Are Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick Buried in the Amazon Jungle?
Paul Redfern dreamed the same dream of making aviation history as Charles Lindberg and on August 25, 1927, three months after Lindberg had landed in Paris in May after his record breaking flight, Paul Redfern guided his single engine monoplane, the Port of Brunswick, into the skies over Sea Island, Georgia.
Paul Redfern proposed a more ambitious agenda than Charles Lindberg, because Rio de Janeiro is located a thousand miles more distant from the United States than is Paris, a distance that required more gasoline than the Spirit of St. Louis. Although Paul Redfern headed for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, instead of Paris, he and Lindberg shared the same goals of making aviation history and collecting aviation prizes. Charles Lindberg arrived safely at his destination and continued with his career, but more than eight decades and thirteen rescue expeditions later, Paul Redfern’s fate is still a mystery. The first aviator to fly solo across the Caribbean Sea, he never came home.
In 1903, the year after both Charles Lindberg and Paul Redfern were born, American aviation began when the Wright Brothers lifted off the sands near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. World War I demonstrated the effectiveness of airplanes in combat and hinted at the possibilities of peacetime air travel and air technology. Industry explored the possibilities of aerial photography, air mail postal delivery and air transportation, but in the 1920s airplanes were still mostly novelties, and pilots were self taught stunt men traveling county fairs and performing flying stunts including wing walking and pulling banners and, charging people to take them for rides.
Pilots in the fledgling industry also competed with each other to break records, including speed records, distance records, and altitude records, competitions that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of pilots and made a small number of them famous. When Charles Lindberg arrived in Paris, 150,000 people greeted him and he became an overnight world hero.
Supporters of all kinds and levels of income enticed aviators with tempting prizes to publicize everything from businesses to cities. Charles Lindberg had competed for and won $25,000 that a New York hotel owner offered to an aviator flying nonstop from New York to Paris. When 25-year-old Paul Redfern learned that the Brunswick, Georgia, Board of Trade offered to match the Lindberg Prize for a flier who could fly nonstop to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, he quickly accepted the challenge. The Brunswick Board of trade hoped that the flight of the Port of Brunswick would establish their tiny city as an East Coast maritime center like Jacksonville or Savannah.
Paul Redfern Grew Up with His Head in the Clouds
Some of Paul Rinaldo Redfern’s family members reported, possibly with tongue in cheek, that Paul Redfern always had his head in the clouds. Other family members, including his parents, said that he constantly wore an aviator’s helmet at an early age. When Paul Redfern was 16, and a sophomore in an industrial arts class at Columbia High School he built and flew a biplane style glider from cardboard and spare parts. When he finished his airplane that he called “The World’s Smallest Flying Machine,” he flew it around a cow pasture next to his school.
Paul displayed his glider at the University of South Carolina and because of his talent and skill at airplane construction, his parents allowed him to leave his second year in high school to work as an inspector at the Standard Aircraft Factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The factory ceased production in February 1919, and he returned to high school in Columbia.
During his senior year in high school, Paul designed and assembled a small biplane from spare parts and a used WWI aircraft engine at Benedict College, where his father was a faculty member. He established the first commercial airfield in Columbia and soloed from this field in his small biplane. After he graduated from high school, Paul acquired and flew a Curtiss Jenny JN-4 and a Dehavilland DH-4. He earned his living as an aviator, operating out of his airport in Columbia, South Carolina. A story in the Columbia, South Carolina Star, reported that Paul did acrobatic stunts at county fairs, and he became an “aerial advertising artist.” Another of his aerial jobs included using an airplane to spot illegal whiskey stills. The story also said that Paul had served jail time in Texas for buzzing a train.
Moving to Toledo, Ohio, to pursue his aviation career, Paul met Gertrude Hildebrand while he worked as an aviator for her father. They married in Toledo in 1925, and he also established an airfield in the area. Eventually Paul and Gertrude moved to Savannah, Georgia, when Paul accepted a job as an aviator with the United States Customs Department.
