they by its large size and strange shape they at first thought it was the famous ‘Flying Dutchman’, the haunted sailing ship that was said to ‘sail’ through the sky.
The frightened fishermen hurried back to land but the object seemed to follow them and came nearer and nearer the tiny village on the shore where they had taken refuge. They soon realized it was a giant balloon. An anchor dangled below the balloon and suddenly it snagged on a rock.
After much arm-waving and shouting a few of the braver village men made their way cautiously to the balloon and grabbed the anchor rope, pulled it to the ground and made it secure. They were horrified by what the found inside the gondola - the bodies of a young man and a young woman.
The man was a mulatto and it was plain to see he had been shot in the head. His right shoulder was torn into pieces and appeared as though it had been gnawed by an animal.
The woman lay on the bottom of the gondola, her mouth and eyes open.
A coroner was sent for. He examined the corpses and found nothing of interest on the person of the man but did find the some letters in a pocket of the woman’s dress. On the floor of the gondola he found a book - a diary.
The letters and the diary explained the mystery of how the two people died and how the balloon, something rarely seen in the Portugal of 1872, came to wind up coming to rest in a little fishing village.
The coroner was astonished to find that the letters were addressed to the woman of the diary, a Mrs. Angelina Bysworth of Calle de Bolivar, Caracas. Could the balloon have travelled clear across the Atlantic all the way from Venezuela, a distance of 4,000 miles?
The diary revealed a tale of love, jealousy, kidnapping and murder.
Angelina Menda was a beautiful young woman with many admirers. One of those admirers was the man found dead in the balloon, Daniel Fignola. Of Spanish-Indian descent Fignola was infatuated with Angelina and he pursued her like a love-sick boy. Angelina did not return his affection and in fact hated and despised him.
The desperate Daniel, infuriated by her rejections, was determined to have Angelina by any means necessary and one day as she was on her way to church he drove up with a coach and horses and kidnapped her. Angelina’s screams were heard by an Englishman named Bysworth. He and two other men rushed to her rescue. They stopped the coach by shooting one of the horses and freed her from Fignola’s grasp.
Bysworth made a good living in Caracas by selling balloon rides. The passengers would ascend five-hundred yards into the air in a sealed, hydrogen-filled balloon which was fastened to heavy anchors on the ground.
The dashing, blond-haired aeronaut and Angelina fell in love and were married. She describes him in her diary as being a man of fine physique and rare beauty.
Time passed and the couple lived happily together while Fignola seethed with anger and jealousy.
Angelina would sometimes go aloft with female passengers and on one fatal day the crazed Fignola saw his chance. Quick as a flash he pushed his way through the crowd of ladies waiting for a ride, jumped into the gondola and cut the rope.
Amid the shrieks of the unfortunate Angelina the balloon soon disappeared. Bysworth was frantic with grief but nothing could be done.
Angelina was made of stern stuff, however, and when Fignola approached her she retrieved a revolver, which was always kept in a pocket of the gondola, and blew his brains out. But with land disappearing quickly to the west and the Atlantic rolling thousands of feet beneath her there was no one to help her, to save her from her most terrible and miserable fate.
Despite being overwhelmed by thirst and hunger Angelina continued to make notes in her diary. After six days and nights without food she became so desperate that she tried to eat the corpse but the odor was too terrible.
“I would rather die than eat human flesh,” she wrote in her diary.
Her final notes were to her beloved husband, requesting those who found her body to tell him of her fate and that she had died “unpolluted” and would meet him in heaven.
The bodies of Angelina Bysworth and Daniel Fignola were buried side by side in the graveyard of the Ingreja do Sonho, the Church of Dreams in the little village south of Lisbon.



Author’s note: Kettinger made his voyage from Maine to Italy in a helium balloon and it took him a little more than three and a half days.