BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

VI THE ADVENTURE OF THE PURPLE CLOUD (Pages 53 - 62)

“The hour was late. The mess fire, around which the officers of No. 666 (Fighter) Squadron had congregated, was low. Flight-Lieutenant Bertie Lissie was asleep on the settee. Some of the others were reading. Conversation, which for some time had been desultory, had died away”. Henry Harcourt says to Ginger that he has been thinking about “these adventures of yours with Dr. August Duck”. He asks Ginger “Did you achieve anything really useful?” Ginger thought for a moment before answering “I suppose you would think I was exaggerating if I said that we may have save the continent of America from devastation. You’d call that an achievement of major importance – wouldn’t you?” Ginger actually gives a clue to the dating of the actual adventure by saying "Five years ago people went on enjoying themselves, little knowing that a purple cloud, a cloud of death, was forming in the west". (This would place the setting of this story around 1936/37. It was first published in the March 1942 edition of Boy’s Own Paper. I believe it was written in 1941). Ginger is persuaded to tell the story and this is the story as he told it:

Ginger says that whilst following the Pan-American route from South America to the United States in the Wanderer with Dr. Duck, they stopped at Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. “They are a pastoral people, and make a fairly comfortable living out of the soil. They don’t have to work very hard to do that, and as they don’t believe in working hard, they are content. They export coffee and bananas”. Everyone is talking about a purple cloud and “Biggles, who speaks Spanish, the local language, asked a citizen what all the fuss was about”. (It is interesting to read that Biggles now speaks Spanish – in Biggles in Spain, published in 1939, only three years before this was first published – Biggles said (on page 23 of the first edition) “It would probably be easier if one of us could speak the language. I know only about a dozen works of Spanish”). The local they speak to tells them that the thing began about a year before when a family came down the Matagena River (a fictional river) from their banana plantation way back in the hinterland. They say that a little purple cloud had passed over during one night and had destroyed everything in its path. The earth is left as bare as the middle of the Sahara, not a leaf, not a blade of grass remaining. “Later reports made it clear that the cloud was swiftly getting bigger. By the end of six months it had become a formidable menace, not only in size but in its devastating effects”. “Yet so casual are these people, who never do to-day what can be put off until to-morrow, that nothing was done about it”. As a result of their discussions, Biggles and Donald when along to a special committee to see if they – or rather, the aircraft – could be of any assistance. An American named Silas Welmer helps persuade the committee to accept Biggles offer to go and look for the cloud. Biggles spends three days flying around but eventually finds it and flies into it. “Donald’s curiosity must have got the better of him, for he opened one of the side windows a fraction of an inch to collect a specimen of the cloud. Well, he got it. Before you could say Jack Robinson the stuff was pouring in like muddy water. Algy yelled, “Look out! It’s alive!” And so it was. It consists of myriads of insects like tiny locusts. Biggles is forced to glide down after the creatures are sucked through his engines. He lands safely and the cloud passes by. Biggles says they have to follow the cloud of insects “to see where this pest has it headquarters”. “If that cloud gets much bigger it won’t be a matter of just wiping out Nicaragua. Once it overflows into the Amazon basin there’ll be no stopping it. It will eat up the entire continent”. They are able to take off safely and follow the cloud for about a hundred miles to a lake where the creatures appear to live. Returning to Managua and reporting to Silas Welmer, Biggles then rings up the United States Department of Agriculture and warns them of the danger. Various aircraft are bought in to spray the area with strong insecticide and eventually the cloud of insects are killed off. Ginger speculates about how the continually growing cloud of insects could have turned the whole world into a ball of mud leaving every creature to die of starvation, including the bugs themselves. Ginger looked at the clock. “Great Scott!” he muttered, “look at the time. And I’m on early patrol in the morning”.