Page 39 of Falling Upwards


  fn34 They planned eventually to fly right around the Mediterranean, an aerial version of the Grand Tour, starting in Morocco. It is possible that this trip was inspired by Jean Bruno’s Les Aventures de Paul enlevé par un ballon (1858). However, L’Hirondelle was suddenly and shockingly incinerated when one of the launch crew casually lit his pipe next to the hydrogen generator. Though no one was hurt, this sudden conflagration in the summer of 1869 was an ill omen: ‘Your beautiful balloon canopy, your generator, your storage hangar, your basket, all gone up in flames! – nothing but a heap of cinders!’ The image of a burning balloon over Paris – which goes right back to Sophie Blanchard – would soon become a political symbol of great power.46

  fn35 The ambiguous aspects of the Prussian occupation, and the issue of collaboration, were savagely portrayed by Guy de Maupassant, who fought against the advancing Prussians as a twenty-year-old volunteer, and later wrote a number of short stories based on his experiences. ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’ (1882) has a typically ironic title, which is the nickname of a particularly sadistic Prussian officer. While entertaining willing French girls from the local village, he destroys the beautiful interior of his château billet, out of a mixture of contempt and brutal drunkenness. In ‘Boule de Suife’ (‘The Suet Dumpling’, 1880), a fat, kindly French prostitute is forced to sleep with a Prussian officer for the convenience of her fellow coach passengers. This happens in Normandy, near Rouen, over sixty miles from Paris. Maupassant’s most moving reflection on the times appears in ‘Two Friends’ (1882). Two Parisians, driven by the hunger and boredom of the siege, get a little tipsy together on cheap wine, and set off for an innocent afternoon’s angling on the lower reaches of the Seine, near the Fort Mont-Valérien. They inadvertently cross into no-man’s land (hauntingly described), and after a few minutes’ idyllic fishing, are captured by a Prussian patrol. They are cross-questioned, skilfully tempted to betray each other by revealing a password, and when this fails, casually shot as spies. Their bodies are thrown unceremoniously into the Seine, while their little catch of fish, still leaping and gleaming in the late sunshine, is symbolically emptied from the Parisians’ net into the Prussian stockpot.

  fn36 This is the spectacular view the modern visitor still sees from the panoramic terrace of the Sacré Coeur. In those days neither the Basilica nor the terrace existed, and the Butte, or Heights, were only marked by the Solferino Tower, commemorating one of Napoleon III’s victories. There was also a popular restaurant, or guinguette, which charged extra for the panoramic view. Both were demolished in the winter of 1871, when it became clear that Prussian gunners were using them as sighting points for their bombardment. The Sacré Coeur, commenced in 1873, was originally intended to commemorate the Franco-Prussian conflict and ‘to expiate the crimes of the Commune’. Its completion was endlessly and symbolically delayed until 1919. Today its stark white cupolas, uneasily tethered on the skyline of Montmartre, still seem to retain some memory of its earliest aeronautical associations. On the place Saint-Pierre below, there is usually a children’s carousel which marks almost exactly the spot of Nadar’s balloon launches. The garden at the side has been renamed the square Louise Michel, in honour of the famous female communard. But Nadar and his heroic Aérostiers have no monument or memorial. Perhaps he would prefer the children’s carousel anyway, as it inspires so many happy photographs.

