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 create an entire sound ‘landscape’: the rural world of farm dogs, cattle, sheep-bells; but also sawing, hammering and agricultural flails; sportsmen’s guns or the ‘re-iterated percussion’ of mill wheels.
Some of this is weakened by Mason’s orotund pseudo-sublime manner, by which he attempts to give ballooning a kind of contemplative gravity, the exact opposite of Hood’s mad ‘levity’. But there are many fine existential passages: on the sense of extreme solitude and silence in ‘the immense vacuity’; on the sublime appearance of cloudscapes and the ‘Prussian blue’ zenith at high altitudes; and on the uneasy feeling of ‘intruding’ on God’s territory, ‘the especial domains of the Almighty’.32 Above all, he attempts to evoke the strange and beautiful other world of the kingdom of the air:
Above and all around him extends a firmament dyed in purple of the intensest hue, and from the apparent regularity of the horizontal plane on which its rests, bearing the resemblance of a large inverted bowl of dark blue porcelain, standing upon a rich mosaic floor or tessellated pavement. In the zenith of this mighty hemisphere – floating in solitary magnificence – unconnected with the material world by any visible tie – alone – and to all appearances motionless, hangs the buoyant mass by which he is upheld … 33
Throughout such passages there is a curious mixture of scientific terminology – horizontal plane, zenith, buoyant mass – with the rhetoric of Victorian poetry and sublimity; even on occasion of Victorian prayers or hymns. This seems to reflect a philosophical, or even theological, problem later expressed by many Victorian balloonists. To what extent is the upper sky, where Prussian blue deepens into black, ‘the space