Barriers to Reaching Brazil
A story published in the Frederick Post of Frederick, Maryland on Thursday, August 26, 1927, said that Paul and his wife Gertrude greeted a crowd of more than 3,000 boosters and well wishers, a smattering of reporters on the Sea Island Beach on Thursday, August 25, 1927. His Stinson Detroiter monoplane that he christened Port of Brunswick was ready to reach “Brazil or Bust.”
Paul Redfern, now 25, faced flying the more than 4,600 miles from Georgia to Brazil, half of the trip over the Atlantic Ocean and half over the lush green jungle blankets of the Amazon Basin. Headhunters and cannibals waited to greet him if his airplane crashed in the jungle. Eddie Stinson who manufactured the new $12,000 Stinson SM-1 Detroiter, warned Paul Redfern that flying solo for 52 hours was “more than a man could stand,” especially after Charles Lindberg reported falling asleep at the throttle many times.
Friends and colleagues suggested to Paul that Caracas, Venezuela, would serve very well as a destination because it was less than halfway to Rio Janeiro, but he clung to the idea of shattering Charles Lindberg’s distance flying record instead of just breaking it. If Paul successfully completed his trip he would fly 1,000 miles further than Charles Lindberg had flown from New York to Paris. Paul had no radio altimeter or radio, just a compass and a map to determine his course. Fuel was vital on this distance flight, so the cockpit was crammed with spare fuel tanks placed around the pilot’s seat. Paul could only see forward through a small periscope in the fuselage or out the side windows.
The end of August also marked the high point of the hurricane season and there were no satellites to predict storms in those days. The end of August was also the time of no moon to light the night skies that Paul had to navigate to reach Brazil. None of these facts deterred Paul Redfern from his determination to fly to Rio de Janeiro. The newspapers reported that Paul carried a rifle and other weapons, fishhooks, flares, and trinkets to trade with the Indians tribes that he might meet if he had to make an emergency landing. He said, “Don’t lose hope if you don’t hear from me for two or three months.”
He said that he believed that if he did have to make a forced landing in the Amazon Valley, he could survive and one day “walk out of the jungle.” Paul Varner, chairman of the flight committee, said that he had told Paul Redfern that “If you find conditions bad after striking the South American mainland, follow the coast to Para. If moderate conditions prevail and you think it advisable, swing inland and fly for Pernambuco, or if everything is fine and you still confident you can make Rio, go on, God be with you.”
Paul Redfern, Bound for Brazil
The Frederick Post story described Paul Redfern’s take off from Glynn Isle Beach at 12:46 p.m. After a false start, Paul hauled his plane, The Port of Brunswick, higher on the beach and straightened it out. For more than a mile he taxied the airplane down the beach and then slowly and with a roar it turned seaward, South America bound. As The Port of Brunswick shrank into a speck on the horizon and then vanished, Gertrude Redfern collapsed into the arms of a friend.
Another friend, Mrs. Eugene Lewis, tried to comfort her, but now that she could no longer see her husband or his plane, she didn’t hold back her sobs that she had stifled with a cheerful smile while she said goodbye to him. Paul soared over the Atlantic Ocean, heading southeast at 85 miles an hour and probably about 5,000 feet altitude. He survived the first cycle of nighttime flying and the next morning 200 miles 200 miles out La Guaira, Venezuela.
Far below him he noticed the wake of a ship that proved to be the Norwegian tramp steamer Christian Krohg and he descended to the ship and threw out a carton containing a note asking for directions to South America. The navigators on the Christian Krohg informed Paul that South America was 200 miles due south, exactly where it had always been. Later that day, Lee Dennison, an American engineer, reported spotting The Port of Brunswick flying over Venezuela’s Ciudad Bolivar Plaza “trailing a thin wisp of black smoke.” He identified Paul Redfern’s plane by its tail number.
