Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes
intended, more than two miles up. Once again they were surrounded by total enveloping blackness and complete silence, except now there were a few scattered stars high above. As they were gazing up at these, something really terrifying happened. There was a sharp cracking sound from the balloon canopy overhead, a sudden jerk on the hoop, and then the whole basket began to drop away beneath their feet.26
Mason vividly described his sensations of horror. His narrative suddenly leaps into the present tense:
At this moment, while all around is impenetrable darkness and stillness most profound, an unusual explosion issues from the machine above, followed instantaneously by a violent rustling of the silk, and all the signs which may be supposed to accompany the bursting of a balloon … In an instant the car, as if suddenly detached from its hold, becomes subjected to a violent concussion, and appears at once to be in the act of sinking with all its contents into the dark abyss below. A second and a third explosion follow in quick succession … 27
Rigid with terror, clinging to the basket’s edge, Mason knew that nothing could now avert his death. Then, with equal suddenness, everything about the balloon reverted to normal. The basket became steady, the balloon canopy smooth and silent above them; all was just as tranquil and reassuring as before. Mason stood gazing blankly at Hollond, both men still clinging to the edge of the basket, pale with shock.
Green reassured his shaken passengers about what had happened. It was all quite normal, he told them with a smile, and could be explained by simple physics. While they had been flying near the ground and in increasingly cold air, the canopy of the balloon had gradually shrunk and folded in on itself, as its volume of hydrogen contracted. But as it was night, no one (except Green) had observed this. Then during their rapid ascent the balloon entered regions of lower pressure, and the hydrogen rapidly expanded again. This forced the canopy to reinflate more swiftly than usual. The loose folds of silk, concertina-ed or ‘corrugated’ together, and partially stuck by ice, did not immediately open. Only when sufficient hydrogen pressure had built up to snap them forcefully apart did the balloon resume its full shape in a series of sharp, violent unfolding movements.
Moreover, chuckled Green, the terrifying jerks on the hoop were actually the basket being pulled upwards as the balloon expanded. The sensation of falling was strictly speaking an illusion: they were actually ‘springing up’ rather than dropping down. All was well. But perhaps they should all have some more brandy?
How far this account reassured his passengers is not clear; nor even how far Green himself had been taken by surprise. It must have occurred to him that the unexpected rapidity of their ascent was in fact extremely perilous, as one of the frozen folds of silk could easily have ruptured before it was forced apart by the pressure of the hydrogen. He later emphasised to Mason that he had ‘frequently experienced the like effects from a rapid ascent’.28
Altogether it was a huge relief when the November dawn slowly began to lighten the sky. The ground below seemed strangely smooth and luminous, and they gradually realised that they were again passing over ‘large tracts of snow’. The bitter cold had increased: they could see the plumes of their own breath, and the glistening ice that had formed on the lower canopy of the balloon. The question of their exact location now became pressing. According to their compass they had been travelling steadily due east for most of the night. Green made a quick dead-reckoning calculation, and concluded that, based on the speed with which they had reached Liège, it was possible they had travelled up to two thousand miles from England. This would put them somewhere over ‘the boundless planes of Poland, or the barren and inhospitable Steppes of Russia’, an alarming prospect. In fact, as Mason later admitted, this was an unduly ‘extravagant’ estimate, over 110mph, largely inspired by the long period of darkness, disorientation and terror they had experienced.29 When they eventually landed at 7.30 a.m., descending inelegantly into a stand of snow-covered fir trees (their sand ballast had frozen solid and could not be properly released), they found that they were still in north Germany. Local foresters, tactfully recruited by means of the balloon’s copious stores of brandy, led them in triumph to the little country town of Weilburg. They were thirty miles north-west of Frankfurt, in the Duchy of Nassau.
Yet their achievement was spectacular. They had travelled 480 miles in eighteen hours.30 This was a long-distance record for a balloon flight, at an average speed of just over twenty-six miles per hour, roughly the same rate as when they set out. But they had covered an astonishing eastwards trajectory, on a line that ran roughly through Calais and Brussels, to Liège, Coblenz, and almost as far as Frankfurt. The Vauxhall had survived in good order, and was immediately rechristened the Royal Nassau, after their landing site. News of the flight caused an international sensation. On the way back Green spent some time in France, and flew his famous balloon from several sites around Paris and at Montpellier Spa. His international reputation was made.
6
The flight inspired something like a renewed balloon craze. Crowds of tourists and foreign visitors flocked to the Vauxhall Gardens. Numerous articles, editorials and poems were published in the press. The fashionable painter John Hollins produced a striking composite portrait entitled A Consultation Prior to the Aerial Voyage to Weilburgh, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The balloonists and their financial backers (including Hollins himself) are shown gallantly grouped around a large planning table, with maps and sheets of calculations, like generals working out a military campaign. Green, seated at the right, gazes purposefully across the table at Robert Hollond MP, seated on the left, while Monck Mason, their historian, stands between them apparently lost in thought. The Royal Vauxhall – now the Royal Nassau – can be seen outside through a window, tethered like an impatient warhorse.
If the flight was heroic, it also had – like all balloon flights – its comic aspects. It had flown over several countries; but mostly at night, when nothing could really be seen. It had achieved a distance record, certainly; but without the balloon ever being capable of steering towards any destination. It had revolutionised long-distance travel, but without making it any more practical. Thomas Hood, famous for his Chartist ballad of the working man, ‘The Song of the Shirt’, wrote several humorous poems in praise of ballooning, including ‘The Flying Visit’. But he outdid himself with a bubbling, mock-heroic party piece, ‘Ode to Messrs Green, Hollond and Monck on their late Balloon Adventure’. It opens with a high, jocular, punning invocation in a ‘champagne style’ that he had invented especially for the occasion:
O lofty-minded men!
Almost beyond the pitch of my goose pen
And most inflated words!
Delicate Ariels! Etherials! Birds
Of passage! Fliers! Angels without wings!
Fortunate rivals of Icarian darings!
Kites without strings! … 31
Hood, with his gaseous puns and mocking emphasis on the amount of food and drink consumed by the aeronauts under the stars, tended to treat the whole expedition as an enormous prank. But Monck Mason was serious. After publishing several articles, his carefully completed account of the voyage appeared two years later in book form as Aeronautica (1838). He made the story especially memorable by his haunting description of night flying.
Mason later added a hundred-page appendix on the general experience of flying in balloons: the euphoric sensations of ascent, the diminution of the people below, views of clouds and sunlight, the spherical appearance of the earth beneath, and the particular panoramic and sharply ‘resolved’ view of cities, rivers, railways. He is surprisingly perceptive about the strangely ‘delineated’ sounds heard from below, and the way they