The Day the World Discovered the Sun (23 page)

One of the servants, who carried a jug of rum, began drinking to keep warm. He started growing tired even faster than the rest of the group.
“Richmond, a black servant, now began to lag and was much in the same way as the doctor,” Banks noted. “With much persuasion and entreaty we got through much the largest part of the birch [thicket] when they both gave out. Richmond said that he could not go any further, and, when told that if he did not he must be froze to death, only answer'd that there he would lay and die.”

A distant planet crawling across a fiery star's face might have warmed the thoughts of
Endeavour
's natural philosophers. However, in a few hours apart from the ship, the entire mission had shifted from cutting-edge science to simple survival. Banks roused Solander to the birch shelter and had sent two others to try to retrieve Richmond. Only one of Richmond's rescue party, frostbitten and delirious, made it back to the lean-to. “The road was so bad and the night so dark that we could scarcely ourselves get on nor did we without many falls,” Banks wrote. “Peter Briscoe, another servant of mine, now began to complain and before we came to the fire became very ill but got there at last almost dead with cold.”

“Now might our situation truly be called terrible,” Banks continued. “Of twelve of our original number were 2 already past all hopes, one more was so ill that tho he was with us I had little hopes of his being able to walk in the morning. . . . Provision we had none but one vulture which had been shot while we were out. . . . And to compleat our misfortunes we were caught in a snow storm in a climate we were utterly unacquainted with but which we had reason to believe was as inhospitable as any in the world.”

In a world of endless night, there's never enough time for sleep. Father Maximilian Hell and his scientific assistant, Joannes Sajnovics, had discovered this counterintuitive fact of life in their arctic barracks as their “days” and “nights” bled into a hazy purgatory of perpetual sunlessness. “The winds are always raging,” Sajnovics later wrote to his Hungarian Father Superior. “You would think these people have plenty of time to sleep. But on the contrary, we have never slept so little as we do on these long nights.”

Without a solar cue to demarcate public and private social hours, Sajnovics found visitors streaming in to the voyagers' makeshift house at increasingly impolite times. “People visit one another during the night here and offer their guests coffee and tea, just like during the day,” Sajnovics wrote. “We also have chocolate, but that is disappearing very fast.”
¹

On January 10, the voyagers and soldiers completed the island's new observatory, a long, single-story wooden shed with sliding hatches in the roof and walls to enable observations of the skies when weather
cooperated. The astronomers had much to do in the months before the transit. Observations of stars' maximum altitudes could, when compared to the same measurements at a known latitude, yield the observatory's latitude. That was the easier of the observatory's two terrestrial coordinates. Hell and Sajnovics had hoped to discover their longitude by timing an eclipse of the moon two days before Christmas. But, as Sajnovics later wrote in a letter from Vardø, “The famous lunar eclipse from 23 December passed invisibly above us to our great sadness.” In his diary entry for the day, Hell's assistant noted, “We could not see any trace of the moon because of the curtain of clouds. We responded to the untactful mockery of the [village's] priest with a few stinging replies.”
²

Instead, they tried to find their longitude via observations of Jupiter's moons. But the planet was so close to the horizon that it was difficult to resolve in their scopes. Lacking marine chronometers, eclipses, or Jovian lunar data, they had to use the moon. But despite being editor of a leading lunar almanac, Hell didn't put much stock in the lunar longitude method as anything more than an approximation.
³
So Vardø remained, for the time being at least, effectively longitudeless.