Paul Redfern Vanished
On his second night out, Paul Redfern was scheduled to drop a flare over the Brazilian town of Macapa, near the mouth of the Amazon River. Macapa had established radio contact with Rio de Janeiro where citizens waited with a display of banners and other decorations and fireworks. Hundreds of Brazilians were ready to storm Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick when they landed and carry them into the city. Included in the crowd were Washington Luis, President of Brazil, and Clara Bow, silent movie star, who was currently appearing in the aerial film Wings.
According to a story in the Reno Evening Gazette, in Reno, Nevada, dated August 25, 1927, Paul Redfern expected to decide at Macapa on the north bank of the Amazon whether to turn to Pernambuco, northeast of Rio, or continue to the Brazilian capital. He had told his technicians, “If I drop a green flare, everything is fine and I am going on to Rio, but if I drop a red flag I means that I expect to land at Pernambuco.”
He explained that his decision would be determined by gasoline supply and weather conditions. It isn’t clear whether Paul had gotten the message from Brazilian officials that there were no places where an airplane could land except Pernambuco, and perhaps, Para, before reaching Rio de Janeiro. If he were forced to land somewhere in Brazil, it likely would be in the jungle, where he might never escape even if he wasn’t injured when his airplane crashed.
The radio operator at Macapa transmitted to Rio de Janeiro that no one had seen flares or any sign from Paul Redfern and the next day thousands of people scanned the skies until sunset, the approximate time that Paul Redern’s plane would have run out of gas. If Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick had really been sighted over Ciudad Boliver the day before, the plane would have gone down along a 2,500 mile route that stretched from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the rugged mountains that sheltered tribal peoples, an area about the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
The Gettysburg Times of August 29, 1927 reported that The Port of New Brunswick had been seen over the Orinoco River Delta flying south on Saturday, August 27, 1927. A Reno Evening Gazette story dated August 31, 1927, said that Gertrude Redfern still believed that her husband was safe. She left Brunswick, Georgia for Sumter, South Carolina, to spend several days with relatives and to await further news from her missing husband. Gertrude Redfern was delighted with the fragment of news received that a plane had been sighted over Venezuela and insisted that if the report was true, the plane was The Port of Brunswick, carrying her husband. She said that she believed that her husband was safe. She never saw him again.
Searching for Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick
During the decade of 1927-1937, more than a dozen rescue expeditions searched for the Port of Brunswick and Paul Redfern. Periodically, an Amazon Indian, a Catholic missionary, or a bush pilot would surface with the rumor that Paul Redfern had been found alive stranded in the jungle. Rescue missions were financed and organized, but no one found him.
The Eugene Register Guard, Eugene, Oregon, of December 27, 1936, chronicled several of the expeditions. In 1932, an American engineer named Charles Hasler reported that Indians were holding an American pilot whose legs had been broken captive in the jungle, but the information was so limited that no expedition was organized.
William J. LaVarre, a diamond explorer born in Virginia and educated at Harvard, instigated an investigation in 1935, when Time Magazine reported that the U.S. consulate in Dutch Guiana “unearthed a Creole Catholic missionary named Melchert who dispatched a Bush Negro to the upper river in December 1934. The Bush Negro returned in February 1935 with the story of a white man who came out of the sky, had both legs broken, and lived in an Indian village.”
On April 15, 1935, an Indian who came to the hospital at Drie Tabbetjes suffering from yaws reported that he had seen a white man and his machine come out of the sky and the machine wrecked on a savanna, not a mountain. The American State Department calculated that it would take an expedition two to three months to reach this Indian village, and William LaVarre organized a party to go to the Indian village. After several weeks the explorers returned, reporting that they had found nothing.
