Works of Jules Verne/Five Weeks in a Balloon/Chapter 1
Five Weeks in a Balloon
CHAPTER I
RECEPTION OF DR. FERGUSON
N the 14th of January, 1862, there was a very large attendance of the members of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 3 Waterloo Place. The President, Sir Francis M———, made an impromptu communication to his colleagues in a speech frequently interrupted by applause. This rare specimen of oratory ended at length with some grandiloquent phrases, in which patriotism was displayed in well-rounded sentences, thus:
"England has always appeared at the head of all other nations in the way of geographical discovery. (Hear, hear.) Doctor Samuel Ferguson, one of her glorious children, will not disgrace the land of his birth. (No, no.) If his attempt succeed (It will, it will!) it will bind together in a complete form the isolated maps of the African continent. If it fail (Never, never!) it will remain at least on record as one of the boldest conceptions of the human mind." (Loud applause.)
"Hurrah, hurrah!" shouted the assembly, quite electrified by these stirring words.
"Hurrah for the undaunted Ferguson!" cried one of the members, more enthusiastic than the rest.
The enthusiasm then rose to a high pitch. The name of Ferguson was in every mouth, and there is no reason to believe that it lost anything in its emancipation from the British throat. The whole assembly was in a ferment.
Yet there were present in that assembly a number of individuals grown old in travel: bold explorers, whose wandering disposition had led them to all parts of the world. All of them, either physically or morally, had escaped shipwreck, fire, the tomahawk of the Indian, the club of the savage, the stake, or Polynesian cannibals. But nothing could still the throbbing of their breasts during Sir F. M.'s speech; it was without doubt the greatest oratorical success of the Royal Geographical Society within the memory of man.
In England, enthusiasm is not by any means confined to words. It can produce money more quickly than the machinery of the Royal Mint. A sum of 2,500 was immediately voted and placed at Doctor Ferguson's disposal. The subscription was in proportion to the importance of the undertaking.
One of the members of the Society asked the President whether Doctor Ferguson might not be officially presented.
"The doctor awaits the pleasure of the meeting," replied Sir Francis M———.
"Let him come in!" they cried; "admit him! It is right that we should become acquainted with a man of such extraordinary daring."
"Perhaps," said an old apoplectic commodore, " this incredible suggestion is nothing but a hoax after all."
"I do not suppose that there is any such person," said a malicious member.
"We must invent him then," replied a joking associate.
"Request Doctor Ferguson to be good enough to come in," said Sir Francis M———, quietly.
The doctor accordingly made his appearance, and was greeted with thunders of applause. He did not, however, appear to be in the least elated by his reception. He was a man of about forty years of age, of no remarkable exterior. His sanguine temperament displayed itself in the ruddiness of his complexion. His face was impassive, with regular features and a prominent nose. This was like the prow of a vessel the nose of a man destined for discovery. His eyes were soft, and, being more intelligent than bold, imparted a great charm to his face. His arms were long, and his feet were planted upon the floor with the firmness of a practical pedestrian. A certain quiet self-possession pervaded the doctor's whole appearance, and no one could believe him capable of the most innocent hoax.
The shouts and plaudits never for one moment ceased until Doctor Ferguson intimated his desire for silence by a gesture. He advanced towards the arm-chair prepared for his reception, then, standing perfectly upright, with a determined expression of countenance he pointed the forefinger of his left hand towards the ceiling, and uttered the word " Excelsior! "
Never had an unexpected popular measure of Messrs. Cobden or Bright never had a demand by Lord Palmerston for an extra vote to arm the English coast defenses met with equal success. The doctor was at once sublime, powerful, unassuming, and prudent. He had struck the key-note of the situation.
"Excelsior!"
The old commodore, completely "brought up in the wind " by this extraordinary man, moved that the entire speech of Doctor Ferguson be entered in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society.
Now, who was this Doctor Ferguson, and to what enterprise was he about to devote himself ? The father of Ferguson was a captain in the English merchant service, and had accustomed his son, from his earliest years, to the dangers and risks of his own profession. The brave lad, who knew not what fear meant, soon displayed an adventurous spirit and desire for information, and a remarkable predilection for scientific research. He also showed a wonderful aptitude for getting out of scrapes, and he was never embarrassed, not even when using a fork for the first time, in which attempt children are not generally successful.
As he grew older, his imagination became stimulated by tales of hairbreadth escapes and records of maritime discovery. He followed diligently the routes of those travelers who made the first part of the nineteenth century famous in history. He longed for the glories of Mungo Park, of Bruce, Caille, and Levaillant, and even of Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe, which were to him in no way inferior. How many happy hours had he passed in the Island of Juan Fernandez? He sometimes approved of the ideas of the shipwrecked sailor, sometimes he denied the propriety of his plans and projects. He would himself have acted differently, to better effect perhaps, or at least as well, at any rate.
However, one thing was certain: he would never have quitted that pleasant island, where he would have been as happy as a king without subjects no, not if they had offered to make him First Lord of the Admiralty! I leave my readers to judge how these tendencies developed themselves during the adventurous days passed in all quarters of the globe. His father, an educated man, did not fail to further consolidate this quickness of intelligence by some serious study–hydrography, physics, and mechanics, with a trifle of botany, medicine, and astronomy thrown in. At the death of the worthy captain, Samuel Ferguson, then twenty-two years old, had already been round the world. He joined a regiment of Bengal Engineers, and distinguished himself on several occasions.
