p immunity often lies in the fact that
you strike the earth at an angle, and being carried forward, impact is
less abrupt. I can only say that I have on more than one occasion found
the greatest safety in a balloon venture involving the element of risk
to lie in complete abandonment to circumstances, and in the increased
life and activity which the delirium of excitement calls forth. In
comparing, however, man's first ventures by sky with those by sea, we
must remember what far greater demand the former must have made upon the
spirit of enterprise and daring.

We can picture the earliest sea voyager taking his first lesson astride
of a log with one foot on the bottom, and thus proceeding by sure stages
till he had built his coracle and learned to paddle it in shoal water.
But the case was wholly different when the first frail air ship stood at
her moorings with straining gear and fiercely burning furnace, and when
the sky sailor knew that no course was left him but to dive boldly up
into an element whence there was no stepping back, and separated from
earth by a gulf which man instinctively dreads to look down upon.

Taking events in their due sequence, we have now to record a voyage
which the terrors of sky and sea together combined to make memorable.
Winter had come--early January of 1785--when, in spite of short dark
days and frosty air, M. Blanchard, accompanied by an American, Dr.
Jeffries, determined on an attempt to cross the Channel. They chose the
English side, and inflating their balloon with hydrogen at Dover, boldly
cast off, and immediately drifted out to sea. Probably they had not paid
due thought to the effect of low sun and chilly atmosphere, for their
balloon rose sluggishly and began settling down ere little more than
a quarter of their course was run. Thereupon they parted with a large
portion of their ballast, with the result that they crept on as far as
mid-Channel, when they began descending again, and cast out the residue
of their sand, together with some books, and this, too, with the
uncomfortable feeling that even these measures would not suffice to
secure their safety.

This was in reality the first time that a sea passage had been made by
sky, and the gravity of their situation must not be under-estimated.
We are so accustomed in a sea passage to the constant passing of other
vessels that we allow ourselves to imagine that a frequented portion of
the ocean, such as the Channel, is thickly d