The Day the World Discovered the Sun (29 page)

As Banks recorded in his journal, he continued collecting specimens while Cook performed his astronomical and navigational tasks.

“At day break this morn a vast number of boats were on board almost loaded with mackerel of 2 sorts, one exactly the same as is caught in England,” Banks wrote. “We concluded that they had caught a large shoal and sold us the overplus what they could not consume, as they set very little value upon them. It was however a fortunate circumstance for us, as by 8 o'clock the ship had more fish on board than all hands could eat in 2 or 3 days. And before night so many that every mess who could raise salt, corn'd as many as will last them this month or more.

“After an early breakfast the astronomer went on shore to observe the transit of Mercury,” Banks continued. “Which he did without the smallest cloud intervening to obstruct him, a fortunate circumstance
as except yesterday and today we have not had a clear day for some time.”

Captain Cook didn't know it at the time, but when he swung into his cot on the night of Monday, June 11, 1770,
Endeavour
's wonderfully unsexy flat keel was about to save his entire mission. At 11:00
PM
, even as recent soundings of the ocean depth had read 17 fathoms (31 meters), the ship suddenly and without warning crashed onto a coral reef. The cacophonous crunch of splintering hull certainly sounded dire at the moment of impact. But practically any other ship of
Endeavour
's size in His Majesty's Navy would likely have been doomed to sink. As it was,
Endeavour
had a blind date with the Great Barrier Reef and might still be salvaged.
⁶

The ship had circumnavigated all of New Zealand, creating exquisitely detailed charts of the two islands that made New Zealand's for a brief time the most accurately mapped coastline in the world. Only after
Endeavour
had completed its mission and Cook's new and innovative cartographic methods were applied to European coastlines did Cook's New Zealand map have any true rivals.
⁷

Now she was plying the east coast of New Holland (today's eastern shores of Australia) and discovering new worlds of flora, fauna, and native populations that kept its gentlemen explorers working day and night. One fishing expedition on
Endeavour
's yawl—the smallest of the ship's three launchable sailing vessels—had recently returned with six hundred pounds of stingrays. Over the ensuing fortnight, Banks's young artist Parkinson made ninety-four sketches of various flora samples collected from shore visits along the way.

The Australian continent's cornucopia of natural wonders was proving so exciting—and distracting—that some warning signals might have
been ignored. No European expedition had come this close to the Great Barrier Reef before. When the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville had sailed through the same waters two years before, he heard the roar of surf breaking on the nearby reef. “This was the voice of God,” the French mariner recorded in his journals as his ship fled toward open ocean, “And we obeyed it.”
⁸

After the jolt of impact, Cook raced up to the main deck in his underwear. He ordered all sails taken in to avoid being blown farther onto the reef. And the surf that Bougainville had discovered now broke onto
Endeavour
's hull, momentarily lifting and then dropping the boat with each passing wave. Thankfully, the moon was nearly full, and all hands on deck could see what they were doing as the captain assessed the dreadful situation. Within minutes, the crew watched helplessly as shards of
Endeavour
floated away from the ship and into the reef's shallow waters.

Cook ordered a detachment of men onto the longboat to attempt to pull
Endeavour
back off the reef complex. The bark would not budge. Engineers reported from below deck that the ship was taking in water and needed to be refloated fast lest the lowering tide strand her till the higher waters returned again the following evening.

Cook delegated his officers to quickly assess what ballast could best be tossed overboard to lighten the ship's load. The crew jettisoned casks, drinking water, spoiled food, iron and stone, and six cannon.
Endeavour
, now forty or fifty tons lighter, still wouldn't move.

Further salvaging techniques failed over the coming day, until finally at 9:00
PM
, the ship righted itself. She might make it to shore, Cook hoped, if only her wounds could be staunched. The ship's master had found a harbor to the north. So
Endeavour
plodded ahead in its new race against the clock. To slow the leakage of seawater into the ship, midshipman Monkhouse filled a spare sail with wool, animal dung, and tar-filled rope fibers. They lowered the “fothering” overboard from the
main deck, and like a drain plug in a bathtub, the water's suction power fastened the makeshift patch against the broken hull.

