The Day the World Discovered the Sun (28 page)

As Sajnovics wrote, for instance, Danish officials had “found out that our journey had been made public by the newspapers in Vienna. The secretary [of the Austrian embassy] said he wrote to [Austrian prince] Kaunitz and told him not to let this happen in the future.”
⁵
By contrast, both Sweden and Russia promptly communicated their (inferior) arctic transit observations to the global clearinghouse for all Venus transit results, the desk of Jérôme de Lalande in Paris. Using the less than ideal
arctic observations, French astronomers ventured first estimates of the earth's distance to the sun. Unsurprisingly, their initial efforts were off the mark. In January, for instance, Lalande calculated 90,500,000 miles—97.7 percent of the actual distance. They could do far better. Visionaries like Edmund Halley had in 1716, for instance, argued that the Venus transit could enable science to trace out a map of the solar system accurate to 99.8 percent or better.

Meanwhile, as the months passed by, Sajnovics wrote about taking lunch with prominent Danes like Count Thott, Count Bernstorff, and the court astronomer Christian Horrebow—brother of the transit voyager Peder. And waiting. “Hell finished his lecture series about the observation of Venus,” Sajnovics wrote in December. “However, the editorial works related to the [book] got stuck.”
⁶

The incessant delays may have originated in the tectonic shifts taking place under every courtier's feet. As a three-day Christmas blizzard whited out the capital, Copenhagen descended into political darkness. King Christian's continental “cure” was proving to have been anything but. His Majesty's fickle moods and foul tantrums had begun to return, and as a result the balance of power at court was blowing capriciously back and forth like a wind vane in a tempest. “When [the king] is dressing, he may sit whole hours and more quite quiet, with eyes fixed, mouth open, head sunk, as though insensible,” one courtier recorded at the time. “I knew him, and I have not forgotten that attitude, which always foreboded some violent scene and some revolution which is then being thought out.”
⁷

Sajnovics's prime sponsor at court, Count Bernstorff, had begun to find that despite all his influence and savvy, the king's private doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, was beginning to eclipse everyone.

The lowly physician would, astonishingly, reach an apotheosis surpassing all but the king himself—ending the careers of lifelong advisers like Bernstorff. Struensee would meet his own tragic end in 1772, when his love affair with Queen Caroline Matilda would prove to be one step too far in the doctor's personal quest for power.

Blissfully ignorant of the operatic level of conspiracy and intrigue going on all around them, on February 8, Hell and Sajnovics presented their long-awaited book,
Observatio Transitus Veneris Ante Discum Solis Die 3 Junii Anno 1769
, to the king.

Christian VII had received his personal copy of the report “with an indescribable gracefulness,” Sajnovics wrote in a letter from Copenhagen. “This meeting resembled a scientific discussion that lasted for half an hour and the King was inspired to declare that he had understood Hell's contribution and its value, and he fully appreciated it. . . . He was immensely satisfied.”

“We talked for about half an hour about the northern lights, the flood tide on the sea, and the peculiarities of the Lapp and Hungarian languages,” Sajnovics wrote the night of his meeting with the king. “We even touched on the issue of the squaring of the circle. It seemed he had been well-informed about Hell's activity and he assured us that we fully reached his expectations and those of the others.”

At last, Hell and Sajnovics's data could be shared with the scientific world. But, because of the eight- or nine-month delay, some scientists had their doubts about the data's veracity. A member of the Académie Française, Cardinal Paul d'Albert de Luynes, wrote to Hell in June about the whispers he'd been hearing that some thought the Vardø team's delay “could give rise to suspicion, that having had the time to receive other [Venus transit] observations, you could accommodate them with yours.”

Others stood up for Hell and Sajnovics, though. The Swedish astronomer Anders Planmann confessed in a letter to a colleague that he was initially dubious of the dataset in question. But, Planmann added, “I free him from all suspicions concerning the correctness of his observation. . . . The circumstances which emerge from the report could not possibly have been fabricated.”
⁸

Others still had grown not suspicious but just angry.

On April 3, Sajnovics wrote, “We received a letter from Lalande in which he inquired, in a very arrogant manner, why we were so late in sharing the results of our observations with the people in Paris, adding
some abominable threats to his questions. Finally he was asking about the Danish Scientific Society—as if it was something unknown.”

Three days later at the Danish Scientific Society, Horrebow presented an account of his unsuccessful Venus transit voyage to Dønnes, Norway. “They did not read the letter in public that Lalande had addressed to the society,” Sajnovics noted.

The voyagers, having worked so hard to procure royal favor, spent a month enjoying Copenhagen with doors swung wide open for them. At the Cathedral, for Palm Sunday and Easter mass, they were seated among dignitaries. The Danish Astronomer Royal gave them a tour of the king's library, perusing modern and ancient biblical texts and the manuscripts of court astronomer Tycho Brahe. They even spent a day, April 19, onboard a Danish warship to take a full tour and sumptuous lunch among captains of the fleet. “Music was constantly played during lunch,” Sajnovics wrote. “Meanwhile the commander-in-chief was talking about how he had suffered while he was kept captive by the Moroccan Emperor, and how the latter stabbed him in the chest with a sword, and how the emperor shot at the bottle in his hand.”

On May 10, King Christian gave Hell a farewell gift—a portrait of King Christian. Five days later, as the voyagers were beginning to pack for their final return to Vienna, Sajnovics handed over to a local official his own magnum opus, a book announcing the discovery of the surprising similarities between the Hungarian and Lapp languages. Sajnovics's
Demonstratio Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum Idem Esse
is still celebrated today as an early triumph in comparative linguistics.

“We said goodbye to a few acquaintances,” Sajnovics wrote on May 19. “We had lunch at Count Thott's place in the company of four Excellencies. After lunch they showed us two triumphal arches—under each there was a telescope positioned toward the Sun as well as two beautiful cottages—representing the victorious return of astronomy.”

