The Day the World Discovered the Sun (16 page)

Some 140 miles west of Mexico City, Chappe paid witness to a high-altitude phenomenon that he'd also recorded during his Siberian voyages: lightning strikes that begin at the ground and then rise up to meet the storm cloud. A rare phenomenon now called “positive lightning,” these unusual electrical discharges were in Chappe's day considered a possible cause of earthquakes.
²⁴

Chappe's characteristically childlike sense of awe at this natural wonder set his musings in marked contrast to the scientific papers of many contemporaries. The voyaging French astronomer displays throughout his volumes no loss of objectivity when his imagination is truly captured. At the same time, vivid language seems readily at hand for him to describe in subjective terms the visceral excitement he's clearly feeling.

“I observed to the south a great black cloud at a moderate height above the horizon; the whole hemisphere about us had a fiery aspect,” Chappe recorded on April 3. “All the while it remained in this state, frequent and smart flashes of lightning appeared in three places of the cloud over these columns. . . . Soon after, the cloud came lower down, and then it was that we saw incessant lightnings rise like so many sky rockets, and flashing at the top of the cloud.”
²⁵

By now, the stories of previous transit voyages—and their lessons learned—had traveled around the world. In 1760 a fellow member of the French Academy of Sciences, Guillaume-Joseph-Hyacinthe-Jean-Baptiste Gentil de la Galaisière (“Le Gentil”), had set sail from France on a Venus transit expedition that took him 15,000 miles around Africa—evading chase, along the way, from a British man-o-war—and to Pondicherry, a French colonial outpost in India. But just before Le Gentil's arrival, the British had taken Pondicherry. So without a place to land, Le Gentil spent June 6, 1761, floating somewhere in the Indian Ocean—unable to set up a telescope onboard his swaying ship to observe Venus traversing the face of the sun. Le Gentil had ventured halfway across the globe, in other words, for nothing.

With less than a month to go before the 1769 Venus transit, Chappe lay adrift in his own watery purgatory, recording in his journal increasingly anxious entries about the “calms and currents” on the Gulf of California. He had, in fact, only received what he had been told to expect.

On April 15, upon arriving in San Blas, Chappe grew nervous that he might not make his Baja destination in time. The Californian gulf was well known for its quiet calm. The captain of Chappe's new packet boat,
La Concepcíon
, said his last crossing of the deceptively narrow three-hundred-mile passage took twenty-one days. And that was at a better time of the year for favorable winds. So Chappe and his fellow Spanish astronomers weighed a last-minute alternative—setting up their observatory in San Blas and observing the Venus transit from there.

But local officials in San Blas informed the travelers that the wet season was fast approaching. Steady rains usually arrived in late May and remained hunkered over this New Spanish Pacific port town for the ensuing month. The nearby Tres Marías islands, seventy-five miles offshore, offered no better prospects for clear skies on June 3 either.

So the voyagers decided to risk it. Setting sail on April 19, the packet boat spent the next fifteen days trying in vain to fight contrary winds and currents. From May 4 to May 9, a breeze at last carried them northward along the shoreline to the latitude of their Baja destination. But they still had another two hundred miles of longitude yet to go. They still needed to actually cross the gulf.

With just twenty-five days remaining before the century's final Venus transit—during which time Chappe and his crew would also require at least a week to set up their instruments and observatory—eyes looked westward. And hearts sank. Even if
La Concepcíon
had picked up her pace to the rate the captain had reported on her previous crossing, they'd still not make it in time.

The ship's captain, no doubt in a gesture intended to placate the founder of the recently expelled Jesuits, set up a shrine on
La Concepcíon
to St. Francis Xavier. The captain, Chappe wrote, “laid [an offering] upon the binacle, beseeching him to send us a fair wind. The devout pilot's remedy did not presently take effect, for the following days we had a succession of calms and contrary winds.”

