There is some haunting analogy between the silken skin of a balloon, the thin ‘onion skin’ of safety, and the thin atmospheric skin of our whole, beautiful planet as it floats in space. This thin breathable layer of air is not much more than seven miles thick – as balloonists were the first to discover. In every way, balloons make you catch your breath.
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Falling upwards by helium party balloon may sound unlikely. But on Sunday, 20 April 2008 a forty-one-year-old Catholic priest, Father Adelir Antonio de Carli, made a heroic ascent using a very similar method. Father de Carli was known locally as Padre Baloneiro – ‘The Balloon Priest’ – and he flew for charity. He took off from the port city of Paranaguá, in Brazil, strapped into a buoyancy chair suspended beneath a thousand small multicoloured helium balloons. They were grouped into five vivid clusters of pink, green, red, white and yellow. His aim was to raise money for a truckers’ rest stop and spiritual centre. He was known for his human rights campaigns, and that January had made a successful four-hour charity ascent suspended beneath six hundred helium party balloons.
On this second flight, armed with a thermal flying suit, GPS system and satellite phone, he rose successfully to some nineteen thousand feet, near to the edge of the sustainable atmosphere, where the sky becomes dark blue, and human breath forms glittering ice crystals in the ever-thinning air. Here, close to heaven, he cheerfully reported back by phone to his flight control. He also gave a phone interview to the Brazilian TV channel Globo, in which he said he was ‘fine, but very cold’, and was having trouble operating his GPS device. But he was also being carried out to sea, and was now thirty miles off the coast. At 8.45 that Sunday evening, he lost contact with the coastguards. An air-sea rescue search was mounted early the following Monday morning, but without success. A surviving cluster of fifty balloons was found floating in the sea late on Tuesday, but without Padre Baloneiro attached. The Brazilian naval search was called off on 29 April. But his parishioners continued to believe in his miraculous survival, and prayed daily for him.
Three months later, on 4 July 2008, an oil-rig support vessel found the remains of his body (lower torso and legs only) floating about sixty miles off the Brazilian coast, still attached to his buoyancy chair. It seems that part of the helium balloon rig must have separated or failed in some way during the first twenty-four hours of his flight. Possibly some of the balloons began bursting at high altitude, but this of course would have automatically reduced his lift, much as planned, and brought him back comparatively gently to earth. Except that now there was no earth beneath him. It seems that Padre Baloneiro must have spent some time meditating in the sea. Finally, he was probably eaten by sharks. But he was a brave man, a daring balloonist, and possibly even a saint.fn1
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The dash and eccentricity of so many of those who have flown balloons since the first Montgolfiers of 1783 is strangely mesmerising. I find it difficult not to admire such figures as Sophie Blanchard, Charles Green, Félix Nadar, James Glaisher, Thaddeus Lowe, Gaston Tissandier or Salomon Andrée. Indeed, I find it difficult not to fall for them. The word ‘intrepid’ is automatically used of balloonists; but almost always thoughtlessly. In my experience, balloonists come in every shape and personality type: meticulous, cautious, reckless, obsessive, sportive, saturnine, or devil-may-care. Equally they seem to have every kind of motivation: professional, commercial, scientific, philanthropic, escapist, aesthetic, or just plain publicity-seeking.
But the one thing they never quite seem to be is down-to-earth. All of them seem to have one enigmatic thing in common, besides physical courage and a head for heights. This is a romantic dream of flying, a strange – an almost unnatural – longing to be airborne. There is something both exotic and magnetic about such people. A biographer is drawn to their enigma.
The balloons themselves are mysterious, paradoxical objects. They are both beautiful and ephemeral. They are a mixture of power and fragility in constant flux. They offer a provoking combination of tranquillity and peril; of control and helplessness; of technology and terror. They make demands.
Consider an earlier balloon flight for charity, which took place on the afternoon of 22 July 1785, when a full-size hydrogen balloon was seen flying at three thousand feet over the Norfolk fishing village of Lowestoft. (Indeed, very close to my village fête.) The balloon was heading rapidly eastwards, directly out over the North Sea, and its pilot was clearly unable to bring it back to earth. There was nothing between the balloon and the distant shores of the Baltic.
The man in the basket was thirty-three-year-old John Money, a half-pay officer from the 15th Light Dragoons. Major Money had taken off earlier that afternoon from Ranelagh Gardens in Norwich, to raise cash for the new Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, founded in 1772. It was a cause supported by the Bishop of Norwich and the local Norwich MP, William Wyndham, a friend of Dr Johnson’s and also a balloon enthusiast. The Major knew a lot about horses, harness, and driving a coach and pair, but he had little practical experience of balloons. He was however a man of courage and resource, who enjoyed a gamble as well as supporting a good cause.
Money had originally joined the Norfolk Militia, then the 15th Light Dragoons, and subsequently went out to serve as a captain under General John Burgoyne for the British Crown in the American War of Independence. He was noted for his unfashionable objection to military flogging for desertion (often a lethal punishment), mildly suggesting that a neat tattooed ‘D’ on the upper right arm might prove more effective. He was captured in Canada after the Battle of Saratoga, but eventually bargained his way out of prison. It seems he was a cool customer in a tight situation.
He was now back home, riding his horses and kicking his heels on his small country estate at Crown Point, in the village of Trowse Newton, just south of Norwich. Balloons fascinated him, partly for their military possibilities, but also for their sheer if uncontrollable beauty. He regarded them as if they were a species of wild horse. Admittedly, he had only made one previous ascent, in London that spring, in what was known as the ‘British Balloon’. This had been constructed as a patriotic rival to the already celebrated Italian balloons of Vincenzo Lunardi and the wealthy eccentric Count Zambeccari. Characteristically, Money had somehow convinced the owners of the British balloon to let him transport it to Norwich, and to fly it solo for this philanthropic ascent.2
The launch went fine, according to the local Gazette, attended by ‘a large and brilliant assembly of the first and most distinguished personages in the city and county’.3 The balloon rose easily above the stately copper beeches on the northern boundary of the gardens (their leaves barely stirring), and was then carried on a gentle summer breeze across the river Yare, in a north-westwards direction towards distant Lincolnshire. But as it gained height, an ‘improper current’ arose, and a brisk wind blew it back across the city – to more enthusiastic cheers – and then south-eastwards, still gaining height, towards the Norfolk coast, a mere fifteen miles away. By 6 p.m. the balloon was spotted sailing high over Lowestoft, and heading out over the North Sea. It was supposed that some problem had arisen with the valve of his balloon, and that Money was unable to vent sufficient hydrogen gas to bring himself down. He disappeared rapidly out over the sea and into the softening eastern haze of the summer evening.
Among the ‘distinguished assembly’ who witnessed the launch at Ranelagh Gardens was the Earl of Orford. He wrote anxiously to William Wyndham the following morning. ‘I am sorry to inform you that a Major Money ascended alone under the British Balloon at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. The balloon rose to a great height and took a direction towards the sea. It was seen entering over the ocean about a league south of Lowestoft at a very great height at six o’clock. By which circumstance I am greatly apprehensive for his thus continuing in the air, but that by some accident perhaps the String which connects to the valve was broken …’4
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