energies lurk in the terrific ‘black and fathomless abyss’ – an abyss paradoxically overhead? What monsters or deities does the upper deep contain?fn14
To give his book further weight, Mason added six other appendices to later additions. Appendix B consisted of a short biography of Charles Green, with accounts of an earlier test flight made with Green from Vauxhall to Chelmsford on 4 October 1836, and of Green’s part in the fatal Cocking parachute experiment of 1838, in which the over-confident inventor Robert Cocking leapt to his untimely death above the Thames Estuary, and almost killed his pilot Green into the bargain. Appendix C was an alphabetical checklist of all known European aeronauts between 1783 and 1836, with longer individual notes on the early pioneering figures like Blanchard, Lunardi, Sadler, Gay-Lussac and Garnerin. Appendix D, ‘On the Mechanical Direction of the Balloon’, investigated the old question of navigating a balloon. Appendix E considered Green’s use of the guide rope and other ‘equilibrium’ devices. Appendix F reflected on the limitations of bird flight (but with special praise for the gliding capacities of the South American condor ‘above the lofty peaks of the Andes’). And Appendix G indulgently reprinted further verses in praise of the Nassau flight.
Thanks to Green, ballooning had once again caught the imagination of writers, but its significance was interpreted in increasingly various ways. In 1837 Thomas Carlyle used the image of balloons in his introductory chapter, ‘The Paper Age’, in The French Revolution, to express the political risks and hopes of the time: ‘Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward – so beautifully, so unguidably! Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself.’
In 1838 John Poole (who had once seen Sophie Blanchard fall to her death in Paris) gave a more satirical but shrewdly perceptive account of a flight with Green at night over the East End of London. It seems to him very different from Paris, with its boulevards, parks and cafés. The sinister, garish lights of gin ‘palaces’, taverns, apothecaries and brothels – alternately twinkling ‘blue, green, purple and crimson’ – are used to explore the notion of the hidden city of poverty, sickness and crime. On landing near Hackney Marshes, the balloon is surrounded by a threatening mob, which has pursued it all the way ‘from Stepney, Limehouse and Poplar’. Prophetically, it was as if the balloon had trespassed into an African jungle, and stirred up an unfriendly horde of howling ‘natives’. Assaulted by ‘their yells, their savage imprecations, curses both loud and deep, their threats to destroy the balloon’, Poole, Green and his burly crew just manage to pack their equipment onto a cart, and beat a strategic retreat to the local Eagle and Child public house. Here they hole up until one in the morning, when it is safe to slip back through the silent streets to the West End and ‘civilization’.36
In his poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), with its own visions of social disturbance and upheaval, the thirty-three-year-old Alfred Tennyson imagined the aeronauts not merely as romantic adventurers, but also as busy commercial traders. They descend in flocks through the evening skies, to settle upon distant marketplaces around the globe. They are part Homeric travellers in the tradition of Jason and the Argonauts; but also partly hungry commercial travellers, with just a hint of a cloud of locusts descending upon an innocent land at dusk:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales …
The poem was originally drafted in 1835. But Tennyson also foresaw, like Franklin before him and H.G. Wells afterwards, balloons producing the terror of aerial warfare:
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s aerial navies, grappling in the central blue. 37
Charles Green had established himself as much more than a balloon showman, or the publicity agent of the Vauxhall Gardens. He had resurrected the old dream of ballooning, but adapted it to the coming Victorian age. Bronze medals were even cast in his honour.
In his Preface to the second edition of Aeronautica, Mason suggested that Green’s ambitions were turning towards an Atlantic crossing. Green apparently took a quite nonchalant view of the huge distances and meteorological challenges this would involve: ‘In his view, the Atlantic is no more than a simple canal: three days might suffice to effect a passage. The very circumference of the globe is not beyond the scope of his expectations: in fifteen days and fifteen nights, transported by the trade winds, he does not despair to accomplish in his progress the great circle of the earth itself. Who can now fix a limit to his career?’38
This was heady talk, and made good journalistic copy. But Mason was not a successful balloon pilot himself, merely a successful balloon passenger, and had perhaps had his head turned by all the excitement and publicity. In the same Preface he cheerfully advocated the use of a trailing guide rope ‘above fifteen thousand feet in length’. He saw no problem in this monster appendage dragging across ‘trees, houses, rivers, mountains, valleys, precipices and plains’ with what he described as ‘equal security and indifference’.39
7
Two years after the publication of Aeronautica, in 1840, Green issued his own proposals to fly the Atlantic. He claimed to have identified a prevailing west-to-east wind current in the upper atmosphere, which meant that he would start the crossing from America. ‘Under whatever circumstances I made my ascent, however contrary the direction of the wind below, I uniformly found that at a certain elevation, varying occasionally but always within 10,000 feet of the earth, a current from west to east, or rather from the north of west, invariably prevailed.’
He also explained that a two-thousand-foot guide rope, fitted with canvas sea drags and copper floats, would be enough to stabilise an eighty-thousand-cubic-foot balloon and keep it airborne, without expending additional ballast, for ‘a period of three months’. He said he was only awaiting a generous sponsor to undertake the trans-Atlantic flight immediately.40 In the end, the astute Green could find no financial backer, refused to depart without one, and the Atlantic attempt was never made.
But it was made in fiction. Green’s proposals inspired a further brilliant invention by Poe, published in the New York Sun in 1844. This time it was a news story hoax. ‘The Atlantic Balloon’ coolly presents an extraordinarily detailed and convincing account of Green and Monck Mason crossing the Atlantic from England in seventy-three hours. Much of the story is drawn from the well-publicised flight of the Royal Nassau. As the third member of the balloon crew, instead of Robert Hollond MP, Poe mischievously added his rival, the popular British thriller writer Harrison Ainsworth.
Poe’s story broke on Saturday, 13 April 1844, when the New York Sun announced that it would be issuing an ‘Extra’ containing a detailed account of a transatlantic crossing by a balloon, the ‘flying machine’ Victoria. There was also a postscript in the morning edition of the Sun, with an appropriate accumulation of exclamation marks: ‘By Express. Astounding intelligence by private express from Charleston via Norfolk! – The Atlantic Ocean crossed in three days!! – Arrival at Sullivan’s Island of a steering balloon invented by Mr Monck Mason!!!’
The Extra created an immediate sensation. According to Poe’s own account, a large crowd gathered in the square surrounding the New York Sun to wait for it,