Art Williams, a respected pilot living in British Guiana, reported that in January 1936, while performing an aerial survey, he passed over an Indian village in Brazil. Claiming that he had taught Paul Redfern how to fly, Art Williams reported that the Indians fled into the jungle but he saw “a lone white man standing in the open and waving frantically to the plane.” Taking a friend, Harry Wendt with him, Art Williams took a small boat and set out to find the village which he had located on his map. When he and Harry Wendt arrived in the village several days later, a heavily armed and war painted tribe of Indians met them and they narrowly escaped with their lives.
In February 1936, the Elbert S. Waid American Legion Post in the Panama Canal Zone, with post commander, W.L. Farrell in charge, launched an expedition to find Paul Redfern. CBS correspondent James A. Ryan also accompanied the expedition. The expedition issued five thousand “Redfern Rescue” stamp covers that had postmarked from Dutch Guiana, hoping to sell them to stamp collectors. One customer, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, bought two “Redfern Rescue” stamp covers.
In May 1936, W.L. Farrell emerged from the jungle and reported that the expedition had found no trace of Redfern and that CBS correspondent James Ryan had drowned. The same month a newspaper in Paramaribo, Suriname, published freelance newspaper reporter Alfred Harred’s Paul Redfern story. Harred said that he and former pilot Art Williams were navigating a floatplane on a boundary survey for British Guiana when they landed on an Amazon tributary.
Harred reported that he and Art Williams started to cross the Tumuc Humac Mountains, a range that forms the Brazilian border with French Guiana and Suriname. The two men encountered a village of completely nude Indians and they saw an airplane in the branches of a big tree. Alfred Harred said that he and Art Williams met Paul Redfern who hobbled around on crutches made of tree branches and liana vines.
At first Redfern spoke English haltingly, but soon he talked to Williams and Harred in reasonably good English. Paul Redfern told them that when he crashed his legs and arms were broken, but the Indian medicine men cured him. He married an Indian woman and they had a son who looked very much like him. Soon the Indians suspected that Harred and Art Williams were there to take Paul away and they brandished their spears and aimed their poisoned arrows. Paul advised his two would- be rescuers to leave and they did, assuring him that they would be back, but at the same time realizing that rescuing Paul Redfern would be a risky venture.
The news about finding Paul Redfern flashed around the world and reporters contacted Art Williams at his home in Georgetown, British Guiana. Art Williams denied the entire story, stating that he had never seen Paul Redfern or his plane and denying ever meeting Harred.
1937, the Thirteenth Rescue Expedition
In the fall of 1937, a few months after Amelia Earhart disappeared in her Lockheed Model 10 Electra on July 2, Paul Redfern’s family requested New York sportsman and explorer Theodore J. Waldeck to head the thirteenth rescue expedition from British Guiana. High water on a desolate island called Devil’s Hole on the remote Cuyuni River marooned the expedition, and one of its members, Dr. Frederick J. Fox of New York, contracted jungle fever and died. The other expedition members buried Dr. Fox and kept travelling until April 27, 1938, when Theodore Waldeck reported that he had discovered the wreckage of the Port of New Brunswick in Venezuela and that he had proof that Paul Redfern was dead, although he didn’t reveal the proof.
Paul Refern’s parents spent the rest of their lives hoping and praying that their son lived somewhere in the jungle. After ten years had passed, Paul’s wife Gertrude had a Michigan judge declare her husband legally dead. Gertrude and Paul did not have any children, and she never remarried. She died in 1981 and is buried in Detroit, Michigan.
Some people still believe that Paul Redfern probably survived in the Amazon jungle and that his children might still live there. A street in Rio de Janeiro was named for him, as well as an airfield on St. Simons island in Georgia. A group called the Paul Rinaldo Redfern Aviation Society in Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital, meets every August 25 at exactly 12:46 p.m., the time that the Port of Brunswick took off from the beach in 1927. They toast Paul Redfern and his jungle adventure, his achievements, and his uncertain fate. References South Carolina State Museum Titler, Dale M. Wings of Mystery: True Stories of Aviation History. Tower, 1966.
