The Day the World Discovered the Sun (24 page)

The shouting and commotion inside the observatory kept no secrets about the stunning moment of triumph happening within its walls. The Vardø town storekeeper, overjoyed at his visitors' great success, took a swig of liquor and shot off his big guns. “The merchant fired his 9 cannons and raised the flag in order to express his joy,” Sajnovics wrote. “The commander followed his example and put out the flag of the fortification. We allowed people into the observatory and showed them the planet Venus inside the sun. But they could only see it for 5 minutes, because the sun was then covered by dark clouds.”

The sun had returned to obscurity. The observers' job was only halfway done. Without recording similarly precise exit times—the exact moment when Venus's outer edge reaches the sun's inner edge and when the last hints of Venus's silhouette completely disappear from the solar disk—halfway done was almost as good as nothing at all. “It was cloudy for five hours in a row,” Sajnovics later wrote in a letter. “So we had to give up on the prospect of seeing [Venus's egress]. The guests were standing sad beside us with sour expressions—and shared their sympathy and pain in silence. You cannot imagine what we felt.”

Yet mere minutes before Venus was to conclude its solar passage, the wall of clouds again parted to clear a line of sight. “We were amazed in our great joy and praised the Heavens,” Sajnovics later wrote. At 3:26
AM
and 6 seconds, Hell saw the first hint of the optical illusion that just eight years before had made precision timing of the transit so unexpectedly difficult. The black drop effect (as it was later termed) may have all but ruined most of the 1761 Venus transit observations, but Hell
and Sajnovics were prepared for it. Four seconds later, Borchgrevink shouted out his sighting of Venus's exiting internal contact. Sajnovics followed suit at 3:26:18. As with the planet's ingress earlier in the evening, a quarter hour passed and the trio trained their eyes on their century's final glimpse of a transiting Venus. Borchgrevink was first to call out his judgment that the celestial phenomenon was officially over, at 3:44:20. Four seconds later, Hell marked down that the Venus transit—the greatest celestial event of his lifetime—was finally and certainly complete. Sajnovics signed out a second after that, at 3:44:27.
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And so, despite impossible observing conditions, Hell and Sajnovics's Venus transit expedition enjoyed every success it could have hoped for.

“The merchant fired his three howitzers again six times,” Sajnovics wrote the next morning. “Everyone in Vardø was very very happy. We said a Te Deum Laudamus . . . with all our heart, then we retired to bed.” To a pair of Jesuit astronomers and adventurers, this Catholic hymn of praise offered up to their maker every thanks a human soul could offer. “It is sung in the Romish church,” explained one contemporary encyclopedia, “with great pomp and solemnity upon the gaining of a victory or other happy event.”
¹⁸

Sajnovics wrote in a letter a few days later, “Our guests find the word ‘miracle' unusual, perhaps even ridiculous. Yet they all agreed that it was not merely due to regular occurrence of natural phenomena, but it was due to some special divine intervention, that we could see the astronomical phenomenon with such clarity and in such terrible weather, as if through magic, in the most clear sky possible. I will remember this miracle for as long as I live.”
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Charles Green, Joseph Banks, and Daniel Solander survived the ordeal at Tierra del Fuego, although two of their servants did not. The weather had broken the following morning, and after a frigid three-hour march the team made it back to the beach. “On reviewing our track as well as we could from the ship, we found that we had made a half-circle round the hills instead of penetrating as we thought we had done into the inner part of the country,” Banks recorded on the day he feared he might not live to see. “With what pleasure then did we congratulate each other on our safety no one can tell who has not been in such circumstances.”
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Having rounded Tierra del Fuego in stormy and foggy weather, Cook ordered
Endeavour
on a southwesterly course to ensure that she was clear of Cape Horn and its unwelcome surprises. For three days and nights at the end of January, Green supervised seventy-eight observations of sun and moon, cracking the spine on his new
Nautical Almanac
for 1769. On January 30, Green, midshipman Jonathan Monkhouse, and Banks's scientific secretary Herman Spöring set up the ship's sextants
on
Endeavour
's main deck, seizing moments of clear throughout the squally day. The three measured—in line with
Nautical Almanac
instructions—angular distances between sun and moon and altitudes of the two bodies from the horizon. Green found that
Endeavour
was 60 degrees and 2 arc minutes south latitude, 73 degrees, 27 arc minutes, and 50 arc seconds west of Greenwich.
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Cook was satisfied that all traces of South America lay in the ship's wake.

