The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales

By Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Marlowe and Regina Marler

Classic tales of mystery, terror, and suspense, including The Fall of the House of Usher—the inspiration for the Netflix series from Mike Flanagan, the director of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass!

This volume gathers together fourteen of Edgar Allan Poe's richest and most influential tales, including: “The Pit and the Pendulum,” his reimagining of Inquisition tortures; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” an exploration of a murderer’s madness, which Stephen King called “the best tale of inside evil ever written”; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe’s tour de force about a family doomed by a grim bloodline curse; and his pioneering detective stories, “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring a rational investigator with a poetic soul. Also included is Poe’s only full-length novel, Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.
 
With an Introduction by Stephen Marlowe
and an Afterword by Regina Marler

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 3, 2006
• ISBN: 9781101077993

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) quedó huérfano desde muy joven; su padre abandonó a su familia en 1810 y su madre falleció al año siguiente. Tanto su obra como él mismo quedaron marcados por la idea de la muerte, y la estela de la desgracia no dejó de acecharlo durante toda su vida. Antes de cumplir los veinte ya era un bebedor consuetudinario y un jugador empedernido, y contrajo enormes deudas con su padre adoptivo, además de causarletodo tipo de problemas. En 1827 publica Tamerlán y otros poemas y en 1830 se instala en la casa de una tía que vivía en Baltimore acompañada de su sobrina de once años, Virginia Clemm, con quien se acabaría casando siete años más tarde. Trabajó como redactor en varias revistas de Filadelfia y Nueva York, y en 1849, dos años después de la muerte de su esposa, cae enfermo y fallece preso de la enfermedad y su adicción al alcohol y las drogas. Su producción poética, donde muestra una impecable construcción literaria, y sus ensayos, que se hicieron famosos por su sarcasmo e ingenio, son destellos del talento que lo encumbraría a la posteridad gracias a sus narraciones. Poe, de hecho, es conocido sobre todo por sus relatos y por ser el predecesor, en cierto modo, de la novela policíaca moderna. Sus cuentos destacan por su belleza literaria y por fundir en ellos lo macabro con el humor, el terror y la poesía.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

The Balloon-Hoax

Ms. Found in a Bottle

A Descent into the Maelstrom

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Purloined Letter

The Black Cat

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Masque of the Red Death

The Cask of Amontillado

The Assignation

The Tell-Tale Heart

Diddling - CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE EXACT SCIENCES

The Man That Was Used Up - A TALE OF THE LATE BUGABOO AND KICKAPOO CAMPAIGN

Narrative of A. Gordon Pym - INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Narrative of A. Gordon Pym

Afterword

Selected Bibliography

SIGNET CLASSICS

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) received a good education, first in England, then in a private school at Richmond, and later spent a year at the University of Virginia before he ran away to enlist in the army. Between 1827 and 1831, he published three volumes of poetry: Tamerlane (1827), Al Aaraaf (1829), and Poems (1831). From 1831 to 1835, he lived in Baltimore, where he began a lifelong struggle with poverty, disappointments in love, and addiction to alcohol. This last defect made it impossible for him to retain the editorial positions he later secured on magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, despite the facts that the tales and book reviews he contributed greatly increased circulation. In May 1836, he married Virginia Clemm, a child of thirteen and the daughter of a paternal aunt. In April 1844, he moved his family to New York, and in January of the following year his literary fortunes turned when his poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening News. Overnight, he became the most talked-about man of letters in America. Early in 1847 his wife died, and the year 1848 saw the end of two unhappy love affairs.

Stephen Marlowe is the author of the internationally acclaimed Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, which was awarded the French Prix Gutenberg du Livre in 1988. His novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, revolves around the real and imagined life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Regina Marler is the author of Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom and editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex. While still in graduate school, she was chosen by the heirs of Virginia Woolf to edit the letters of Woolf’s artist sister, Vanessa Bell, which appeared as Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell in 1993. Marler lives in San Francisco.

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Introduction

The abiding image of Edgar Allan Poe is unremittingly dark.

He dressed habitually in sober black. His hair, worn long, was black. His eyes were brooding, somber.

His moods were often dark, understandably so. Though he achieved broad fame in his lifetime—with a poem about a black bird—his life was one of poverty and misery. He was the first American writer to try to support his family entirely by the efforts of his pen, and in this he failed.

His subjects were often dark too. He chronicled the midnight impulses of the human heart, the dark night of the soul. Goya’s black paintings come to mind. Dissection of the alienated psyche was absent from literature before Poe, omnipresent after.

