Planes Over Gardner Island
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A week after the loss, three Navy floatplanes from the battleship Colorado fly over Gardner Island and see signs that someone has lived there.
Friday 9 July 1937
The story
The battleship Colorado steams south from Hawaii. It carries three small floatplanes that are launched by catapult. On the morning of 9 July they fly to Gardner Island.
From the air the island is a thin ring of trees around a big lagoon. A steamer lies broken on the reef at the western end. Lieutenant Lambrecht writes that signs of recent habitation are clearly visible. The planes circle and dive. Nobody waves.
In this story, the plane is already gone by now. Perhaps the surf has lifted it off the reef and dragged it into deep water. Perhaps the two flyers are under the trees on the far side, out of sight, or too weak to reach the beach in time.
The planes fly on. The Navy decides no one is on any of the Phoenix Islands.
What the record says
Here signs of recent habitation were clearly visible but repeated circling and zooming failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants and it was finally taken for granted that none were there.
Lambrecht, report of 16 July 1937, on Gardner Island
Given a chance, it is believed that Miss Earhart could have landed her plane in this lagoon and swam or waded ashore.
Lambrecht, report of 16 July 1937
The result of her operations was definitely to establish that neither the plane nor its passengers were ashore in the Phoenix Group and therefore that they were not on any known land within 450 miles of Howland and that they were not afloat in the extensive areas searched by the ship and her three seaplanes.
Murfin, Report of Earhart Search, paragraph 12, on the Colorado
Lambrecht did report 'signs of recent habitation' and no answering wave, and his crews saw no airplane. He does not describe what he saw, and no one went ashore; three months later Bevington called Gardner 'an uninhabited coral island'. The Navy concluded that the flyers were not on land in the Phoenix Group. That the flyers were alive and hidden is the story's supposition.