Cinq semaines en ballon. English Read online

  CHAPTER FIRST.

  The End of a much-applauded Speech.--The Presentation of Dr. SamuelFerguson.--Excelsior.--Full-length Portrait of the Doctor.--A Fatalistconvinced.--A Dinner at the Travellers' Club.--Several Toasts for theOccasion.

  There was a large audience assembled on the 14th of January, 1862, atthe session of the Royal Geographical Society, No. 3 WaterlooPlace, London. The president, Sir Francis M----, made an importantcommunication to his colleagues, in an address that was frequentlyinterrupted by applause.

  This rare specimen of eloquence terminated with the following sonorousphrases bubbling over with patriotism:

  "England has always marched at the head of nations" (for, the readerwill observe, the nations always march at the head of each other), "bythe intrepidity of her explorers in the line of geographical discovery."(General assent). "Dr. Samuel Ferguson, one of her most glorious sons,will not reflect discredit on his origin." ("No, indeed!" from all partsof the hall.)

  "This attempt, should it succeed" ("It will succeed!"), "will completeand link together the notions, as yet disjointed, which the worldentertains of African cartology" (vehement applause); "and, should itfail, it will, at least, remain on record as one of the most daringconceptions of human genius!" (Tremendous cheering.)

  "Huzza! huzza!" shouted the immense audience, completely electrified bythese inspiring words.

  "Huzza for the intrepid Ferguson!" cried one of the most excitable ofthe enthusiastic crowd.

  The wildest cheering resounded on all sides; the name of Ferguson was inevery mouth, and we may safely believe that it lost nothing in passingthrough English throats. Indeed, the hall fairly shook with it.

  And there were present, also, those fearless travellers and explorerswhose energetic temperaments had borne them through every quarter of theglobe, many of them grown old and worn out in the service of science.All had, in some degree, physically or morally, undergone the soresttrials. They had escaped shipwreck; conflagration; Indian tomahawks andwar-clubs; the fagot and the stake; nay, even the cannibal maws of theSouth Sea Islanders. But still their hearts beat high during Sir FrancisM----'s address, which certainly was the finest oratorical success thatthe Royal Geographical Society of London had yet achieved.

  But, in England, enthusiasm does not stop short with mere words. Itstrikes off money faster than the dies of the Royal Mint itself. So asubscription to encourage Dr. Ferguson was voted there and then, andit at once attained the handsome amount of two thousand five hundredpounds. The sum was made commensurate with the importance of theenterprise.

  A member of the Society then inquired of the president whether Dr.Ferguson was not to be officially introduced.

  "The doctor is at the disposition of the meeting," replied Sir Francis.

  "Let him come in, then! Bring him in!" shouted the audience. "We'd liketo see a man of such extraordinary daring, face to face!"

  "Perhaps this incredible proposition of his is only intended to mystifyus," growled an apoplectic old admiral.

  "Suppose that there should turn out to be no such person as Dr.Ferguson?" exclaimed another voice, with a malicious twang.

  "Why, then, we'd have to invent one!" replied a facetious member of thisgrave Society.

  "Ask Dr. Ferguson to come in," was the quiet remark of Sir FrancisM----.

  And come in the doctor did, and stood there, quite unmoved by thethunders of applause that greeted his appearance.

  He was a man of about forty years of age, of medium height and physique.His sanguine temperament was disclosed in the deep color of his cheeks.His countenance was coldly expressive, with regular features, and alarge nose--one of those noses that resemble the prow of a ship, andstamp the faces of men predestined to accomplish great discoveries.His eyes, which were gentle and intelligent, rather than bold, lent apeculiar charm to his physiognomy. His arms were long, and his feet wereplanted with that solidity which indicates a great pedestrian.

  A calm gravity seemed to surround the doctor's entire person, and no onewould dream that he could become the agent of any mystification, howeverharmless.

  Hence, the applause that greeted him at the outset continued until he,with a friendly gesture, claimed silence on his own behalf. He steppedtoward the seat that had been prepared for him on his presentation,and then, standing erect and motionless, he, with a determined glance,pointed his right forefinger upward, and pronounced aloud the singleword--

  "Excelsior!"

