The Twenty-One Balloons PMC Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  I - Professor Sherman’s Incredible Loyalty

  II - A Hero’s Welcome Is Prepared

  III - A Description of the Globe

  IV - The Unwelcome Passenger

  V - A New Citizen of Krakatoa

  VI - The Gourmet Government

  VII - The Moroccan House of Marvels

  VIII - Airy-Go-Round

  IX - Concerning the Giant Balloon Life Raft

  X - What Goes Up Must Come Down

  Professor William Waterman Sherman has a secret....

  Professor Sherman dictated the following message:

  Dear Sir: I appreciate the fact that the President’s invitation amounts to what I should consider a Command Performance. However there is a code of ethics among explorers which I find myself unable to break. Had I a less fascinating story to tell, nobody, except my fellow explorers, would care where or when I gave account of it.The very fact that my adventure is so unparalleled multiplies the need that I keep true to my oath of membership and first share the details of my passage with my brothers of the Western American Explorers’ Club in San Francisco.

  William Waterman Sherman

  The President appreciated the Professor’s loyalty to his club. He had his Secretary send the following unprecedented wire to Professor Sherman:Dear Sir:

  The President understands exactly how you feel. He will eagerly await reports of your trip across the continent as the world breathlessly stands by waiting to hear your story.

  The Secretary to the President of the United States

  “William Pène du Bois combines his rich imagination, scientific tastes, and brilliant artistry to tell a story that has no age limit.”

  —The Horn Book

  PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group. 345 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue,Toronto, Ontario,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published by The Viking Press, 1947

  First published by Puffin Books, 1986

  This Puffin Modern Classics edition published by Puffin Books,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005

  Copyright © William Pène du Bois, 1947

  Copyright © renewed by William Pène du Bois, 1975

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PREVIOUS PUFFIN BOOKS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Du Bois, William Pène, 1916- The twenty-one balloons.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: Viking Press, 1947.

  Summary: Relates the incredible adventures of Professor William Waterman

  Sherman, who in 1883 sets off in a balloon across the Pacific, survives the

  volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, and is eventually picked up in the Atlantic.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00706-8

  [1. Balloons—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Author’s Note

  Just before publication of The Twenty-One Balloons, my publishers noted a strong resemblance between my book and a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald entitled “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. I read this story immediately and discovered to my horror that it was not only quite similar as to general plot, but was also altogether a collection of very similar ideas. This was the first I had heard of the F. Scott Fitzgerald story and I can only explain this embarrassing and, to me, maddening coincidence by a firm belief that the problem of making good use of the discovery of a fabulous amount of diamonds suggests but one obvious solution, which is secrecy. The fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald and I apparently would spend our billions in like ways right down to being dumped from bed into a bathtub is altogether, quite frankly, beyond my explanation.

  William Pène du Bois

  January 16, 1947

  Introduction

  THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF TRAVEL. THE USUAL way is to take the fastest imaginable conveyance along the shortest road. The other way is not to care particularly where you are going or how long it will take you, or whether you will get there or not. These two methods of travel are perhaps easiest to be seen by watching hunting hounds. One hound will follow his nose directly to his prey. Another will follow his nose in a roundabout way to molehills, empty rabbit holes, garbage cans, and trees; and perhaps not pay any attention to his prey even when he happens upon it. This second way of getting around has always been pointed out as the nicest for, as you can see in the case of the slower hunting hound, you are able to see more of what is going on in the world and also how nature is getting along.

  Not long from now, in the Atomic Age, it is easy to imagine that travel will be tremendously fast. In order to travel, for example, from New York to Calcutta, you will simply have to walk into a station in New York, through one door into a room beamed on Calcutta, out another door into the station in Calcutta, then on out into Calcutta’s streets. It will take you no longer than it takes you to walk through any ordinary room and you won’t feel a thing. What will happen when you enter the room is that you will be atomically broken down into a radio wave, transmitted by radio to Calcutta, and atomically restored upon being picked up by the radio receiver in Calcutta. The instant you are no longer in New York you will be in Calcutta in the same way as the instant a man’s voice leaves a radio station it can be picked up anywhere in the world. Travel to any capital in the world will be instantaneous, for once man discovers the deeper secrets of nature, time and space will stop being paired together. You will hear of “miles” and you will hear of “hours,” but the expression “miles per hour” will be most old-fashioned.

