Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, August, 1880. Various
rain below the clouds into a dense snowstorm above them. My feet and hands were almost numb with cold, and the prospect was about as cheerless as it well could be, when a thought passed through my brain that made me laugh outright. I had heard of people coming down in bursted balloons, but I was the first who had ever gone up in one. The idea appeared so ridiculous that it really made me feel warmer." Think of this aërial babe in the woods, with Nature's awful forces warring about him and the earth lost to view, laughing himself warm over a joke at the expense of his terrible situation! Truly, "he jests at scars that never felt a wound." Perhaps it was the balloon, but I believe it could only have been his good angel, that brought the boy safely down into a small cleared space in a forest thirty-eight minutes and forty miles from the point of departure.
Another of Master John's voyages curiously illustrates the different directions of coexistent currents. On July 4, 1878, he made an ascension from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, landing ten miles south of the city, while J.M. Johnston, of the Lancaster Intelligencer, who ascended in another balloon at the same moment, came down at a point equally distant in an exactly opposite direction from the city.
With the name of John Wise that of another aëronaut equally well known is associated—not alone by their joint attempt to cross the Atlantic by balloon, but also on account of the probably identical manner and locality of the death of both—Washington H. Donaldson. While the interest in the mysterious fate of Donaldson and Grimwood was yet fresh in the public mind Mr. Wise published a pamphlet giving a fanciful account of their adventures, as if related by the aëronaut. In the light of the Wise-Burr tragedy its concluding paragraph has a singular significance: "In the end I ask the world to deal charitably with me. Should my body be found, give it decent burial and write for an epitaph: 'Here lies the body of a man whose reckless ambition and fear of being accused of want of nerve have sacrificed his own life and betrayed a fellow-mortal into the snares of death, with no higher object than to serve the interests of a scheme which, to say the best of it, is but a poor thing in the progress of art and refinement.'"
Donaldson was a man in many respects remarkable, in some admirable. With scant schooling, his father gave him a thorough training as a draughtsman and engraver. Allowed to choose for himself, he embarked in the amusement business, his active and versatile temperament leading him to become in turn a rope-walker, gymnast, actor, ventriloquist and, singularly enough, electro-physician. For most of these varied callings he had a certain adaptability by reason of his splendid physique, perfect health, entire abstinence from stimulants, ready wit, good-humor, fertility in expedients and promptitude and energy in execution, as well as by the daring and ambition naturally associated with such physical and mental qualifications. A friend writes of him: "He was as ready to navigate a cockle-shell from the Battery to Long Branch as he was to run a velocipede along a hundred yards of slack wire." His drawings, particularly those illustrating aëronautical scenes and incidents, were spirited and faithful. He tried his hand at verse-making among the rest. The following brief outburst, written after all the old loves had given place to that which became the absorbing passion of his life, and printed on his letter-heads and admission-cards, sufficiently illustrates the manner and matter of his efforts in this direction:
There's pleasure in a lively trip when sailing through the air.
The word is given, "Let her go!"—to land I know not where.
The view is grand: 'tis like a dream when many miles from home:
My castle in the air I love, above the clouds to roam.
Not an ideal character certainly, but a complete one in its way, and readily recognizable as belonging to a born aëronaut. The unromantic but not unusual inability of a professional predecessor to pay his board-bill, obliging him to leave his balloon with mine host as surety, first placed in Donaldson's hands the means by which he became afterward best known. Fearless as he undoubtedly was, an ascension was undertaken with the misgivings which usually preface an initial stepping from terra firma to the inconstant air. Once aloft, however, with the widespreading splendor and endless immensity of the earth's surface unrolling beneath him, and an exquisite physical exhilaration thrilling along his nerves, Donaldson became heart and soul an aëronaut. The novel and sensational expedients with which he embellished his subsequent ascensions are well known. Becomingly dressed in tights, he delighted to sail away skyward hanging by one hand from a trapeze-bar, generally terminating a variety of feats thereon by poising himself a moment on his back, then suddenly dropping backward, catching by his feet on the side-ropes—easy and safe enough, doubtless, with his preliminary acrobatic training, but blood-curdling to the breathless spectators beneath. He left drawings for a jointed bar which, at the proper time, should apparently break in two and leave him dangling to one of the pieces. For a consideration which the citizens of Binghamton, New York, sensibly declined to give he offered to ascend to the height of a mile in a paper balloon, there set fire to it and descend in a parachute.
A little incident, not generally known, illustrates the gentler side of his nature. He had been giving one of his trapeze exhibitions at Ithaca, New York, and was induced by some Cornell students to furnish them captive ascensions from the university campus. As if specially for the occasion, there came three days of delightful May weather with a propitiously quiet atmosphere. To the natural elevation of the location were added several hundred feet of rope, affording a bird's-eye view of Cayuga Lake, the town and far-famed adjacent scenery. Two or three hundred persons were "sent up," including several university professors. Donaldson was in his element, and kept everybody laughing at his jokes and amusing experiments. He had a crowd of children constantly at his heels, and in the intervals of waiting for pay-passengers would tumble them into the basket to the number of six or eight, and send them skyward screaming with delight and pelting him with a shower of hats and caps. Did their mothers know? Probably not, or there might have been screaming of a less joyous kind. One diminutive but intrepid youth of six won for himself the proud distinction of "our old experienced aëronaut," being generally used as ballast in making up a load.
Donaldson's fondness for proving his nerve in the face of a doubting crowd led him into many difficulties, as it finally caused his death. Once, when about to make an ascension at Pittsburg with a balloon that had not been used since the previous season, his assistant, Harry Gilbert, noticed that the ropes attaching the netting to the concentrating-ring seemed rotten, and proposed to replace them with new. This Donaldson insisted would take too much time, but he was finally induced to allow eight of the sixteen to be renewed. While giving his customary trapeze performance high above the housetops the old cords began to snap, and before he could bring the balloon down every one of them had parted—a startling intimation of how his rashness might have resulted.
Among the unkilled American aëronauts undoubtedly the best known for professional skill and experience is Samuel A. King. He seems to have been a predestined air-sailor, for he made his first ascension (Philadelphia, 1851) in his twenty-third year, and during more than two hundred subsequent voyages, many of them extending over hundreds of miles, and some adding darkness and proximity to large bodies of water to the ordinary dangers, he has shown an intuitive knowledge of the construction and management of the balloon and an appreciation of aërial forces which, while they have not robbed his experiences of thrilling incidents, have kept them singularly free from disastrous consequences. One of the most memorable of these excursions was made from Plymouth, New Hampshire, September 26, 1872, on which occasion Mr. King was accompanied by his friend and frequent fellow-voyager, Luther L. Holden, of the Boston Journal. The balloon used only held twenty thousand cubic feet of gas, but was inflated with hydrogen. It was liberated at 4.18 P.M., and immediately manifested a determination to accompany some dense black clouds which were hurrying in a north-easterly direction toward the heart of the mountain-region on the verge of which Plymouth lies. Over Mount Washington and across the Androscoggin Valley it flew at the rate of fifty miles an hour. At six o'clock Lake Umbagog was floating beneath our adventurers, and before they realized their danger—so deceptive are time and space when reckoned from balloons—night surprised them in the great Maine wilderness. The alternative was between a descent in a trackless forest a hundred miles from human habitation, with scant provisions and no firearms or fishing-tackle, and an all-night voyage, trusting to luck and their ballast for getting beyond the wilderness. They had taken chances together before, and they went on now. If they failed to get out of the woods, they could tear up the balloon,