The Day the World Discovered the Sun (27 page)

Servants who had been perfectly healthy when Chappe, Pauly, Doz, and Medina had landed at San José del Cabo were now falling prey to the infection that still was creeping steadily through the population.

The second phase of jail fever, the contemporary literature said, leaves a sufferer “confined entirely to his bed on the second, third or sometimes on the beginning of the fourth day from the first accession of the cold shivering fit. Almost all the symptoms now increase. The pain of the head becomes acute. The debility is such that the patient cannot be raised to an erect or even sitting posture for any length of time without great danger of bringing on a fainting fit; the appetite is totally gone; the thirst increases.”
¹⁵

Eight years before, Chappe slept on a mountaintop observatory in remote Siberia and, on the morning of June 6, 1761, recorded some of the most accurate Venus transit data of any observer in the world. Now, as the pale pearl dawn on June 3, 1769, roused the voyagers, a new day of cosmic inspection awaited. This time, no clouds threatened to steal the moment away.

During his seventy-seven-day passage across the Atlantic Ocean six months before, Chappe had already begun rehearsing his regimented procedures for transit day.

“I was busy,” Chappe recorded in his journal, “during the crossing from Cadiz to Vera Cruz, calculating all the details of the passage of Venus for San José, putting together all the observations I was to make, arranging them so that none detracted from another, posting beforehand the site and disposition of each instrument, according to the operation for which I intended it. I drew up as well a master chart where all details of the observation were exposed in their order, and I fixed it the day before on the wall, facing my instruments, so that I might at every moment be able to recall what I was to do or to prepare for.”
¹⁶

Chappe's converted barn and Medina and Doz's clay hut, alive with anticipation and activity on this cloudless morning, sounded a bright grace note in a time of dirges. Even as families wept over dead spouses and children, and tribal healers gave whatever comfort they could to a gravely ill nation, two unyielding outposts pressed on with their mission. Even typhus could not close the window the skies were about to open.

In Chappe's barn, a servant counted out each second, while Pauly kept track of the passing of each minute and recorded Chappe's time stamps and observations. Through his eyepiece and through the smoked glass at the objective lens on the three-foot telescope, Chappe watched, as he put it, “Venus making a small indentation on the edge of the sun, perfectly defined.” The time was 11:59 and 17.03 seconds.
¹⁷

Chappe had initially considered enlisting Pauly to perform a redundant set of observations from another telescope inside the barn. But eventually Chappe decided it was better to concentrate his group's work on a single measurement. There were already redundant efforts on the mission grounds and at Santa Anna.

Doz and Medina had made the opposite decision. Each of the two chief Spanish observers would be looking through his own telescope
and tracking Venus's motions independently. “The sun was nearing its zenith, and the telescope was therefore almost perpendicular,” Doz recorded in his journal. “The position I found least inconvenient in observing the first contacts was lying flat on the ground.”
¹⁸
Doz had calculated Venus would first be appearing on the sun's northeast edge, some 25 degrees above the solar equator. He recorded difficulty making out the exact moment of contact, however. By Doz's figuring, Venus first touched the sun's edge at 11:59 and 14 seconds. Medina independently observed 11:59 and 18 seconds. The second contact, that instant when the entirety of Venus's shadow first crosses over into the solar disk, came another 18 minutes and 11 seconds later—for Medina it was 18 minutes and 12 seconds, for Chappe, 18 minutes and 9.84 seconds.

Both Doz and Chappe recorded something else that the Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov—whom Chappe had met in St. Petersburg—had discovered in 1761. “I noted what I had hoped for days to discover,” Doz wrote, “to find . . . around the planet a faintly illuminated penumbra, which I took for its atmosphere.”
¹⁹
As Venus cut a small semicircular hole into the edge of the sun, in other words, Venus's atmosphere scattered some of the sun's light and created the illusion of a faint halo surrounding the otherwise invisible remainder of the planet.