The boat continued to sail farther north, beyond the latitude of its destination, hoping to find a more generous current to cross the gulf. “From this time, it was my fixed resolution to land at the first place we could reach in California,” Chappe recorded. “I little cared whether it was inhabited or desert, so [long] as I could but make my observation.”

By nightfall on May 18, some “favorable gales,” in Chappe's words, had brought
La Concepcíon
—almost miraculously—to within twenty miles of Baja peninsular land. The captain surmised they were approaching San José del Cabo, a small town near the peninsula's southern tip. The Spanish officers knew, however, that San José del Cabo would be a difficult landing. Heading toward this patch of Baja, they argued, risked wrecking the whole ship. “I was strenuous for landing at the nearest place,” Chappe recalled. “But as I was singular in my opinion the
whole day was spent in altercations. . . . I was confident that his Catholic Majesty had rather lose a poor pitiful vessel than the fruits of so important an expedition as ours.”

Doz, Medina, and the captain argued for traveling a little farther down the coast, to more accommodating ports in the bay of San Barnabé. Chappe would have none of it. Time was running out, and no options looked better than the coastline that now lay before them. The ship's master, familiar with San José del Cabo, said that although the landing might be rough, he also knew a Franciscan mission nearby that could serve the expedition's purpose well.

So on Friday, May 19—with just over a fortnight before the Venus transit
—La Concepcíon
dropped anchor less than two miles from the river that led inland toward their ultimate destination. As if on cue, the wind whipped up a new microstorm, one that set tempers blazing again. But it died down just as quickly, before any heated verbal exchanges could be logged.

Pauly and the expedition's young artist, Alexandre-Jean Noël, climbed aboard a longboat and hauled most of the equipment ashore. The sight of such a pathetic craft ferrying such essential gear must have raised the nerves to the kind of heights that a man like Chappe, under other circumstances, might have wanted to study. Chappe could only watch helplessly as the longboat capsized again and again in the rough surf.

Pauly returned to
La Concepcíon
alone, informing his boss that through some brave twist of luck, “They came off with no other harm than their fright and being very wet, as were all the chests.” On Chappe's boat ride toward land, he wrapped up his clock and kept it close. “I . . . sat down upon it myself, to keep it dry in case the waves should chance to wash us,” Chappe wrote.

The ocean had already soaked the longboat's passengers on approach to shore. And as breakers pushed the craft toward its uneasy meeting
with white sand, the saltwater spray ensured no clothes or unpacked provisions came ashore without a briny overscent coloring the sweat and stench of a long passage. The boom of a vivacious gulf now safely behind him was all the roaring crowd Chappe needed.

“Then it was that casting my eyes upon my instruments that lay all around me, and not one of them damaged in the least,” Chappe reflected, “revolving in my mind the vast extent of land and sea that I had so happily compassed, and chiefly reflecting that I had still enough time before me, fully to prepare my intended observation, I felt such a torrent of joy and satisfaction, it is impossible to express, so as to convey an adequate idea of my sensation.”

The sun hung low over the scrubby San Felipe foothills to the northwest. Nightfall was too close at hand to venture to San José del Cabo's active mission seven miles inland. Instead, the abandoned former mission at the edge of the beach was their nearest shelter for the night. Freshwater from the nearby lagoon quenched the party, while fresh pitahaya fruit must have tasted like multicolored manna to stale mouths deadened by salt meats and hardtack.

One part of the abandoned beachside property, however, was active. The nearby cemetery kept an informal history of the region told in tombstones—grave markers for local missionaries and converted indigenes of the peninsula, dating back to the mission's founding in 1730.
²⁶

And judging from the number of fresh graves, in fact, history was still being made. Word had been spreading across the region that for nearly a year a brutal fever had been carrying off both Spanish and native populations like nothing since the spotted fever epidemics of the 1740s.
²⁷
Some called this new plague measles, others a different kind of
grande enfermedad
. All who knew enough to say knew enough to advise the travelers to stay far away from anyone infected.

The thundering surf feeding in from the bay sounded a steady and soothing drone to the travelers who at last lay down for the night, casting
their thoughts northward to their final inland destination just a couple of leagues away.

