The Day the World Discovered the Sun (14 page)

The Admiralty also handed Cook a sealed packet of secret orders that he was to open only upon completion of the Venus transit portion of the trip. Banks suspected that the orders involved heading southward from St. George's Island to scour the South Pacific for the mythical missing southern continent.

Half of the planet needed to be navigated, though, before anyone could worry or argue about any great lost landmass of the Southern Hemisphere. The Atlantic Ocean, for one, held mysteries aplenty still.

Setting out from Plymouth on Friday, August 26, 1768, Cook recorded a matter-of-fact entry in his captain's log. “At 2 p.m. got under sail and put to sea having on board 94 persons including officers, seamen, gentlemen and their servants,” Cook wrote. “Near 18 months provisions.”
⁴¹

Banks summed up
Endeavour
's mood of excitement and foreboding when he wrote in his journal fifteen days later: “Today for the first time we dined [off the coast of] Africa and took our leave of Europe for heaven alone knows how long, perhaps for ever. That thought demands a sigh as a tribute due to the memory of friends left behind. And they have it. But two cannot be spared. T'would give more pain to the sigher than pleasure to have sigh'd for. ‘Tis enough that they are remembered. They would not wish to be too much thought of by one so long to be separated from them and left alone to the mercy of winds and waves.”
⁴²

So departed a bark that would become one of the most legendary sailing ships of its time. However,
Endeavour
's primary mission remains far less celebrated than the captain who stood at its helm. Unjustly so, too. For the legendary Captain Cook would not be the legendary Captain Cook without the Venus transit that first sent him sailing across the planet. Venture now, one might paraphrase Cook's orders, to the ends of the earth to find the nearest faraway star.

Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche had finally, after five years' preparation, completed his memoir of the Siberian expedition. Lesser explorers might have confined their remarks to the adventurous journey and the Venus transit observations—perhaps tossing in a few lyrical odes to the higher calling the transit affords for knowing mankind's place in the cosmos.

Chappe, on the other hand, produced a manuscript, “Voyage en Sibérie fait par Ordre du Roi en 1761,” in which Venus's rare conjunction with its parent star was just a launching point. Everything under, and including, the sun was his bailiwick. And wherever great mysteries or controversies lie—or could be stirred up—Chappe directed his pen.

“Nature has beauties even in her horrors,” Chappe would later write, in a lyrical passage that encapsulates his whole philosophy.

Nay, it is there perhaps that she is most admirable and sublime. The calmness of a fine day is in some measure less interesting than the moments of distress, when the waves, lifted up by the
winds, seem confounded with the sky. Deep gulfs are opening at every moment. At this instant man shudders at the sight of a danger that appears inevitable. But anon, when he sees the calm succeed the tempest, his admiration turns upon himself, upon the vessel, upon the pilot, who are come off conquerors over the most formidable elements. A secret pride rises in his mind. He says within himself, “If man, as an individual, is but a speck, an atom in this vast universe, he is by his daring spirit worthy to embrace its whole extent, and to penetrate into the wonders it contains.”
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Chappe's eloquence, as expressed above in a poetic description of the Western scientific worldview, reveals how undeserved is his obscurity today. Though he didn't live as long as his American counterpart, Benjamin Franklin, Chappe's star burned brighter and shone more tremendous insight and character than any other Venus transit astronomer of the 1760s. May he someday find welcome among the Enlightenment's luminaries who are indeed his peers.

In addition to the many controversial reforms Chappe prescribed for Russian society, thrown into the finished manuscript, the natural philosopher also pondered an emerging mystery with theological implications: fossils. Biblical scholars who had carried the Old Testament's chain of begats back to Adam and Eve calculated that at exactly 9:00
AM
on October 26, 4004
BC
, God created the heavens and the earth. Many natural philosophers accepted the Bible as prima facie evidence of the origin of man, beasts, the universe, and their home planet. Even such preeminent geniuses as Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler accepted the literal truth of Bible stories—and endeavored to use the tools of science to better understand the workings of Scripture. Others such as Chappe, however, proved less eager to seek out scientific verification of biblical legends.