  The best way of travel, however, if you aren’t in any hurry at all, if you don’t care where you are going, if you don’t like to use your legs, if you want to see everything quite clearly, if you don’t want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature. How fast you will go and where is left to the winds. It is a wonderful way to travel, particularly if you want to travel from your home to school. You get up early in the morning with your school-books, climb into the basket, look in the direction of the schoolhouse, untie the ropes, and fly off. On your way many delightful things can happen such as:a. the wind will be calm and you’ll never get to school;

  b. the wind will blow you in the wrong direction and take you fifty miles out into the country away from school, and

  c. you might decide to play hookey, just once, and nobody can bother you in a balloon.

  Then too, you mi
ght fly over a ball park on the way and change your mind as you make a quick descent onto the roof of the grandstand. Or if you pass any lakes on the way to school you can drop a line and do some fine fishing. Balloon travel is the best, particularly between home and school.

  These ideas on travel went through the head of a rather nice old professor named William Waterman Sherman. Professor Sherman had been teaching arithmetic at a school for boys in San Francisco for forty years and was thoroughly tired of the idea. At first he thought of balloon travel only as a wonderful way of going to school because he was so tired of teaching. Then he thought of balloon travel as a way of spending a year of rest after retiring. At the age of sixty-six he stopped teaching, built himself a huge balloon, and filled the balloon’s basket full of food. In this giant balloon he thought he could float around for a whole year, out of touch with the earth, with nobody to bother him and leaving his destination to the winds. This book, The Twenty-One Balloons, tells of his exciting trip. It is exciting, for he ran into trouble right away, including such disturbances as the greatest explosion in the history of the world. It also tells of just about every kind of free balloon travel known to man and of a few balloon inventions unknown until now. The period of the book is the period when balloons were most popular, 1860 to 1890.

  Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened. Some of the balloon inventions in this book were actually built with success, some were designed by famous balloonists who didn’t have enough money to build them and try them out. The others might easily have happened too.

  The part about the Pacific Island of Krakatoa is true. There is a volcanic island of that name in the Pacific and it did blow up with the biggest explosion of all time so that it is now half as big as it was in 1883. Krakatoa was fourteen hundred feet above sea level before the explosion. After the explosion it was a submarine cavity with its bottom more than a thousand feet below the sea. The sound of the explosion was heard as far as three thousand miles away, which is the greatest distance sound has ever been known to travel. The violence of the eruption caused dust, ashes, and stones to be hurled seventeen miles high into the air. The black cloud of ejected material darkened an area with a radius of one hundred and fifty miles from the eruption. Waves generated by the explosion reached a height of fifty feet, destroying countless vessels, swamping and inundating and completely destroying villages on islands hundreds of miles away, and causing thousands of casualties.

  This book is the story of Professor William Waterman Sherman’s unusual voyage, of his fabulous friends and unusual life on the Island of Krakatoa ending with the noisiest day in the life of any man in history.

  I

  Professor Sherman’s Incredible Loyalty

  THE WESTERN AMERICAN EXPLORERS’ CLUB, in the city of San Francisco, was honored as it had never been honored before in the first week of October 1883 by being promised to be first to hear the details of an unexplained, extraordinary adventure; the biggest news story of the year, the story the whole world was waiting impatiently to hear—the tale of Professor William Waterman Sherman’s singular voyage. Professor Sherman had left San Francisco August 15. He flew off in a giant balloon, telling reporters that he hoped to be the first man to fly across the Pacific Ocean. Three weeks later he was picked up in the Atlantic Ocean, half starved and exhausted, clinging to the debris of twenty deflated balloons. How he found himself in the Atlantic with so many balloons after starting out over the Pacific with one, caught and baffled the imagination of the world. When he was sighted and rescued in the middle of the wreckage of twenty balloons in the Atlantic by the Captain of the freighter S.S.Cunningham, en route to New York City, he was immediately put to bed, for he was sick and weary, suffering from cold and shock. He was treated with great care by the ship’s doctor, strengthened with food and brandy by the ship’s cook, honored by the personal attention of Captain John Simon of the S.S. Cunningham. When he was well enough to talk, the Doctor, Cook, and Captain leaned over him at his bedside and said in excited voices, “How do you feel?”

  “I could be worse,” said Professor Sherman, rather feebly.

  “Do you feel strong enough to tell us your story?” asked Captain Simon.

  “I am strong enough,” said Professor Sherman, “and I want first of all to thank you three gentlemen for your kind attention. But, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “as an honorary member of the Western American Explorers’ Club in San Francisco, I feel sincerely that I owe the first accounting of my extraordinary adventure to that illustrious fraternity!”