Endeavour
made it to the mouth of a river—a waterway Cook named Endeavour—where at high tide the bark was beached so the blacksmith and carpenters could begin repairing the wounded vessel. The reef itself, an inspection soon revealed, had saved the entire ship from sinking. The fothering had only closed up part of the hull's hole. Part of the hull-cutting reef had broken off, and the fothering had inadvertently wedged the coral into place to fill the gap.

By June 22, all crew members were camped onshore and recuperating from the nearly fatal disaster. Banks, of course, seized the opportunity to collect more specimens. Along with the usual catch of birds and satchels full of plants, Banks and Cook caught glimpses of a beast that was nothing like they'd ever seen before.

“It was of a light mouse color and the full size of a greyhound,” Cook recorded. “I should have taken it for a wild dog but for its walking or running in which it jump'd like a hare or a deer.”
⁹
According to Tupaia their Tahitian interpreter, whose interpretive skills were weakening as the ship ventured farther and farther away from his native island, the locals called this animal “kangooroo.”

Banks now turned his sights on hunting the strange animal. The newly discovered marsupial, Banks wrote, “hop[s] upon only its hinder legs, carrying its fore close bent to its breast. In this manner, however, it hops so fast that in the rocky bad ground where it is commonly found it easily beat my greyhound, who, though he was fairly started at several, killed only one and that quite a young one.”
¹⁰

Cook concluded, simply, that the kangaroo “proved most excellent meat.”
¹¹

The repaired
Endeavour
continued to leak and ultimately required the attention of professional shipwrights in a bona fide naval yard. Cook knew his best chance of surviving passage through the Indian Ocean and beyond the Cape of Good Hope was to refit
Endeavour
at the Dutch East India Company's headquarters in Batavia. A ship that probably couldn't have made the return voyage thus docked at the company shipyards. In Banks's words, crew members were “rosy and plump” when the ailing ship pulled into port.

The Dutch had built Batavia in the early 1600s and, naturally, filled the city with canals. Over the ensuing century and a half, however, the stagnant water, sewage, and animal carcasses in the canal made the East India Company capital city a festering swamp of malaria and dysentery.

During the twelve weeks the shipwrights required to repair
Endeavour
, all but one of the ship's crew fell sick at least once.
Endeavour
's healthiest shipmate turned out to be John Ravenhill, a sail maker characterized by Cook as a drunk. By Cook's estimate Ravenhill was “an old man about 70 or 80 years.” Actually Ravenhill was forty-nine.
¹²

On December 26, when Cook finally weighed anchor and set sail for Cape Town, the captain wrote that
Endeavour
left Batavia “in the condition of a hospital ship. [We lost] seven men, and yet all the Dutch captains I had an opportunity to converse with said that we had been very lucky and wondered that we had not lost half our people in that time.”
¹³

Cook would continue losing men on his “hospital ship” as they set sail across the Indian Ocean. (The unhealthy “fresh” drinking water that
Endeavour
took aboard at Batavia was the likely culprit.)
¹⁴
During the first two weeks out of Batavia, another seventeen died. Banks's young artist, Parkinson, died on January 27, 1771. Two days later, Cook recorded in his journal the final passage of his chief astronomer.

