A lot of hot air
Jan Morris
Great News! Last week they crossed the Atlantic by balloon! Never mind that they have been crossing it in aeroplanes and airships for half a century. Never mind that it took 138 hours 6 minutes (twenty-six years ago the steamship United States did it in eighty-three hours). When Major Christopher Davey the English balloonist looked up and saw the Double Eagle II floating triumphantly over Hampshire, he wept: and when Mr Bosanquet appeared to introduce News at Ten that night, it was with an almost visionary smile that he told us the epic tale before all else.
Of course it is the silly season, but even so this quixotic enterprise was astonishingly received. 'A Moment in History', the Daily Mirror called it, and The Times itself wrote about American Conquerors of the Atlantic. I am not, however, complaining. Fiercely though I resent those immense mountaineering expeditions in which amidst a welter of publicity and sententious comment women are widowed, children made fatherless and bestsellers conceived, I found this Atlantic Conquest distinctly appealing. It hardly brought the tears to my eyes, when Double Eagle II lurched to its landfall in France, but at least it took my mind off gloomier matters.
I liked its modesty, for one thing. Three men in a silent receptacle, being blown across the ocean, is a very different thing from those neo-military performances of the Himalaya. If anyone had to die on this adventure, it was the adventurers themselves no employees were at risk, no responsibilitites were devolved. Better still,
nobody did die. Just as I do not subscribe to the tragic theory of comedy, so I much prefer exploits where everyone survives.
Also I think it really was that rare and lovely thing, an altogether unnecessary event. 'It was,' said one of the intrepid aeronauts when they landed, 'just something to do for fun'. I am reminded of the Chesterton quotation chosen by H.W. Tilman, himself tragically missing at this moment somewhere in the South Atlantic, to preface his book about the Everest expedition of 1938: 'The thing was perfectly useless to everybody, including the , person who did it'.
Not for the great Tilman those pieties about Man's unconquerable Spirit, or the Frontiers of Awareness. 'Perfectly useless to everybody' It was one of the charms of the Double Eagle enterprise that it could do no good whatsoever to anyone, the only possible purpose of crossing the Atlantic by balloon being to cross the Atlantic by balloon.
Even Thor Heyerdahl or Tim Severin, I think, could read no ancient message into this voyage. No Polynesians migrated thus, I feel certain: no Irish monks descended upon Greenland by gondola. I suppose it is possible that Mr von Daniken's Gods from Space arrived by balloon, but it must have been in a particularly early moment of prehistory, since long before the building of Stonehenge they were, I gather, zooming about in rockets.
Is there any danger that somebody might develop something as a result of the flight? Well, one of the crew is by profession a
manufacturer of hang gliders, and may I suppose get some new wrinkles for his trade out of this 3,000-mile meander, but then his seems a sufficiently marginal occupation in itself. Somebody somewhere, I suppose, may be inspired by Double Eagle II to build a better balloon, but then one of the merits of nonsense is that, however hard you multiply it, nonsense it remains.
It is true of course that the Conquest established not merely a precedent, but a record too. It was the slowest aerial crossing of the ocean, and this offers baleful possibilities, for the Human Spirit may now strive to cross the Atlantic by balloon slower still. The appeal of it will certainly wear off, if trans-Atlantic ballooning degenerates into Observer single-handed un-races.
I did think I heard, too, out of the corner of my ear, one disturbing observation from Mr Anderson, the senior and therefore most vulnerable member of the crew. I thought I heard him say something about 'extending the frontiers of human endurance'. But! hope I was mistaken, because so far the crossing of Double Eagle II seems to me an exploit sans reproche — silly, engaging, meaningless, brave and altogether devoid of archaeological import.
Wouldn't it be lovely if they didn't write a book about it? But that, I fear, would be asking too much of the Unconquerable Spirit.
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