COURAGE AND FOOLHARDINESS.
THE amazing attempt by Mr. Wellman and his five com. panions to cross the Atlantic in a dirigible balloon was near the border-line which divides foolhardiness from courage • but on the whole we should place it just on the right side of the line,—on the side of courage. By deeds which are the result of courage as distinguished from foolhardiness we mean only those that serve an intelligent, or at all events intelligible, purpose. In practice men will draw the line in different places ; but our principle will probably be good enough for all. We should not call walking on a tight-rope foolhardi• ness, because it demonstrates the possibilities of human balance; but we should call it foolhardiness if a man walked on a tight-rope over a tank of molten lead, for the feat would prove nothing further, and the molten lead would be a base
irrelevance. Mr. Wellman's flight was the first attempt at a journey which we must all admit to be possible of achieve- ment. Most of us, indeed, look to journeys of indefinite length in the air as a strong possibility of the future. We do not, therefore, call it foolhardiness in Mr. Wellman to have tried to cross the Atlantic ; yet we do call it something very like foolhardiness not to have tested the soundness of the details on which so much depended. He might have tested his balloon along the coast for a distance corresponding to that across the Atlantic before he launched himself over the ocean, immeasurably reducing his chances of succour in case of a disaster. But we must not go so far as to reach the illogicality of imposing too much prudence on an act of superlative daring. It is clear that Mr. Wellman and his companions trusted to the power of their balloon to stay aloft during such a long journey as has never been accomplished, or even nearly accomplished, and that in this unquestioning confidence they were blind to risks so long as they had a definite scientific object in view. We cannot contemplate such an unforgettable act without being wonderfully impressed. We are tempted to adapt Sir Thomas Browne's words and exclaim : "Man is a noble animal, splendid in daring and pompous even in his defeats."
Mr. Wellman's courage has withstood the strain of long anticipation, which is the highest tax that can he put on any man's nerves. It will be remembered that he planned to go to the North Pole in a dirigible, and spent two summers in Spitsbergen working at his balloon and waiting for a favour- able moment. At last the desired southerly breeze came, and he started, only to be caught in a squall, which broke the long tube trailing from his balloon, and left him among the ruins of his dirigible on the side of a hill. Similarly he waited lately day after day at Atlantic City for the right sort of weather report before starting across the Atlantic, and at the end of three weeks most of the American newspapers had made up their minds that he was there for show and not for use, and indulged in ridicule which should have been directed not against his courage but against the inadequacy of his precautions. The Duke of Wellington used to talk of " four-in-the-morning courage," a phrase which perfectly explains itself. The Northern races like to think that this is a courage which is characteristically their own. We all know the élan and exalted devotion of which some more mercurial nations are capable, but we flatter ourselves with the thought that these things are rather a mood than a resolution, and have a reflex of sudden dejection. The highest degree of fortitude, we tell ourselves, is that which knows no sudden flame of lyrical and supporting passion, but draws up minutely a plan involving almost certain death, and days, weeks, or it may be months, afterwards carries out the plan letter for letter exactly as it was devised. That sort of courage is the coinage of Mr. Wellman and his companions, if ever it belonged to any men.
One would think that the daily contemplation of the dirigible and its apparatus would have accumulated mis- giving to the point of despair. The whole design on which success depended, although rational enough, was an un- known quantity. The dirigible was built out of the nucleus of what remained of Mr. Wellman's Polar dirigible. The long trailing tube which he used in his attempt to reach the Pole as a "stabilisator" or " equilibrator "—it was then filled with a reserve of provisions—was reproduced in the new dirigible, but this time it was composed of reserve tanks of gasoline for the engine. The effect of this long tail, the lower part of which hung in the water, was to keep the balloon at an almost uniform distance from the sea. The balloon was, so to speak, tethered to the sea. When the temperature rose, the hydrogen in the balloon increased its lifting-power and more of the tail was raised, and when the temperature fell the balloon sank nearer to the sea- The envelope of the balloon was of a special kind which was said to be warranted to retain the hydrogen longer than any envelope ever used before, and the theory was that the gradual loss of lifting-power in the balloon would be compensated by the consumption of the gasoline in the tail But surely the sheer experimental nature of this tail was enough to make the stoutest hold his breath. No one could guess how it would behave in a heavy sea. Imagine all those tanks of gasoline banging and jerking about in a gale. With a lighter tail it would be different. X. de In Vaulx, as we learn from interesting descriptions in the Daily Telegraph, which has paid part of the expenses of Mr. Well- man's expedition, used a long tail with light wooden floats, and these responded gently enough to the rhythmic movements of the sea. But a heavy chain of metal tanks filled with liquid is another matter altogether. Any one who has ridden at anchor in a small yacht in a particularly heavy sea knows the vicious jerking and straining if a chain cable is used, and the relief which comes immediately if a hawser is bent on to the chain and the yacht is allowed to ride to that. The difference, we should imagine, must be very much the difference between M. de la Vaulx's tail of wood floats and Mr. Wellman's dangling tanks. One would think that it was easy to foresee that in a gale the tanks would worry the framework of the dirigible to pieces.
Then this heavy tail might have got foul of a ship, and the end of the balloon would have been sudden. It might have become mixed up with any one of the hundreds of fishing vessels off Newfoundland. The aeronaut, looking with a doubting eye at the dirigible before the start, would have remembered that a dirigible never has stayed aloft so long as is necessary for crossing the Atlantic—the record journey for a balloon of any kind is thirteen hundred miles—and then he would have reflected that if a gale came in the latter part of the journey it would attack the balloon when it was at the greatest possible disadvantage. Mr. Wellman's balloon was of the non- rigid type, and when such an envelope becomes flabby the wind does with it very much what it does with a loose sail. No one who has been near a sailing-ship's staysail when it broke loose in a heavy blow will need to be told the appalling fury, the almost human vindictiveness, of the thing threatening to stun and knock overboard every one who comes near it before it can be sheeted home again or hauled inboard. Sometimes one is inclined to think that the men who fight the wind fight the most ruthless of all natural forces, and that Horace had indeed marked " the deep heaving into ridges narrow " and heard " the blast bellow on its ocean way" when he said that man in daring the sea was audas mania perpeti. A ship's behaviour in a gale is at least predict- able, but no one could possibly say before the start what Mr. Wellman's ship of the air would do after that thrilling moment at Atlantic City last Saturday when it disappeared in the fog pointing for Europe. Those who were less courageous than Mr. Wellman probably allowed their thoughts to busy them- selves chiefly with the usefulness and trustworthiness of the lifeboat and the wireless telegraphic apparatus which the dirigible carried. Theii minds turned to forlorn hopes, as ours would certainly have done had we been there. Mr. Wellman was indeed extraordinarily lucky to be picked up after he had been driven far out of the common track of steamers. The precautions of common-sense—of preliminary trials of the untested "stabilisator "—should undoubtedly have been urged on him by his friends. Perhaps they were urged ; if not, those who encouraged him bore a heavy responsibility. But we are entitled to assume that Mr. Wellman himself was genuinely satisfied of the soundness of his calculations. It is the nature of pioneers to be optimists, and it were folly to condemn them for it. Enough that Mr. Wellman's splendid daring had its intelligible purpose; in him it was courage, after all, even if the element of foolhardiness was not wholly banished.
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