As far as Sajnovics was concerned, the two Hungarians accomplished their goals completely. Not only had they successfully observed the Venus transit, but Sajnovics felt other scientific observations the pair
performed during the trip—concerning the earth's magnetic fields and the northern lights—might be equally important too. Sajnovics wrote in a letter from Copenhagen that Hell's book,
Observatio
, “presents 12 chapters . . . the mere titles [of which] already raised the expectations of the scientific circles from here, which is proof that we spent our time in Vardø working very hard and not with relaxation, and we used that time with result for the sake of science.”
⁹

The Royal Society's original choice to captain
Endeavour
, Alexander Dalrymple, never set foot aboard the refitted ship that would circumnavigate the planet and help chart the entire solar system. But Dalrymple still had pull. His legacy endured into the
Endeavour
's after-mission. Upon completing the Venus transit observations and requisite measurements of moon and stars to get a precise fix on Fort Venus's latitude and longitude, Cook opened a sealed set of orders from the Admiralty.

“So soon as the observation of the planet Venus shall be finished,” the orders stated, “you are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above mentioned [Terra Australis Incognita] until you arrive in the latitude of 40° [south], unless you sooner fall in with it.”
¹

Discovering the fabled southern continent was one of Dalrymple's lifelong passions. And the Scottish hydrographer worked to ensure that
Endeavour
would do all in its power to reach its shores, whether he was onboard or not.

Cook never believed in the missing continent, but orders were orders. So
Endeavour
spent a final month at Tahiti—where on the eve of the ship's departure two marines had decided to stay with their new “wives.” Cook had them brought back aboard ship and flogged. And then Cook rounded the archipelago and headed due south on August 10.

Banks brought a Tahitian onboard to help guide the ship through the South Pacific. Tupaia, an island chieftain, befriended the voyagers and while Cook would not personally be responsible for the foreign traveler, the captain recognized the value of an indigenous envoy who could accompany the ship. Banks wrote, in the characteristic paternalistic tones of his age, “I do not know why I may not keep [Tupaia] as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tigers at a larger expense than he will ever put me to. The amusement I shall have in his future conversation and the benefit he will be to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas.”
²

On discovering the island Ohetiroa (today Rurutu) on August 14, Cook dispatched Tupaia, Banks, and Lieutenant Gore in the pinnace to land and “speak with the natives and to try if they could learn from them what lands lay to the southward of us,” Cook wrote.
³

Having spent the day ashore, Banks appreciated all the more the Tahitian paradise he'd recently bid farewell to. “The island to all appearance that we saw was more barren than anything we have seen in these seas,” Banks journaled. “The people seem'd strong, lusty and well made.”
⁴

As the pinnace approached land, islanders waded out to greet the visitors. But the scene quickly devolved into a bad bazaar experience, with grabbing at anything hands might reach. Marines fired their muskets into the air—not intending to harm. Nevertheless, one islander sustained a small head wound. The away team soon returned to
Endeavour
, and Cook decided to weigh anchor.

“It appear'd that we could have no friendly intercourse with them until they had felt the smart of our fire arms, a thing that would have been very unjustifiable in me at this time,” Cook wrote. “We therefore hoisted in the boat and made sail to the southward.”

By September 2,
Endeavour
had reached the parallel her orders demanded. “At 4 p.m., being in the Latitude of 40° 22 [arc minutes] south and having not the least visible signs of land,” Cook wrote, “we wore and brought to under the fore sail and reef'd the main sail. I did intend to have stood to the southward if the winds had been moderate so long as they continued westerly . . . but as the weather was so very tempestuous, I laid aside this design, thinking it more advisable to stand to the northward.”
⁵

And so died the Southern Hemisphere's great “lost continent,” as unceremoniously as a shift in the day's breeze.

Endeavour
spent September and early October charting an inverted
V
—first bearing northwest, then southwest—toward what is today called New Zealand. On October 7, a teenage surgeon's assistant spotted land. Cook rewarded one Nicholas Young a gallon of rum.

Could Young Nick's Head[land], a place-name that remains to this day, be the first hint of the legendary Terra Australis? Cook and Banks were, as ever, dubious that the mythic continent existed. But Cook couldn't know for certain what kind of landmass he was dealing with until he could circumnavigate it. (
Endeavour
ultimately would. Young Nick had in fact lighted upon the eastern coast of New Zealand's North Island.)

The next ten days turned bloody. Shore parties encountering New Zealand tribesmen, Maori, violently ended their brief visit three times—each with fatalities—when Maori tried to steal officers' belongings or kidnap Tupaia's young assistant. Cook ordered
Endeavour
's course reversed, and she began sailing northward along New Zealand's eastern shore instead.

On November 4,
Endeavour
pulled into a bay near the North Island's northern tip.

“We were accompanied in here by several canoes who stay'd about the ship until dark,” Cook wrote. “And before they went away they were so generous as to tell us that they would come and attack us in the morning. But some of them paid us a visit in the night, thinking no doubt but what they should find all hands asleep. But as soon as they found their mistake they went off.”

Cook hoped to find a sheltering harbor to observe the more frequent—much less astronomically useful—transit of Mercury on November 9. Astronomers in Europe would also be performing careful observations of the planet Mercury crossing the sun's disk. And while Mercury's transit is too brief and the planet's solar distance too close to assist in measuring the solar system's dimensions, its November 9, 1769, transit was still a universal time stamp. Cook's observation of the Mercury transit would at least ensure that he knew the exact longitude and latitude of “Mercury Bay,” as Cook had now dubbed the inlet. All other longitudes and latitudes of Cook's (stunningly accurate) New Zealand map would build from the Mercury transit longitude.