John Monk witnesses the birth of airmail, maybe

I uncovered an array of stories while researching Bonaparte & Brimstone, some of which proved to be just a step too far removed from my subject and had to be discarded. While patrolling in Danish waters during the long summer days of 1808, John Monk and the men of HMS Edgar may have unknowingly witnessed one of the world’s first successful airmail deliveries. 

During the summer of 1808, in an ingenious attempt to break the British blockade, Johann Peter Colding in Nyborg attached packages of letters to balloons filled with hydrogen, calculated wind, weather and buoyancy, and sent them up and over the Great Belt. It was twenty-five years since the Montgolfier Brothers had first demonstrated their balloon in Paris and, before the latest war with Britain, Colding had been performing his own balloon routine at local fairs, in which he sent a baby rabbit into the air and let it parachute down over the city’s roofs. 

Colding’s postal balloons floated east from Funen towards Copenhagen on the neighbouring island of Zealand. The first successful delivery was on June 2nd, just as HMS Edgar was entering the Kattegat to the north. Other packages followed during the summer. The French have earlier rival claims, balloons sent from besieged towns in 1793, but the Danes might argue that the French efforts fell into enemy hands and so strictly speaking were not successfully delivered. 

In 1974 the Danish postal service issued a commemorative stamp showing one of Colding’s balloons floating above the British blockading ships, HMS Edgar and Dictator, John’s current and former floating homes, in celebration of the world’s first successful airmail delivery.