Knowing some of Mr. Charles Green’s friends I was rather hankering to see more of the air-captain, as the Germans style us, but I knew by experience that “two of a trade seldom agree,” and I was naturally reluctant to offend my patron by being intimate with Mr. Green, whose fame was of long standing and very properly universal.
Circumstances soon brought us together, but on meeting I was impressed with the belief that I was regarded as the advocate of an opposition aëronaut, and not as one upon whom Mr. Green would lavish his experience, or whom he would take up either as a paying passenger or pupil. I was evidently considered a dangerous fellow, and as Mr. Hampton had once stated that he thought I should one day become an aëronaut, although at the time I had no serious intention of doing so, this was quite sufficient to cause me to be shunned by all the family of the Greens, or, if not exactly shunned, at least viewed with caution and suspicion.
For three years I was in the habit of meeting Mr. Hampton and of talking over ballooning, until I grew well nigh surfeited with the tongue part of aërial voyaging, and longed for the reality, which was delayed until the year 1844. Mr. Hampton was then enabled with my assistance to start a new balloon, and I had an opportunity of seeing the construction of it. His first engagement with this was at the Old Vauxhall Gardens, in Birmingham, and thither I went to be his companion, but, to my mortification, the balloon would not raise two persons, so that I had to remain on terra firma, and suffer the taunts of several spectators, who chose to attribute to motives of fear my getting out of the car after having been once in for the ascent.
My third attempt was successful. Mr. Hampton was solicited to make an ascent from the White Conduit Gardens, Pentonville, on Monday, August 19th, 1844, and I was without fail to accompany him.
Many years had elapsed since the ascent of a balloon from these famed gardens; the attraction was accordingly very powerful.
The balloon was filled at the Imperial Gas Works, Battle-bridge, and the car placed on a cart, to which it was secured by ropes; it was conveyed to the gardens by six o’clock on Monday morning, an extra supply of gas being provided to keep up the loss by condensation.
Before the public entered the grounds, it was rumoured by the privileged few who were present that a Mr. Wells was to be the aëronaut’s companion, as that gentleman had recently been disappointed at Birmingham. Some other persons, mentioning my name, declared that Mr. Coxwell was to be the favoured party.
An appeal was then made to me for authentic information, and as I was now within a stone’s throw of my residence in the Barnsbury Road, Pentonville, where I had recently commenced practice, it was expedient I should frankly declare that I had previously assumed the name of Wells in order to prevent anxiety among my friends, and that the candidate Wells and the aspirant Coxwell were one and the same person.
This being understood, and the motives which actuated me in taking upon myself an alias being respected, Mr. Hampton, at six o’clock, accompanied by Mr. Wells (as “the Illustrated News” recorded it), stepped into the car, and the balloon rose in majestic style, travelling easterly over the metropolis, and descended in a field belonging to Mr. T. Rust, at East-ham Hall.
This, then, was my first real ascent; but such was the amount of thought I had bestowed on the subject in previous imaginary flights, built upon the descriptive accounts of others, that I seemed to be travelling an element which I had already explored, although, in reality, I was only for the first time realising the dreams of my youth. In most respects I found the country beneath, including the busy humming metropolis, the River Thames, shipping, and distant landscape, pretty much as I expected, and had been tutored to see in the mind’s eye; but the extraordinary and striking feature of this ascent was the enchanting way in which these appearances unfolded themselves in a manner so opposite to what one would picture by looking at a balloon in the sky. This is owing to the peculiarly imperceptible way in which a balloon rises, and herein consists the difference—the delightful, fascinating difference—between heights accomplished by balloon ascents, and altitudes attained by climbing hills, mountains, monuments, and buildings. In Alpine travels the process is so slow, and contact with the crust of the earth so palpable, that the traveller is gradually prepared for each successive phase of view as it presents itself; but in the balloon survey, cities, villages, and vast tracts for observation spring almost magically before the eye, and change in aspect and size so pleasingly, that bewilderment first, and then unbounded admiration is sure to follow, and when one reflects that all these wonderful panoramic effects are produced by the noiseless, unobserved, ascension of the balloon, we are reminded of the motion of the earth which rolls us round the glorious sun, and the heavenly orbs, so that they, the sun, stars, and planets, appear to be rising and setting.