The Day the World Discovered the Sun (12 page)

The longest transit times, Hornsby found, would best be observed above the Arctic Circle in Scandinavian towns such as Tornio and Kittila (in today's Finland) and Wardhus (Vardø, Norway). But the council had learned “that the Swedes or Danes will undertake to make this observation.” The Viennese astronomer whom Chappe had met on his way through the Austrian capital in 1760, Father Maximilian Hell, was soon to be outfitted for an arctic expedition to Vardø, at the Danish king's invitation.

A British expedition to Hammerfest, in the northwest Norwegian coastal region, was ultimately mounted too. But the prospects for clouds breaking long enough to observe the sun at this location in early June were bleak. As another British visitor to Hammerfest would chronicle a few decades later, “This island produces nothing: Nature remains in perpetual torpidity—or suffers under the pressure of a perpetual fog.”
⁹
(The expected result came to pass, too. The British team in Hammerfest never saw the Venus transit.)
¹⁰

Although the council resolved to send a backup subarctic mission to the Hudson's Bay colony—and instructed Maskelyne to confirm with his Scandinavian counterparts the veracity of the Swedish or Danish mission—the most pressing question involved the expeditions to observe the shortest transits, those to be carried out near the equator.
¹¹

Nowhere in the Royal Society Council minutes for November 19 are international politics discussed. But international politics—particularly concerning religion—hovered in the cramped Crane Court room like the “nitrous airs” and “acid airs” the society experimented with in its chemistry demonstrations.

Hornsby had found that the shortest transit could most conveniently be observed from the northern Pacific coast of Spanish-occupied Mexico.
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To this end, the Royal Society's president James Douglas, Earl of Morton, had lately been corresponding with society member Roger Joseph Boscovich, a polymath scientist based in Milan, to lead the society's Mexican transit voyage. Not only was Boscovich a certifiable genius—having made important contributions to celestial mechanics and the emerging atomic theory of matter—but as a Jesuit, Boscovich carried clout that no English-born Protestant scientist could wield with Catholic Spain.

And had one royal decision not been made, the council might well have handed Boscovich the assignment—transforming his obscurity into the kind of immortal renown that other Venus transit voyagers like Mason and Dixon would soon enjoy. However, tensions within the Catholic world conspired otherwise.

Keeping pace with courts in France and Portugal, in March 1767 the Spanish king Charles III expelled from his country all Society of Jesus members—more than 10,000 people. In exiling his nation's increasingly radical Jesuits, Charles said he only regretted being “too lenient” before.
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The Royal Society's surefire plan had just backfired. In May, Douglas wrote to Spain's ambassador assuring him the society knew the suddenly outré Jesuit father would be an “impracticable” choice to lead an English mission through Mexico. Instead, he suggested, “two of our astronomers, delegated by the Royal Society, and each accompanied by an English or foreign servant, [might] go to California to make this important and, in a way, unique observation.” In July, the Royal Society
heard back from the Spanish Council of the Indies, which was insulted by the society's presumptuousness. The society could no longer rely on Spanish cooperation.

Just twenty-three months remained before an English expedition had to be assembled, outfitted, and shipped to the other side of the planet. The Royal Society still had no firm plans. And so—on this momentous November evening—the society summoned Maskelyne, Bevis, Short, and Ferguson to offer up their best alternatives.

For starters, the Astronomer Royal told the Council of the Royal Society that the French had already picked up the society's dropped lead. Jérôme Lalande, Maskelyne said, had recently made inroads with Spain to send a joint French and Spanish mission to California. So between the Swedes and Danes taking one key transit observation and the French now handling the other, England—home to the very astronomers who first championed Venus transits—might have no substantial role to play in the celebrated measurement.

But, Maskelyne said, some Spanish- and Dutch-discovered islands in the South Seas—the Mendozas (today's Marquesas), Rotterdam (Nomuka, Tonga), or Amsterdam (Tongatapu, Tonga)—could instead serve as a transit mission's Pacific destination. “There is a good harbour in the Mendozas, which is rather to be preferred,” Maskelyne meekly added.
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Ferguson sputtered on for pages without saying much. (“My opinion is . . . the sun's parallax can be best computed by observations made at those places where the whole transit will be visible.”) Bevis and Short made Maskelyne's wild guess of a proposal look concrete by comparison.

“I think it advisable to cross the Tropic [of Capricorn] at about 120° or 130° west of London and then, sailing Westward, to make choice of the first island that offers, provided there be a good harbour and anchorage, fresh water and tractable inhabitants,” said Bevis—a seventy-four-year-old doctor whose opinions carried great authority due to his longtime friendship with Edmund Halley.

Short added to Bevis's nebulous counsel that somewhere west of South America and within 25 degrees south of the equator, “a great number of islands are set down in the maps, and any of them will do very well for this purpose.”
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The Royal Society, in so many words, barely had a clue what to do for its primary Venus transit voyage. And worse, it still needed money.

In a formal petition to King George III in February, members of the society's governing council—including Astronomer Royal Maskelyne, chemistry pioneer Henry Cavendish, and American polymath Benjamin Franklin—projected a 1769 South Seas transit expedition would cost a hefty £4,000 plus the buying and customizing of the ship that would carry the expedition. The council admitted neglect in securing satisfactory results from the 1761 transit expeditions and confessed to a maddeningly uncertain destination.

On the other hand, the council said, English prestige was on the line. Britain was the world leader in astronomy, they said, and “it would cast dishonour upon [the nation] should they neglect to have correct observations made of this important phenomenon.” Moreover, “several of the great Powers in Europe, particularly the French, Spaniards, Danes and Swedes are making the proper dispositions for the [transit] observations.”