  Never had one of Bright's or Cobden's sudden onslaughts, never hadone of Palmerston's abrupt demands for funds to plate the rocks of theEnglish coast with iron, made such a sensation. Sir Francis M----'saddress was completely overshadowed. The doctor had shown himselfmoderate, sublime, and self-contained, in one; he had uttered the wordof the situation--

  "Excelsior!"

  The gouty old admiral who had been finding fault, was completely wonover by the singular man before him, and immediately moved the insertionof Dr. Ferguson's speech in "The Proceedings of the Royal GeographicalSociety of London."

  Who, then, was this person, and what was the enterprise that heproposed?

  Ferguson's father, a brave and worthy captain in the English Navy, hadassociated his son with him, from the young man's earliest years, inthe perils and adventures of his profession. The fine little fellow, whoseemed to have never known the meaning of fear, early revealed a keenand active mind, an investigating intelligence, and a remarkableturn for scientific study; moreover, he disclosed uncommon address inextricating himself from difficulty; he was never perplexed, not evenin handling his fork for the first time--an exercise in which childrengenerally have so little success.

  His fancy kindled early at the recitals he read of daring enterprise andmaritime adventure, and he followed with enthusiasm the discoveries thatsignalized the first part of the nineteenth century. He mused over theglory of the Mungo Parks, the Bruces, the Caillies, the Levaillants, andto some extent, I verily believe, of Selkirk (Robinson Crusoe), whomhe considered in no wise inferior to the rest. How many a well-employedhour he passed with that hero on his isle of Juan Fernandez! Often hecriticised the ideas of the shipwrecked sailor, and sometimes discussedhis plans and projects. He would have done differently, in such and sucha case, or quite as well at least--of that he felt assured. But of onething he was satisfied, that he never should have left that pleasantisland, where he was as happy as a king without subjects--no, not ifthe inducement held out had been promotion to the first lordship in theadmiralty!

  It may readily be conjectured whether these tendencies were developedduring a youth of adventure, spent in every nook and corner of theGlobe. Moreover, his father, who was a man of thorough instruction,omitted no opportunity to consolidate this keen intelligence by seriousstudies in hydrography, physics, and mechanics, along with a slighttincture of botany, medicine, and astronomy.

  Upon the death of the estimable captain, Samuel Ferguson, thentwenty-two years of age, had already made his voyage around the world.He had enlisted in the Bengalese Corps of Engineers, and distinguishedhimself in several affairs; but this soldier's life had not exactlysuited him; caring but little for command, he had not been fond ofobeying. He, therefore, sent in his resignation, and half botanizing,half playing the hunter, he made his way toward the north of the IndianPeninsula, and crossed it from Calcutta to Surat--a mere amateur tripfor him.

  From Surat we see him going over to Australia, and in 1845 participatingin Captain Sturt's expedition, which had been sent out to explore thenew Caspian Sea, supposed to exist in the centre of New Holland.

  Samuel Ferguson returned to England about 1850, and, more than everpossessed by the demon of discovery, he spent the intervening time,until 1853, in accompanying Captain McClure on the expedition that wentaround the American Continent from Behring's Straits to Cape Farewell.

  Notwithstanding fatigues of every description, and in all climates,Ferguson's constitution continued marvellously sound. He felt at ease inthe midst of the most complete privations;
in fine, he was the verytype of the thoroughly accomplished explorer whose stomach expands orcontracts at will; whose limbs grow longer or shorter according tothe resting-place that each stage of a journey may bring; who can fallasleep at any hour of the day or awake at any hour of the night.

  Nothing, then, was less surprising, after that, than to find ourtraveller, in the period from 1855 to 1857, visiting the whole regionwest of the Thibet, in company with the brothers Schlagintweit,and bringing back some curious ethnographic observations from thatexpedition.

  During these different journeys, Ferguson had been the most active andinteresting correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, the penny newspaperwhose circulation amounts to 140,000 copies, and yet scarcely sufficesfor its many legions of readers. Thus, the doctor had become well knownto the public, although he could not claim membership in either of theRoyal Geographical Societies of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, orSt. Petersburg, or yet with the Travellers' Club, or even the RoyalPolytechnic Institute, where his friend the statistician Cockburn ruledin state.

