The Twenty-One Balloons

What a fun story in this classic children’s tale, The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois. It is the story of Professor William Waterman Sherman, a retired school teacher who sets out to demolish the world record for traveling around the world in a balloon, which he does in half the time of the former record of eight-days.  Sherman next decides to go on a more “relaxed” trip around the world again, but this time the real adventure occurs where a year after his departure he is found floating in the North Atlantic Ocean with twenty balloons deflated around him.  When he is rescued he explains his escapades of landing on an island, called Krakatoa.  People question how he left with one balloon yet landed with twenty, and so he explains what he found while shipwrecked on the island, which occurred when a seagull inadvertently popped his balloon, leading him to find an amazing treasure, the island with twenty families on it!  Sherman explains that the island was home to the richest mine holding the largest diamonds in the world and the twenty families who lived there centered their world around the treasure.  One of the men had discovered the island by accident and went back to his homeland to find nineteen other families, all of which needed to meet a certain criterion to be invited: have two children (one boy and one girl) and have a trade or level of knowledge in a diverse field to help the island be comprised of all of the aspects a new society would need to thrive (teacher, scientist, builder, gardener, etc.).  The families  built their ideal community living together by sharing resources and created a new world with new names (families were known as family A, B, C, etc.) and shared their skills in a rotating basis so each family provided for each other equally.  The families would sail to other locations around the world to receive the best foods and other material needed by building a new boat while at each port by selling a few of the diamonds.  This allowed the families to never give anyone a hint of where they lived (they did not want to share the knowledge of the diamonds).  The one problem on the island was the active volcano that could erupt at any time.  After nearly a year residing as their guest on the island, they realized that the volcano was about to erupt, luckily the families had made plans long before by building the perfect balloon that could take ALL twenty families away.  And so it did and as they flew away families dropped out of the balloons to safety leaving Sherman on the balloon as the last occupant, until the balloon fell into the ocean.  Was Sherman’s story real?  Was it imagined?   Did the island really exist?  Well he took two diamonds he had secured out of his pocket after the crash to purchase a new balloon to fly back.  You see anything is possible and is real, if we believe!  Fun story!