But the darkest thing about Edgar Allan Poe was the black legend that posthumously tarred his reputation.

A few months before he died—under circumstances that were unclear if not downright mysterious—Poe named as his literary executor one Rufus Griswold, a fellow critic and would-be fiction writer who had always resented him and who wasted no time in execrating both the man and his works. Poe, his executor wrote, was a vicious, unscrupulous type who, among other indecencies, slept with his aunt, who happened also to be his mother-in-law. Moreover, he was a drunkard and a drug addict who created characters no less depraved than himself. He was, in short, a monster, and his works monstrous—this judgment from the very man Edgar Poe had chosen to edit his oeuvre and to assure his place in the world of letters!

The calumnies prevailed for a half century and more. In the decades following Poe’s death, his work was depreciated in his own country. But meanwhile in France, with a fine irony that Poe would have been quick to appreciate, he was being championed and masterfully translated by the symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire—and hailed as a hero, a poète maudit, a deliberately decadent thumber-of-the-nose at bourgeois morality and philistinism. Even as his reputation sank in America, it soared in Europe. Thus Edgar Poe, first in so much else, was also the first American writer to win high regard earlier abroad than at home.

In his abbreviated life he published some seventy tales, some seventy poems, one short novel and part of another, a considerable body of generally sound literary criticism, and a rather fevered cosmological treatise. The cosmology and the criticism are now little remembered. But a century and a half after his death, Poe’s fiction is as widely read as ever—and with reason. Of all nineteenth-century writers Poe was the most seminal, the most influential. The black legend has ceased to overshadow his genius. His literary longevity—and legacy—continue to grow.

The Argentinian master of fantastical fictions Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: Every writer creates his own precursors. Borges loved such apparent paradoxes, which seem to stand logic on its head but on reflection make an intuitive kind of sense. This one is straightforward, at least for Borges. You can be no precursor until your influence manifests itself in the work of others. In that sense time and even causality can be said to flow backward.

Borges was one of a long line of authors who thus created Edgar Poe as a precursor. A minimal list would include Melville, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud, Conrad, Conan Doyle, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Kafka, and Nabokov.

Many of these writers acknowledged their debt to Poe. All of them flattered him by imitation. Can there be any doubt that Poe’s The Oval Portrait suggested The Picture of Dorian Gray, or that his William Wilson sired Dostoyevsky’s The Double as well as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Who would deny that the ambiguous symbolism of Melville’s white whale sprang at least in part from the powerful final lines of Poe’s novel of the sea, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym:

And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

Actually, Melville would deny it. He was part of that American generation under the sway of the black legend who professed to disdain Poe morally and literarily. So was Henry James. James represented his Turn of the Screw as a ghost story in which he handled properly everything that Poe had gotten wrong; a more objective view would say that without Poe, there would have been nothing to correct. Later in his career James mellowed, citing Poe approvingly in The Golden Bowl—and mining Poe’s poem Lenore for the novel’s title as well.

In Nabokov’s Lolita the homage to Poe is overt, the debt gracefully disclosed. Like Dostoyevsky, Nabokov had translated Poe into Russian. Though he discarded Lolita’s working title The Kingdom by the Sea (a quotation from Annabel Lee), allusions to the Poe poem abound, as when the protagonist recalls his first child-love, Annabel, who died young in a princedom by the sea. As the aching innocence of Poe and his child bride, Virginia, is transformed in Nabokov’s hands into the worldly wise depravity of Humbert Humbert and the nymphet Lolita, it is clear that Nabokov found the black legend impossible to accept—and irresistible to adapt.

The premier example of debt to Poe remains, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s. Sherlock Holmes owes his existence, his skills and methods, many of his eccentricities, even his job description—the word détective was borrowed from the French—to Poe’s Parisian amateur of crime, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. It can fairly be said that Dupin, by way of Holmes, gave rise to every armchair and/or gumshoe crime solver in fiction from Hercule Poirot to Philip Marlowe to Kinsey Millhone and their ever expanding legion of heirs.

But Edgar Poe was much more than the father of the detective story—or, for that matter, of science fiction and of tales of horror.

The brothers Goncourt, French literary critics nonpareil, wrote not long after Poe’s death that one could predict the shape of twentieth-century literature by looking at his work. As the century ends, we see how right they were. In the Borges sense of writers creating their own precursors, virtually all of modern fiction created Edgar Allan Poe. He developed and, through writers as diverse as Kafka and Conrad, passed to us the two pervasive themes of our own literature, the disintegration of personality and the breaching of the barrier between illusion and reality. Poe would have felt a frisson of recognition on reading of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis or of the horror expressed by Kurtz as he lay dying in Heart of Darkness, for he made them possible.