  fn37 The mystery of Le Jacquard throws some light on the spirit of the siege balloonists. Prince had never been in a balloon before, but in the last-minute absence of a regular aeronaut, he volunteered to fly from the Gare d’Orléans on a night launch. ‘I reckon to make a good long flight,’ he said simply. ‘People will talk about my trip.’ His instructions were basic. He was not to come down anywhere before dawn. He must be absolutely certain that he was completely clear of the Prussian lines. The mail must only be delivered into friendly hands. He was last reported by a British fishing boat, thirty miles due west of the Scilly Isles, and flying exceptionally high. However, some of his mailbags were later found among the rocks at the Lizard, the most south-westerly point of England. What had happened? His flight path on a marine chart indicates a roughly straight trajectory between Paris, Cherbourg, the Lizard and the Scilly Isles. While still flying low, Prince probably saw the tip of the Lizard below, and realised it was his last possible point of landfall before the Atlantic Ocean. So he deliberately threw out his mailbags in the desperate hope that they would be found and delivered, even by the English. (In fact some of this mail actually was later delivered.) But in doing so he was throwing out a large part of his remaining ballast. As he must have known, Le Jacquard was doomed to gain massive height and to continue ever westwards over the Atlantic Ocean. Alexandre Prince’s story – the lone figure in the high balloon headed west into the sunset – had a peculiar power to haunt Parisians. His name can be found in golden letters on a solitary memorial in the Salle des Pas Perdus, in the present Gare d’Austerlitz.40

  fn38 Hugo’s other heroic siege poems include ‘Paris bloqué’, ‘Du Haut de la muraille de Paris’, ‘Les Forts’ and ‘Le Pigeon’. But his letters and prose diary suggest that the siege sometimes rather suited him. As well as being cosseted by his ageing but ever-faithful mistress Juliet Druot, and provisioned by generous well-wishers, his diary shows that he was also privately visited by a stream of late-night female fans and acolytes. Most brought small, innocent offerings, billets-doux, sweetmeats or poems. But some were anxious to offer various forms of sexual favour to the great man. Among these were Gautier’s unhappily married literary daughter Judith Catulle-Mendès, and none other than the future Communard leader, the fiery and headstrong Louise Michel.55

  fn39 The cumulative figure must obviously be a broad estimate. But over a decade later, Henry Coxwell, not necessarily a friendly witness, put the figure at around three million letters. Glaisher and Flammarion put it at ‘2,500,000 letters weighing nearly ten tons’, and L.T.C. Rolt agrees, while the modern French historian Victor Debuchy presents it characteristically as: ‘10,670 kilos of mail … at 20 centimes per 4 grams per letter … generating a gross income of 533,500 francs for the Bureau de Poste … or a net sum of 294,150 francs’. Debuchy’s figures, incidentally, when translated, would give a precise total of 2,667,500 letters delivered, which would surely satisfy even a Prussian accountant.61

  fn40 Nearly a decade later, in 1886, now aged sixty-six, Nadar achieved yet another publicity coup when he staged the first ever photo interview, or ‘talking head’. This was a long animated conversation, held across a dining-room table, with the distinguished French chemist Michel-Eugène Choiseul, the inventor of margarine and an early expert on gerontology. The spry, twinkling Choiseul, with his wild mop of white hair and reputation as a scientific enfant terrible (very much to Nadar’s taste), was celebrating his hundredth birthday. The dialogue was recorded by a stenographer, and published alongside a running series of ‘candid’ photographs of Choiseul, continuously ‘snapped’ in the act of talking and gesticulating. It produced something between a strip cartoon and the first filmed interview, and was catchily entitled ‘The Art of Living to One Hundred Years Old’. Nadar himself lived to be eighty-nine. Less than a year before his death, in July 1909, he telegraphed Louis Blériot to congratulate him on having successfully flown the Channel: ‘Heartfelt thanks for the joy your triumph has brought this antediluvian supporter of Heavier-than-Air – Nadar.’

  fn41 But dreams of course persist. The famous Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873–1932) came to France and built a tiny dirigible ‘No. 1 Airship’ in 1898, regularly flying it around Paris from his apartment at 9, rue Washington. He frequently anchored above his favourite restaurant next door in the Champs-Elysées. In his ‘No. 6 Airship’ he finally flew around the Eiffel Tower in 1901. I lived at 30, rue Washington, opposite Santos-Dumont’s apartment, for six months in 1994, and sometimes heard him taking off in the silent hours before dawn. I treasure the opening paragraph of L.T.C. Rolt’s classic The Balloonists
(1966), which begins: ‘We were walking up the Champs-Elysées, and had reached the corner of the rue Washington when my friend Charles Dollfuss suddenly halted and, to the mild surprise of passers-by, struck the pavement a sharp blow with his stick. “Here,” he announced, “Santos-Dumont landed in his balloon.”’ Later, even Santos-Dumont changed to lightweight monoplanes.