Other careful measurements demanded the scientists' attention. First, the pull of gravity was slightly stronger in Vardø than it was in central Europe. This meant a second as measured on their pendulum clock would be slightly shorter than the time interval the same pendulum clock would tick out in Vienna. Figuring out exactly how much shorter involved timing individual stars' progress through the sky for a complete twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth. Hell and Sajnovics then used this data to fine-tune the length of their clock's pendulum so that it ticked out something much closer to true seconds, minutes, and hours. Furthermore, Hell suspected the arctic atmosphere was thicker, which would increase the amount by which the sun's light is deflected (or refracted). If so, another set of corrections would need to be applied to account for Vardø's different levels of atmospheric refraction.
⁴

Meanwhile, each day Sajnovics described the living conditions on the iced-over chunk of rock that was now their home. “To the west the island has a about a quarter mile of land; the rest is covered with a thick iced glacial sea covering about one mile,” he wrote in a letter from Vardø. “And even though it is flat, it is here and there pierced by coarse layers of rocks. This environment does not produce anything besides moss and always available cochelaria [scurvy grass]. . . . There are no seedlings or trees on the island, nor on the neighboring lands. They transport the firewood from many miles away, mainly from Russia.”
⁵

The winter was, as the voyagers had expected, brutal. “We were waiting for better days with peace and patience and we were expecting the sunshine to disperse the darkness,” Sajnovics wrote in another letter. “We were sitting at home making proper use of our time, reading books, defining sea algae and examining snails, hoping that one day people might benefit from the fruit of our loneliness.”
⁶
But even after the sun began to reintroduce itself in mid-January, the storms and long nights still took a toll. “Nothing special,” Sajnovics bleakly journaled on March 8, “unless the great coldness and the wind are worth mentioning.”

Hell had passed part of the time plying his spiritual trade, counseling some of the local residents in their no doubt seasonally affected malaise. According to Sajnovics, Hell helped to settle some family disputes and personal grudges among the populace—to the point that some formerly feuding parties now amicably visited with one another and even held gatherings together.

“These good people thought we were very much like them, and we would spend the whole night playing cards and going to dances with them,” Sajnovics wrote in a letter from Vardø. “So they immediately decided on a day when they would hold a night party at the commander's place every week. . . . But soon they noticed from the way we talked and behaved that the Roman Catholic priest has a certain dignity—admiring us for our lonely lifestyle, moderation, soberness, and especially for the way we were looking away from the ladies.”

Hell and Sajnovics's newfound affection for the locals was partly due to a surprise discovery Sajnovics had made: The regional Lapland dialect, Sami, was a linguistic cousin to Hungarian.
⁷
Hell was overjoyed at the discovery of his newfound cousins. “They are Hungarians,” Hell wrote in a letter to a Hungarian Jesuit colleague, thanking the creator of the universe he hoped to unlock. “They speak our language; they wear our Hungarian clothing, they live according to the customs of our Hungarian forefathers. In a nutshell, they are our brothers!”
⁸

One week before the century's final Venus transit, on Saturday, May 27, nature put on a show for the visiting scientists in Vardø. The meteorological and northern lights spectacle was either a sign of good grace toward the Jesuit astronomers or a faith-testing demonstration of how badly things could go wrong in seven days. Weather along the north Norwegian Sea coast during June is often foggy, from nonstop sunlight evaporating arctic waters and offshore breezes blowing the moist air inland.
⁹
Hell and Sajnovics knew they had a fair chance of never seeing the Venus transit. But something told them God was smiling on the voyage—although that didn't stop the voyagers from bettering their odds by praying often and, as Sajnovics records in his journals and letters, taking Communion not infrequently too.

Whatever the source, the snow clouds flirting with sun and “polar lights” on May 27 did provide the visitors wonders to marvel at. Vardø's mayor visited the observatory in the morning, as the thirteenth straight day without any night wore on. “We saw a remarkably beautiful northern light east to the sun,” Sajnovics wrote in his journal. “The sun was standing high above the horizon between north and west covered by a dense snow cloud. Thirty degrees to the northeast there was another dense snow cloud at the same altitude. The rest of the sky was clear.
Very beautiful rays of light were stretching from the former cloud into the latter in great number; they were stretching long from the northwest and all the way to the zenith with bright particles rolling with an incredible speed towards the cloud that was in the northeast.”