The present collection begins with three tales of adventure and the sea, and happily concludes in the same vein with Poe’s longest work, the too seldom seen Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Tales of the sea were, of course, no innovation of Poe’s. They existed even before stories were written down—since Homer’s Odyssey, since Noah’s Ark. But Poe infused his sea stories, like every genre he touched, with a combination of elements uniquely his own. He also infused them with what might seem an improbable expertise.

Except for a childhood sojourn in England, Edgar saw no far places. But Henry Poe, two years his senior, was a merchant seaman. The brothers were close, with a shared desire to travel and to write. Before Henry died—of the same disease that would claim Poe’s beloved Virginia, tuberculosis, and at the same age, twenty-four—he regaled Edgar with accounts of life aboard the frigate Macedonian. Evidently Henry was a fine observer and yarn spinner, and Edgar lent him attentive ears: Joseph Conrad, master mariner turned novelist, would later write that Poe’s first sea story, MS. Found in a Bottle, must have been written by a sailor of somber and poetical genius.

MS. Found in a Bottle is the tale of a shipwreck—of two, in fact. Conrad considered it a variation of the Flying Dutchman legend; other critics have other theories, one even suggesting that the crew of the ghost ship are Columbus and his Spaniards aboard the Santa Maria! No matter: Poe’s writing can accommodate countless interpretations. As we follow his narrator with unstrained credulity from the first shipwreck to the second—from the real world to an illusory one?—Poe does not tell us whether the baleful forces besetting the ship are natural or supernatural. As ever his instinct is for elasticity, equivocality. Like all great writers, he knows how to leave room in his work for the reader to bring something from his own life.

In A Descent into the Maelström there is something from Poe’s life as well. The fishermen who face a terrifying whirlpool off the Norwegian coast are brothers, as close in many ways as Edgar and Henry. Yet their fates are tragically divergent as they are engulfed by the sea—a sea that for Poe, as for other masters from Melville to Conrad to Jan de Hartog to Golding, runs deep with the mythic tides of a compelling ambiguity.

The Balloon-Hoax melds adventure with science fiction—one of the genres Poe can be strongly argued to have invented. His was an era when poet and scientist might yet exist in the same skin, and Edgar Poe, acknowledged innovator in the writing of fiction, aspired also to recognition as a serious thinker. Today few people know that Poe undertook a hundred-page exploration of the origin and nature of the universe. This work, Eureka, was published soon after his wife’s death, and Poe was not cheered by its summary dismissal in America on the grounds that a theory not scientifically proven must be invalid. In France Eureka fared better, being hailed as brilliantly visionary. A retrospective look rather vindicates the French view: Poe’s cosmogony anticipated elements of modern astrophysical theory, including the Big Bang. His interests ranged across speculative physics and the natural sciences, and many of his tales reveal his studies of aeronautics, astronomy, geography, oceanography, and entomology. Of these tales the ones set in the future—Poe’s future—are less read now, perhaps because the science itself is dated.

The Balloon-Hoax is set in Poe’s own day. Its scientific detail was so persuasive that a major New York paper ran the story as purported news, scooping its competitors with an account of the three-day transatlantic crossing. Poe’s tongue-in-cheek characterization of the journey as the most important ever undertaken presages the media hype that now heralds every technological and scientific breakthrough, and the story is charmingly relevant today.

Poe called The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter tales of ratiocination. It is a word he rescued from general disuse, and rightly. There is a world of difference between mere reasoning and the cerebral gymnastics of C. Auguste Dupin. In these two tales the chevalier amazes by his ability to divine the mental processes of others. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue the contradictory nature of the testimony is fodder for Dupin’s deductions. In The Purloined Letter Dupin’s recital of the multifaceted brilliance of the villain neatly establishes his own superiority. Yet for all his skill as a logician, Dupin is proof that success in detection needs the inspiration of a poet as well.

Dupin appeared in just three stories. But so real was his character, so dominating his influence, that one expects him still to be awaiting the arrival of a new case—in the dark, of course—at No. 33, rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain, Paris.

Today, much as Hollywood bestows Oscars, the Mystery Writers of America award Edgars. These blue, black, and white ceramic busts, saluting excellence in the field of crime writing, are richly deserved recognition that Edgar Allan Poe invented the story of crime and detection.