References
https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/environment/south-carolina-department-of-natural-resources
Titler, Dale M. Wings of Mystery: True Stories of Aviation History. Tower, 1966.
Paul Redfern proposed a more ambitious agenda than Charles Lindberg, because Rio de Janeiro is located a thousand miles more distant from the United States than is Paris, a distance that required more gasoline than the Spirit of St. Louis. Although Paul Redfern headed for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, instead of Paris, he and Lindberg shared the same goals of making aviation history and collecting aviation prizes. Charles Lindberg arrived safely at his destination and continued with his career, but more than eight decades and thirteen rescue expeditions later, Paul Redfern’s fate is still a mystery. The first aviator to fly solo across the Caribbean Sea, he never came home.
In 1903, the year after both Charles Lindberg and Paul Redfern were born, American aviation began when the Wright Brothers lifted off the sands near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. World War I demonstrated the effectiveness of airplanes in combat and hinted at the possibilities of peacetime air travel and air technology. Industry explored the possibilities of aerial photography, air mail postal delivery and air transportation, but in the 1920s airplanes were still mostly novelties, and pilots were self taught stunt men traveling county fairs and performing flying stunts including wing walking and pulling banners and, charging people to take them for rides.
Pilots in the fledgling industry also competed with each other to break records, including speed records, distance records, and altitude records, competitions that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of pilots and made a small number of them famous. When Charles Lindberg arrived in Paris, 150,000 people greeted him and he became an overnight world hero.
Supporters of all kinds and levels of income enticed aviators with tempting prizes to publicize everything from businesses to cities. Charles Lindberg had competed for and won $25,000 that a New York hotel owner offered to an aviator flying nonstop from New York to Paris. When 25-year-old Paul Redfern learned that the Brunswick, Georgia, Board of Trade offered to match the Lindberg Prize for a flier who could fly nonstop to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, he quickly accepted the challenge. The Brunswick Board of trade hoped that the flight of the Port of Brunswick would establish their tiny city as an East Coast maritime center like Jacksonville or Savannah.
Paul Redfern Grew Up with His Head in the Clouds
Some of Paul Rinaldo Redfern’s family members reported, possibly with tongue in cheek, that Paul Redfern always had his head in the clouds. Other family members, including his parents, said that he constantly wore an aviator’s helmet at an early age. When Paul Redfern was 16, and a sophomore in an industrial arts class at Columbia High School he built and flew a biplane style glider from cardboard and spare parts. When he finished his airplane that he called “The World’s Smallest Flying Machine,” he flew it around a cow pasture next to his school.
Paul displayed his glider at the University of South Carolina and because of his talent and skill at airplane construction, his parents allowed him to leave his second year in high school to work as an inspector at the Standard Aircraft Factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The factory ceased production in February 1919, and he returned to high school in Columbia.
During his senior year in high school, Paul designed and assembled a small biplane from spare parts and a used WWI aircraft engine at Benedict College, where his father was a faculty member. He established the first commercial airfield in Columbia and soloed from this field in his small biplane. After he graduated from high school, Paul acquired and flew a Curtiss Jenny JN-4 and a Dehavilland DH-4. He earned his living as an aviator, operating out of his airport in Columbia, South Carolina. A story in the Columbia, South Carolina Star, reported that Paul did acrobatic stunts at county fairs, and he became an “aerial advertising artist.” Another of his aerial jobs included using an airplane to spot illegal whiskey stills. The story also said that Paul had served jail time in Texas for buzzing a train.
Moving to Toledo, Ohio, to pursue his aviation career, Paul met Gertrude Hildebrand while he worked as an aviator for her father. They married in Toledo in 1925, and he also established an airfield in the area. Eventually Paul and Gertrude moved to Savannah, Georgia, when Paul accepted a job as an aviator with the United States Customs Department.
