HOPES DASHED

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4872, 18 July 1936, Page 5

HOPES DASHED

OF FINDING ULM ALIVE. MOTUITI ISLAND INHABITED. CASTAWAY PROBABLY NATIVE. (Press Association.—Copyright.) (Received 12 noon.) Canberra, this day. A cablegram has been received by the Prime Minister's Department from the Consul-General at Papeete in reply to a message sent by Mr. Lyons asking for news of attempts to rescue the man reported to have been seen at Motuiti Island. The cable states that a wireless message from the captain of the Port Darwin was communicated to the French authorities on June 27. The reply stated that the island was inhabited by a group of Tahitians and would be visited by the Concessionaire at the end of this month.

It would appear, therefore, that the island is not uninhabited as was thought when the news of the castaway was received in Melbourne. The officers and seamen of the Port Darwin do not believe the person they saw was Mr. Ulm. They think the man was probably a native who has been cast adrift from one of the adjacent islands.

Mr. Ulm, who was accompanied by Messrs. K Littlejohn, co-pilot, and J. L. Skilling, navigator and radio operator, left Oakland, California, at 3.41 p.m. on December 3, 1934, for Honolulu, a distance of about 2400 miles, on the first stage of a flight to Australia. After leaving Honolulu the airmen had intended to fly to Fanning Island, Suva and Auckland, from where they would have continue to Sydney. At 10.30 p.m., Pacific standard time, a radio station at San Francisco reported that it had established brief contact with the machine. On the following day at 8 a.m. the airmen sent out a message that they had lost their bearings and were running short of petrol. They could not pick up the radio beacon at Honolulu. The next message stated that the machine was south of Honolulu and that they were flying back and at 9.28 a.m. the machine was reported to be on the water. The fliers were totally lost and did not actually know whether they were north or south of Honolulu, a fact which greatly handicapped searchers.