  At this, of course, Captain John Simon was somewhat hurt. After all, he had ordered the rescue of Professor Sherman when he found him floating around almost dead in a maze of broken planks and empty balloons, he had saved his life. And the ship’s doctor had healed and tenderly nursed the Professor back on the road of recovery. The ship’s cook had gone out of his way to prepare special, delicate food for him. They were all three most disappointed. This also made them much more curious. They tried all sorts of ways to get him to tell his story. They tried arguing with, persuading, tricking, and agitating him. They tried to entice him with spirits. They gave him medicine which made him dopey. But he only seemed to become more and more firm as he exclaimed as loudly as his strength would permit, “This tale of mine shall first be heard in the auditorium of the Western American Explorers’ Club in San Francisco, of which I am an honorary member!”

  “Will you at least tell me your name?” asked Captain Simon. “So that I might make a proper entry and report of the rescue in the ship’s log.”

  “That information I shall not withhold,” said the Professor. “My name is William Waterman Sherman.”

  “And now one more question,” said Captain Simon.

  “No more questions!” interrupted Professor Sherman. “You will be well rewarded for rescuing me and my fare will be paid in full. I am saving every other detail of the voyage for the Western ... ”

  “All right, all right,” said Captain Simon. He left the Professor’s cabin, went to his own, and made the following entry in the ship’s log:

  Tuesday, September 8, 1883; n.lat.60°, w.long.17°; weather clear—At twelve noon, sighted strange wreckage in the distance. Approached it with caution. Found it to be a mass of broken wooden beams to which were attached twenty ascension balloons in various stages of deflation. In the middle of all of this flotsam there appeared to be a large furnace, painted red with gold trim. The furnace toppled over and sank before we were near enough to make out clearly what it could possibly be for. Clinging to a beam which was part of a balustrade we found a man, near exhaustion and suffering from cold and shock. This man’s clothes, unlike those of most explorers or balloonists, seemed suited for fashionable evening wear. We picked up the man, questioned him at length when he was able to talk, but the only information we could get out of him was that his name was William Waterman Sherman. Orders have been given to treat Professor Sherman with the normal care and attention given a regular passenger of this ship. He shall be treated and billed accordingly.

  When the S.S.Cunningham arrived in New York, Professor Sherman was still in no condition to get around by himself. He planned a few days’ rest before boarding a train for San Francisco. He asked Captain Simon to help him get to a hotel. Captain Simon helped him into a carriage and took him to the Murray Hill Hotel. He saw that he got a room, wrote down the number of the room. He then went back to his ship, picked up his ship’s log which he took to the offices of the New York Tribune. He knew the story of the rescue had news value and that he could sell it for a handsome price to this paper. The Tribune bought the story immediately, paid Captain Simon for this information, and sent two reporters to Professor Sherman’s room at the Murray Hill at once. Of course Professor Sherman didn’t like this idea at all. To all questions asked him by the reporters he replied, “Gentlemen, I am saving the extraordinary details of my voyage for a talk in the auditorium of the Western American Explorers’ Club in Sa
n Francisco—you are only wasting your time and mine. Good day, gentlemen!”

  The reporters were quite disgusted at this. They made the most they could of the information found in Captain Simon’s log and printed whatever story they could make of it on the front page. The story, incomplete as it was, did attract considerable attention. The headline read: PROFESSOR SHERMAN FOUND IN ATLANTIC WITH WRECKAGE OF TWENTY BALLOONS, and the sub-headline read: Refuses to Explain How or Why.

  The San Francisco Tribune naturally picked up this story, with tremendous interest. They wired the information to the New York Tribune that a Professor Sherman had only recently attempted to fly the Pacific Ocean in one balloon. The New York Tribune looked in its picture files and found a picture of Professor Sherman taken at the Higgins Balloon Factory. They sent a photographer to the Murray Hill Hotel who (with considerable difficulty) took a picture of Professor Sherman. The following day the New York Tribune printed the two pictures side by side, to show it was quite the same man, in the front page with a headline which read: PROFESSOR SHERMAN IN WRONG OCEAN WITH TOO MANY BALLOONS, and the subheading: Refuses to Explain How or Why. These two stories were enough to excite the curiosity of millions, and Professor Sherman, in his bed at the Murray Hill, suddenly found himself to be the center of a considerable amount of the attention of the world. The Mayor of New York paid him a special visit. With all the pomp and ceremony that could possibly be displayed around the sick bed of a weary explorer in a hotel room, the Mayor presented the Professor with the Key to the City. Professor Sherman thanked him at length for this honor.

  “And now,” said the Mayor, “would it be too much to ask you in return to give to me, to New York, to the nation, to the world, the details of your amazing exploit?”