At noon, the three astronomers—Hell, Sajnovics, and Borchgrevink—manned the Vardø observatory's two quadrants. They used the devices to find the sun's highest altitude, at noon. The chief instrument for the task, loaned to the expedition by German explorer Carsten Niebuhr, was a “portable” piece of bronze and iron optical machinery that had been carted around in three big boxes. According to Hell's manuscript account of Niebuhr's quadrant, a trained technician could set the instrument up or take it down in an hour. Its three heavy iron feet formed the base on which the brass optical finery rested. The quadrant looked a little like a quarter slice of pie made of trelliswork. A small telescope was hinged at the pie slice's center with its eyepiece fixed along the circular edge by brass rollers attached to a brass plate. Tick marks and subdivisions (along a “Nonius” or Vernier scale) along the circular segment enabled angular measurements of the telescope's orientation down to its finest scale, 30 arc seconds. The quadrant had its own plumb line, which gave them their true vertical and horizontal directions.
¹⁰
A trained user of these astronomical quadrants could in a few seconds' time get a precise fix on a sun, star, or planet's altitude measured in degrees, arc minutes, and tens of arc seconds.
¹¹

Niebuhr had famously used the same quadrant to become the first European to map the Arabian peninsula during a disastrous trip to the Middle East and India from which he was the only survivor. Hell sometimes complained about Niebuhr's quadrant, but his team's measurements using the instrument were nevertheless well beyond merely adequate.
¹²

A storm then dumped snow on the island and enveloped the sun. Although it kept the region in daylight twenty-four hours a day, the sun remained hidden behind the clouds for the ensuing week. A quiet six
days of tense preparations passed before Sajnovics even dared to offer up his mission's fate to the powers above. “We did the necessary preparations for the observations tomorrow,” he wrote on June 2. “If it pleases God—Will's Gott! [Let it be God's will!]”

By 3:00
AM
the next morning, the sun had shone briefly and just as quickly disappeared behind a curtain of clouds. At 9:00
AM
, some twelve hours before the transit, the astronomers held mass. Tenuous and wispy streams of cirrocumulus—or perhaps northern lights—danced across a windy sky. Tension mounted throughout the afternoon, as the sun peeked through the sky's cottony blanket and then hid beneath it again like a playful child. Sajnovics, a gourmand who often took pains to discuss food and drink throughout his travel diaries, didn't bother to describe having even a drop of water throughout a very long June 3 Venus transit day. As the evening progressed toward the fated nine o'clock hour, the mood in the observatory began to darken.

“We had put all our trust in God,” Sajnovics later wrote in a letter to his Hungarian Father Superior. “At nine in the evening, we were standing in front of the telescope, torn between fear and hope—Hell and me and the student [Borchgrevink], trying to see the entrance of Venus into the rising sun. [But] lo and behold, there was an opening in the clouds and we could see the sun as if through a window!”
¹³

According to Hell's published account (in Latin) of the Venus transit at Vardø, at 9:15
PM
and 17 seconds (9:15:17), the first hints of Venus's leading edge began encroaching into the sun's disk.
¹⁴
(The observers later corrected these observations for effects like atmospheric refraction. The “true” first ingress time then became 9:16:39.8. Hell's group's claims of tenths-of-a-second accuracy is laudable but doubtless, removed from the excitement of the moment, errs on the side of ambitiousness.)
¹⁵
Over the ensuing quarter hour Venus's silhouette grew in the sun from a tiny dot to a little dimple to a dark semicircle to a dark circle with just a little wedge taken out. Then, at 9:32:30, Sajnovics was the first of the three to yell out that he could see the whole of Venus's circumference
against the sun. At that moment, the sun appeared to the men as a giant luminous globe out of which a black circle 1/35 of the sun's apparent diameter had been stamped out. For six seconds starting at 9:34:04.6, the very temporary alignment of these celestial bodies enabled the sun to directly illuminate Venus's atmosphere and create a kind of brilliant thread that traced Venus's circumference. Hell described the momentary spectacle surrounding the tiny planet as a “shining band.”
¹⁶