The first American balloon flight rose over a sugar plantation

Evidence

A colonial government clerk named Beccard had made a few attempts to send up small balloons, achieving his first success in late March 1784. Meanwhile he had begun building a larger balloon with several other men, among them a man named Odeluc, the procureur, or administrator, of three plantations owned by the marquis de Gallifet. Gallifet was far away, living off the profits from his plantations in Paris. In his absence, Odeluc offered one of the plantations he managed as a site for the balloon experiment. So it was that the first large balloon to fly in the Americas went up over a thriving sugar plantation. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 308

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat, easily-retold historical nugget: the era’s marvel of scientific progress debuts directly over a slave-worked cane field.
• FICTION: The image of the balloon ascending over the plantations, watched by enslaved spectators remarking on man’s ‘insatiable passion… to exert power over nature,’ is rich symbolic material.