The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century, a tragic tale of a life cut short in pursuit of a glorious goal.
She was one of the most famous pilots of her generation, an American aviator who took to the skies and blazed her name across the record books, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the United States, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly solo across the Pacific.
But in 1937, her ambitious adventure to become the first woman to fly solo around the world ended in her death – and even, some have suggested, a grisly end at the hands – or claws – of a powerful animal foe, the coconut crab.
Let’s rewind. On 1 June that year, the 39-year-old Earhart took off with her navigator Fred Noonan from Miami in the US in her trusty twin-engined Lockheed Electra, embarking on her latest record attempt. The press had gathered to see her off, and she reassured them that ‘it is to be safe and sane flight.’
For the first 22,000 of her 29,000-mile journey across five continents, all went well. She and Noonan landed to refuel at various points and on 29 June they arrived in Lae, New Guinea. A few days later, on 2 July, they departed for the final leg, heading for Howland Island, a tiny coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean. But they never arrived. Earhart, Noonan and the plane went missing. An intense search mission by the US coast guard and navy drew a blank and the pair were declared dead.
Speculation has flourished about Earhart’s fate. Did she end up living out her life as a castaway on a Pacific island? Was she captured by the Japanese and executed as a spy? Or were those fearsome coconut crabs to blame?
These mega-crabs are Guinness World Record-breakers in their own right, as the heaviest and largest crustacean to spend all its life (up to 60 years) on land. On encountering them on his travels, Charles Darwin described them as of ‘monstrous size’. He was right.
Coconut crabs have a leg span of up to a metre, an impressively powerful grip (they can lift up to 28kg), and can climb trees. They do, as their name suggests, smash open and eat coconuts. But they also hunt live prey, including mice, rats and even large seabirds.
It’s been suggested that Earhart, having failed to find Howland Island, landed on Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific, some 350 nautical miles away. If she did, she may have come face to face with these scary opponents.
There is some evidence for the Nikumaroro theory: radio messages at night from the area, signs of a bivouac found later that year by a British officer, and the fact that, while the island was a steep-sided, extinct volcano, on the night the plane disappeared the tide was very low and a beach could have acted as a landing strip.
Perhaps most compelling was the discovery in 1940 of 13 human bones found next to the remains of a campfire. The remains were shipped to Fiji, but they were lost and their identity has never been confirmed. Another key question remains unanswered: what happened to the rest of the skeleton? If Earhart did perish on Nikumaroro, it’s not impossible that coconut crabs played a role in destroying her body.
A 2018 experiment by the International Group of Historical Aircraft Recovery used pig carcasses to demonstrate how the crabs were able to drag them back to their burrows and strip the bones of flesh, in under a fortnight.
The evidence of what happened to Earhart is far from conclusive.