And as the ultimate insurance policy against a case of the royal ho-hums, the council explained that an accurate set of Venus transit observations would “contribute greatly to the improvement of astronomy, on which Navigation so much depends.”
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By March, the king had granted the Royal Society its £4,000 plus the Royal Navy's open purse to buy and retrofit a commercial ship for a mission to a yet to be determined island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

As a top naval architect, Thomas Slade was the mastermind behind some of the most powerful gunboats on the oceans. A student of superior
French warship design, Slade stole the Gallic crafts' sleek curves as part of a radical overhaul of the British Navy's battle lines. His seventy-four-gun “third rates” struck a delicate balance between hull-blasting cannon power and steady maneuverability in uncertain seas. A good commander at the helm of one of Slade's ships could play both offense and defense like no others in the world.

His legacy lived long, too. Not only did the Navy continue Slade's designs well past his death—eight of the thirteen ships of the line in Nelson's 1798 victory at the Nile originated from Slade's drafting table—he was also a talented teacher.
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His students, not least at the Deptford shipyard where Slade learned his craft, became one of the British Navy's secret weapons, working the craft that helped to build the island nation's global empire by century's end.

As the Surveyor of the Navy, Slade pursued a prosaic life. He scrutinized ships' hulls, masts, and yards for maintenance and repair, and—according to the Admiralty's orders handed down on March 23—he sized up a special order for a special mission. The proposed captain of the Royal Society's newly funded South Seas Venus transit voyage, Alexander Dalrymple, joined Slade at the King's Yard in Deptford. The yard, just west of Greenwich, was a hub of Royal Naval activity that had seen history unfold on its very wharfs—from Queen Elizabeth I knighting Sir Francis Drake on his Deptford-docked boat to the Russian czar Peter the Great spending three months there studying shipbuilding.

Dalrymple later wrote in his memoirs that “Alexander Dalrymple [
sic
] accompanied the Surveyor of the Navy to examine two vessels that were thought fit for the purpose. The one he approved was accordingly purchased.”
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Dalrymple was a surveyor who'd come to the Royal Society's notice with a recent book he'd written,
An Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacifick Ocean Previous to 1764
. In it, he wrote of his admiration for Magellan and Columbus and how “the fond object of his [
sic
] attention . . . was the discovery of a Southern Continent.” The mythical
Terra Australis—a hypothesized landmass in the South Seas that might counterweight the vastness of Europe, Asia, and North America—had taunted mapmakers and explorers for more than a century. And Dalrymple was a man possessed, calling the search for the mysterious continent “the great Passion of his life.”
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A former East India Company clerk who had already ventured through some of the Pacific archipelagos under consideration, Dalrymple had been the Astronomer Royal's favorite pick to lead the transit voyage. There was just one catch. Dalrymple would only participate in the voyage, he informed the society, as its commander.
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History does not record how the taciturn, sixty-four-year-old career Navy man received Dalrymple, half Slade's age. But in the pair's review of the two merchant ships—the
Valentine
and the
Earl of Pembroke—
Slade no doubt cast his critical eye as much on the prideful young hotspur as he did on the two barks they were sizing up.

On March 29, Slade and associates reported back to the Admiralty that they'd purchased the
Earl of Pembroke
—“a ‘cat-built' bark in burthen 368 tons, 3 years, 9 months old”—for £2,307. Built to haul coal,
Pembroke
was every inch the fatted cow to the majestic warhorses the King's Yard usually sent bounding out to sea. Although she'd ultimately be outfitted with guns, the ship's unwarlike looks would later cause great grief in South American waters. (The term “cat-built” has uncertain origins. One etymology has the first word as an acronym for “coal and timber.” Ships of this calling were known for their round bluff bows, their deep waists, and tapered sterns.)

Now Slade and his Deptford apprentices would be transforming a sturdy but dumpy collier into a globetrotting explorer's vessel, ready for anything that might be hiding in the vast South Pacific and beyond.

The three-year-old
Pembroke
was at her prime, having already settled into her joints—but not yet wearing into them or otherwise loosening at the seams. Her bottom and sides, however, had known only cold and choppy North Sea waters. On the other hand, ships anchoring in stiller
and warmer tropical ports such as Kingston, Jamaica, had famously fallen prey to marine shipworms, a wood-burrowing insect that, as one traveler said, “cut[s] with great facility through the planks and burrow[s] a considerable way in the substance of them, incrustating the sides of all their holes with a smooth testaceous substance.”
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Preparing the ship to ward off such infestations was only the first order of duty when on April 7 the Royal Navy's Survey Office recorded, “Ship purchased to be sheathed, filled and fitted for a voyage to the southward. To be called
The Endeavour Bark.”
²²

Sheathing and filling the outer hull meant slopping on a tar-pitch-sulfur mixture and then fastening fir planks atop the goop. The “fitting,” though, was the real challenge. The newly christened
Endeavour
—still little more than a floating box—may have looked ugly. However, the oversize holds designed to maximize coal tonnage could now yield precious living and cargo space that a prettier vessel couldn't accommodate. A collier of
Endeavour
's size might normally carry a crew of sixteen. Slade's men built a whole extra deck, increasing her capacity sixfold to ninety-four men. Still, despite the tight quarters, the spacious officers' area—complete with skylight-illuminated lobby—afforded the kind of elbow room
Endeavour
's botanical and zoological mission required, too. She also sailed with eighteen months' worth of stores: 10,000 kilograms of bread (a dried biscuit called hardtack), 10,000 pieces of salted beef and pork, as well as 5,400 liters each of beer and spirits and 30 tons of fresh water. Despite all the tonnage of equipment and provisions, she nevertheless kept a shallow draft—a standard feature of colliers that allowed them to be beached to unload coal. Such comparatively low displacement would ultimately translate to safe passage through otherwise impassable waters.
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