  fn42 Interrupted by both World Wars, the Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett was reinstated in 1983, and continues to this day. It is regarded as the premier free-flight gas balloon competition in the world. But it also remains perilous. In October 2010 I was at Albuquerque for the annual International Balloon Fiesta, when rumours of the disappearance of two experienced and much-loved local aeronauts, Richard Abruzzo and his co-pilot Carol Davies, began to circulate. They had won the 2004 Gordon Bennett Cup, and were the favoured crew in the 54th event, which that year launched from Bristol. They had flown southwards across the Bay of Biscay, over France, Spain and Italy, and then on the third morning turned east and started to cross over the Adriatic, between Brindisi and Serbia. Here, on 29 September, all radio contact had suddenly been lost, and no emergency beacon could be tracked. Over the next few days it gradually emerged that they had been killed in a thunderstorm when struck by lightning at five thousand feet, and had dropped like a stone into the sea. Their open gondola, still containing their bodies, was not recovered until December. I had flown and talked with some of their colleagues, and witnessed the consternation and soul-searching this terrible news caused. I was also shown the aluminium frame basket they had used on a previous prize-winning flight, proudly preserved in the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque Museum. My notebook reads: ‘The yellow panelling is torn where they were thrown out on a rough landing and Richard fell thirty feet and broke his ribs and pelvis.’

  fn43 Andrée’s idea of a ‘photometric survey’ of the Arctic was not ill-conceived. It eventually led to continuous high-altitude surveys of the Arctic ice cap, beginning with NASA’s ‘Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer’ (SMMR) satellite in 1978. These first showed the huge seasonal expansion and contraction of the Arctic ice field, though not the thickness of the ice. It appears that the volume of summer Arctic ice has contracted by approximately 50 per cent since the year 2000, though the re-freeze of the ice cap in winter has remained roughly stable. These summer contractions or meltings were particularly noticeable in 2007 and 2012. Model predictions suggest that there may be no summer ice cap at all by 2030. The cause of this may be part of a natural cycle (the end of the so-called ‘4th ice age’), or directly attributable to man-made global warming, or both. Either way, such shrinking, if continuous, would probably affect the Gulf Stream and the whole weather system of Great Britain and northern Europe. It would make it less temperate and more extreme, in storms, heatwaves and droughts. See ‘Arctic Sea Ice’ on NASA’s Earth Observatory internet site. André’s fellow Scandinavian scientists were already considering such possibilities.

  fn44 Ekholm always maintained his interest in aerial exploration, but he saw that the future lay with the heavier-than-air machine, and became the founding chairman of the Swedish Aeronautical Society in 1900. Nevertheless, he still believed, like Glaisher, that crucial meteorological data could be gathered from high-altitude balloons. In addition to his work at the Swedish Meteorological Office, he continued to publish scientific papers. His visionary paper ‘On the variations of the climate of the geological and historical past and their causes’ was published in January 1901 by the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. It was one of the earliest academic papers to predict that increased CO2 emissions, both natural and man-made, would eventually produce global warming. However, Ekholm argued that this would broadly be beneficial to mankind, and would ward off the threat of a new Ice Age. See ‘On Variations of the Climate’ on the Nils Ekholm internet site.

  fn45 They did have successors, but not as Andrée had imagined. In 1907 and 1909 an American journalist, Walter Wellman, attempted to fly an airship from Dane’s Island, but only got thirty miles out and crashed on a glacier. In 1923 and 1925, the great Norwegian Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen made two attempts to fly over the Pole by twin-engined seaplane, one from Alaska and one from Spitsbergen, During the second expedition he successfully landed on the ice at 88 degrees north, thereby beating both Andrée’s and Nansen’s records, and successfully flew back three weeks later. But perhaps his most appropriate feat was to launch an airship, the Norge, from the site of Andrée’s launch on Dane’s Island in 1926, and overfly the Pole itself. However, the first successful free balloon, in deliberate emulation of Andrée, did not reach the Pole until 2000. It had much modern equipment aboard, and flew the ‘high-level journey’ up to fifteen thousand feet. It was piloted by the British explorer David Hempleman-Adams, and actually managed a brief landing on the ice at 89.9 north. But it did not quite fulfil Dr Ekholm’s original stipulation, and fly back again. Both balloon and pilot were brought back in a helicopter.