  The latter savant had, one day, gone so far as to propose to him thefollowing problem: Given the number of miles travelled by the doctor inmaking the circuit of the Globe, how many more had his head describedthan his feet, by reason of the different lengths of the radii?--or,the number of miles traversed by the doctor's head and feet respectivelybeing given, required the exact height of that gentleman?

  This was done with the idea of complimenting him, but the doctor hadheld himself aloof from all the learned bodies--belonging, as he did, tothe church militant and not to the church polemical. He found his timebetter employed in seeking than in discussing, in discovering ratherthan discoursing.

  There is a story told of an Englishman who came one day to Geneva,intending to visit the lake. He was placed in one of those odd vehiclesin which the passengers sit side by side, as they do in an omnibus.Well, it so happened that the Englishman got a seat that left him withhis back turned toward the lake. The vehicle completed its circular tripwithout his thinking to turn around once, and he went back to Londondelighted with the Lake of Geneva.

  Doctor Ferguson, however, had turned around to look about him on hisjourneyings, and turned to such good purpose that he had seen a greatdeal. In doing so, he had simply obeyed the laws of his nature, and wehave good reason to believe that he was, to some extent, a fatalist,but of an orthodox school of fatalism withal, that led him to relyupon himself and even upon Providence. He claimed that he was impelled,rather than drawn by his own volition, to journey as he did, and that hetraversed the world like the locomotive, which does not direct itself,but is guided and directed by the track it runs on.

  "I do not follow my route;" he often said, "it is my route that followsme."

  The reader will not be surprised, then, at the calmness with which thedoctor received the applause that welcomed him in the Royal Society. Hewas above all such trifles, having no pride, and less vanity. Helooked upon the proposition addressed to him by Sir Francis M----as thesimplest thing in the world, and scarcely noticed the immense effectthat it produced.

  When the session closed, the doctor was escorted to the rooms of theTravellers' Club, in Pall Mall. A superb entertainment had been preparedthere in his honor. The dimensions of the dishes served were made tocorrespond with the importance of the personage entertained, and theboiled sturgeon that figured at this magnificent repast was not an inchshorter than Dr. Ferguson himself.

  Numerous toasts were offered and quaffed, in the wines of France, tothe celebrated travellers who had made their names illustrious by theirexplorations of African territory. The guests drank to their health orto their memory, in alphabetical order, a good old English way of doingthe thing. Among those remembered thus, were: Abbadie, Adams, Adamson,Anderson, Arnaud, Baikie, Baldwin, Barth, Batouda, Beke, Beltram, DuBerba, Bimbachi, Bolognesi, Bolwik, Belzoni, Bonnemain, Brisson, Browne,Bruce, Brun-Rollet, Burchell, Burckhardt, Burton, Cailland, Caillie,Campbell, Chapman, Clapperton, Clot-Bey, Colomieu, Courval, Cumming,Cuny, Debono, Decken, Denham, Desavanchers, Dicksen, Dickson, Dochard,Du Chaillu, Duncan, Durand, Duroule, Duveyrier, D'Escayrac, De Lauture,Erhardt, Ferret, Fresnel, Galinier, Galton, Geoffroy, Golberry,Hahn, Halm, Harnier, Hecquart, Heuglin, Hornemann, Houghton, Imbert,Kauffmann, Knoblecher, Krapf, Kummer, Lafargue, Laing, Lafaille,Lambert, Lamiral, Lampriere, John Lander, Richard Lander, Lefebvre,Lejean, Levaillant, Livingstone, MacCarthy, Maggiar, Maizan, Malzac,Moffat, Mollien, Monteiro, Morrison, Mungo Park, Neimans, Overweg,Panet, Partarrieau, Pascal, Pearse, Peddie, Penney, Petherick, Poncet,Prax, Raffenel, Rabh, Rebmann, Richardson, Riley, Ritchey, Rochetd'Hericourt, Rongawi, Roscher, Ruppel, Saugnier, Speke, Steidner,Thibaud, Thompson, Thornton, Toole, Tousny, Trotter, Tuckey, Tyrwhitt,Vaudey, Veyssiere, Vincent, Vinco, Vogel, Wahlberg, Warrington,Washington, Werne, Wild, and last, but not least, Dr. Ferguson, who,by his incredible attempt, was to link together the achievements of allthese explorers, and complete the series of African discovery.