During the next six hours, Chappe labored furiously to measure every step of Venus's linear passage across the sun's face. Six times he used the telescope finder's crosshairs to measure the planet's angular size down to fractions of an arc second. Another twenty-eight times he measured the slowly changing distances between various edges of Venus and various edges of the sun. At 12:25 and 13.7 seconds, for instance, Chappe found the northern cusp of the planet was 2 arc minutes and 48.04 arc seconds distant from the sun's northern edge.

Finally, at 5:54
PM
and 50.31 seconds, a sweat-soaked Chappe called out to Pauly that Venus was beginning to exit the sun's disk. Doz and Medina both recorded this initial “egress” at 5:54 and 47.5 seconds. Each said good-bye to the “morning star” as it took 18 minutes and 28.18
seconds (Chappe) or 17 minutes and 54 seconds (Doz) or 17 minutes and 59 seconds (Medina) to exit entirely.

Doz reported difficulties in seeing the exact time of Venus's exit due to what would later be called the black drop effect—the same optical illusion that was well reported on from 1761. The molasses-like drawing out of the moment of final contact was certainly no surprise, and yet Doz's notes suggest he hadn't prepared. The “shortcoming” in his data, Doz grumbles in his journal, “was caused by lack of time to establish the observatory on high ground and the decision prompted by the zeal of Mr. Chappe not to continue to our original destination, Cabo San Lucas.”
²⁰

Doz's two explanations conflict with each other. One says there was not enough time; the other says there was plenty. The unmentioned factor, however, was the typhus striking down able bodies all around them. Doz's irritation may have been more deeply seated than he realized. For even as the observers were performing final calibrations and measurements in the transit's immediate aftermath, it struck.

Pauly wrote, “On the 5th of June, two days after they had observed the transit of Venus, Mr. Doz, Mr. Medina and all the Spaniards belonging to them, to the number of eleven, sickened at once. This occasioned a general consternation; the groans of dying men, the terror of those who were seized with the distemper, and expected the common fate, all conspired to make the village of San José a scene of horror.”
²¹

The altar bread had grown moldy since Sajnovics and Hell were last in town. And with Communion supplies imported from the Netherlands, the priests in this Norwegian port city had no holy host to spare. The Jesuit astronomers had spent all of July and August surviving various hair-raising sea adventures on the 850-mile journey from Vardø. They relished a rare moment when their greatest worry concerned spoiled wafers.

On the morning of Saturday, September 2, Sajnovics sat in his unheated guest quarters and scratched out a letter recounting the sea journey to his Hungarian Father Superior. The soldiers and townsfolk in Vardø, Sajnovics said, “were not too thrilled to see us go. . . . They were forced to stay in this place nobody liked and everybody wanted to leave, wishing to be freed so much that they utter hundreds of sighs.”
¹
But the captain said the wind was finally favorable, and the astronomers had done all the astronomy they needed to do. So with a new pet (“the little fox we had purchased from a Finn in Vardø kept scaring people with its cute barking”) and a new ship (“its cabin was sumptuously furnished,
but it was small, and it had no stove”), Hell and Sajnovics and their crew were soon on their way.

“Only he who has experienced the unspeakable wrath of the Arctic Ocean and its many rocks and cliffs reputed for sinking countless ships can have an idea about the many dangers we had to face,” Sajnovics wrote. Within a week, they'd already begun to hear about competing arctic transit expeditions. The Danish king had also sent, as a backup mission, astronomer Peder Horrebow to a Norwegian coastal town two hundred miles north of Trondheim. But Horrebow, Sajnovics reported, “was unable to see the transit because of the unfavorable weather conditions.” The following week, Sajnovics had come within hailing distance of an English ship bearing two sets of astronomers who had tried to observe the Venus transit from another northern Norwegian location. “As we learned later on, neither of them saw Venus because of that impenetrable fog that was blocking the view on the 3rd and the 4th of June,” Sajnovics wrote.
²

“Oh amazing divine providence,” Sajnovics wrote, “that from all these people who had prepared and worked hard, [God] only granted Father Hell the privilege to reach the goal for which so many have strived and hoped for.”

