had landed in the Phoenix area, from where it and its navigator continued to send distress signals for three days. There they were captured by the Japanese, who either removed or destroyed the aircraft and took them to Saipan, where they died sometime before the end of 1937. The US government was supposedly aware of this but, because of diplomatic relations between the two countries, did not make it public.
The TIGHAR project, founded in 1988, has taken the investigation more seriously. In the first ten years of their work, they raised and spent around two million dollars to discover the truth about Amelia’s disappearance. At the end of last year, they finally concluded that they knew the truth: Amelia did not die in the plane, but on the ground. And she did not die on 2 July 1937, but a few days, perhaps even a few months later, after struggling to survive on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the Caribbean Sea.
British authorities found human remains on the site as early as 1940, but concluded that they belonged to a man. The skeleton was carefully measured and inventoried, and the documents were archived. In 1998, they came into the hands of members of the TIGHR project, who sent them to forensic anthropologists.
The anthropologists examined the morphology of the described bones using modern forensic methods and concluded that the skeleton was consistent with a female of Amelia’s height and ethnic group. But when anthropologist Richard Jantz updated the measurements of the bones, he noticed something unusual: the skeleton’s arms were longer than those of a typical European woman.
He and his colleagues analysed Erhart’s photographs and compared the data with those of the skeleton. A forensic visual effects expert was involved in the research. He compared old photographs of Erhart, in which she was wearing short sleeves and her arms were clearly visible, with images of the remains of a stranger on the island. He found that the hands were identical.
A month or two before the final conclusions on Amelia Earhart’s fate were revealed last year, TIGHRA members also explained to the public that Earhart had sent more than 100 radio calls for help between 2 and 6 July 1937, which means that her plane had not crashed. If it had, the plane’s engine would have been destroyed, and if it had, the radio would not have worked.
They also presented documents showing that the airlines did indeed receive calls for help at the time. At that time, people still believed that Amelia was alive, but they gave up hope when planes combing the area found nothing. But why didn’t the pilots spot Amelia’s plane?
That’s because, they say, by the time they arrived, the plane had been swallowed up by the sea and sank. At that time, they claim, Amelia was still alive. In the late 1990s, bones were found on an uninhabited island and there were signs that someone had lit a fire nearby. Since the bones were fish and bird bones, they concluded that they were the remains of Amelia’s food.
There was no drinking water on the island, so it was probably squeezing water from the leaves of trees and collecting rainwater, they continued. She spent at least a few weeks, if not months, on the island.
But no other human remains have been found on it, so it is assumed that its navigator, Frederick J. Noonan, really died during or shortly after the emergency landing, as some records report that Amelia reported that Noonan was injured. After his death, he was reportedly washed out to sea.
Now, on the 80th anniversary of the death of the famous pilot Amelia Earhart, TIGHR is confident that it has solved the riddle that has occupied people’s imagination for so long: Amelia survived the landing on Nikumaroro Island and fought heroically for survival, all alone, for quite some time.
The mysterious deafness of Francisco Goya
But they cannot prove it irrefutably because they do not have a corpse, just as scientists cannot say for sure why the Spanish painter Francisco Goya suddenly fell ill while visiting his mentor.
At 46 years old, he began to suffer from a severe headache. He was dizzy and hallucinating. His eyesight deteriorated and his ears rustled. Most of the symptoms slowly subsided, but he remained deaf. His fame as a painter continued to rise, but he felt cut off from the world ever since.
He lost his hearing in 1793, and scientists couldn’t accept that they didn’t know what had happened to him. Descriptions of his symptoms have been as scant as descriptions of his life, yet recently they have come up with the idea that he could have suffered from an auto-immune disease known as Susak syndrome.
Patients suffering from Susak syndrome may start to behave unusually, for example becoming suspicious and paranoid. They often have migraine-like headaches and speech problems, and may also have problems with their vision. Symptoms of this very rare condition, which usually affects young people around the age of 18, usually resolve within five years.
Of course, they could not have known this in Goya’s time, because Dr John Susac only described the disease in 1979, although it is still not known why it occurs and why it affects more girls than boys. Thus, doctors did not even name his illness, and later researchers speculated whether he might have suffered from bacterial meningitis or syphilis. The latter could well have been the case, since the famous Spanish painter was not very faithful to his wife of 39 years, Josefa Bayeu.
It is not known how unfaithful he was to her, but Josefa is hardly mentioned in any record of him, even though he was a court painter. He probably married her because she was the sister of three painters more successful than himself and he hoped for their help. In 1813, or the year after Josefa died, their recently divorced housekeeper Leocadia Zorrilla gave birth to a daughter, Maria del Rosaro Weiss, who most scholars of Goya’s life believe to have been his daughter. When he left Spain for France in 1823, Leocadia followed him with her children.
But she was healthy and so was he, except that he was deaf. If he really had syphilis, it would have had more lasting effects because it was not yet curable in the 18th century, according to doctors. The symptoms described could also have been those of lead poisoning, which was still a component of paint at that time, but even then he would not have recovered as successfully as he did.
They cannot, of course, make a definitive diagnosis going back more than two centuries, but they can speculate that he had Susak syndrome, just as researchers into his life speculate what happened to his head.
When he died in 1829 at the age of 82, he was reportedly buried with her in Bordeaux. She was gone when he was exhumed in 1898 to be transported to Madrid. Once during those 69 years, she mysteriously disappeared.
The Spanish consul sent a telegram to Madrid: “Goya’s headless body. Please give me instructions.” The reply came quickly: “Send Goya, with or without head.”