Conan Doyle led the way in making known his debt to Poe, even having Dr. Watson tell Sherlock Holmes that he reminded him of Dupin. (Holmes, to be sure, retorted that he was the better detective!) Anyone who reads The Purloined Letter, followed by the first Holmes short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, will be struck by the extent of the parallels. Conan Doyle modeled Holmes’s methods and character on Poe’s detective, borrowed his plots and narrative devices, echoed his themes. He also copied Poe’s incorporation of cryptographic analysis into fiction. This innovative element appeared not in the Dupin canon but in Poe’s ground-breaking The Gold Bug, a tale of adventure, detection, and buried treasure, from which Stevenson too drew inspiration for his Treasure Island. But that is another story. (There is always another story when we discuss our debt to Poe.)

Poe’s restless intellect jumped easily from the realm of ratiocination to that of unreason. Here, with his pioneering focus on the disturbed mind and the disintegrating personality, Poe has had his most pervasive influence on contemporary literature.

The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart depict characters gripped by an irresistible urge to commit evil acts for the sole reason that they should not. In The Tell-Tale Heart the narrator has gotten away with his crime and somehow justified it to his deranged self, while vigorously assuring the reader that he is not mad—and then compounds his perversity by confessing. One immediately sees a link with Raskolnikov’s compulsion in Crime and Punishment to discuss with the policeman Porfiri Petrovich the murders of the old pawnbroker and her sister, and ultimately to confess. When Dostoyevsky wrote the novel, he had already translated several of Poe’s tales into Russian and was an avowed admirer, particularly of the insights into morbid psychology and unreason that run like a leitmotiv through Poe’s fiction. A fascination with unbalanced minds, ranging from the highly distraught to the hopelessly demented, is to be found everywhere in Poe’s pages, whether in tales of horror or of humor.

Horror was a field where Poe loomed large. Ask who Edgar Allan Poe was, and most people will say that he wrote horror stories. Many think he invented the genre, and in a sense he did. Before Poe the horror story was a rigidly stylized affair—architecture Gothic, time medieval, characters mostly aristocratic, villains unalloyedly evil, and events supernatural whenever the plot required. Of all these elements Poe was master, though never slave. But after Poe, and thanks to him, the horizons of the horror story were expanded to encompass a range of real human emotion at once wider and more subtle.

Perhaps the most famous of Poe’s tales—certainly of his tales of horror—is The Fall of the House of Usher. It is also the most gothic, with its gloomy landscape and gloomier mansion, its barely glimpsed retainers, its grim family secret, its not-quite-buried dead—the whole arsenal of escalating terror. Yet it offers the reader far more to wonder about than just what hideous fate will befall its doomed characters. Is Roderick Usher’s illness of the body or of the mind? What is his true role in the life, and death, of his twin sister, Madeline? Can the perceptions of the narrator be trusted? Is he only an observer, or some kind of catalyst? Even the title is wonderfully dual. As so often with Poe, questions abound—and resonate.

The Pit and the Pendulum, by contrast, is devoid both of gothic trappings and of abnormal psychology; it is a story of terror engendered purely by physical agencies. At every turn the victim’s fear that he may be losing his mind is displaced by fresh proof that the Inquisition, in its diabolical ingenuity, intends for him a drawn-out death by means that are all too real. Poe builds the terror solely by his powers of description, by his relentless use of dispassionate detail. He is aided by his unswerving pursuit of unity of effect—something that may have impeded him in writing longer fiction but that served him well in his short stories.

Unity of effect is on admirable display in The Cask of Amontillado, where Poe pulls off the difficult double of keeping the tone jocular and witty while crafting a quintessential tale of obsession, revenge, and mounting horror.

The Masque of the Red Death, perhaps my own favorite, starts out as the most literary of these tales. Its style is elegant, its inspiration the Decameron. But where Boccaccio had his characters behave quite decorously at the country estate where they withdrew to escape the Black Death, Poe’s Prince Prospero and his guests abandon themselves to revelry until, on the night of the opulent masked ball ...

The Assignation is set in Italy too. But there the resemblance ends. This tale, published when he was twenty-five, tells less about what the young Poe would one day write than about what early nineteenth-century readers of periodicals demanded—which largely was gothic/romantic/tragic and which Poe richly delivers. The Assignation also strikes notes that will recur. There is an embedded poem (published later with a telling one-word change as To One in Paradise) as there is in House of Usher with its Haunted Palace. And the room of wholly red-paned windows in The Assignation will be echoed in The Masque of the Red Death as well as The Haunted Palace. Little signatures: Poe was here.

