A Thrilling Adventure

A letter from Fortress Monroe says:

We learn from Gen. Wool that there was an accident of a most thrilling nature at General McClellan’s headquarters yesterday. Gen. Fitz John Porter ascended in a balloon, for the purpose of making a reconnoisance. When high up, the rope broke, and off floated the balloon, directly over the enemy’s entrenchments. The officer was considered to be inevitably lost. The hearts that were wrung with the hardness and strangeness of his fate, were suddenly cheered as well as amazed with the spectacle of the return of the balloon over our own camps. It had ascended to a counter current of air, and was wafted with all its precious freight, back to safety. Once again over his own troops, the soldier aeronaut pulled the valve and discharged the gas from the balloon, and came down to the earth “by the run,” entirely unharmed. What he saw is for military use, and not for publication.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Thursday Morning, April 24, 1862, p. 2