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Updated: June 17, 2025
At once the Lunardi collapsed and became manageable; and having roped it to a ring-bolt astern, the crew fell to their oars. My teeth were chattering. These operations of salvage had taken time, and it took us a further unconscionable time to cover the distance between us and the brig as she lay hove-to, her maintopsail aback and her headsails drawing.
The filling of the balloon caused some delay, but, in order to keep the patience of the populace within control, it was only partially filled. At five minutes past two the balloon ascended amid the loud acclamations of the assembled multitudes, and Signor Lunardi had proved himself no impostor. He writes to his friend, "The stillness, extent, and magnificence of the scene rendered it highly awful.
It was Byfield's balloon the monster Lunardi in process of inflation. "Confound Byfield!" I ejaculated in my haste. "Who is Byfield?" "An aëronaut, my dear, of bilious humour; which no doubt accounts for his owning a balloon striped alternately with liver-colour and pale blue, and for his arranging it and a brass band in the very line of my escape. That man dogs me like fate." I broke off sharply.
Their first imitator in England, Vincenzo Lunardi, had made a successful ascent from Moorfields as recently as 1784, while in the following year Blanchard crossed the channel in a balloon and earned the sobriquet Don Quixote de la Manche. His grotesque appropriation of the motto "Sic itur ad astra" made him, at least, a fit object for Munchausen's gibes.
"Don't cut, man! What the devil!" Our rope had tautened over the coping of a high stone wall; and the straining Lunardi a very large and handsome blossom, bending on a very thin stalk overhung a gravelled yard; and lo! from the centre of it stared up at us, rigid with amazement, the faces of a squad of British red-coats!
If Lunardi went up and came down, there was the matter settled. We prefer to grant the point. We do not want to see the experiment repeated ad nauseam by Byfield, and Brown, and Butler, and Brodie, and Bottomley. Ah! if they would go up and NOT come down again! But this is by the question.
The whole neighbourhood became alarmed, and it followed as a matter of course that Lunardi was peremptorily ordered to discontinue his preparations, and to announce in the public press that his ascent from Chelsea Hospital was forbidden.
A line of silver ahead: a ribbon drawn taut across the night, clean-edged, broadening the sea! In a minute or two I caught the murmur of the coast. "Five hundred miles," I began to reckon again, and a holy calm dawned on me as the Lunardi swept high over the fringing surf, and its voice faded back with the glimmer of a whitewashed fishing-haven. I roused Dalmahoy and pointed. "The sea!"
But to my unspeakable relief the Lunardi floated upwards, and continued to float, almost without a tremor. Only by reading the barometer, or by casting scraps of paper overboard, could we tell that the machine moved at all. Now and again we revolved slowly: so Byfield's compass informed us, but for ourselves we had never guessed it.
Becoming embroiled in politics, he published a handbill of a seditious tendency, and consequently was compelled to seek a refuge in America, where he died in 1805, after conducting a newspaper at Salem, in New England, for several years." The voyage of Vincenzo Lunardi was made in September 1784.
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