Barriers to Reaching Brazil
A story published in the Frederick Post of Frederick, Maryland on Thursday, August 26, 1927, said that Paul and his wife Gertrude greeted a crowd of more than 3,000 boosters and well wishers, a smattering of reporters on the Sea Island Beach on Thursday, August 25, 1927. His Stinson Detroiter monoplane that he christened Port of Brunswick was ready to reach “Brazil or Bust.”
Paul Redfern, now 25, faced flying the more than 4,600 miles from Georgia to Brazil, half of the trip over the Atlantic Ocean and half over the lush green jungle blankets of the Amazon Basin. Headhunters and cannibals waited to greet him if his airplane crashed in the jungle. Eddie Stinson who manufactured the new $12,000 Stinson SM-1 Detroiter, warned Paul Redfern that flying solo for 52 hours was “more than a man could stand,” especially after Charles Lindberg reported falling asleep at the throttle many times.
Friends and colleagues suggested to Paul that Caracas, Venezuela, would serve very well as a destination because it was less than halfway to Rio Janeiro, but he clung to the idea of shattering Charles Lindberg’s distance flying record instead of just breaking it. If Paul successfully completed his trip he would fly 1,000 miles further than Charles Lindberg had flown from New York to Paris. Paul had no radio altimeter or radio, just a compass and a map to determine his course. Fuel was vital on this distance flight, so the cockpit was crammed with spare fuel tanks placed around the pilot’s seat. Paul could only see forward through a small periscope in the fuselage or out the side windows.
The end of August also marked the high point of the hurricane season and there were no satellites to predict storms in those days. The end of August was also the time of no moon to light the night skies that Paul had to navigate to reach Brazil. None of these facts deterred Paul Redfern from his determination to fly to Rio de Janeiro. The newspapers reported that Paul carried a rifle and other weapons, fishhooks, flares, and trinkets to trade with the Indians tribes that he might meet if he had to make an emergency landing. He said, “Don’t lose hope if you don’t hear from me for two or three months.”
He said that he believed that if he did have to make a forced landing in the Amazon Valley, he could survive and one day “walk out of the jungle.” Paul Varner, chairman of the flight committee, said that he had told Paul Redfern that “If you find conditions bad after striking the South American mainland, follow the coast to Para. If moderate conditions prevail and you think it advisable, swing inland and fly for Pernambuco, or if everything is fine and you still confident you can make Rio, go on, God be with you.”
Paul Redfern, Bound for Brazil
The Frederick Post story described Paul Redfern’s take off from Glynn Isle Beach at 12:46 p.m. After a false start, Paul hauled his plane, The Port of Brunswick, higher on the beach and straightened it out. For more than a mile he taxied the airplane down the beach and then slowly and with a roar it turned seaward, South America bound. As The Port of Brunswick shrank into a speck on the horizon and then vanished, Gertrude Redfern collapsed into the arms of a friend.
Another friend, Mrs. Eugene Lewis, tried to comfort her, but now that she could no longer see her husband or his plane, she didn’t hold back her sobs that she had stifled with a cheerful smile while she said goodbye to him. Paul soared over the Atlantic Ocean, heading southeast at 85 miles an hour and probably about 5,000 feet altitude. He survived the first cycle of nighttime flying and the next morning 200 miles 200 miles out La Guaira, Venezuela.
Far below him he noticed the wake of a ship that proved to be the Norwegian tramp steamer Christian Krohg and he descended to the ship and threw out a carton containing a note asking for directions to South America. The navigators on the Christian Krohg informed Paul that South America was 200 miles due south, exactly where it had always been. Later that day, Lee Dennison, an American engineer, reported spotting The Port of Brunswick flying over Venezuela’s Ciudad Bolivar Plaza “trailing a thin wisp of black smoke.” He identified Paul Redfern’s plane by its tail number.