Diddling and The Man That Was Used Up are among Poe’s many pieces in a lighter vein. These are often neglected today, for Poe was catering to a broad popular humor that featured farcical names (Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, the town of Vondervotteimittiss), sometimes unsubtle wordplay, dialects, and a strong shaggy-dog tendency. But these tales do show that, far from being the posthumous black legend’s implacably depraved creator of depraved characters, Poe could deploy a lively wit and, more important, an archly indulgent view of the foibles of his fellow man.

Exotic adventure is not a staple of Poe’s short fiction but is the form in which he cast his two long works, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and The Journal of Julius Rodman. The latter, a tale of the Western frontier, was left unfinished, along with a verse play, Politian. Even Pym was terminated arbitrarily, using the bald device of announcing that the rest of the seafaring narrator’s manuscript was missing. Poe had trouble with endings.

This, for me, was a beginning. When I embarked on writing a novel that would recount in equivocal terms the mysterious last days of Poe, the first thing that intrigued me was: Poe had trouble with endings. The next was: at his death he left an enigmatic untitled tale (or fragment of a tale?) about a man who takes a lonely lighthouse-keeping job so he can finish writing- a book. Thus the seeds of The Lighthouse at the End of the World, which kept me for the better part of two years happily in the company of Edgar Allan Poe.

You who are about to read him for the first time or the hundredth will find him equally good company.

—STEPHEN MARLOWE

The Balloon-Hoax

[Astounding News by Express, viâ Norfolk!—The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days! Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying Machine!—Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, S. C., of Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and four others, in the Steering Balloon, Victoria, after a Passage of Seventy-five Hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!

The subjoined jeu d’esprit with the preceding heading in magnificent capitals, well interspersed with notes of admiration, was originally published, as matter of fact, in the New York Sun, a daily newspaper, and therein fully subserved the purpose of creating indigestible aliment for the quidnuncs during the few hours intervening between a couple of the Charleston mails. The rush for the sole paper which had the news, was something beyond even the prodigious; and, in fact, if (as some assert) the Victoria did not absolutely accomplish the voyage recorded, it will be difficult to assign a reason why she should not have accomplished it.]

THE GREAT PROBLEM is at length solved! The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon! and this too without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S. C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M., on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst; Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck’s; Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of Jack Sheppard, etc.; and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying machine—with two seamen from Woolwich—in all, eight persons. The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as, with a slight exception, they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is also indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received, has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our Agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.

THE BALLOON

"Two very decided failures, of late,—those of Mr. Henson and Sir George Cayley,—had much weakened the public interest in the subject of äerial navigation. Mr. Henson’s scheme (which at first was considered very feasible even by men of science) was founded upon the principle of an inclined plane, starting from an eminence by an extrinsic force, applied and continued by the revolution of impinging vanes, in form and number resembling the vanes of a windmill. But, in all the experiments made with models at the Adelaide Gallery, it was found that the operation of these fans not only did not propel the machine, but actually impeded its flight. The only propelling force it ever exhibited, was the mere impetus acquired from the descent of the inclined plane; and this impetus carried the machine farther when the vanes were at rest, than when they were in motion—a fact which sufficiently demonstrates their inutility; and in the absence of the propelling, which was also the sustaining, power, the whole fabric would necessarily descend. This consideration led Sir George Cayley to think only of adapting a propeller to some machine having of itself an independent power of support—in a word, to a balloon; the idea, however, being novel, or original, with Sir George, only so far as regards the mode of its application to practice. He exhibited a model of his invention at the Polytechnic Institution. The propelling principle, or power, was here, also, applied to interrupted surfaces, or vanes, put in revolution. These vanes were four in number, but were found entirely ineffectual in moving the balloon, or in aiding its ascending power. The whole project was thus a complete failure.

"It was at this juncture that Mr. Monck Mason (whose voyage from Dover to Weilburg in the balloon, ‘Nassau,’ occasioned so much excitement in 1837) conceived the idea of employing the principle of the Archimedean screw for the purpose of propulsion through the air—rightly attributing the failure of Mr. Henson’s scheme, and of Sir George Cayley’s, to the interruption of surface in the independent vanes. He made the first public experiment at Willis’s Rooms, but afterward removed his model to the Adelaide Gallery.