During their Trondheim stay, Hell remained busy. He accepted an honorary diploma, awarding him in absentia membership in the Danish Academy of Sciences; the consul in Trondheim hosted the visiting dignitaries for a concert in their honor; the scientifically minded bishop shared his natural history collection with Sajnovics and offered to give the holy father a microscope for better conducting his research.

Then, on a clear and crisp mid-September morning, Hell and his team set off over the terrible roads out of Trondheim for the inland part of their journey. Like the sea voyage they'd just completed, the trip to Oslo would be much like the previous year's odyssey—only in reverse.

However, this time some of the locals now knew about the Venus transit expedition and were eager, as the scientists returned south, to inquire how it went. The night after Hell and Sajnovics set out from
Trondheim, they took dinner in a tiny hamlet where the locals excitedly asked about the astronomical mission, as they understood it at least. They'd learned from Horrebow and his assistant, when the Danish observers were passing through, that astronomers had been “searching for a lost star.” So, Sajnovics recorded, the locals wondered if Hell and Sajnovics's destination might have been where the missing celestial object was hiding.

“The peasants . . . were asking very seriously if we found the star that had been lost and that we had been searching for,” Sajnovics wrote that night. “When we answered with ‘Yes!' they were very grateful and told us that the other professors did not manage to find it.”

Denmark's King Christian VII had curbed his manias somewhat on his 1768–1769 grand tour of England and the Continent. He had indeed returned to Denmark a healthier and ostensibly saner man. Courtiers who had promoted the king's travels climbed the ladder of preferment, while skeptics who had doubted the king's capacity for self-healing were shunted aside. Christian VII's court—where a soupçon of intrigue was served up with every meal—had returned to Denmark in all its familiar forms. But outside the Amalienborg royal palace, the outlandish cost of the royal tour—the expensive gifts His Majesty handed out at every stop, the elaborate costume balls employing as many as 1,500 carriages—had tainted any feelings of joy that even Christian's supporters might have felt upon his return.

Such was the poisonous political atmosphere that Hell and Sajnovics entered as their train of carriages and baggage carts caught its first glimpse of Copenhagen on Tuesday, October 17. At their first official reception with members of King Christian's court, two days later, Sajnovics noted that minister of state, Count Otto Thott, “was glowing with joy and happiness for a whole hour. He was expecting that Father
Hell would realize a complete renewal of Danish astronomy.” If the economic upheaval in the Danish and Norwegian population had risen to the travelers' attention, none chronicled it. And Sajnovics remained dazzled by the gilded glow of munificence. “It is unbelievable how much money this royal court directs toward the development of the sciences,” Sajnovics wrote.
³

Hell and Sajnovics carried with them data that other countries—and other Danes—had tried in vain to get for themselves. The transit expeditions to sites near the equator made the Hungarians' results worth all the more. Without good arctic transit observations for comparison, no amount of good luck and great brilliance by British and French equatorial explorers could make up for the fact that they were only performing one-half of the full, worldwide experiment. Hell was beginning to realize that fortune had handed him the key to the other half. In letters written from Copenhagen, Hell said that his employers prohibited his disseminating any information about the observations before he'd formally presented a report to Christian VII.
⁴

Jérôme de Lalande in Paris began to process the data coming in, without access to Hell's numbers. Hell and Sajnovics holed up in Copenhagen for the winter, working on the complete account of their travels that they would then publish for the king. A spirit of international cooperation had graced nearly all transit missions to date—even in 1761 when sponsoring countries were at war with one another. But Hell and Sajnovics constitute the most glaring example of the proprietary extreme to which researchers and their sponsors sometimes take their prized results.