Why would a small red-and-white balloon rescued from a Victorian shrubbery in the west of England have excited weeks of feverish activity at the Admiralty in London? Because it appeared to have attached to it a message from the doomed HMS Erebus, captained by Sir John Franklin, by then missing for six years in the Arctic.
If the message was genuine, it meant that Britain’s greatest mariner of the day and his 130 crew – or at least some remnant of the expedition – were still alive, locked in the ice of the North-West Passage. It meant new efforts should be made to rescue them.
The Admiralty hushed up the affair of the Gloucester balloon and it remains curiously ignored to this day. The message was almost certainly a hoax. But who perpetrated it? And for what purpose? And where did the hoaxer get the Admiralty-issue balloon?
On the morning of 5 October 1851, a strange balloon was spotted floating over the cathedral city of Gloucester in the west of England. By lunchtime it had reached the outskirts of the city, where it descended gently into the shrubbery of a certain Mrs Russell of Wotton Lodge. Curious, she dispatched one of her servants to retrieve it.
The silk balloon, partially filled with gas, was less than a metre across and carried a small, soiled card declaring: “Erebus. 112°W. Long: 71°N. Lat. September 3rd 1851. Blocked in.” That was it. Nothing more.
Everyone knew the name Erebus. Sir John Franklin was one of the great public heroes of the age. His two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had left Britain…