"Like Sir George Cayley’s balloon, his own was an ellipsoid. Its length was thirteen feet six inches—height, six feet eight inches. It contained about three hundred and twenty cubic feet of gas, which, if pure hydrogen, would support twenty-one pounds upon its first inflation, before the gas has time to deteriorate or escape. The weight of the whole machine and apparatus was seventeen pounds—leaving about four pounds to spare. Beneath the centre of the balloon, was a frame of light wood, about nine feet long, and rigged on to the balloon itself with a network in the customary manner. From this framework was suspended a wicker basket or car.

"The screw consists of an axis of hollow brass tube, eighteen inches in length, through which, upon a semi-spiral inclined at fifteen degrees, pass a series of steel-wire radii, two feet long, and thus projecting a foot on either side. These radii are connected at the outer extremities by two bands of flattened wire—the whole in this manner forming the framework of the screw, which is completed by a covering of oiled silk cut into gores, and tightened so as to present a tolerably uniform surface. At each end of its axis this screw is supported by pillars of hollow brass tube descending from the hoop. In the lower ends of these tubes are holes in which the pivots of the axis revolve. From the end of the axis which is next the car, proceeds a shaft of steel, connecting the screw with the pinion of a piece of spring machinery fixed in the car. By the operation of this spring, the screw is made to revolve with great rapidity, communicating a progressive motion to the whole. By means of the rudder, the machine was readily turned in any direction. The spring was of great power, compared with its dimensions, being capable of raising forty-five pounds upon a barrel of four inches diameter, after the first turn, and gradually increasing as it was wound up. It weighed, altogether, eight pounds six ounces. The rudder was a light frame of cane covered with silk, shaped somewhat like a battledore, and was about three feet long, and at the widest, one foot. Its weight was about two ounces. It could be turned flat, and directed upward or downward, as well as to the right or left; and thus enabled the aeronaut to transfer the resistance of the air which in an inclined position it must generate in its passage, to any side upon which he might desire to act; thus determining the balloon in the opposite direction.

"This model (which, through want of time, we have necessarily described in an imperfect manner) was put in action at the Adelaide Gallery, where it accomplished a velocity of five miles per hour; although, strange to say, it excited very little interest in comparison with the previous complex machine of Mr. Henson—so resolute is the world to despise any thing which carries with it an air of simplicity. To accomplish the great desideratum of äerial navigation, it was very generally supposed that some exceedingly complicated application must be made of some unusually profound principle in dynamics.

"So well satisfied, however, was Mr. Mason of the ultimate success of his invention, that he determined to construct immediately, if possible, a balloon of sufficient capacity to test the question by a voyage of some extent—the original design being to cross the British Channel, as before, in the Nassau balloon. To carry out his views, he solicited and obtained the patronage of Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr. Osborne, two gentlemen well known for scientific acquirement, and especially for the interest they have exhibited in the progress of äero-station. The project, at the desire of Mr. Osborne, was kept a profound secret from the public—the only persons entrusted with the design being those actually engaged in the construction of the machine, which was built (under the superintendence of Mr. Mason, Mr. Holland, Sir Everard Bringhurst, and Mr. Osborne) at the seat of the latter gentleman near Penstruthal, in Wales. Mr. Henson, accompanied by his friend Mr. Ainsworth, was admitted to a private view of the balloon, on Saturday last—when the two gentlemen made final arrangements to be included in the adventure. We are not informed for what reason the two seamen were also included in the party—but, in the course of a day or two, we shall put our readers in possession of the minutest particulars respecting this extraordinary voyage.

"The balloon is composed of silk, varnished with the liquid gum caoutchouc. It is of vast dimensions, containing more than 40,000 cubic feet of gas; but as coal-gas was employed in place of the more expensive and inconvenient hydrogen, the supporting power of the machine, when fully inflated, and immediately after inflation, is not more than about 2500 pounds. The coal-gas is not only much less costly, but is easily procured and managed.

"For its introduction into common use for purposes of aërostation, we are indebted to Mr. Charles Green. Up to his discovery, the process of inflation was not only exceedingly expensive, but uncertain. Two and even three days have frequently been wasted in futile attempts to procure a sufficiency of hydrogen to fill a balloon, from which it had great tendency to escape, owing to its extreme subtlety, and its affinity for the surrounding atmosphere. In a balloon sufficiently perfect to retain its contents of coal-gas unaltered, in quality or amount, for six months, an equal quantity of hydrogen could not be maintained in equal purity for six weeks.

