The Day the World Discovered the Sun (25 page)

As with Cook's experience at Lagoon Island, the native inhabitants of Tahiti beat a hasty path to the beach once word had spread that
Endeavour
lay anchored offshore.

“This morn early came to an anchor in Port Royal bay, King George the Third's Island [Tahiti],” Banks wrote in his journal. “Before the anchor was down we were surrounded by a large number of canoes who traded very quietly and civilly, for beads chiefly, in exchange for which they gave cocoa nuts, bread-fruit—both roasted and raw—some small fish and apples.”

The Tahitians also tried to sell a pig to
Endeavour
's crew, who offered up some nails in exchange. The islanders were already, because of their previous encounters with Europeans, savvy hagglers. The Tahitians, Banks wrote, “repeatedly offer'd it for a hatchet; of these we had very few on board, so thought it better to let the pig go away than to give one of them in exchange, knowing from the authority of those who had been here before that if we once did it they would never lower their price.”

The Tahitians' open society was already well-known. Before the day was out, Cook had laid down five rules for his crew to govern their interactions with the locals. The first mandated the men to “cultivate a friendship with the natives and to treat them with all imaginable humanity.”
Not two years before, the HMS
Dolphin
had committed a minor massacre on the natives after a pathetic volley of stones thrown from canoes bumped off the ship's hull. Cook wanted no repeats of that mistake.

The second, third, and fourth of Cook's rules governed trade with the locals, limiting such dealings to a delegated representative and stipulating penalties for trading or losing their own or the ship's goods. The fifth rule, though, was a preventative measure that spoke to social peculiarities specific to Tahiti.

“Fifth,” Cook spelled out, “No Sort of iron, or any thing that is made of iron, or any sort of cloth or other useful or necessary articles are to be given in exchange for any thing but provisions.”
¹⁰

Tahitians, as the crew on the
Dolphin
had discovered, loved iron. They also lived in a fecund society that imposed precious few restrictions on sexual intercourse—and boasted naturally large extended families as a result. From their early teenage years onward, Tahitian boys and girls were encouraged to unloose their libido as often as they liked—so long as the copulating couple was not known to be directly related and did not cross class lines.
¹¹
For HMS
Dolphin
sailors who could sneak off to the island, iron quickly became the currency of sex. Before
Dolphin's
five-week Tahitian stay was over, a seaman could hardly find a loose nail or hook to hang his hammock on. Here was another line that Cook did not want
Endeavour
's men to cross.
¹²

Endeavour
's landfall at Tahiti was marked, Cook recorded, by a mutually edgy and mistrustful peace. The morning of Friday, April 14, Cook, Banks, Solander, and a few of the ship's officers made a foray inland to find the best location for their ship (offshore) and observatory (onshore). Hundreds of locals greeted
Endeavour
's noteworthies. “Mats were spread and we were desired to sit down fronting an old man who we had not before seen,” Banks recorded. “He immediately ordered a cock and hen to be brought which were presented to Captain Cook and me. We accepted of the present.”

Banks's wandering eye lighted on a young beauty in the crowd. The Englishman was seated with the chief's wife, though, who Banks noted was “ugly enough in conscience.” Banks began trying to impress the nubile young lady, “load[ing] my pretty girl with beads and every present I could think pleasing to her,” Banks wrote. But the courtship ended when Solander and William Monkhouse, the ship's surgeon (brother to
Endeavour
's midshipman), discovered that their pockets had been picked.

“Complaint was made the chief,” Banks added. “And to give it weight I started up from the ground and striking the butt of my gun made a rattling noise which I had before used in our walk to frighten the people and keep them at a distance.” After some delicate negotiations, the missing opera glasses and snuff box were returned—although the snuff itself had gone missing.

The following day was worse, with a detachment going ashore and ultimately shooting dead a Tahitian who tried to pilfer a musket. Buchan, the painter who had suffered an epileptic fit at Tierra del Fuego, had a second seizure on April 16 and died the next day.

