Читать книгу The Ice Balloon - Alec Wilkinson - Страница 12

Sailing to America, Andrée had had two acquaintances, his cabin mate, “a young German who was ducking military duty,” he wrote in a journal, “and a Swede who claimed to be a pork importer bound for Chicago, but who later proved to be a fugitive.” However, “the pseudo pork dealer, who was a good mixer, soon made other friends who were richer than we and with whom he became engaged in gambling. My German cabin mate and I preferred remaining quietly in our berths.”

The deserter had brought love letters that he liked to pore through. Andrée had only one book, Laws of the Winds, by C. F. E. Björling, which he would read lying on his bunk. One day, reading about the trade winds and struck by their regularity, an idea “ripened in my mind which decisively influenced my whole life,” he wrote. This was the thought “that balloons, even though not dirigible, could be used for long journeys. And not only from the Old to the New World, but also in the opposite direction and between the other continents.” The German happened to laugh and interrupt Andrée’s reverie, but he returned to it and “firmly resolved, when I landed in America, to get in touch with an aeronaut and find out what I could about such balloons as were then manufactured.”

In Philadelphia, Andrée went to the Swedish consul to ask for a pass to the fair. The consul said he couldn’t give him one, but he could hire him as the janitor at the Swedish Pavilion. He could live upstairs in the pavilion and go anywhere at the fair that he wanted.

Andrée would go to bed at nine and get up at five. One day he made a trip to a river where he picked roses and daisies to press and send home to one of his sisters. He had only one companion, he wrote her, Plato, “but the best is good enough.” It pleased him that work was honored in America and that the harder someone worked the better he was treated. At the fair he was impressed by the machines that printed hundreds of thousands of newspapers in hours, and the “screws to make pocket watches so small and delicate that only with a microscope can you see that they are screws.” There was a steam engine “high as a three-story house,” and a cannon weighing “millions of pounds” that shattered a foot-thick steel plate “as easily as if it were glass.” In New York he had heard they were building “a suspension bridge over the city, which already cost eighty million crowns, but it is not ready yet for a long time” (the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883).

Once in New York and once in Philadelphia, Andrée visited phrenologists. He presented himself as a tailor, and was told that he would make an excellent engineer. Also that his determination led people to regard him sometimes as stubborn. His contrary temperament made him “quick to avenge insults and repel attacks.” A love for independence and change led to behaviors that frequently contradicted his feelings. His thinking was unconstrained by conventions. He could be trusted with “positions that demand masculinity, honor and faith” and was a natural leader: “You win people over to your cause and get them to sympathize personally with whatever you undertake.” Nevertheless, from deep caution, he was “watchful and worried” and deliberate, and only reluctantly did he trust people. Judgment and prudence helped him control his fantasies, “however large.” As for his future, twenty years would “pass before you achieve the highest degree of your spiritual development.”