"The supporting power being estimated at 2500 pounds, and the united weights of the party amounting only to about 1200, there was left a surplus of 1300, of which again 1200 was exhausted by ballast, arranged in bags of different sizes, with their respective weights marked upon them—by cordage, barometers, telescopes, barrels containing provision for a fortnight, water-casks, cloaks, carpet-bags, and various other indispensable matters, including a coffee-warmer, contrived for warming coffee by means of slack-lime, so as to dispense altogether with fire, if it should be judged prudent to do so. All these articles, with the exception of the ballast, and a few trifles, were suspended from the hoop overhead. The car is much smaller and lighter, in proportion, than the one appended to the model. It is formed of a light wicker, and is wonderfully strong, for so frail-looking a machine. Its rim is about four feet deep. The rudder is also very much larger, in proportion, than that of the model; and the screw is considerably smaller. The balloon is furnished besides with a grapnel, and a guide-rope; which latter is of the most indispensable importance. A few words, in explanation, will here be necessary for such of our readers as are not conversant with the details of aërostation.

"As soon as the balloon quits the earth, it is subjected to the influence of many circumstances tending to create a difference in its weight; augmenting or diminishing its ascending power. For example, there may be a deposition of dew upon the silk, to the extent, even, of several hundred pounds; ballast has then to be thrown out, or the machine may descend. This ballast being discarded, and a clear sunshine evaporating the dew, and at the same time expanding the gas in the silk, the whole will again rapidly ascend. To check this ascent, the only resource is (or rather was, until Mr. Green’s invention of the guide-rope) the permission of the escape of gas from the valve; but, in the loss of gas, is a proportionate general loss of ascending power; so that, in a comparatively brief period, the best-constructed balloon must necessarily exhaust all its resources, and come to the earth. This was the great obstacle to voyages of length.

"The guide-rope remedies the difficulty in the simplest manner conceivable. It is merely a very long rope which is suffered to trail from the car, and the effect of which is to prevent the balloon from changing its level in any material degree. If, for example, there should be a deposition of moisture upon the silk, and the machine begins to descend in consequence, there will be no necessity for discharging ballast to remedy the increase of weight, for it is remedied, or counteracted, in an exactly just proportion, by the deposit on the ground of just so much of the end of the rope as is necessary. If, on the other hand, any circumstances should cause undue levity, and consequent ascent, this levity is immediately counteracted by the additional weight of rope upraised from the earth. Thus, the balloon can neither ascend nor descend, except within very narrow limits, and its resources, either in gas or ballast, remain comparatively unimpaired. When passing over an expanse of water, it becomes necessary to employ small kegs of copper or wood, filled with liquid ballast of a lighter nature than water. These float, and serve all the purposes of a mere rope on land. Another most important office of the guide-rope, is to point out the direction of the balloon. The rope drags, either on land or sea, while the balloon is free; the latter, consequently, is always in advance, when any progress whatever is made: a comparison, therefore, by means of the compass, of the relative positions of the two objects, will always indicate the course. In the same way, the angle formed by the rope with the vertical axis of the machine, indicates the velocity. When there is no angle—in other words, when the rope hangs perpendicularly, the whole apparatus is stationary; but the larger the angle, that is to say, the farther the balloon precedes the end of the rope, the greater the velocity; and the converse.

"As the original design was to cross the British Channel, and alight as near Paris as possible, the voyagers had taken the precaution to prepare themselves with passports directed to all parts of the Continent, specifying the nature of the expedition, as in the case of the ‘Nassau’ voyage, and entitling the adventurers to exemption from the usual formalities of office; unexpected events, however, rendered these passports superfluous.

"The inflation was commenced very quietly at day-break, on Saturday morning, the 6th instant, in the court-yard of Wheal-Vor House, Mr. Osborne’s seat, about a mile from Penstruthal, in North Wales; and at seven minutes past eleven, every thing being ready for departure, the balloon was set free, rising gently but steadily, in a direction nearly south; no use being made, for the first half hour, of either the screw or the rudder. We proceed now with the journal, as transcribed by Mr. Forsyth from the joint MSS. of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Ainsworth. The body of the journal, as given, is in the handwriting of Mr. Mason, and a P. S. is appended, each day, by Mr. Ainsworth, who has in preparation, and will shortly give the public a more minute and, no doubt, a thrillingly interesting account of the voyage.