Paul Redfern Vanished
On his second night out, Paul Redfern was scheduled to drop a flare over the Brazilian town of Macapa, near the mouth of the Amazon River. Macapa had established radio contact with Rio de Janeiro where citizens waited with a display of banners and other decorations and fireworks. Hundreds of Brazilians were ready to storm Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick when they landed and carry them into the city. Included in the crowd were Washington Luis, President of Brazil, and Clara Bow, silent movie star, who was currently appearing in the aerial film Wings.
According to a story in the Reno Evening Gazette, in Reno, Nevada, dated August 25, 1927, Paul Redfern expected to decide at Macapa on the north bank of the Amazon whether to turn to Pernambuco, northeast of Rio, or continue to the Brazilian capital. He had told his technicians, “If I drop a green flare, everything is fine and I am going on to Rio, but if I drop a red flag I means that I expect to land at Pernambuco.”
He explained that his decision would be determined by gasoline supply and weather conditions. It isn’t clear whether Paul had gotten the message from Brazilian officials that there were no places where an airplane could land except Pernambuco, and perhaps, Para, before reaching Rio de Janeiro. If he were forced to land somewhere in Brazil, it likely would be in the jungle, where he might never escape even if he wasn’t injured when his airplane crashed.
The radio operator at Macapa transmitted to Rio de Janeiro that no one had seen flares or any sign from Paul Redfern and the next day thousands of people scanned the skies until sunset, the approximate time that Paul Redern’s plane would have run out of gas. If Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick had really been sighted over Ciudad Boliver the day before, the plane would have gone down along a 2,500 mile route that stretched from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the rugged mountains that sheltered tribal peoples, an area about the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
The Gettysburg Times of August 29, 1927 reported that The Port of New Brunswick had been seen over the Orinoco River Delta flying south on Saturday, August 27, 1927. A Reno Evening Gazette story dated August 31, 1927, said that Gertrude Redfern still believed that her husband was safe. She left Brunswick, Georgia for Sumter, South Carolina, to spend several days with relatives and to await further news from her missing husband. Gertrude Redfern was delighted with the fragment of news received that a plane had been sighted over Venezuela and insisted that if the report was true, the plane was The Port of Brunswick, carrying her husband. She said that she believed that her husband was safe. She never saw him again.
Searching for Paul Redfern and the Port of Brunswick
During the decade of 1927-1937, more than a dozen rescue expeditions searched for the Port of Brunswick and Paul Redfern. Periodically, an Amazon Indian, a Catholic missionary, or a bush pilot would surface with the rumor that Paul Redfern had been found alive stranded in the jungle. Rescue missions were financed and organized, but no one found him.
The Eugene Register Guard, Eugene, Oregon, of December 27, 1936, chronicled several of the expeditions. In 1932, an American engineer named Charles Hasler reported that Indians were holding an American pilot whose legs had been broken captive in the jungle, but the information was so limited that no expedition was organized.
William J. LaVarre, a diamond explorer born in Virginia and educated at Harvard, instigated an investigation in 1935, when Time Magazine reported that the U.S. consulate in Dutch Guiana “unearthed a Creole Catholic missionary named Melchert who dispatched a Bush Negro to the upper river in December 1934. The Bush Negro returned in February 1935 with the story of a white man who came out of the sky, had both legs broken, and lived in an Indian village.”
On April 15, 1935, an Indian who came to the hospital at Drie Tabbetjes suffering from yaws reported that he had seen a white man and his machine come out of the sky and the machine wrecked on a savanna, not a mountain. The American State Department calculated that it would take an expedition two to three months to reach this Indian village, and William LaVarre organized a party to go to the Indian village. After several weeks the explorers returned, reporting that they had found nothing.
Art Williams, a respected pilot living in British Guiana, reported that in January 1936, while performing an aerial survey, he passed over an Indian village in Brazil. Claiming that he had taught Paul Redfern how to fly, Art Williams reported that the Indians fled into the jungle but he saw “a lone white man standing in the open and waving frantically to the plane.” Taking a friend, Harry Wendt with him, Art Williams took a small boat and set out to find the village which he had located on his map. When he and Harry Wendt arrived in the village several days later, a heavily armed and war painted tribe of Indians met them and they narrowly escaped with their lives.
