Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes

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      Orford’s notion of a balloon controlled by a ‘string’ was a little simplistic; but he noted accurately that although the balloon ‘was not half full’, and that its lower part appeared to have suffered what he called ‘a collapsion’, it continued unchecked towards the horizon. Indeed, Money was struggling to rein in his balloon as if it were a runaway horse, but without success. It was only an hour later, when he was well out of sight of land, that the cooling night air finally deposited his balloon twenty miles off the Norfolk coast, in an area known on mariners’ charts as Long Sand, notorious for its shoals and shipwrecks.^fn2 The balloon still had sufficient hydrogen to keep its basket partially above the waves. Waist-deep in water, Money began a long battle to remain afloat in a choppy sea as darkness fell.

      He soon abandoned his basket, cutting it loose and allowing it to sink beneath him, while climbing up into the balloon hoop and clinging onto the rigging. By skilfully playing the lines, he managed to hold sufficient gas in the balloon canopy to keep it partially inflated, pulling him slowly through water almost like a kite, and giving him just enough buoyancy to stay afloat. Increasingly cold and exhausted, Money hung on grimly hour after hour as the balloon steadily dragged him further and further out to sea through the darkness. As the gas slowly escaped, he sank gradually deeper into the water, until after four hours he was up to his chest, and almost incoherent with hypothermia.

      Several pleasure boats and fishing smacks had in fact set out after him, both from Yarmouth and further south from Southwold. Their crews were in sportive mood, playfully competing to find the airborne quarry. But as darkness fell they grew dispirited and bored, eventually giving up any hope of recovering him. One by one they turned to beat back into port, telling each other that he was either drowned or in Holland, which came to much the same thing. Agonisingly, it appears that Money had seen several of these ships. Their sails were clearly silhouetted on the western horizon behind him, dark against the dying summer light. But they were too far away, and he was now too weak even to shout. The water was colder, and the waves came up from his chest to his chin.

      But one determined coastguard cutter, the Argus, had set out from Lowestoft. Long before a regular lifeboat service was formed, this was a professional rescue vessel, its crew skilled in the pursuit of both smugglers and mariners in distress. A balloon was a new and interesting object for them to hunt. Its skipper skilfully put the wind dead astern and, making due allowance for tides, steadily followed exactly along the balloon’s last observed line of flight, with lookouts posted at his masthead. He knew that the moon was due to come up by late evening, and would illuminate the sea very well if he persisted.

      Just before midnight, after Major Money had been in the water for over five hours, the pale shape of his crumpled balloon canopy was spotted on the dark waves by the crew of the Argus. They came gently alongside, carefully disentangled his body from the rigging, and hauled him out of the water. As he was pulled aboard, he stirred, and they realised he was still conscious. Well-practised in revival techniques, the crew wrapped him in blankets, forced brandy down his throat, and had Major Money joking and telling his story by the time they were back in port the following dawn.⁵

      Money immediately became famous throughout East Anglia. The Norfolk and Norwich Hospital received a splendid donation. He was interviewed by the local journals, and became the subject of one of the most dramatic of all the early balloon prints, a mezzotint by Paul Renaigle, entitled The Perilous Situation of Major Money. It showed him heroically struggling with the flapping balloon canopy, half-immersed in the water, while a ship turns away from him under a stormy sky.

      Major Money remained undaunted by this experience. He later volunteered to command a French regiment at the Battle of Valmy, and for the first time saw balloons being used for observation on the battlefield. When he returned he was promoted General, and in 1803 published A Short Treatise on the Use of Balloons in Military Operations. This was unusual for a military manual, in that it included a number of balloon ideas set to verse:

       Great use, he thought, there might be made

       Of these machines in his own trade;

       Now o’er a fortress he might soar

       And its condition thence explore

       Or when by mountains, woods, or bog

       An enemy might lie incog

       Our friend would o’er their station hover

       Their strength, their route, and views discover;

       Then change his course, and straight impart

       Glad tidings to his chieftain’s heart … ⁶

      These were all to prove strangely prophetic.

      5

      The experience of ballooning is in a sense timeless. Man-carrying balloons are both extremely modern and extremely primitive devices. In their contemporary form, powered by stainless-steel propane-gas burners and using rip-stop nylon envelopes, they were virtually reinvented in 1960 by an American, Ed Yost, experimenting in Nebraska. His ideas were quickly taken up by Don Cameron and others in Britain and France.⁷ It should not be forgotten that these reinvented balloons were contemporary with the first moon landings and the earliest communication satellites.

      But balloons are also ancient and symbolic devices. They have a long history, and a longer mythology, going back in various forms and dimensions thousands of years, to ancient civilisations in South America and China. There are vague accounts of man-carrying smoke balloons from the Yin dynasty of the twelfth century BC. The great scholar and Sinologist Joseph Needham suggested that Chinese of the fourth century BC used fire balloons for signalling in warfare, or perhaps for carrying love letters. There are rumours of shamanic balloon flights made by the priests of the pre-Inca civilisations. Peruvian funereal rituals involved sending corpses out over the Pacific by hot-air balloon, just as the Vikings would later send out their sacred dead by fireboat into the North Sea. The famous geometrical carvings on the Nazca plateau in southern Peru, some of them animal shapes stretching over four miles in outline, are only explicable if they were originally designed to be viewed from hundreds of feet in the air, so presumably by balloon.

      It has been suggested that the Nazca designs were made by visiting aliens, hovering in flying saucers.^fn3 But the modern balloonist Julian Nott successfully invented a huge smoke balloon, constructed purely from local materials, to prove that human beings could overfly and supervise the carvings even in the fifth century AD.⁹

      The primitive and the sophisticated elements of ballooning are often combined. In this way the balloon may have both a practical and a symbolic function, for example when it is used as a means of escape. Among the most remarkable balloon escapes ever made was a flight across the East German border in September 1979. Its daring, and the idea of a symbolic flight from Communism to the free West, so caught people’s imaginations that it was made into an adventure film by Disney, Night Crossing (1982), starring John Hurt and Beau Bridges.

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