When her writing and flying activities failed to absorb all her energies, Quimby found herself tempted by another aeronautical ‘first’ — a flight across the English Channel. Since Louis Blériot had first flown the Channel on July 25, 1909, other famous male fliers had followed. But no woman, although there were several European female fliers at the time, had dared challenge the Channel.

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In New York, Quimby agreed with Leslie’s request for exclusive American rights to a first-person account of the proposed flight. She obtained a letter of introduction to Louis Blériot and, in March 1912, sailed for England.

In London, she concluded an agreement with The Mirror to finance her flight at ‘a handsome inducement,’ as she later described it. Meeting Blériot in Paris, she made another wily move, ordering a new 70-hp plane and at the same time arranging to borrow a new 60-hp Blériot for her flight. Both were two-seaters, and the borrowed craft was the same general type (Moisant’s ‘copy’) that she had flown in America.

Temporary, but annoying, setbacks followed. She found deplorable weather at the French Channel resort town of Hardelot, where Blériot had a hangar and where she was to practice in her borrowed plane. With flying impossible for days, she returned to England, first arranging to have the untried aircraft shipped in secret to an airfield at Dover. She wanted no woman to beat her to the Channel flight.

She confided her plans to a British pilot, Gustav Hamel, who seemingly violated the confidence by flying an English woman, Eleanor Trehawke Davies, across the Channel on April 2. But Davies had been only a passenger and the far greater glory of flying a plane across remained open to Quimby.

Hamel, ironically, turned up in Dover to help Quimby, flight testing the borrowed Blériot and serving as technical adviser. He stressed the need for constant attention to the plane’s compass, an instrument Quimby had never used before. He warned that even a minor error could send her wandering above the cold expanse of the North Sea.

From the outset, Hamel had been unsure of a woman’s ability to fly an aircraft across the Channel. He even suggested that he dress up in Harriet’s satin flying costume, pilot her plane across the Channel, and land at a deserted spot where she could meet him naturally, refused.

It may be difficult today to see why the 22-mile Channel hop could be considered hazardous. Yet it was, and several fliers had already been lost in the attempt. For Quimby, this was her first flight in a Blériot, first with a compass, and first across water. Add to that a flimsy plane that warped its wings to turn, an engine that needed prayer as well as fuel, and finally, as it turned out, fog that hid the water for much of the flight.

Thus it was a worried group of friends who saw Quimby off early on the morning of Tuesday, April 16. Heavily clad against a chill, damp day, she wore under her satin flying suit (as she later wrote), ‘two pairs of silk combinations, over the suit a long woolen coat, over this an American raincoat, and around and across my shoulders a long wide stole of sealskin.’ Her friends even pressed on her a hot water bag which Hamel tied to her waist. That Quimby still found space within the Blériot’s cramped cockpit testified to her petite figure.

Airborne at 8:58 a.m., Quimby climbed in a wide circle above the heights of Dover, reaching 2,000 feet before heading out over the Channel. Before running into a fog bank, she caught a brief glimpse of The Mirror’s rented tugboat, which was jammed with reporters and photographers.

She climbed through the mists to 6,000 feet, seeking clear sky, but found only more mists and ‘a bone-chilling cold.’ She kept a close watch on her compass, recalling Hamel’s warning. Finding no clear air, she nosed the plane down, only to meet more trouble: the nose-down angle flooded the carburetor and the engine began to misfire. She leveled out, preparing to ditch and hoping to pancake into the water as gently as possible, when the engine, to her vast relief, resumed its steady purr.

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