In February 1936, the Elbert S. Waid American Legion Post in the Panama Canal Zone, with post commander, W.L. Farrell in charge, launched an expedition to find Paul Redfern. CBS correspondent James A. Ryan also accompanied the expedition. The expedition issued five thousand “Redfern Rescue” stamp covers that had postmarked from Dutch Guiana, hoping to sell them to stamp collectors. One customer, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, bought two “Redfern Rescue” stamp covers.
In May 1936, W.L. Farrell emerged from the jungle and reported that the expedition had found no trace of Redfern and that CBS correspondent James Ryan had drowned. The same month a newspaper in Paramaribo, Suriname, published freelance newspaper reporter Alfred Harred’s Paul Redfern story. Harred said that he and former pilot Art Williams were navigating a floatplane on a boundary survey for British Guiana when they landed on an Amazon tributary.
Harred reported that he and Art Williams started to cross the Tumuc Humac Mountains, a range that forms the Brazilian border with French Guiana and Suriname. The two men encountered a village of completely nude Indians and they saw an airplane in the branches of a big tree. Alfred Harred said that he and Art Williams met Paul Redfern who hobbled around on crutches made of tree branches and liana vines.
At first Redfern spoke English haltingly, but soon he talked to Williams and Harred in reasonably good English. Paul Redfern told them that when he crashed his legs and arms were broken, but the Indian medicine men cured him. He married an Indian woman and they had a son who looked very much like him. Soon the Indians suspected that Harred and Art Williams were there to take Paul away and they brandished their spears and aimed their poisoned arrows. Paul advised his two would- be rescuers to leave and they did, assuring him that they would be back, but at the same time realizing that rescuing Paul Redfern would be a risky venture.
The news about finding Paul Redfern flashed around the world and reporters contacted Art Williams at his home in Georgetown, British Guiana. Art Williams denied the entire story, stating that he had never seen Paul Redfern or his plane and denying ever meeting Harred.
1937, the Thirteenth Rescue Expedition
In the fall of 1937, a few months after Amelia Earhart disappeared in her Lockheed Model 10 Electra on July 2, Paul Redfern’s family requested New York sportsman and explorer Theodore J. Waldeck to head the thirteenth rescue expedition from British Guiana. High water on a desolate island called Devil’s Hole on the remote Cuyuni River marooned the expedition, and one of its members, Dr. Frederick J. Fox of New York, contracted jungle fever and died. The other expedition members buried Dr. Fox and kept travelling until April 27, 1938, when Theodore Waldeck reported that he had discovered the wreckage of the Port of New Brunswick in Venezuela and that he had proof that Paul Redfern was dead, although he didn’t reveal the proof.
Paul Refern’s parents spent the rest of their lives hoping and praying that their son lived somewhere in the jungle. After ten years had passed, Paul’s wife Gertrude had a Michigan judge declare her husband legally dead. Gertrude and Paul did not have any children, and she never remarried. She died in 1981 and is buried in Detroit, Michigan.
Some people still believe that Paul Redfern probably survived in the Amazon jungle and that his children might still live there. A street in Rio de Janeiro was named for him, as well as an airfield on St. Simons island in Georgia. A group called the Paul Rinaldo Redfern Aviation Society in Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital, meets every August 25 at exactly 12:46 p.m., the time that the Port of Brunswick took off from the beach in 1927. They toast Paul Redfern and his jungle adventure, his achievements, and his uncertain fate. References South Carolina State Museum Titler, Dale M. Wings of Mystery: True Stories of Aviation History. Tower, 1966.
References
https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/environment/south-carolina-department-of-natural-resources
Titler, Dale M. Wings of Mystery: True Stories of Aviation History. Tower, 1966.