“His loss to me is irretrievable,” Banks recorded. “My airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanish'd.” Out of fear of what the Tahitians might do with Buchan's body, Cook ordered a small crew to pilot one of
Endeavour
's boats out to open water, where the artist was given a sea burial.

Ashore, the Tahitians had attempted a peace offering of some breadfruit and a few hogs. Cook gave the two chiefs who'd brought forward the offering a nail and a hatchet each. Cook had begun sizing up the shore for his ultimate purpose of visiting Tahiti—an astronomical event now forty-seven days away.

“In the afternoon,” Banks recorded, “we all went ashore to measure out the ground for the tents, which done, Cap Cooke and Mr. Green slept ashore in a tent erected for that purpose, after having observ'd an eclipse of one of the satellites of Jupiter.”
¹³

Theft had become practically a form of communication between Cook's men and the Tahitians. European explorers visiting the island—who claimed the whole landmass first for Spain, then for France, and then for England—usurped big. But Tahitians often picked pockets and pilfered whatever they could lay their hands on whenever the Europeans came into their presence.

Green, Banks, Solander, and Cook had spent the remainder of April leading
Endeavour
's carpenters and crew in building Fort Venus—an emerging walled complex of tents and makeshift structures that would become the British base camp and observatory. Cook had two weeks before he selected the sandy peninsula, dubbing it Point Venus. The promontory proved a strategic choice, being bounded on two sides by water and within cannon range of the
Endeavour.
¹⁴
(Trying to keep up peaceful relations with the Tahitians, Cook nevertheless planned for worst-case scenarios too.) The explorers put up with some thievery of their metal implements and garments. But the big wooden box that evaporated into nothingness on May 1 was a different story. Without the astronomical quadrant the box contained,
Endeavour
's mission to Tahiti would be dangerously compromised. Fort Venus's superintendents hoped that the quadrant's thief wouldn't open the secure box and find the delicate triangular instrument within. Or at least they hoped the crook would discard the instrument, seeking out something more relevant to the island's daily life—or at least something sharper.
¹⁵

On a sunny and breezy Tuesday morning, May 2, Banks took the situation into hand.
¹⁶
The crew and officers had already searched the whole of Fort Venus for the missing quadrant and turned up nothing. Banks started looking in the woods surrounding the fort. At a nearby river, the gentleman traveler ran into one of the local chiefs, Tubourai. “[He] immediately made with 3 straws in his hand the figure of a triangle,” Banks
recorded. “The Indians had opened the cases. No time was now to be lost!”

So Banks, Green, an unnamed midshipman, and Tubourai raced into the Tahitian jungle to pursue the thief who could singlehandedly scuttle Britain's greatest scientific expedition. The 91-degree heat was stifling, but they ran whenever they could. “Sometimes we walk'd, sometimes we ran when we imagin'd (which we sometimes did) that the chase was just before us,” Banks wrote. Three miles into their seven-mile inland trek, Banks sent the midshipman back to Fort Venus to summon reinforcements. And so the sweaty, panting voyagers ran through black flies and mud, forest and clearing, till they reached the village where Tubourai had heard the quadrant had been taken.

The day was wearing on, and no doubt all three overheated runners were hungry and thirsty. But once they'd arrived, Banks level-headedly sat down among the reported “hundreds” of villagers who soon surrounded him. He'd learned some local customs that he now wielded to his own favor. Banks drew a ring in the grass and sat in the middle of it, ready to hold court. (“Mr. Banks . . . is always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned,” Cook later observed.)
¹⁷
Grabbing the villagers' attention with his exposed but unbrandished pistols, Banks used his storytelling and explanatory skills to convey his words to Tubourai, his interpreter.