How a man read a fossil, in other words, revealed something about how he read God. For instance, in Chappe's home city the famous
author Voltaire had been wrestling with various accounts of marine fossils newly discovered at high elevations. These might be seen as proof of Noah's flood. But Voltaire, whose deist theology questioned biblical myths, didn't believe it. On the other hand, the natural history cabinet at St. Petersburg's Academy of Sciences—where Chappe had lectured about the Venus transit in 1762—kept fossilized remains of a rhinoceros found on the tundra that local experts interpreted as “convincing proof . . . [of] a most violent and rapid inundation which formerly bore such carcasses toward these frozen climes.”
²

During his Siberian odyssey, Chappe had discovered pieces of a tusk which, he wrote, “must have belonged to an elephant of the largest kind.” At a recent gathering at the estate of the learned courtier François Le Tellier, Marquis de Courtanvaux, Chappe had met his American doppelgänger, Benjamin Franklin—each man becoming known in his home country as an outspoken controversialist and intellectual omnivore. Franklin too had recently come into possession of elephant remains, in his case from the Ohio River valley. Neither saw the out-of-place pachyderms as roundabout evidence for a biblical flood. Instead, Chappe and Franklin simply wanted to follow the evidence to whatever conclusion it might lead, heretical or no.

In January 1768, Franklin sent Chappe an elephant tooth that perplexed the American. Franklin said in his accompanying letter to Chappe that some colleagues in England suggested the tooth could only have been useful to a carnivorous animal, and thus could not belong to an elephant. But, Franklin wrote, “those knobs [on the tooth sample] might be as useful to grind the small branches of trees as to chaw flesh. However, I should be glad to have your opinion and to know from you whether any of the kind have been found in Siberia.”
³

At the same time, even as Chappe's three-volume account of his Siberian adventures began making a name for the explorer in his home city, the Royal Academy of Sciences began preparing to take him out of it again. This time, though, a frigid destination was not on the program. Chappe's fellow cleric-astronomer Alexandre Guy Pingré had, at
meetings of the Academy, been a vocal proponent for a South Seas destination this time. As with British preparations for the 1769 transit, French scientists sought sites that offered the shortest and longest transit times—and thus, by comparing the two, would ultimately yield the best solar distance (“solar parallax”). The longest times would be available, Pingré said, somewhere in northernmost Scandinavia. And, Pingré added, “the Swedes and the Danes will penetrate into the most favorable places in Lapland.”
⁴
The Nordic kingdoms, in other words, would take care of it.

So, Pingré asked, where should the academy send an expedition to provide the ideal complement to the Swedes' and Danes' data? “Easter Island,” Pingré said, “is best placed of all to effect this parallax.”
⁵
The astronomer then went on for pages poring through recent accounts of other South Seas adventures for other possible backup observing stations.

Members of the academy had been speaking with Chappe about venturing to Easter Island—or some other remote Pacific outpost—not just to collect Venus transit data. They spoke with Chappe about undertaking the same mission to explore and chart these strange new worlds and to put the latest French marine chronometers to a sea trial.
⁶

Chappe's ship,
Le Nouveau Mercure
, could have been any of the dozens of cruisers that passed through this French port city on any given month. Her provisions—contrasted to the small town stuffed into the HMS
Endeavour
—represented no great stowage. A ship setting sail for Easter Island with this cargo, like ascending the Alps with a change of shirt and a couple apples, would barely have made it to the eastern shores of South America.

But plans had changed. Chappe and his three fellow voyagers were still carrying kit enough to construct a world-class scientific lab wherever
they landed. Beyond that, the voyage launching from Le Havre's quayside was nothing remarkable. Instead, passage to their Venus transit observing site—on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula—was now Spain's duty.
Le Nouveau Mercure
needed only to make it as far as Cadiz, a Spanish coastal town near Gibraltar where much of the Iberian nation's fleet laid anchor.

