The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (40 page)

Edgar A. Poe.”

In 1840 Poe attempted another novella,
The Journal of Julius Rodman.
Published in several installments in
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine,
it was said to be a firsthand account of an eighteenth-century expedition across the Rockies. In what had become his standard practice for adventure stories, Poe took numerous passages from other books, relying perhaps most heavily on the 1814
History of the Expedition Under
the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark.
(This at a time when he was castigating Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for allegedly having “pur-loined” a poem by Tennyson, a very faint likeness that Poe nonetheless labeled “bare-faced and barbarous plagiarism.”) Though
The Journal of
Julius Rodman
was not very successful as a work of literature (Poe never completed it), in one instance it succeeded utterly as a hoax: Rodman’s “journal” was cited in a report issued by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on the Oregon Territory, which asserted that “nothing yet appears, either in the journal or related to it, calculated to excite suspicion with regard to its authenticity.”

Poe wrote other hoax stories as well, among them a story about a chemist who discovers a method of changing lead into gold, which Poe hoped would provide a check on the gold fever then gripping the country. His most ambitious one, though, was published in New York in 1844, nearly nine years after Locke’s moon series had brought home to him the power of a well-conceived hoax. Like “Hans Phaall,” it was a
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story about a balloon voyage, but unmarred by what Poe now saw as the imperfections of his earlier one: a story that he felt certain would dwarf the moon series in its impact, and prove his superiority as a hoaxer once and for all.

On the morning of April 6, 1844, amid a driving rainstorm, Edgar Allan Poe arrived by steamship in New York. He had been to New York before—

those terrible few weeks some thirteen years earlier, when he stayed over after his expulsion from West Point, sick and shivering, the only sure thing in his future the wrath of his stepfather—but now he entered the city as a married man, accompanied by his wife Virginia, whom he affection-ately called “Sissy.” (His aunt Maria Clemm—“Muddy,” Poe called her— was still in Philadelphia, and he hoped soon to earn enough money to send for her.) Within a matter of hours Poe had found a room for them in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street, just a couple of blocks from the North River. It was an especially unlovely part of town, its side streets a haven for wharf rats, the seamen’s bars selling watered beer and brandy that was nothing more than whiskey colored red with oak juice. The boardinghouse itself was old and shabby, its color a forlorn brown, but the room was clean and the board very generous. “Last night, for supper,”

Poe wrote to his aunt the next morning, “we had the nicest tea you ever drank, strong & hot—wheat bread & rye bread—cheese—tea-cakes (elegant), a great dish (2 dishes) of elegant ham, and 2 of cold veal, piled up like mountains and large slices—3 dishes of the cakes, and every thing in the greatest profusion. No fear of starving here.”

Starvation was not an idle worry, as after the trip up from Philadelphia Poe had only four and a half dollars remaining from the eleven with which he had started out. (It was slightly less than he had anticipated: he had paid twenty-five cents for an umbrella for Sissy, who, he was pleased to note, had not been coughing as much of late.) Still, he felt in excellent spirits. He thought he could borrow three dollars from a friend, an amount that would hold them over for at least a fortnight. Even more promising, he had an idea for a story that he was sure he would be able to sell. He had been planning the story for a long while, had made certain of every particular, so that no one reading it could tell that it was entirely untrue. It concerned a new type of steering balloon, designed and flown by the illustrious aeronaut Monck Mason, which had just completed the first ever transatlantic crossing. The air, like the earth and water before it,
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had now been conquered by science. It was a remarkable story, Poe told himself confidently, and there was only one proper venue for it.

He paid a visit to the offices of the
Sun.