But a soldier's life did not suit him. He did not like his commanding officer, and obedience was irksome, so he obtained his discharge, and, sometimes hunting, sometimes botanising, he made his way towards the North of India, and crossed it from Calcutta to Surat. Just a pleasant walk–nothing more.
From Surat he went to Australia, and in 1845 took part in Captain Stuart's expedition to discover that Caspian Sea which is supposed to exist in the interior of New Holland.
In 1850 Samuel Ferguson returned to England, and more than ever possessed by the desire of discovery, in 1853 he accompanied Captain M'Clure in the expedition that traversed the American Continent from Behring's Strait to Cape Farewell.
Despite hardships and change of climate, Ferguson's constitution remained unimpaired. He lived at ease in the midst of the greatest privations. He was the type of a perfect traveler, whose appetite can be controlled at will, whose limbs can adapt themselves equally to a bed whether it be long or short, who can sleep at any hour of the day, and awake at any hour of the night. So there was nothing very astonishing in finding our indefatigable traveler engaged, during the years 1855 to 1857, in exploring the west of Thibet, in company with the brothers Schlagintweit, whence he brought back many curious ethnographical records.
During these several expeditions Samuel Ferguson was the most active and interesting correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, a penny journal, whose circulation is 140,000 copies a day, and scarcely suffices for millions of readers. Thus the doctor was very well known, although he was not a member of any scientific institution, neither of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or St. Petersburg; nor of the Travelers' Club; nor even of the Polytechnic Institution, presided over by his friend Kockburn, the statistician. This gentleman proposed to him one day the following problem, with the intention to pay him a compliment: "Given the number of miles traversed by the doctor round the world, how much farther had the head moved than the feet in consequence of the difference in the length of radii." But Ferguson kept aloof from such learned people, and being rather of the acting and not of the talking disposition, he found his time better employed in exploration than in argument, in discovery rather than discussion.
It has been related that an Englishman came to Geneva with the intention to view the Lake. He got into one of those old carriages in which people sit at the sides like in an omnibus. Now it happened that this Englishman was seated with his back to the Lake. The carriage peacefully accomplished its round without his ever turning his head; and he returned home, charmed with the Lake of Geneva!
But Doctor Ferguson had turned round, and more than once during his travels, and to such purpose that he had seen nearly everything. In this, as in other things, he obeyed the dictates of his nature, and we have reason to believe that he was somewhat of a fatalist, but of a very orthodox pattern, relying upon himself as well as upon Providence. He used to say that he was impelled rather than attracted to his expeditions, and ran about the world something like a locomotive which does not direct its own course, but is directed by the route it follows.
"I do not pursue my way," the doctor would remark; "my way pursues me."
It is not astonishing, therefore, that he received the plaudits of the Royal Society without any show of emotion. He was superior to that, and being neither proud nor vain, he perceived nothing extraordinary in the proposition he had made to the President, and did not appear to notice the great effect he had produced.
After the meeting was dissolved the doctor was conducted to the Travelers' Club in Pall Mall, where a splendid banquet was prepared in his honor, the dimensions of the various dishes being proportionate to the importance of the guest, and the sturgeon, which was a prominent figure in this magnificent repast, was only three inches shorter than Samuel Ferguson himself.
Numerous toasts were proposed to the healths of those celebrated travelers who had distinguished themselves on the soil of Africa, and duly honored. They drank to their healths in alphabetical order. To Abbadie, Adams, Adamson, Anderson, Arnaud, Baikie, Baldwin, Barth, Batouder, Beke, Beltram de Berba, Bimbachi, Bolognesi, Bolwick, Bolzoni, Bonnemain, Brisson, Browne, Bruce, Brun-Rollet, Burchell, Burckhardt, Burton, Caillaud, Caille, Campbell, Chapman, Clapperton, Clot-Bey, Colomieu, Courvall, Cumming, Cuny, Debono, Decken, Denham, Desavanchers, Dicksen, Dickson, Dochard, Du Chaillu, Duncan, Durand, Duroule, Duveyrier, Erhard, d'Escayrac de Lauteur, Ferret, Fresnel, Galinier, Galton, Geoffroy, Golberry, Hahn, Halm, Harnier, Hecquart, Heuglin, Hornemann, Hough ton, Imbert, Kaufmann, Knoblecher, Krapf, Kummer, Lafargue, Laing, Lajaillé, Lambert, Lamiral, Lamprière, John Lander, Richard Lander, Lefebvre, Lejean, Levaillant, Livingstone, Maccarthy, Maggiar, Maizan, Malzac, Moffat, Mollieu, Monteiro, Morrisson, Mungo Park, Neimans, Overweg, Panet, Partarrieau, Pascal, Pearse, Peddie, Peney, Petherick, Poncet, Prax, Raffenel, Rath, Rebmann, Richardson, Riley, Ritchie, Rochet d'Héricourt, Rongawi, Roscher, Ruppel, Saugnier, Speke, Steidner, Thibaud, Thompson, Thornton, Toole, Tousny, Trotter, Tuckey, Tyrwitt, Vaudey, Veyssiere, Vincent, Vinco, Vogel, Wahlberg, Warrington, Washington, Werne, Wild, and lastly to Doctor Samuel Ferguson, who, by his unheard-of project, was about to bind together the works of all these travelers, and complete the series of African discoveries.