Ernest Hemingway: How to survive two plane crashes on the same holiday
Ernest Hemingway was no stranger to hardship in his time.
It seemed baked into his very genetics that he’d have a tough old life. Alcoholism and depression ran in his family, affecting the generations that came before him and after. He wasn’t the only member of his family to take his own life, either; his father did the same when Hemingway was young.
Of course, this history of mental illness doesn’t lead to a peaceful life either, and while Hemingway was one of the most successful and respected writers of his generation, his personal life was a mess.
Hemingway married four times. Each of them turbulent relationship with arguably more downs than ups. However, it does sound like the ups were quite special. They’d have to be to make up for all the trauma suffered otherwise, and the majority of them did seem to share Hemingway’s desire to experience all that life had to offer, from the finest of luxury to the basest necessities. This was particularly the case with his fourth and final wife, Mary Welsh.
She and Hemingway were a better match than many of his romantic partners. Welsh was accepting of his domineering personality and was more than happy following Hemingway wherever his flights of fancy took him next. After they met in London, they lived in Cuba and Venice, and took many holidays wherever Hemingway felt like going next. After the publication and rapturous reception of his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea, the next vacation planned was a safari trip to Africa.
This trip would nearly kill him. Twice.
How did Hemingway survive two plane crashes?
The first trip was a sightseeing flight over what we would now call the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but was in January 1954 known as the Belgian Congo.
The irony of it all is that this specific trip was actually booked by Hemingway as a Christmas present to Mary. Part of the trip was photographing Murchison Falls from the air, but as the plane flew towards the waterfall, it took the plane too close to the ground and struck an abandoned utility pole.
This forced a crash landing. Everyone on board suffered grave injuries as a result; Hemingway injured his shoulder and back, while Welsh broke a number of her ribs. This is bad luck enough, but the sheer rotten luck of what happened next would be hilarious if it weren’t true. After a night in the bush, Hemingway, Welsh and their party chartered a boat back to Butiaba, where they were met by a pilot who’d been sent to find them and finish their trip.
For some reason, Hemingway and Welsh agreed to continue their trip, and as their plane was tracking down a rough, rural airstrip to take off, the plane’s engine exploded. Mary and the pilot escaped through a broken window while Hemingway, in a display of raw masculinity that even he would have baulked at for being too on the nose, smashed his window open with his own head to escape. Obviously, this left him with a horrific head injury to go with all his new burns.
These two accidents happened within days of each other, and yet would leave scars that would plague Hemingway for the rest of his life. Causing this “thinly controlled alcoholic” to intensify his drinking even further to numb the pain.