Spain had effectively taken over the expedition because it had colonized the prime transit-observing destinations where the French wanted to travel. Yet the king of Spain, Carlos III, wasn't interested in underwriting an expensive voyage to a remote Pacific island. Instead, the proposal the British Royal Society had already broached—observing from the Baja peninsula on Mexico's Pacific coast—soon became the king's preferred plan. Still, France had the best astronomers. “It was thus decided that M. Chappe would go to California,” Chappe's colleague Jean-Dominique de Cassini later wrote. “And he would situate himself the closest he could to the southern tip of the peninsula of Cabo San Lucas—to have the shortest [transit] time possible.” Chappe would not be observing alone, however. King Carlos also instructed his scientific authorities in Cadiz to nominate two Spanish astronomers to join Chappe on the voyage across Mexico.
⁷

Each idle week brought a new insult. Chappe had departed from Le Havre on September 27, delayed enough as it was. Moreover, the journey to Cadiz had consumed an additional week and a half of unexpected travel time. “A hard gale that we met with north of Cape Finisterre left the sea very tempestuous for near a week after,” Chappe recorded in his journal. Yet still the lion's share of land and water yet remained to be crossed—from the Atlantic Ocean to the thousand-mile overland journey from Veracruz via Mexico City to the Pacific
port town of San Blas and then across the Gulf of California to a yet to be determined site on the southern Baja peninsula.

However, upon arriving at Cadiz on October 17, Chappe and his three traveling companions discovered that Spanish bureaucracy would be delaying them even longer than the waves and wind off Finisterre had.

The orders from Madrid had only specified Chappe as France's Venus transit voyager. The group's sixteen-year-old artist, Alexandre-Jean Noël—tasked to record the trip's zoological, geographical, and botanical finds—was not allowed to board. The same rebuff of omission withheld Chappe's astronomical assistant, Jean Pauly, and the technician, “M. Dubois,” trained to repair all the clocks and instruments. Worse still, only one such instrument was allowed on the voyage. Chappe had five telescopes—two conventional models, a “transit instrument” for observing celestial objects at their highest altitudes, a “mégamètre” for simplifying lunar longitude measurements, and one in the vain hope of observing the moons of Jupiter at sea—thereby, in such a pipe dream, solving the longitude problem. Chappe's group also carried two quadrants, the latest version of Ferdinand Berthoud's experimental marine chronometer, as well as a precision compass, barometer, thermometer, and a specially designed prototype instrument for measuring water density that, as another long shot, was hoped might yield more useful proxies for longitude at sea.
⁸

So, with the ocean air taunting his nostrils every day, Chappe spent the final two months of 1768 stuck in this Spanish port city, lobbying for and then awaiting the paperwork that would let him and his team proceed as originally planned. Initial hopes of sailing on a Spanish galleon soon ratcheted down to practically any seaworthy craft. As if urging the travelers to keep their eyes on the horizon, Cadiz offered nothing to see onshore—its unfinished cathedral still hadn't cleared thirty feet—with the only walking path in town providing unobstructed
views of, as one of Chappe's colleagues wrote, “the ships continually going in and out.”
⁹

By mid-December, Chappe had had enough. “When I calculated the time it would take to reach . . . California,” he wrote, “I foresaw it was morally [
sic
] impossible we should get there in time for our observation, if we were retarded ever so little longer.” The Frenchman notified his ambassador at Madrid that his team now needed to take “the first ship, no matter which” that was bound for Vera Cruz.

Finally in mid-December, Spanish officials caved. A tiny craft, with a crew of only twelve, would ferry Chappe, his assistants and gear, and his Spanish crew and co-observers across the Atlantic. “The frailty of the vessel I was going to venture in, and on which account some people endeavoured to intimidate me, was in my eyes one merit the more,” Chappe recorded in his journal. “Judging of her swiftness by her lightness, I preferred her to the finest ship of the line.”
¹⁰