The Day the World Discovered the Sun (18 page)

Yet one day's rosary-bead clutching sometimes cued the next day's moments of jaw-dropping awe. On July 23, Sanjovics marveled, “Today's journey was the most beautiful by far. The wide plain was accompanied by mountains on both sides, reaching far up high, where they were covered by woods. The valley was crossed by a sea-blue river abounding in fish. . . . Part of the population was scything the beautiful grass, which was then put up to dry on horizontal bars hoisted onto firmly grounded poles; others were enjoying the harvesting month, made promising by the heavy wheat. . . . The waters gushing down from the cliffs and the mountains, mostly vertically, offer a spectacular view for someone who is not used to such sights.”
¹⁹

Hell had hired a servant to travel ahead of the group by a half day, anticipating the caravan's quotidian needs—ordering lunches and dinners at inns, arranging for fresh horses to be available wherever possible. (“We needed 4 for the carriage[s], 6 or 8 for the carts, one steed for the servant and also one for the Danish interpreter who joined us in Copenhagen,”
Sajnovics later recalled.)
²⁰
Because the Norwegian Sea grew increasingly treacherous as the darkness of autumn descended, the plan was to arrive at Vardø, their ultimate destination, in August and spend the entire fall, winter, and spring setting up their observatory and making astronomical, magnetic, and meteorological measurements. But as the summer's purple heather began to disappear from the roadside's tender color palate, a storm-soaked autumnal passage to Vardø looked increasingly likely.

Showers on land were no great joy either. But for these men, rain delivered in quantity meant not just seeking shelter but also uncasing various instruments for scientific measurements. On July 25, in the midst of the Dovrefjell mountain range, lightning bolts illuminated a darkened afternoon sky as Hell's magnetic compasses deviated 19 degrees westward from magnetic north—presumably due to the storm itself. Earlier in the day, under clearer skies, the explorers had also used a quadrant on loan from the German explorer Carsten Niebuhr to find the sun was 42 degrees, 16 arc minutes, and 50 arc seconds from the horizon. Reminders of winter remained underfoot, even on a summer's day. “We were laughing that on July 25 we were able to walk on snow and touch it,” Sajnovics wrote.
²¹

Good spirits kept the group going, as a few days later an accident would provoke the same response as the snow. “The wheel bumped into a cliff, causing the carriage to capsize and everything in it spilled out,” Sajnovics later wrote. “Just imagine: bacon, bread, boxes, and wine flasks, etc. lying all over the place. We could not help but laugh about it.”
²²

Tight ravines cradled rocky torrents as the travelers wound their way northeast. They were only four days away from Trondheim, the Norwegian port city that would serve as their way station before shipping out to the arctic. Four days is a long time, though, when nature seems fixed on holding back every forward step.

“We were going over a sea of cliffs, along a rushing river crossed at many points by strong bridges built into the cliffs,” Sajnovics wrote at
the end of what he figured the expedition's worst day, July 26.
²³
He later described the alpine passage in a letter: “These mountains always look like they are splitting into two. When they do, the two sides are connected by bridges. But what bridges! They are merely wooden planks without anything securing them. The minute the horse steps on it the whole thing starts swaying and the foreigner begins to be frightened thinking that he might find his grave among the rushing waves down below. In such dangerous traveling conditions, it is no wonder that our carriages were always breaking. Either the axle cracked or the wheels. Mending them always cost a lot of money and time.”
²⁴

On July 30 the battered train of broken royal carriages and baggage carts pulled into Trondheim. Sajnovics and Hell returned—one last time—to the luxury they had come to know as the guests of King Christian VII. “We stayed at the inn that had already been ordered for us by the governor of the region,” Sajnovics wrote back from Trondheim to his Hungarian superior. “The town officials came one after the other to pay their respects to Father Hell.” The Hungarian travelers had seen similar pomp on their earlier visits to Oslo (“received by the officials of the town in the company of all the nobility in great festivity and with admiration”) and Copenhagen (“It is almost unbelievable how they took to us; the scientists all feel honored to be able to seat us at their tables . . . everyone is keen on meeting the brilliant Hell face-to-face and talk to the man known by his works and reputation; we are truly wonder-men here”).
²⁵