There are even more theories about where she went than about why Goya went deaf. One involves the Austrian painter Dionisio Fierros (1827-1894). His biographer says that a 19th-century painting of his reads: “Goya’s Skull, painted in 1849.” When the biographer was researching what this might mean, her path led her to Fierros’ widow and grandson. Both claimed that the painter had a skull in his studio and that it might have been Goya’s.
Unfortunately, the painting on which the inscription was made disappeared without a trace, but another biographer claims that the skull was kept in the studio until one of his nephews decided to experiment with it a little during his medical studies. It cracked, and because the nephew did not know what to do with it, he gave it to a dog to chew on for a while.
The second theory involves Dr Laffargue, a friend of the painter. Before his death, Goya supposedly allowed him to cut off his head after his death. On it Laffargue could study phrenology, which assumed that a person’s intellectual and personality characteristics depended on the size, shape and proportions of his skull. The field was still in its infancy at the time, and Laffargue was reportedly sent a skull from Bordeaux to Paris to study it a little, but later lost it.
A more romantic version says that Goya asked the executor of his will to cut off his head and bury it in Madrid at the foot of the tomb of the Duchess of Alba, supposedly his one true love. He met her in 1795, when he was already recovering from his mysterious illness but was deaf. He was commissioned to paint a portrait of the ducal couple, but the Duke died suddenly the following year. Goya was one of the few people the Duchess asked to keep her company during the requisite mourning.
Two years later, he painted a second official portrait of the Duchess. It shows the widow, dressed in black, pointing towards the sand, which reads Solo Goya or Goya Only. They were obviously really close. He never handed her the painting, if it was commissioned at all, and it was still part of his private collection at the time of his death.
It was inherited by Javier, the only survivor of the seven children Goya had with his wife. The Duchess of Alba also remembered Javier in her will and left him a small income from her estate.
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Haydn, 145 years without a head
But that doesn’t prove that Goya’s head is really at her feet, and it is certain that Goya is not the only artist to have lost his head after death. The same happened to the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn.
When he died, Austria was still in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, so Prince Esterhazy ordered Haydn to be temporarily buried in the city cemetery. Eleven years later, in 1820, he ordered Haydn’s mausoleum to be excavated and transported to a new mausoleum.
The officials did as they were told, and opened the coffin a little in between. They were left speechless: Haydn’s body rested inside, but his head was nowhere to be found. Where it should have been, there was only a wig. The Prince of Fury demanded a police investigation.
In it, it emerged that Haydn had been resting in peace for only five days before his friend Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, formerly the Prince’s secretary, and Johann Napomuk Peter, a prison employee, bribed an undertaker to unlock the cemetery at night, dig up the coffin and decapitate the corpse.
He brought it to them wrapped in a cloth. On the way home, Rosenbaum couldn’t resist peeking into the wrapping. “I had to vomit – I couldn’t stand the smell,” he later wrote in his diary. “My head was already quite green, but still quite recognisable.” He immediately had it professionally cleaned: Haydn’s brain and hair were removed at the Vienna General Hospital, the skull was cleaned with bleach and macerated.
She and Peter looked at it closely. They were also phrenology devotees, but they were looking for the key to Haydn’s genius in the skull. If they found it, they did not entrust it to anyone, but when they were finally caught by the police, they insisted that they simply could not allow such a beautiful spirit to lie in the ground and be corroded by worms.
At that time, the skull had been in Rosenbaum’s home for 11 years. He placed it on a pillow of black satin covered with silk, which he placed in a wooden box he had made on the model of a Roman sarcophagus. He placed it in a mausoleum, which he made in the garden behind the skull for visitors to see, decorated with a gold lyre.
But when Peter told the police everything he knew, the skull was no longer safe there. The police searched Rosenbaum’s house and garden, but found no skull. Rosenbaum hid it under his mattress, and then Mrs Rosenbaum lay on top of it, claiming she was so sick she could not get up.
To get the police to leave him alone, Rosenbaum gave Prince Esterhazy another skull from his collection, and the Prince paid him handsomely for it. Thus, on 4 December 1820, Haydn was buried with someone else’s head, while his rested with Rosenbaum for the next nine years. But she was not at peace yet.
Before he died in 1829, Rosenbaum gave it to Peter, but he requested that it be donated to the Vienna Society of Music Lovers after his death. Peter’s widow did so ten years later, but had the misfortune to place it in the hands of another phrenology devotee, Dr Karl Haller. He gave the skull to Professor Rokitansky of the Institute of Pathology at the University of Vienna instead of to the music lovers.
Now the skull was their property, but music lovers refused to accept it. They sued the university, and Esterhazy’s descendants, who wanted the skull for themselves, also filed their own lawsuit. So, 86 years after his death, Haydn’s skull became the subject of lawsuits until a court awarded it to the music lovers. They kept it on the pedestal of their society for more than 130 years.
But Esterhazy’s descendants have not given up. Duke Paul Esterhazy built a new Haydn mausoleum in Einstadt and wanted the composer’s head in the coffin. Music lovers were now ready to sell it, but in the midst of the economic crisis, during which Hitler successfully rose to power, it was too expensive even for the Duke.
So the skull spent the Second World War in Vienna, after which music lovers decided to donate it to Esterhezy’s descendants. On 30 May 1954, 145 years after Haydn’s death, his skull was ceremoniously placed in an urn decorated with a gold wreath and red and white peonies. A procession of 100 cars then set off from Vienna. It passed Haydn’s birthplace and landed in Einstadt, where Haydn’s remains were placed in a new copper coffin, the old wooden one having disintegrated, and finally Haydn’s head was placed in it.