A welcome sleep washed over the voyagers. Even as fits of chills and shivers gripped stricken locals in the epidemic's deadly embrace, a warm offshore breeze kissed the nearby jacaranda trees, cradling their purple blossoms softly to the ground.

The window to an unfurnished room slammed shut. From behind it, sharp words muttered in a vaguely Scandinavian-sounding language filtered out into the spring night. The linguist and astronomer Joannes Sajnovics and his boss Father Maximilian Hell—two Jesuit scientists on their way to observe the 1769 Venus transit from a northern Norwegian island—had taken lodgings for the evening in the Bohemian town of Kolín. And Sajnovics was not pleased.

“They barely gave us anything for dinner,” Sajnovics (pronounced SHINE-oh-vitch) groused in his travel diary. “We spent the night sleeping on a tiny bit of straw. We could hear the most vacuous music from the neighboring tavern, as much as the impossible sound lacking any refinement of two whistles can be considered music. Good thing they stopped it around ten.”
¹

Hell and Sajnovics were Hungarians who had accepted an invitation from the teenage king of Denmark to gather Venus transit data from a desirable location in his kingdom: an island garrison that's practically as close as the European continent gets to the North Pole. Hell, who
had met Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche on the Frenchman's way through Vienna in 1760, was a Jesuit man of science. Hell enjoyed a place of prestige as chief astronomer to Holy Roman empress Maria Theresa and had edited a lunar calendar and ephemeris that had predated Nevil Maskelyne's
Nautical Almanac
—and was intended more for fellow astronomers' use than for facilitating navigation at sea. Hell had also earned some clout demolishing the claims, some coming from Danish astronomers, that Venus had its own moon. (Hell was right to criticize. The planet Venus, as we know today, does not have any moons.)
²
However, Hell, who'd turned forty-eight in January, was no youngster. And the 1761 transit had left the most important number in astronomy frustratingly indeterminate. The solar distance, also called the astronomical unit (AU), still demanded its celebrated discoverers. The only remaining opportunity the century provided to unveil it still yielded the greatest calling any man of the stars might have hoped for.

Hell had turned down two other propositions to observe the transit from other locations. But the Danish king's offer placed him in an ideal position. The best astronomers in the world, French and British, were observing the transit at tropical locations in the South Seas and at the distant edge of New Spain. But their results would be practically meaningless in the quest for the AU unless they could compare their data with similar observations performed at higher, preferably arctic, latitudes. That a Protestant monarch would invite a Jesuit scholar into his kingdom to gather this needed arctic data could only, as Hell saw it, have been the intervention of divine providence.
³

Accepting King Christian VII's invitation, Hell picked Sajnovics as his junior scientist, a thirty-five-year-old former assistant from the Vienna observatory who was a fellow Hungarian and Jesuit. Brooding and saturnine, Hell had found a travel mate whose animated and tetchy travel diary entries showcase a pair of men almost comically misfit for one another. Their entourage included a servant, Sebastian Kohl, and Hell's dog, Apropos.

As Sajnovics recorded it, the duo's audience with the empress in Vienna had left the assistant a little starstruck. “Her Highness asked for my name,” Sajnovics wrote in a letter at the time. “She asked me where I was from and who my relatives were. Moving on to my astronomical studies, she asked about them so affably, in such a friendly and gracious manner, that her confidential and relaxed conversation completely beguiled me. Finally she made me promise that I would bring back her Hell safe and sound.”
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Hell and Sajnovics were now making their way north from Vienna to the German port city of Lübeck—where their scientific instruments had already been shipped—whence they would sail to Copenhagen and ultimately embark for their northernmost Scandinavian destination. The voyage carried the familiar clocks, telescopes, and quadrants necessary for precision measurements of Venus crossing the sun's disk on June 3, 1769. But Hell and Sajnovics also brought with them magnetic compasses to satisfy their own scientific curiosity about the subtle variations in the earth's magnetic pull.