In 1844 Benjamin Day was no longer the publisher of the
Sun,
having sold his share of the newspaper six years earlier to his brother-in-law Moses Yale Beach. Physically, Beach was Day’s opposite—he was a broad-shouldered, handsome man with wavy hair and rakishly long sideburns—but like Day he was a Connecticut Yankee who prized the values of thrift, hard work, and a positive balance sheet. The recession of 1837 had dramatically reduced the profitability of the
Sun
—it had scared Benjamin Day into selling the paper—and in the years since then, Beach had sought to recoup his investment with content he believed would have the widest possible appeal, introducing romantic fiction and giving even greater attention to crime stories and coverage of sports and entertainment. He was also, as it turned out, not averse to the idea of another hoax. Although Beach did not assume full ownership of the
Sun
until 1838, he had begun working for the paper in 1835, not long before the publication of the moon series, and he surely remembered how lucrative a proposition that had been. He offered Edgar Allan Poe fifty dollars for his story. That was not an especially generous offer (a decade earlier Locke had received more than ten times that amount for his series), but Poe accepted the money gladly; the payment would allow Sissy and him to rent their own apartment and bring Muddy up from Philadelphia as well.

On Saturday, April 13, exactly one week after Poe’s arrival in New York, the
Sun
brought out a single-page extra edition given over almost entirely to the balloon story. Six headline decks thundered the announcement in bold capital letters, each line printed in a different typeface, some italicized and some not, accompanied by a forest of exclamation points, the whole of it looking less like a newspaper headline than a broadside announcing the arrival of a menagerie or minstrel show.

ASTOUNDING NEWS!

BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON’S FLYING MACHINE!!! . . .

FULL PARTICULARS OF THE VOYAGE!!!

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The story itself was nearly five thousand words long, divided into two main sections. The first part was said to have been written by an “agent”

of the
Sun
in South Carolina, identified only as a “Mr. Forsyth,” who had also arranged to transmit the exciting news by horse express, so that the
Sun’
s readers could have it before the regular mail had arrived from Charleston. Forsyth triumphantly announced Monck Mason’s remarkable achievement (“The great problem is at length solved!” he proclaimed.

“The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon!
”), and then briefly related the details of “this most extraordinary voyage.”

According to Forsyth, Mason’s journey had begun in Wales on Saturday, April 6, at eleven o’clock in the morning (more or less exactly the moment that Poe himself had arrived in New York), and ended in Charleston, South Carolina, the following Tuesday at two o’clock in the afternoon: a mere seventy-five hours from shore to shore. The balloon’s passengers were the celebrated Monck Mason and his fellow balloonists Holland and Henson, the historical novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, two members of the English peerage, and two seamen hired for the trip.

Forsyth then described, often in highly technical language, the history and development of Mason’s new balloon, the
Victoria,
and the genesis of the history-making balloon flight. The original plan had been simply to cross the English Channel to Paris, though the balloon’s passengers had obtained passports good for all parts of the Continent. In doing so they believed they were preparing for all eventualities—but “unexpected events,”

remarked Forsyth, “rendered these passports superfluous.”

The story’s second section was composed of journal entries made during the trip, the bulk of them written by Monck Mason. The
Victoria,
Mason related, had lifted off in fine English weather; it rose higher and higher, the countryside below revealing itself with ever greater boldness, showing dramatic crags and pinnacles that “resembled nothing so much as the giant cities of eastern fable.” In half an hour the balloon had reached the Bristol Channel, and its happy passengers had just given nine cheers and dropped a ceremonial bottle into the sea, when “an unforeseen accident occurred which discouraged us to no little degree.” A sudden swaying of the balloon car dislodged the steel rod that connected the rudder to the propeller. As Mason struggled to reattach it, a strong wind blew the balloon out over the Atlantic. By the time the rod had been secured, the balloon was drifting off the southern coast of Ireland. This was when Harrison Ainsworth made his extraordinary suggestion: rather than beat
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their way back toward Paris, they should take advantage of the prevailing winds and attempt to reach North America. In Mason’s estimation, it was a bold but “by no means unreasonable or chimerical proposition.” Together the two men convinced the other passengers of the soundness of their new plan, and with that they set their course due west.

