BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

VIII THE ADVENTURE OF THE MUSTY MAMMOUTH (Pages 72 - 81)

“Flying-Officer “Ginger” Hebblethwaite, tired after his second patrol that day, stretched luxuriously in front of the mess fire. The action drew up one leg of his slacks, showing a strip of bare flesh between the top of the sock and the bottom of the trousers. Tex O’Hara noticed it, and smiled. Then his smile turned to a frown, and he leaned forward, eyes focusing on a mutilated section of skin”. Say, kid, that’s a whale of a scar you’ve got on your leg,” he remarked, “How do you pick that one up”. When Ginger says it was from a little affair with a mammoth a hush falls upon the room. “Something tells me that Dr. Donald was in this picnic,” murmured Angus Mackail. Ginger is invited to tell the tale and this is the story he told:

“It was a dark and stormy night – I’m not joking. That’s a fact”, Ginger begins. He says that he, Biggles and Algy were at home in their flat in London when Dr. Duck bursts into the room in a state of high excitement saying they have got to go to Greenland. Dr. Duck has just bought some mammoth tusks from the skipper of a Danish Cargo vessel that had been picked up at Holstenborg, in Greenland. They had been found by an Eskimo hunter named Arkit. Dr. Duck has cabled the Mayor of Holstenborg to ask if Arkit is still there and has been told he is and Dr. Duck wants to examine the site where the mammoth was found. Usually, these finds are in Siberia which is very hard to get to. Donald has got permission from the Danish authorities to go and have a look around. A few days later they arrive in Holstenborg, Greenland and they find Arkit the Eskimo. “He turned out to be a big, rather surly brute”. “His nature turned out to be as surly as his looks, and it took us a long time to get anything out of him. Why he should be so secretive was not apparent – at least, not at the time. He seemed to take the view that in the location of the mammoth he possessed a valuable secret, and wasn’t going to part with it. This, as it turned out, was true, but we weren’t to know it at the time. In the end Donald raised the price so high that he couldn’t refuse, and he gave us the information we wanted”. Flying to the location without Arkit, as he refused to come, the place is some four hundred miles from anywhere. “Biggles had plotted a compass course, and eventually he announced that we had arrived over the objective. There was nothing to show that we had”. They land on an unbroken white plain. (One of the most far-fetched parts of this story is how they find the exact place!). Biggles puts the Wanderer down on a perfectly level strip of ice near to an ice-cliff to protect the machine from any north gale. They hear rumbling sounds beneath the ice. Our heroes split up and begin searching separately. Ginger searches a sloping gully in the ice-cliff and notices that it appears to be getting warmer. He then finds frozen pterodactyls. Suddenly he is faced with a stinking mammoth and, noticing other mammoths, he turns to run and slips and slides back down the gully. The closest mammoth comes sliding after him and as it passes him, the tusk catches his leg "causing the wound that started this yarn. I bled like a pig, and the snow around me was like a slaughter house”. “After that I must have passed out, because the next thing I remember was Biggles pouring brandy down my throat while Algy was tying up my leg. Of course, the first thing I thought of was the mammoth”. Ginger asks where “Big Bill” is. “If you mean Old Hairy, he’s right beside you” says Biggles who confirms the mammoth to be dead and has been for several thousand years. Dr. Duck speculates that recent volcanic disturbances have released heat freeing the mammoths from the ice where they had been frozen. Dr. Duck is able to hack out the tusks from this mammoth before the ice turns to slush and prevents Biggles from flying away. “Then we piled into the machine and headed for home”. Ginger yawned. “Well, that’s all there was to it. It probably sounds all very silly now, but at the time, for a few seconds when I was sliding down the gully, it was quite exciting. Now I’m retiring for a spot of shut-eye – goodnight, chaps”.

(This story was plagiarised and led to Oxford books and W. E. Johns taking legal action against EAGLE comic when issue 16, dated 28^th July 1950 published on page 12 “The Strange Affair of Hairy Harry” – a new complete story by Chesney MacGuire. This version of the story, again told in the first person, doesn’t have Biggles or Ginger or Dr. Duck in it at all. It is a yarn spun by Uncle Pensarn about having a letter from a friend called Peter Burwood. Peter has bought some mammoth tusks and they travel to Langanes in Iceland to meet Eskimo Vayack. They bribe him to tell them where he found the tusks and an unnamed pilot flies them to the location. The two men split up to search, and Uncle Pensarn finds the pterodactyls and the mammoth. He slides down the gulley followed by the mammoth and has his leg gashed by a tusk. A boy by the name of Richard C. May wrote to W. E. Johns and sent him the story, pointing out the similarities to Johns own story. Johns, via his literary agent, Peter Watt, then contacted Oxford publishing to confirm that Oxford still owned the second serial rights to the story. Peter Watt then instructed their solicitors to pursue EAGLE for the fee, which was originally paid to Chesney MacGuire, that fee to be paid half to Johns and half to Oxford. Peter Watt argued that the publication damaged Johns reputation in that people would think he was recycling old stories under a different name).