There had been multiple close calls. In 1850, flying through dense cloud cover, his balloon snagged the top of a tall tree in Hanover, Germany. A passenger, known only as Captain James, sprung into action, shimmying down the rope and freeing the balloon. A rescue party was dispatched to locate the man, who had by then managed to climb down.
“Do pray, assure these good people, that I am uninjured, some of them saw me come down the tree rather sharp, and no doubt take me for an orangutan,” James quipped upon discovery, “others imagine my figure-head is smashed do tell them I am all right, and as lively as a kitten." James and his head were no worse for the wear, though the man’s hat had been lost to tree cover. The locals, however, quickly fetched a replacement from a nearby shop.
A half-decade prior, the craft’s pilot, Henry Tracey Coxwell, lived to tell the tale of an even more harrowing excursion. A bolt of lighting revealed a tear in the balloons fabric, before the craft came plummeting down to Earth above London’s West End.
“Fortunately,” Coxwell would write in an autobiography years later, “or rather say providentially, the balloon fell in a newly formed street in the Belgrave Road, Pimlico, while the network caught in some scaffold poles, which helped to break the force of collision.” He added that he was the only one of the four passengers hurt in the incident – an injury to his hand that occurred when a Londoner worked to cut the tangled mess free from the poles.
Coxwell returned to the air the following week. Most of his party, however, opted to sit that one out.
But it was an 1862 flight that would go down as Coxwell’s most notable brush with death, when the balloonist flew too close to the sun. A scientific expedition executed at the behest of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, James Glaisher was on-board to perform experiments in the upper atmosphere. The meteorologist took his final barometric measurement at 29,000 feet, before temporarily losing his vision, followed quickly by his consciousness. One of the six messenger pigeons he brought along died from the altitude.
Coxwell’s hands went numb. A dentist turned professional balloonist, he resorted to releasing the valve with his teeth.
“He wished to approach me, but could not,” Glaisher would write in his own memoir, “and when he felt insensibility coming over him too, he became anxious to open the valve. But in consequence of having lost the use of his hands he could not do this; ultimately he succeeded by seizing the cord with his teeth, and dipping his head two or three times, until the balloon took a decided turn downward.”
This time, the balloon had plummeted 19,000 feet in roughly 15 minutes, down from an estimated 37,000 feet. Once again, both passengers survived the rapid descent remarkably unscathed, though the meteorologist would complain later about the long walk from Ludlow.
“No inconvenience followed my insensibility,” Glaisher added, “and when we dropped it was in a country where no conveyance of any kind could be obtained, so I had to walk between seven and eight miles.”
By 1864, Coxwell’s exploits had earned him a celebrity aeronaut status. That summer, a crowd of 50,000 spectators gathered in Leicester to witness his massive new balloon, Britannia, set to carry himself and 13 passengers. For his part, Coxwell was unimpressed by the travelers.
"Those who had paid their money and obtained tickets pounced into the basket in such a rude and unceremonious manner that all operations were stopped and the passengers themselves were preventing their own departure," he would reflect in The Times.
The crowd, conversely, was not particularly impressed by Britannia. A man claiming to be a fellow aeronaut spread rumor that it was actually an older model being passed off as the latest thing, a “cruel libel,” per Coxwell. It was, however, enough to foment unrest among the massive gathering. He threatened to cancel the ascent due to the restless and vocal throng, when one of a mere five police officers gathered struck a nearby woman.
A bottle was hurled in Coxwell’s direction, tearing a hole in the balloon. As it began to deflate, the crowd pounced and finished the job, ripping it to shreds and tearing the aeronaut’s clothing. Coxwell managed to escape to a nearby home, once again with relatively few injuries. Britannia wasn’t so lucky. The balloon was destroyed and the basket (which had survived the Glaisher incident) was burned.
"I never witnessed such barbarous ignorance, baseness and injustice in my life," a bystander wrote to the local paper. "I feared Mr Coxwell would be killed. I was knocked down thrice myself simply for endeavoring to defend him." As the letter concluded, the writer added that the angry mob who had destroyed Britannia had just passed by the window, “parading its remains.”
Sources:
Travels in the Air by James Glasher
My Life and Balloon Experiences by Henry Tracey Coxwell
Victorian Strangeness: The great balloon riot of 1864 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28674654