After this event Green made many other voyages in the great Nassau balloon, and met with many exciting adventures. On one occasion, ascending in a violent gale of wind, he and a passenger covered twenty miles in a quarter of an hour, and, on descending near Rainham, in Essex, were blown along across the fields at a furious pace, until the anchor caught, and brought them up with such a wrench that it broke the ring and jerked the car completely upside down. Green and his friend only escaped from being thrown out by holding on to the ropes, and they were afterwards dragged wildly through fences and hedges until the balloon collapsed and came to a stand, though not before they had both been severely hurt. On another voyage the famous balloon met with serious injury, for having been some time above the clouds, during an ascent, Green found himself carried out to sea, and was obliged to come down in the water two miles north of Sheerness. As in the accident which befell Mr. Sadler in his attempt to cross the Irish Channel, the wind caught the silk and bore it along across the water too rapidly for a pursuing vessel to overtake it. Green then lowered his anchor, which by happy chance soon became entangled in a sunken wreck, and so brought the balloon up. A boat immediately put out to his assistance, and he and a companion were speedily rescued; but the balloon was so restive in the wind that it was dangerous to approach it. Green himself then suggested that a volley of musketry should be fired into the silk to expel the gas, and this was accordingly done and the balloon secured, though it afterwards took Green a fortnight’s hard labour to repair the damage done to the fabric. But the saddest event connected with the Nassau balloon was the fatal accident which befell Mr. Cocking in 1837, the year after the great Nassau voyage. Before relating this, however, it will be necessary to refer briefly to the history of a most important accessory of the balloon, hitherto unmentioned--the parachute. The name parachute comes from two French words, _parer_, to parry and _chute_, a fall, and it signifies a contrivance, made more or less in the form of an enormous umbrella, to break the fall from a balloon or other great height. The principle of the parachute was understood even before the invention of the balloon. In Eastern countries, in particular, where the umbrella or parasol has been in familiar use from earliest ages, parachutes were frequently employed by acrobats to enable them to jump safely from great elevations. In France also, at the end of the eighteenth century, a captive officer attempted to escape from a lofty prison by similar means.