A third scientist joined the expedition in Trondheim, Jens Finne Borchgrevink—a man who knew the local dialects, had traveled in the region before, and even had family in the area.
²⁶
Borchgrevink was a student of the legendary Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Sajnovics began addressing his botanist colleague as “the student,” although the man was thirty-one years old. “He is a student of the nature of sea plants and algae, and also an initiated botanist, having attended the courses of Linnaeus in Sweden for a whole year,” Sajnovics recorded in
his diary. “He thought he might learn a thing or two about the astronomical sciences.”
²⁷

Sajnovics, Hell, and Borchgrevink spent much of August awaiting a ship to be readied for the dangerous passage north. Hell hired a mariner named Friedlieb to outfit a
jagt
(yacht) for the sea voyage to Vardø. “He ordered Mr. Friedlieb not only in his name but also, in the name of the king, that P. Hell's expenses must be covered no matter what he wanted or where he was going, in accordance with the royal ordinance sent by the King to Trondheim,” Sajnovics recorded.
²⁸

Passing the time, the Hungarian visitors wowed town officials with tricks using Sajnovics's and Hell's magnets. Hell gave Catholic mass to penitent Danish soldiers—many of whom were hired hands from papist countries in Europe—garrisoned nearby. One of their traveling companions, son of the town's late bishop, showed off his musical talents. “Mr. [Eileru] Hagerup plays the piano and the flute and he can sing,” Sajnovics recorded about a concert the town gave for Hell and Sajnovics on August 2.
²⁹

On Sunday, August 21, Hell and Sajnovics held their last formal mass and began packing for the journey north. Their
jagt
was ready. Originally named
Anden
(Norwegian for “The Duck”), the boat was rechristened
Urania
—after the ancient Greek muse of astronomy.
³⁰
The town governor had, Sajnovics wrote, “equipped a large ship for us that was big enough for all our equipments and could also resist the waves of the roaring sea, hiring five sailors who were to take us there, spend the winter with us on the island and bring us back the next year.”

Their winter needs—wood and coal as well as fish skin gloves and every fur and wool garment an arctic adventurer could want—were well met. A cook and pastry chef shipped out with them too, Sajnovics continued, complete with a hold well stocked with “meat, salted fish, bacon, peas, beans, carrots, cabbage, two receptacles filled with large quantities of flour. Moreover, they sent tea, coffee and Dutch chocolate, as well as cutlery for all of these. . . . They did not forget about wine either. We
had red and white wine at our disposal; more than that, they also gave us brandy, and all the necessary tools to brew beer.”
³¹

At noon the next day, the
Urania
set sail with twelve men aboard—the three scientists, one gentleman passenger (Hagerup), two servants, plus the cook and five crew.
³²
A storm descended on the ship within four hours of launching, forcing it to anchor at the nearest port, Lensvik. “No sooner did we throw in the anchor than a terribly vertiginous wind started around six,” Sajnovics wrote in his journal. “There were plenty of fish around here too. We could hear them jumping and playing in the water until late at night. We had fried fish around ten, washed down with red wine. Sleep.”
³³

Nautical adventure books of the day told of sleek French frigates and early English clippers that could zip across stretches of the Atlantic and Indian oceans at almost incomprehensible speeds. The
Urania
was not one of those ships. She had just one sail, albeit a multipurpose sail with detachable sections that could billow deep in accommodating winds but also trim light when storms raged. The ship spent the rest of August covering nautical mileage that could have been bested on land by oxcart.

For three August nights, with only headwinds to face, the group whittled away the hours in a tavern in the town of Vallersund, with Father Hell plinking out songs on a new mandolin and the party's gentleman guest, Hagerup, accompanying on flute and dulcimer.

