Count Paolo Andreani, the Balloonist Who Came to Grand Portage in 1791

An aeronaut

Count Paolo Andreani was a wealthy Italian nobleman and one of the world's first aeronauts. After watching the Gerli brothers launch an unmanned model balloon, he commissioned them to build one big enough to carry a man — 75 feet across. It took 24 days to make and weighed 2,900 pounds. In March 1784, in the first balloon ascension in Italy, Andreani and two assistants rose 4,900 feet and traveled several miles.

An explorer on Lake Superior

In 1790–91 Andreani turned to exploration and visited the Great Lakes. According to Lord Selkirk of the Hudson's Bay Company, he arrived at Grand Portage in a birchbark canoe bought from Forsyth & Richardson, merchants connected to the North West Company (NWC), and traveled Lake Superior in it. John Johnson, an NWC trader at LaPointe on Madeline Island, recorded meeting him there in September 1791, taking celestial observations from the island. The mapmaker David Thompson recorded some of Andreani's navigational measurements from around Thunder Bay, Ontario — further evidence that he may have been among the first notable travelers to go all the way around Lake Superior.

Accounts of his visit describe Grand Portage as "the center of this trade... kept in good repair, garrisoned with fifty men... in this place frequently a concourse of one thousand people and upwards."

What he saw of the fur trade

Both Selkirk and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld Liancourt mention Andreani in Travels Through the United States of America, published in 1799. Liancourt says he quotes from Andreani's journal, which has either been lost or not yet found. According to it, several thousand Native people brought their furs to the Great Carrying Place to trade, for "woolen blankets, coarse cloth, thread and worsted ribbons of different colors, vermillion, porcelain bracelets, silver trinkets, firelocks or flintlock guns, shot, gunpowder, and, especially, rum." The goods were priced at eight times their cost in Montreal, and in the interior traders set prices "at their will or pleasure." Workers were paid in merchandise, on credit against the next year's trapping.

In a 1791 letter to his brother Gian Mario in Milan, Andreani explained that he had not crossed the ocean to see cities, but to immerse himself in unknown places.

A student of North America

Andreani studied the continent and its peoples, recording the customs and activities of every tribe he met. His diary holds one of the first detailed sketches of a lacrosse stick, and he compiled an Italian–Iroquois (Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca) dictionary. In what is now Minnesota he identified upper sources of the Mississippi River.

He came back to North America between 1806 and 1812, by then deep in debt. He sold many of his scientific instruments and collections, left Italy and his unpaid debts behind for exile in France, and died there in 1823 — an unusual early visitor whose records help tell the story of the Great Carrying Place.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "Balloons Over Rendezvous" (Grand Portage National Monument; public domain), in hubnx's own words; quotations from 1791–1799 are given as printed. The article's spellings "lacross," "Iriquois" and "Onodaga" are corrected.