Now a 4,000-mile path across a new ocean stretched out ahead.

The Pacific Ocean was as mysterious an entity as could be found anywhere on earth. Most of it was uncharted, and indeed some eminent scholars claimed that a great undiscovered continent—something so vast as to offset the mass of Europe, Asia, and North America—waited somewhere in the Pacific's southern reaches.

More immediately, winds and currents remained as unknown as the landmasses that might spring up along the journey. A broad ocean up-welling that would later be called the Humboldt Current—named after a scientist born, as it happens, in 1769—brought much of the southern Pacific's aquatic life to the
Endeavour
as she cut the first part of her course to the northwest. “The weather was such,” Cook recorded in early February, “as to admit Mr. Banks to row round the ship in a lighterman's skiff shooting birds.”
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Banks's ornithological specimens grew by the bushel, with a few hearty meals of bird meat tucked in as well. Banks kept his sketch artists fully employed too, portraying both the tropical birds and fish being hauled in as well as the still unrecorded specimens from earlier in
Endeavour
's voyage. “This morn some sea weed floated past the ship and my servant declares that he saw a large beetle fly over her,” Banks recorded on February 9. “I do not believe he would deceive me, and he certainly knows what a beetle is, as he has these 3 years been often employ'd in taking them for me.”
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And so life onboard a tiny, three-decked ship with more than ninety men carried on through February and into March. Some days produced
sun; other days produced rain. Each day marked tens or even scores of miles' progress toward the mission's Tahitian destination. An uninitiated visitor descending on
Endeavour
in full sail through the South Pacific might—after first marveling at its astonishingly cramped quarters—have to stifle a gag reflex: the warmer weather meant increasingly spoiled meats and stocks.
Endeavour
's freshwater supplies were becoming breeding pools of algae and slime. The pigs, poultry, and goats added their own noxious perfume to the moist air. Allowing the sweat-drenched crew to bathe did little to abate the problem. The Royal Navy was still more than a decade away from introducing soap to its hygienic arsenal. Special sails Cook rigged to help vent the putrid gases below decks gave little relief. And no amount of romanticizing this indisputably historic voyage can gloss over the maggot- and cockroach-laced foods—often gnawed on by rats too—that the men had to down. Wiser crew members waited till nightfall to eat. At least that way they didn't have to see their meal.
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Liquor provided what little gastronomic relief might be enjoyed. The beer was kept somewhat palatable by mixing in flour, sugar, and salt. Add rum or brandy and the concoction was called “flip.” “Grog” was water plus rum. A day's ration of alcohol amounted to about five shots (250 ml), which filled out the day's liter of water giving a man a slight buzz without inducing drunkenness.

The ship's bow held what the crew called
Endeavour
's two “seats of ease,” the toilets. All parts exposed on these seats—dropping straight into the ocean—felt the brunt of the oncoming wind and surf. And if a wave crashed while one sat doing one's business, so be it. Welcome to His Majesty's Navy.

One Saturday in late March, a marine marched up toward the seats of ease. Any who saw him make his way thought nothing of the commonplace routine. But it was dusk, and when the marine hadn't returned from the dark a half hour later, his fellow men at arms began to wonder.

“At 7, William Greenslade, Marine, either by accident or design, went overboard and was drowned,” Cook laconically noted in his diary. Banks's journals reveal Greenslade headed toward the bow that evening never intending to return.