“In the night died Mr. Charles Green who was sent out by the Royal Society to observe the transit of Venus,” Cook wrote on January 29. “He had long been in a bad state of health, which he took no care to repair—but on the contrary lived in such a manner as greatly promoted the disorders he had had long upon him. This brought on the flux which put a period to his life.”
¹⁵

The mildly good news, as some of those suffering from the Baja fever began to see, is that ultimately the plague was survivable. “The patient talks somewhat incoherently, yet knows his friends and will answer questions with tolerable distinctness,” the jail fever chronicler said about the third phase of the illness. “In this situation he continues six, seven, eight, nine, ten or eleven days and from which, if the symptoms do not increase, he gradually recovers.”
¹

By June 5, Chappe had become both chief astronomer and chief doctor to the mission. “Mr. Chappe had brought with him from France a little chest of medicines and some physic [medical] books,” Pauly wrote. “In this emergency he was an occasional physician. He examined the symptoms of the disease, then consulting his books, he endeavored to find out the proper remedies. But he soon found himself as much at a loss as those who formerly consulted the oracles, whose ambiguous answers frequently admitted of two opposite meanings, and left them as much in the dark as before.”
²

Chappe remained busy in his observatory, too. On the night of June 6, he trained his telescope on Jupiter to mark the time its moon Io
crossed behind the planet.
³
Chappe notes in his logbook that his observation of Io's eclipse behind Jupiter was something close to ideal. “Perfect observation,” he wrote.
⁴
The next four nights Chappe was up late observing the “culmination” of the stars Arcturus and Kornephoros (the second-brightest star in the constellation Hercules). An astronomical culmination is the equivalent of solar noon for any given star. It's the highest point in the sky that a star's east-west journey carries it on any given night. And just like regular noon, when a star is at its culmination, it's almost exactly halfway between where it rose in the east and where it'll be setting in the west. This makes two different, nearly perpendicular angles on the sky.
⁵
So it provides an opportunity to test slight errors in one's astronomical quadrants. On the night of June 7, Chappe measured both the distance toward the eastern horizon from Arcturus and Kornephoros at culmination. On June 8, he took the same measurement but this time toward the western horizon. Later analysis proved that the quadrant he used to take transit data carried, over wide angles, an intrinsic error of 1 arc minute and 25 arc seconds.
⁶

During the 9:00
AM
and 2:00
PM
hours on June 8, Chappe busied himself with careful measurements of the sun to test any slight or subtle drift rates in his pendulum clock. And then on the nights of Friday, June 9, and Saturday, June 10, he went back to using his quadrant to take culmination measurements on Arcturus and Kornephoros again.

For Chappe, Sundays at the mission were hardly days of rest. Sunday, June 4, the day after the Venus transit, Chappe had been busy both day and night measuring the sun's motion and Jupiter's moons to continue collecting data that would pin down both his clock's exact error rate and his observatory's longitude. But the following Sunday, June 11, was a different story. This time, as Pauly noted, Chappe “had a violent pain in his side and was delirious at times.”
⁷
Typhus had struck the group's leader.

Bouts of fever and delirium came in twenty-six to twenty-eight-hour stretches. “He was forced to prepare his own medicines,” Pauly noted. When he was still well, Chappe had relied on another healthy member of the mission to mix the tonics. But one vial was mistaken for another, and as a result the group's feverish artist Noël had nearly been poisoned. Chappe wasn't going to make that mistake again.

Chappe's astronomical measurements, of course, stopped. But Chappe also knew that on June 18, one week into his illness, there would be a lunar eclipse. Astronomers all across Europe would be timing the exact moment of the eclipse's beginning and end. This was the ultimate cure-all for his longitude problem. Chappe had resolved, regardless of his health, to measure the June 18 eclipse with the same precision that had defined his transit data. “It is inconceivable how Mr. Chappe, low as he was, laboring under his malady, weakened by the fever fits he had gone through, could lend as close an attention to this phenomenon as the ablest observer could have done in full health,” Pauly wrote. “Indeed he had much ado to hold out to the end of the observation. He was taken with a fainting fit, and a pain in his head. . . . He desired to be let blood; his interpreter, a surgeon who had never practiced much, and who was himself sick, tried to bleed him but missed. However, encouraged by Mr. Chappe, he tried again and succeeded.”
⁸