The month's final two days could well have ended the whole expedition. “We had to sail on a famously dangerous eight mile portion of the sea, known for the many shipwrecks, situated far away from the shores,” Sajnovics later recalled in a letter. “Our ship was lifted as high as on a mountain by the ever-growing waves and then it seemed to be falling
back to the bottom of the sea, and then it was being thrown around to the left and right, threatening to fall apart among creaking sounds. The rainy fog was making the situation even more dangerous, because we could not see the mountains nor the rocks in the sea.”
³⁴

Much of September bore down like the headwinds that increasingly battered the
Urania
and forced her in to port for five days and four nights of waiting for favorable weather. On two different days that month, the travelers passed the time in “miserable expectation,” as Sajnovics wrote, by collecting local sea life onshore. On the third, for instance, some hired hands helped them dig for clams. Sajnovics noted that the locals “were eating the clams in Normand style, raw and with great appetite,” while the visiting scientists watched “with eyes and mouths wide open—but still would not join them.” Instead, they ate lunch and dinner in the pouring rain, whipped by a bitter northern wind.
³⁵

Other exotic life-forms in and around the Norwegian Sea had long been rumored. And while the scientists on the expedition did not bother collecting such tales, crew members on the
Urania
had no doubt been well schooled in the local myths. Mermen, mermaids, monstrous sea snakes, and the dreaded kraken were all reputed to live in the waters off the northern Norwegian coast. Some almanacs of the day spoke of these beasts matter-of-factly, as if rattling off peculiarities of the climate or local cuisine. One gazetteer, for instance, wrote that Norwegian mermen and mermaids “are so well authenticated that I make no doubt a new and very surprising theory of aquatic animals may in time be formed.”
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And the kraken—a behemoth octopus-like sea creature that could allegedly swallow entire ships whole—had practically earned the title of most fearsome beast on the planet. “The most surprising creature in this sea, and perhaps in the whole world, is the kraken, or korven, an animal of the polypus kind, seeming a mile-and-a-half in circumference,” a popular English author wrote in 1768. “The Norwegian fishermen sometimes . . . know the kraken is below them, and that they are
fishing on his back. When they perceive, by their lines, that the water grows more and more shallow, they judge he is rising slowly to the surface and row away with great expedition.”
³⁷

Yet not every legend in these storied waters went unobserved. The Venus transit voyagers spent September 25–26 squaring off against the Moskstraumen—the famous oceanic vortex that in the coming century Edgar Allen Poe would immortalize as the “maelström,” and Jules Verne would set as the final destination for his fictional submarine in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. Both nineteenth-century authors turned what was a dramatic—and potentially deadly—force of nature into the stuff of melodrama and hyperbole. Sajnovics, by contrast, simply chronicled what he saw.

“We got close to the island of Stromoe [Ryøya] having sailed between mountains covered in snow,” Sajnovics wrote. “On the edges of the gulfs the water was wrathfully ruffling, and it was flapping incredibly hard, speeding up the twirls of each and other. . . . In this section the water seems to be still, compared to ones around it, where the frequent waves that are not big, but very high and steep, rush and roll very quickly. Many fishing boats are lost here every year.”
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Yet September was just a teaser for attractions still to come.

On October 1, the
Urania
crossed into the waters off Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, where Vardø was. “On the 2nd we could start again with a favorable wind,” Sajnovics later wrote. “But because of the thick snow that was covering everything in sight we had to stretch out the entire sail so that we would not hit the cliffs, and so we were exposed to the rage of the wind and the storm to such a degree that the captain nearly got blown away from the steering wheel.”
³⁹

Sleet storms, fierce tides, and changeable gales had conspired to lead the
Urania
into the rocky shallows. Three days of repairing the ship followed, with the next day on the water nearly dashing them against the rocks once more. “We were facing the most dangerous portion of our journey thus far,” Sajnovics journaled. “We had to cross two big fjords,
the deep Eastern Sea under us throughout the whole time. Both fjords were being perturbed by gigantic waves, and if the wind happened to change direction, these waves would have brought on an even greater danger for us.”
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