A TERRIBLE BALOON

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 22, 8 January 1907, Page 2

A TERRIBLE BALOON

BLOWN ACROSS THE BALTIC. Two German soldiers have just had the most thrilling balloon trip ever recorded. It certainly beat anything that has ever been given to the world as fiction. The men in question were Privates Goergen and Pelp, who were serving in the Ballooning Battalion* They received instructions to make an experimental trip in the new military balloon Ibis, an/1 at midday on the date on which they received those instructions they ascended from the military balloon station at Tegel, near Berlin, The balloon promptly took a northerly direction, soon disappeared above the clouds, and sailed steadily with the wind until five o'clock in the afternoon, when the two men considering that tho experimental flight had lasted quite long enough, decided to descend. Whei) they got below the cloudS,. however, they found to their horror that they had left Germany behind them, and were over the Baltic, and, to make matters worse, the balloon continued to sink. The men gradually threw out all the ballast, but contrary winds had arisen, and the balloon remained an hour at a,height of 800 ft. above the water level. Then darkness came on, and distances could no longer be judged, but the two men heard only too distinctly the breaking of the waves of the choppy sea beneath them. They now realised that desperate efforts must be made to save their lives. They threw every unnecessary article overboard, detached the heavy towing rope and coverings of the car, but all to no avail.

The men then threw off their boots, coats, their braces, and their stockings, and even emptied their pockets; but nevertheless, the balloqn was driven lower and lower by the gale. Nothing remained but to sacrifice tfco car,* 1 * difficulty two of the cords attaching it to the balloon were Severed. Then the men climbed into the network of the balloon, and heard the dragging car dashed by tho tops of the waves, and not a moment too soon succeeded in severing the remaining two cords. They at once rose and were driven a considerable distance by the storm; then fell again and, as the very last resource, the brave men flung away their instruments, their charts, their belts, and their sidearms, and the balloon slowly rose once more. A quarter of an hour later they heard the barking of a dog, and knew they were saved. They opened the ventilators and sank on to some tree tops. It was now one o’clock on the Sunday morning ; they had been seven hours over the stormy water, driven by winds which reached the force of a gale, blinded with snow,' and hallfrozen with cold. They waited, wrapped in the folds of the balloon, till the first signs of dawn, and then they had to walk two hours barefooted in deep snow before that found a human habitation.

In a lonely cottage they were hospitably looked after, and learned they, were in Sweden, near Carlskrone With the aid of the German Consul at the latter place the intrepid travellers soon had ‘the remains of their balloqn packed up, and a day or so later were safely back in Berlin.