Lindy’s Maritime Salute

On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh did it: He became the first man to fly the Atlantic solo nonstop. The headline that announced his historic accomplishment in The Times, “Lindbergh Does It! To Paris in 33 1/2 Hours; Flies 1,000 Miles Through Snow and Sleet; Cheering French Carry Him Off Field.”

After the 25-year-old pilot attended celebrations in his honor in Paris, London and Brussels, he eventually made his way home to the United States. His first stop: Washington, D.C. From the nation’s capital, he traveled to New York City. The Times reported that the colonel “came as he went, out of the clouds, on the wings of a swooping plane” and received “the greatest reception the city has ever accorded a private citizen.”

A Times photographer took this photo of the 400 vessels that turned out in New York Harbor to offer the aviator a maritime salute. “I now know the meaning of a New York welcome,” Lindbergh wrote in The Times the following day. (He was a fairly regular contributor that year.) “I’ve often read about them, but they must be seen to be appreciated. Once, however, is enough for an ordinary human being like myself, and the memory of today will be fresh in my mind if I live to be a hundred.”