My God, they were marooned! They were shipwrecked on a deserted island! They were alive. They were lost! They were not lost. They were only stuck.

She stopped and folded her arms and stared at the western shore. The waves washing up and tumbling around the coral. No surfing here. Sam came up beside her and stood too.

“You should get out of the sun,” he said.

“How long, do you think? Until we’re rescued?”

“Shouldn’t be long. A few days.”

“What if it’s longer?”

She meant survival. But as they stood there together, side by side, watching the empty ocean, gathering sunshine, nothing but grass and sand and rocks and salt water and the two of them, the question took on something else, some untoward quality. Some intimacy that answered itself.

By the summer of 1928, the Pacific Command of the U.S. Navy had grown accustomed to assisting American flyboys on their harebrained adventures. After all, it was in the nation’s interest to promote aviation and thereby encourage the development of the world’s best airplanes and pilots; you never knew when another war might break out and such things would be required without delay. Last year there was the Dole Air Derby to Honolulu—what a circus that was—and before that you had several individual attempts to span the Pacific from San Francisco to Hawai’i, some of them foolhardy and some of them heroic, and some of them both at once. So the navy knew how to communicate with men in the air, and it knew how to fish them out of the water.

Tracking them down on some scrap of an island in the middle of the Pacific, now. That was a new one.

As it happened—and this should come as no surprise to those familiar with the pattern of threads linking just about every paid-up member of the American Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with all the others—Admiral John Smith, the officer in command of the South Pacific fleet in the middle of 1928, was an old friend of Mr. George Morrow, the two of them having prepped together at St. Paul’s in the first decade of the century. They had worked closely together in the arrangements for the landmark Mallory–Foster flight to Australia, and when the first garbled Morse code came through to the USS Farragut at 0323 local time on the morning of the second of August (something about an engine, possible detour) Admiral Smith immediately sent a relay on to Mr. Morrow, who had been delivered to Sydney by ocean liner a day earlier.

We can only imagine Mr. Morrow’s true feelings as he received this message in the middle of the Australian night, from the comfort of his hotel suite overlooking the harbor. History records only his official reply to Admiral Smith, which was sent nearly two hours later, sometime after Sam and Irene had landed on Howland Island: