Lieutenant-Commander Henry Wells is a Naval engineer, of solid middle class Northern stock.  Having come to Mars in the hope that the dry and cold air will relieve the symptoms of the consumption from which he suffers, Wells has left behind his beloved fiancee Edith, to whom he writes regularly.

Wells is a skilled mechanic, with a persuasive air and an astonishingly fierce intellect which has already led to his invention of the driftwood mine, an element of aerial ordnance currently under consideration for more general deployment.