“He was a very young man, scarce 21 years of age,” Banks noted in his diary. “Remarkably quiet and industrious.”

Greenslade had been guarding the cabin door when one of Cook's servants pulled out a piece of sealskin for making tobacco pouches. Greenslade asked for a piece of the skin but was refused. The marine surreptitiously helped himself to the sealskin nevertheless, but when the servant discovered the theft, he grabbed it right back. And so the matter would have ended there, with the servant saying he wouldn't snitch since ultimately there was no crime. But the sergeant got wind of the offense and put it into his head that the honor of the marines was suddenly at stake. The Articles of War, read aloud to the entire ship's crew every Sunday, made stealing aboard a naval vessel a capital crime. Replacing executed crew members at sea was a real difficulty, though, so Greenslade would probably have been whipped or otherwise humiliated in front of the rest of the ship. Clearly, however, to this soldier, death was preferable to dishonor.

“To make [Greenslade's] exit the more melancholy,” Banks added, “[he] was drove to the rash resolution by an accident so trifling that it must appear incredible to every body who is not well acquainted with the powerful effects that shame can work upon young minds.”
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By early April,
Endeavour
had spent nearly two months crossing open ocean without a hint of land, let alone any fabled lost continent. And then on April 4 at 10:30 in the morning, Cook finally spied his first sight of terra firma, a tiny oval-shaped atoll just six miles across at its
widest. “I named it Lagoon Island,” Cook noted in his diary entry for the day.
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“We approach'd the north side of this island within a mile and found no bottom with a 130 fathom of line, nor did there appear to be any anchorage about it. We saw several of the inhabitants, most of them men. And these march'd along the shore abreast of the ship with long clubs in their hands as tho they meant to oppose our landing.”

Endeavour
sailed on. The next day she encountered another coral atoll, this one uninhabited. Cook named it Thrum Cap, with the following day's land-ho (again uninhabited) being dubbed Bow Island. So
Endeavour
atoll-hopped for the following six days until on April 12 its destination came into view. Green, Cook, and two of
Endeavour
's officers stationed themselves on the main deck, sextants in hand, to perform the familiar task of taking the three essential measurements of moon and sun (respective altitudes and angular separation) and repeating the measurements each three times.
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Another half hour's scribbling, and the
Nautical Almanac
yielded their longitude approaching Tahiti—148 degrees and 58 arc minutes. Cook estimated at the time the island lay to the southwest “distant 6 or 7 leagues,” which would make the calculated longitude something close to exact.

Endeavour
's captain could—and did—take pride in a great medical accomplishment. In addition to the previously noted drowning, suicide, and freezing deaths on Tierra del Fuego, Cook had lost only one more crew member (another drowning) during the seven and a half months
Endeavour
had been at sea. Ships traveling the distances
Endeavour
plied often crewed double the hands they needed, expecting to lose scores of men to scurvy. Cook hadn't lost a single soul to the disease.

On a sunny Thursday morning, April 13, as
Endeavour
ran an easy sail into the bay that would be its anchorage at Tahiti, Cook took stock of his record. In his estimation, he wrote, the rendered meat products and sauerkraut constituted the main reason for his defeat of the dreaded seaman's plague. The captain allowed himself to gloat a little. Every day, he said, he'd ordered the sauerkraut “dressed . . . for the [officers'] cabin
table, and permitted all the officers without exception to make use of it—and left it to the option of the men either to take as much as they pleased or none at all.” When the officers, by Cook's orders, were seen taking such pleasure in eating the foodstuff, seamen began clamoring for it. Not even a week later, Cook began rationing sauerkraut because it had become so popular.

“Such are the tempers and disposition of seamen,” Cook noted. “Whatever you give them out of the common way . . . you will hear nothing but murmuring ‘gainst the man that first invented it. But the moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world.”
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