In a nice touch by Poe, Monck Mason’s rather matter-of-fact journal entries (the type that would be expected from an experienced aeronaut) were interspersed with far more animated ones from the novelist Harrison Ainsworth. “The last nine hours have been unquestionably the most exciting of my life,” he declared in his first entry. “I can conceive nothing more sublimating than the strange peril and novelty of an adventure such as this. May God grant that we succeed!” On the afternoon of the third day, the travelers sighted the coast of South Carolina.

“We have crossed the Atlantic,” marveled Ainsworth, “fairly and
easily
crossed it in a balloon! God be praised! Who shall say that anything is impossible hereafter?”

“The Journal,” reported the
Sun,
“here ceases.” The remainder of Poe’s story described securing and deflating the balloon and temporarily lodging its passengers at Fort Moultrie, near Charleston. (Poe had been stationed there briefly during his army days.) More information would be forthcoming in the
Sun
on Monday, and with that Forsyth concluded his account, his final words on the subject as enthusiastic as those set down midflight by Harrison Ainsworth: “This is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking, ever accomplished or even attempted by man. What magnificent events may ensue, it would be useless now to think of determining.”

Poe had long reflected on the success of Richard Adams Locke’s moon series, and in designing his balloon story he clearly appropriated some of Locke’s techniques. Just as Locke had established the credibility of his story by ascribing the lunar discoveries to a prominent astronomer, John Herschel, so too Poe wrote about a real-life balloonist, Monck Mason.

And as the first installment of Locke’s series had described the invention of Herschel’s new telescope, the first part of Poe’s story focused on the construction of Mason’s new flying machine. There was, however, one critical difference: Richard Adams Locke had created his story nearly from scratch. John Herschel had not invented a “hydro-oxygen telescope”— no one had—and he was not even particularly interested in the moon as a subject of astronomical research. On the other hand, Poe chose for his

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hoax a type of balloon that
did
exist and had actually been flown by Mason.

In November 1836 Mason and two other aeronauts had made a balloon trip across the English Channel from London to the German town of Weilberg, a trip like the one described in Poe’s story, which included a change in course due to shifting wind currents and a decision to proceed to a new destination. (Like the passengers in Poe’s story, Mason and his partners had originally intended to fly to Paris.) Later that year Mason wrote up a report of the trip as a pamphlet with the title
Account of the
late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg, accomplished by
Robert Holland, Esq., Monck Mason, Esq., and Charles Green, Aeronaut.
Poe put innumerable details from Mason’s
Account
into his story, from the operation of the balloon’s guide rope to the equipment carried onboard (barometers, telescopes, even a device for warming coffee with slack lime). Originally published in London in 1836, Mason’s pamphlet was not reprinted in New York until the following year. This was certainly the version Poe read, as the discrepancy in dates seems to have confused him slightly: in his balloon story he made note of the Weilberg expedition but misidentified it as having taken place in 1837.

Poe drew even more heavily on another pamphlet. In 1843, at London’s Royal Adelaide Gallery, Monck Mason exhibited a model of a balloon that he had recently built; the pamphlet that accompanied the exhibition,
Remarks on the Ellipsoidal Balloon, propelled by the Archimedean
Screw, described as the New Aerial Machine,
described the new balloon and explained the history of its construction. Poe must have found the technical nature of the pamphlet appealing because he took from it all the basic details for his own balloon story. Mason’s balloon was “an ellipsoid or solid oval; in length, 13 feet 6 inches, and in height, 6 feet 8 inches.”

Poe’s too was an ellipsoid, and “its length was thirteen feet six inches—

high, six feet eight inches.” The weight of Mason’s flying apparatus was seventeen pounds with “about four pounds to spare”; Poe’s was “seventeen pounds—leaving about four pounds to spare.” So it continued for the rest of the elements of the balloon’s design, from its “frame of light wood” (as described in both accounts) to its rudder made of “a light frame of cane covered with silk.”