This is the first book of a biographical trilogy about George Anton Schaeffer (1779-1836), a German physician who (in this book) administered a secret plan of Russian Tsar Alexander I to kill Napoleon Bonaparte from a hydrogen-filled, rotor-wing-powered balloon during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, then (in the next and second book) meddled in Hawaiian island politics during the reign of King Kamehameha, ruling the island of Kaua'i as co-regent with its last independent King Kaumuali'i in 1816-7, then (in the third and final book) wound up founding a plantation colony called Frankenthal in Brazil, to which he transported thousands of German mercenaries and their families on behalf of Brazil's first independent Emperor Dom Pedro I and his Hapsburg wife Dona Leopoldina.