THE JOURNAL

"Saturday, April the 6th.—Every preparation likely to embarrass us having been made overnight, we commenced the inflation this morning at daybreak; but owing to a thick fog, which encumbered the folds of the silk and rendered it unmanageable, we did not get through before nearly eleven o’clock. Cut loose, then, in high spirits, and rose gently but steadily, with a light breeze at north, which bore us in the direction of the British Channel. Found the ascending force greater than we had expected; and as we arose higher and so got clear of the cliffs, and more in the sun’s rays, our ascent became very rapid. I did not wish, however, to lose gas at so early a period of the adventure, and so concluded to ascend for the present. We soon ran out our guide-rope; but even when we had raised it clear of the earth, we still went up very rapidly. The balloon was unusually steady, and looked beautiful. In about ten minutes after starting, the barometer indicated an altitude of 15,000 feet. The weather was remarkably fine, and the view of the subjacent country—a most romantic one when seen from any point—was now especially sublime. The numerous deep gorges presented the appearance of lakes, on account of the dense vapors with which they were filled, and the pinnacles and crags to the southeast, piled in inextricable confusion, resembling nothing so much as the giant cities of Eastern fable. We were rapidly approaching the mountains in the south, but our elevation was more than sufficient to enable us to pass them in safety. In a few minutes we soared over them in fine style; and Mr. Ainsworth, with the seamen, was surprised at their apparent want of altitude when viewed from the car, the tendency of great elevation in a balloon being to reduce inequalities of the surface below, to nearly a dead level. At half-past eleven still proceeding nearly south, we obtained our first view of the Bristol Channel; and, in fifteen minutes afterward, the line of breakers on the coast appeared immediately beneath us, and we were fairly out at sea. We now resolved to let off enough gas to bring our guide-rope, with the buoys affixed, into the water. This was immediately done, and we commenced a gradual descent. In about twenty minutes our first buoy dipped, and at the touch of the second soon afterward, we remained stationary as to elevation. We were all now anxious to test the efficiency of the rudder and screw, and we put them both into requisition forthwith, for the purpose of altering our direction more to the eastward, and in a line for Paris. By means of the rudder we instantly effected the necessary change of direction, and our course was brought nearly at right angles to that of the wind; when we set in motion the spring of the screw, and were rejoiced to find it propel us readily as desired. Upon this we gave nine hearty cheers, and dropped in the sea a bottle, inclosing a slip of parchment with a brief account of the principle of the invention. Hardly, however, had we done with our rejoicings, when an unforeseen accident occurred which discouraged us in no little degree. The steel rod connecting the spring with the propeller was suddenly jerked out of place, at the car end, (by a swaying of the car through some movement of one of the two seamen we had taken up,) and in an instant hung dangling out of reach, from the pivot of the axis of the screw. While we were endeavoring to regain it, our attention being completely absorbed, we became involved in a strong current of wind from the east, which bore us, with rapidly increasing force, toward the Atlantic. We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than fifty or sixty miles an hour, so that we came up with Cape Clear, at some forty miles to our north, before we had secured the rod, and had time to think what we were about. It was now that Mr. Ainsworth made an extraordinary but, to my fancy, a by no means unreasonable or chimerical proposition, in which he was instantly seconded by Mr. Holland—viz.: that we should take advantage of the strong gale which bore us on, and in place of beating back to Paris, make an attempt to reach the coast of North America. After slight reflection I gave a willing assent to this bold proposition, which (strange to say) met with objection from the two seamen only. As the stronger party, however, we overruled their fears, and kept resolutely upon our course. We steered due west; but as the trailing of the buoys materially impeded our progress, and we had the balloon abundantly at command, either for ascent or descent, we first threw out fifty pounds of ballast, and then wound up (by means of a windlass) so much of the rope as brought it quite clear of the sea. We perceived the effect of this manoeuvre immediately, in a vastly increased rate of progress; and, as the gale freshened, we flew with a velocity nearly inconceivable; the guide-rope flying out behind the car, like a streamer from a vessel. It is needless to say that a very short time sufficed us to lose sight of the coast. We passed over innumerable vessels of all kinds, a few of which were endeavoring to beat up, but the most of them lying to. We occasioned the greatest excitement on board all—an excitement greatly relished by ourselves, and especially by our two men, who, now under the influence of a dram of Geneva, seemed resolved to give all scruple, or fear, to the wind. Many of the vessels fired signal guns; and in all we were saluted with loud cheers (which we heard with surprising distinctness) and the waving of caps and handkerchiefs. We kept on in this manner throughout the day with no material incident, and, as the shades of night closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than five hundred miles, and was probably much more. The propeller was kept in constant operation, and, no doubt, aided our progress materially. As the sun went down, the gale freshened into an absolute hurricane, and the ocean beneath was clearly visible on account of its phosphorescence. The wind was from