  fn46 The physical and psychological stress that Andrée and his crew faced are vividly illustrated by the balloon flight to the North Pole made by David Hempleman-Adams in 2000. He used the latest propane burners, an autopilot, a GPS satnav, the most up-to-date survival kit, an Iridium mobile phone, a radio link providing a constant stream of updated meteorological data, and a helicopter back-up team. Even so, it took him five days to reach the Pole, and he nearly didn’t make it. At one point he fell into exhausted sleep, hallucinated that he had landed, and awoke to find himself climbing out of the basket at thirteen thousand feet, believing the cloudbase to be solid, snow-covered ground. ‘Then I wake up. I am standing in the basket, with one leg thrown over the side … Only the harness is stopping me from jumping out, but I continue to jerk at the reins … then I realize I am floating several thousand feet above the polar pack ice, one tiny step away from plunging out of the basket … I feel frightened, really frightened, like no fear I’ve felt before.’ See David Hempleman-Adams, At the Mercy of the Winds (2001).

  fn47 During the rest of the expedition Strindberg took a further 240 photographic exposures, of which ninety-three have survived, about half in reasonable condition. His Karl Zeiss cameras worked at one hundredth of a second, and produced large 13×18cm Eastman-Kodak negatives, which could potentially produce brilliant images (like those from Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1914). But very few of the pictures appear to have been taken in sunlight. There are no defining shadows, no depth or details. Instead the dead, uniform glare from the ice field gives the images a curiously flat and ghost-like appearance, though this may partly be the result of water damage over thirty years. The collection does not constitute the projected ‘photometric survey’ of the Arctic. It is a tragic miscellany of survivor snapshots, from which Nils himself is mostly absent. The best are of routine, low-key subjects taken from the middle distance: Andrée standing on the upturned balloon basket; Fraenkel pushing a sledge stuck on a hump of pressure ice; Fraenkel and Nils standing over a shot polar bear; Andrée and Fraenkel breaking camp in the snow. None of the others have the drama of the first two balloon pictures. There are very few close-ups, except for a dead ivory gull pinned to a piece of canvas. There is also a picture of a set of three table forks, the third of which Andrée had laboriously constructed for Fraenkel. This last is perhaps another indication of Strindberg’s mischievous humour. Most striking is the total absence of any surviving portraiture. We never see the balloonists’ faces. Once they have returned to earth, they become virtually anonymous. The collection continues to be subject to detailed analysis and technical improvement by the Swedish Aeronautical Society.

  References

  CHAPTER 1: THE FALLING DREAM

  1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by David Raeburn, Penguin Classics, 2004, pp.303–6

  2 Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds), Norwich Since 1500, Hambledon and London, 2004; Hilaire Belloc, ‘A Norfolk Man’, On Something, 1925; New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, John Money
; J.E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain, Oxford, 1924, pp.179–85

  3 Norwich Since 1500, pp.80–2

  4 Ibid., pp.80–3

  5 L.T.C. Rolt, The Aeronauts: A Dramatic History of the Great Age of Ballooning, London, 1966 (republished as The Balloonists, 2006), p.95

  6 J.E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain, Oxford, 1924, p.183

  7 Don Cameron, Preface to L.T.C. Rolt

  8 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 1049–55

  9 See Julian Nott, official website

  10 Sources: ‘Freedom Balloon’ by John Dornberg, Popular Mechanics, February 1980; Ballonflucht, Günter Wetzel official website; Night Crossing, film treatment

  11 Airey Neave, They Have Their Exits: The First Briton to Make the Home Run from Colditz, London, 1970; and Pat Reid, The Latter Days at Colditz, London 1953