Piece by piece, the quadrant and its components began to emerge from the huts. Once the main body of the quadrant had been returned, Green looked it over to see what could be salvaged after its rough transit inland. Green found small parts of the instrument missing, some of which were returned—some not. But ultimately Green satisfied himself that what they had would suffice.
¹⁸
“We pack'd all up in grass as well as we could and proceeded homewards,” Banks recorded. “After walking about 2 miles, we met Captn Cook with a party of marines coming after us. All were, you may imagine, not a little pleas'd at the event of our excursion.”
¹⁹

To scout for backup sites in case of cloudy weather, Cook had sent men to two other nearby locations—one to the east and the other to Moorea, a nearby westerly island. But they wouldn't be needed. The night of June 2 brought a tropical sunset unmarred by clouds—and calm to Fort Venus. “This day prov'd as favourable to our purpose as we could wish,” Cook wrote the following day. “Not a cloud was to be seen the whole day, and the air was perfectly clear, so that we had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the planet Venus over the Sun's disk.”

Cook posted sentinels around the observatory at Fort Venus, to ensure no thieving or other meddling by locals got in the way of job number one on that sunny Saturday morning. Earlier Green had set up a pendulum clock inside the officer's tent, erected right next to a wooden-walled, canvas-roofed portable observatory. Per his instructions, Green had fastened the clock to a firm wooden stand and set the pendulum to the familiar length already established for Greenwich.

The clock had been used before. It was on Nevil Maskelyne's unsuccessful 1761 Venus transit voyage to St. Helena and then again, in 1766–1767, as one of the main timekeepers for Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon's surveying trip to measure the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland—a line that immortalized the astronomers' names.

Outside the observatory building, Green and Cook each set up two-foot telescopes—as well as the repaired astronomical quadrant, with a wooden barrel serving as its makeshift stand.
²⁰
The Royal Society mathematician and optical instrument maker James Short had made these Gregorian telescopes—named after a Scots mathematician from the previous century who'd proposed the scope's compact two-mirror design that had superseded Isaac Newton's pioneering reflectors. The pair of two-foot brass instruments stood on sturdy brass stands that nevertheless belied their delicate optics. It was a stroke of good fortune that no
idle Tahitian hands had absconded with these finely crafted devices. A broken quadrant, in the hands of a good watchmaker like Spöring, could be refitted. A broken telescope might have been beyond repair.

Through the Gregorian reflectors' 4 3/4–inch eyepieces, dimmed at the front end by smoked glass solar filters, Cook and Green trained their eyes on the star that makes day.
²¹
At 7:21
AM
and 20 seconds, Green was the first to see what planet astronomers all over the earth would be carefully viewing for the next six or so hours. Five seconds later, Cook shouted out that he spotted Venus too. Another twenty-one seconds after that, Solander recorded his first sighting of Venus's ingress.
²²

Here Cook, the preeminent tactician and military mind, was outflanked by nature. He might have bested the odds by crossing an entire unwelcoming planet to reach his remote destination, but the same optical trick that had marred 1761 data fooled him too. “We differ'd from one another in observing the times of the contacts [of Venus with the edge of the sun] much more than could be expected,” Cook wrote in his journal.
²³
As the chief astronomer of the voyage, Green should have known what was coming. But Cook and Green collected their data as if the black drop effect was something unexpected and unknown.

During the transit, Cook and Green used special adjustable eyepieces (so-called Dollond object glass micrometers) that enabled measurements of Venus's apparent diameter. Both found the planet just under one arc minute in size—54.77 and 54.97 arc seconds, respectively. The same micrometer enabled Cook to measure a series of the angular distances between Venus and the sun's edge as the planet inched its way across the blazing solar face.
²⁴

And blaze the sun did on June 3. Cook noted in his journal that the mercury topped 119 degrees Fahrenheit by midday. “We have not before met with 119,” Cook recorded with characteristic terseness. Observers the world over felt the sweat of pressure as Venus inched toward departing the solar disk for the second and final time of the eighteenth
century. But at Fort Venus, nervous perspiration could hardly compete with the body's natural reaction to such oppressive heat.