Free Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Page B

about the thrill of adventure, or finding a pot of gold. It wasn’t even about the lost planes. It was about memory. It was about preserving the past. It was about the feeling that came over him when he saw the Dixon and Custer wreckage, though it would be a long time before he understood where that feeling rose from in his past.
    “ On both the Custer and Dixon sites , I was emotionally overcome,” he wrote in his journal. “Seeing the wings in the photos and in their final resting places, realizing the bits and pieces that I see once carried crews of Americans every bit as hopeful for a future as I was at that age, I have gotten to know these crews a little. To them, it made no difference that they died in a backwater campaign. They died young and violently. They are to be remembered.”
    —
    O N HIS LAST AFTERNOON in Palau, Scannon drove up a long, winding road to the luxury hotel and putting green overlooking the bay. As he walked among the tropical shade trees, he felt the soft Palauan soil give beneath his feet, and he was struck again by the distinctive smell of the islands, a fusty aroma of jungle flowers, salt water, and decay, of wood fire mingling with diesel smoke, as if a thousand years of history wafted through the air at once.
    In his research on the islands, he had been surprised by how long they were isolated. For centuries, European explorers simply called them “the Black Islands.” Even modern archaeologists saw the archipelago as a puzzle. They could confirm just enough about the ancient people who inhabited them to be mystified by who they were. There were signs of civilization everywhere, from the old stone ruins covered in vines, to thetops of huge mountains that appeared to be sheared off. The hillsides were dribbled with evidence of settlement that traced back three thousand years. But the genetic composition of the islanders seemed to have shifted drastically in that time. It was difficult to say exactly who had lived there, or when, or for how long. The only thing certain was that people had been on the islands continually for thousands of years, their tribes merging together and warring, and building cultures that transformed from one to the next.
    The nearest neighbor was Yap, a cluster of four small islands three hundred miles away, yet for centuries, the two were locked in a blood feud, passed down by legend and by oral tradition, and manifest in the odd Yapese habit of sneaking onto Palau to carve giant stone discs from the limestone hills and ferry them home. Some of those discs were twelve feet in diameter and weighed several thousand pounds, and their value on Yap was measured precisely in the danger of obtaining them. On Yap, a disc could be traded like currency to buy land or pay dowries, while on the shores of Palau, tribal sentries stood watch for raiding Yapese moneymakers.
    The first European to sight the islands was Ferdinand Magellan in 1522, but another half century passed before Sir Francis Drake came ashore, then another century before the Spanish claimed the islands, and yet another before the English stayed long enough to meet the natives. That was in 1783, when the British ship
Antelope
crashed into the archipelago on a journey that the historian Daniel Peacock has called “ a secret voyage to China .” The British were reeling from the American Revolution, at odds with France and Holland, and found their merchant ships in Asia besieged by marauders. They had sent the
Antelope
to chart a course to China along a less traveled route. If the journey was successful, it would reopen the doors for English commerce in Asia.
    The journey was not. The
Antelope
had been designed by the master shipwrights of Newburyport, Massachusetts, to be light and fast, but not especially sturdy. When it slammed into the western island of Ulong, themen on board were shipwrecked for months. By the time they had pieced together a new ship from the fragments of the old, they’d become so