Donaldson's fondness for proving his nerve in the face of a doubting crowd led him into many difficulties, as it finally caused his death. Once, when about to make an ascension at Pittsburg with a balloon that had not been used since the previous season, his assistant, Harry Gilbert, noticed that the ropes attaching the netting to the concentrating-ring seemed rotten, and proposed to replace them with new. This Donaldson insisted would take too much time, but he was finally induced to allow eight of the sixteen to be renewed. While giving his customary trapeze performance high above the housetops the old cords began to snap, and before he could bring the balloon down every one of them had parted—a startling intimation of how his rashness might have resulted.
Among the unkilled American aëronauts undoubtedly the best known for professional skill and experience is Samuel A. King. He seems to have been a predestined air-sailor, for he made his first ascension (Philadelphia, 1851) in his twenty-third year, and during more than two hundred subsequent voyages, many of them extending over hundreds of miles, and some adding darkness and proximity to large bodies of water to the ordinary dangers, he has shown an intuitive knowledge of the construction and management of the balloon and an appreciation of aërial forces which, while they have not robbed his experiences of thrilling incidents, have kept them singularly free from disastrous consequences. One of the most memorable of these excursions was made from Plymouth, New Hampshire, September 26, 1872, on which occasion Mr. King was accompanied by his friend and frequent fellow-voyager, Luther L. Holden, of the Boston Journal. The balloon used only held twenty thousand cubic feet of gas, but was inflated with hydrogen. It was liberated at 4.18 P.M., and immediately manifested a determination to accompany some dense black clouds which were hurrying in a north-easterly direction toward the heart of the mountain-region on the verge of which Plymouth lies. Over Mount Washington and across the Androscoggin Valley it flew at the rate of fifty miles an hour. At six o'clock Lake Umbagog was floating beneath our adventurers, and before they realized their danger—so deceptive are time and space when reckoned from balloons—night surprised them in the great Maine wilderness. The alternative was between a descent in a trackless forest a hundred miles from human habitation, with scant provisions and no firearms or fishing-tackle, and an all-night voyage, trusting to luck and their ballast for getting beyond the wilderness. They had taken chances together before, and they went on now. If they failed to get out of the woods, they could tear up the balloon, and, encasing the wicker-basket with the waterproof material, float down some favoring stream. On and on for hours in an unknown direction, over an unknown region, winged by the wind and ally of the storm, they went, until, in the dismal watches of the early morning, to darkness, uncertainty and the intensity of isolation a new horror was added. The murmur of plashing forest-streams, which had hitherto been the only sound greeting them from the nether gloom, now gave place to the measured roll of the surf, and this, in turn, to complete silence. They were drifting out to sea, and were already far beyond the shore! The valve was opened at once, and as the balloon slowly settled into a dense, chilly fog the occupants of the basket momentarily expected a plunge-bath. The drag-rope, however, behaved with distinguished consideration, holding them a few feet above the waves, through which it whisked at a terrific rate. The weary and anxious watchers were thus kept in suspense for nearly half an hour, when suddenly there broke through the fog ahead the welcome outlines of a forest-shore, and in a moment more the drag-rope had lifted them above the tree-tops. By five o'clock it became light enough to note the time and that they were travelling in a south-westerly direction exactly contrary to their course of the evening before. At seven o'clock the balloon was moored to a limb, and its passengers, climbing down the drag-rope, made their way to a railroad-cutting which they had noticed while aloft. It proved to be on the line of the Intercolonial Railway in the county of Rimouski, Lower Canada, three hundred miles below Quebec. They had been dancing along the southern border of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and, had they not descended from the upper current into the water, were in a fair way to have next sighted land somewhere on the coast of Labrador.
Mr. King first brought large balloons into use in this country, and has thus been able to share the pleasures and perils of most of his sailings up and down with one or more companions, generally journalists. Few of the balloons in use twenty-five years ago would hold more than twenty thousand cubic feet of gas. Of the large balloons the Buffalo became widely known on account of its size and the number of notable voyages it made. Capacity, symmetry, lightness and staying quality considered, it was probably the best balloon ever built in America. When fully inflated it contained ninety-one thousand cubic feet of gas, and would carry up a dozen passengers. It was the Buffalo which on the memorable press-excursion from Cleveland, September 4, 1874, gave the reporters such a realizing sense of the pleasantness of dry land, the greater part of the day being spent in sailing to and fro over Lake Erie, the voyage being farther extended in the darkness of night across Essex county, Ontario, Lake St. Clair and into Michigan. The writer happened to be on the Cleveland steamer with the returning party, and had occasion to notice that the amateurs were too busily engaged in writing up their notes to thoroughly enjoy Mr. King's waggish allusions to "sea-sickness."
A night-trip made from the city of Buffalo in its namesake on July 4, 1874, was noteworthy for the magnificent success attending the use of the drag-rope. The balloon took a south-easterly course across the State of Pennsylvania, going over the Alleghany Mountains and other ridges in the southern section of the State, being kept close to the earth most of the way. The relief of weight caused by a portion of the drag-rope lying and trailing upon the tree-tops enabled the balloon to climb the side of the mountain at about the same relative elevation. Swinging clear from the crest of the ridge, the balloon would soon settle into the valley, to repeat the same manœuvre farther on. Sunrise met the party near the Maryland line, and after a delightful sail across a portion of that State, Delaware and Delaware Bay, a landing was made in Southern New Jersey, four hundred miles and thirteen hours from the starting-point. The Buffalo will also be remembered in connection with the ascension from the exposition-grounds during the Centennial Exhibition.
The failure of the costly experiments undertaken by Mr. King for the American Aëronautic Society, at Coney Island last season, simply affords another illustration of the aëronautical axiom that "Captives are uncertain." Under the most favorable circumstances, and at inland points least exposed, on perhaps not more than a dozen days in the year will the air be sufficiently quiet to make captive ascensions practicable and pleasant, and the difficulty is of course greatly enhanced at the seacoast. The society proposes to again thoroughly test the matter this season, studying the velocity of the wind near the ocean from various altitudes.