Five Weeks in a Balloon | Page 7

Mungo Parks, the Bruces, the Caillies, the Levaillants,
and to some extent, I verily believe, of Selkirk (Robinson Crusoe),
whom he considered in no wise inferior to the rest. How many a
well-employed hour he passed with that hero on his isle of Juan
Fernandez! Often he criticised the ideas of the shipwrecked sailor, and
sometimes discussed his plans and projects. He would have done
differently, in such and such a case, or quite as well at least--of that he
felt assured. But of one thing he was satisfied, that he never should
have left that pleasant island, where he was as happy as a king without
subjects-- no, not if the inducement held out had been promotion to the
first lordship in the admiralty!
It may readily be conjectured whether these tendencies were developed
during a youth of adventure, spent in every nook and corner of the
Globe. Moreover, his father, who was a man of thorough instruction,
omitted no opportunity to consolidate this keen intelligence by serious
studies in hydrography, physics, and mechanics, along with a slight
tincture of botany, medicine, and astronomy.
Upon the death of the estimable captain, Samuel Ferguson, then
twenty-two years of age, had already made his voyage around the
world. He had enlisted in the Bengalese Corps of Engineers, and
distinguished himself in several affairs; but this soldier's life had not

exactly suited him; caring but little for command, he had not been fond
of obeying. He, therefore, sent in his resignation, and half botanizing,
half playing the hunter, he made his way toward the north of the Indian
Peninsula, and crossed it from Calcutta to Surat--a mere amateur trip
for him.
From Surat we see him going over to Australia, and in 1845
participating in Captain Sturt's expedition, which had been sent out to
explore the new Caspian Sea, supposed to exist in the centre of New
Holland.
Samuel Ferguson returned to England about 1850, and, more than ever
possessed by the demon of discovery, he spent the intervening time,
until 1853, in accompanying Captain McClure on the expedition that
went around the American Continent from Behring's Straits to Cape
Farewell.
Notwithstanding fatigues of every description, and in all climates,
Ferguson's constitution continued marvellously sound. He felt at ease in
the midst of the most complete privations; in fine, he was the very type
of the thoroughly accomplished explorer whose stomach expands or
contracts at will; whose limbs grow longer or shorter according to the
resting-place that each stage of a journey may bring; who can fall
asleep at any hour of the day or awake at any hour of the night.
Nothing, then, was less surprising, after that, than to find our traveller,
in the period from 1855 to 1857, visiting the whole region west of the
Thibet, in company with the brothers Schlagintweit, and bringing back
some curious ethnographic observations from that expedition.
During these different journeys, Ferguson had been the most active and
interesting correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, the penny newspaper
whose circulation amounts to 140,000 copies, and yet scarcely suffices
for its many legions of readers. Thus, the doctor had become well
known to the public, although he could not claim membership in either
of the Royal Geographical Societies of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna,
or St. Petersburg, or yet with the Travellers' Club, or even the Royal
Polytechnic Institute, where his friend the statistician Cockburn ruled in
state.
The latter savant had, one day, gone so far as to propose to him the
following problem: Given the number of miles travelled by the doctor
in making the circuit of the Globe, how many more had his head

described than his feet, by reason of the different lengths of the
radii?--or, the number of miles traversed by the doctor's head and feet
respectively being given, required the exact height of that gentleman?
This was done with the idea of complimenting him, but the doctor had
held himself aloof from all the learned bodies--belonging, as he did, to
the church militant and not to the church polemical. He found his time
better employed in seeking than in discussing, in discovering rather
than discoursing.
There is a story told of an Englishman who came one day to Geneva,
intending to visit the lake. He was placed in one of those odd vehicles
in which the passengers sit side by side, as they do in an omnibus. Well,
it so happened that the Englishman got a seat that left him with his back
turned toward the lake. The vehicle completed its circular trip without
his thinking to turn around once, and he went back to London delighted
with the Lake of Geneva.
Doctor Ferguson, however, had turned around to look about him on his
journeyings, and turned to such good purpose that he