The Day the World Discovered the Sun (3 page)

The opulent Winter Palace (today part of the Hermitage Museum) concealed the busy activity of its hundreds of residents and attendants—whose attention was now trained on the distinguished visitors from the
west. Yet for all its comforts, the Winter Palace also harbored an uncomfortable surprise. Despite her admiration for French erudition, Elizabeth had also signed off on two competing Russian Venus transit expeditions to two sites near Lake Baikal—some 1,500 miles farther east than Chappe's destination. Not all of Elizabeth's court shared their empress's Francophilia, and indeed perhaps the most revered Russian astronomer of the day, Mikhail Lomonosov, did not want to see his nation cede to a foreigner the unique opportunity for the advancement of
Russian
science that the 1761 Venus transit provided.
¹¹

Nevertheless, having mollified her patriotic Russian scientists with their own pair of expeditions, Elizabeth commanded that Chappe journey to Tobolsk with royal sanction. The lead horse on his team of sleighs would carry a special bell in its harness, signaling all Russians traveling the icy roads to clear the way for a vehicle of “royal post.” Chappe requested both a top clockmaker and a translator to join his Siberian caravan as well, provisions that were soon made. Finally on March 10, four sleighs glided eastward out of the Russian capital and into the greatest expanse of frozen wilderness the world scarcely knew.

During the ensuing two weeks, the royal sleigh's interior had become quite familiar. Chappe and his four-man crew traveled straight through—stopping for just one night's bed rest in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. On this cloudy night, Chappe fell asleep as the fresh horses he'd secured in the town of Troitskoye earlier in the evening pulled their burdens through the powder. Waking up with a jolt, he had no idea how long he'd been out. And with his translator in one of the other sleighs, there was no point trying to discover such information from his driver either. His servant, the court-appointed sergeant, the translator, and the watchmaker had all been growing increasingly irritable.
“They took some opportunity every day of showing their dissatisfaction,” Chappe later recorded.
¹²
Recovering from the groggy haze of waking up still exhausted to darkness, Chappe discovered that the three other sleighs in his party were nowhere in sight. He was now on his own. Still unsure whether a dream was getting the better of him, Chappe felt the grip of a sudden adrenaline rush. His disgruntled comrades, he realized, may have abandoned him to the wilderness. “The horror of my situation will easily be conceived,” Chappe wrote, “when I found myself alone in one of the darkest nights, at the distance of fourteen hundred leagues from my native country, in the midst of the frosts and snows of Siberia, with the images of hunger and thirst before me, to which I was likely to be exposed.”

Chappe called out to his driver to stop the sleigh. Stepping out of the tiny cab, he stood amid the glowing blackness of the cloudy night's unilluminated snowscape. He shouted the names of his four fellow travelers into the void. Not even an echo replied.

Grabbing two pistols from the sleigh, Chappe set out along one of the trodden paths that enabled him to walk without snowshoes. Eyes adjusting to extreme dark, he could make out gross features like individual trees and the clear pathway ahead of him. In his pulse-pounding, heightened state, Chappe walked straight into the woods. He knew better, but he did it anyway. Chappe stepped off the compacted trail and—one free-falling instant later—into the shivering embrace of a snowbank. Now up to his shoulders in the frozen stuff, he exhausted himself struggling back onto the path. Catching his breath and then digging his pistols out of the snow, Chappe raced back to the sleigh to warm up. He spent most of the night methodically exploring his immediate surroundings till the windchills got the better of him and sent him back to the fur blankets in his sleigh's enclosed cab.

Within a few hours, he'd discovered a source of light in the distance. It was a farmhouse. Making a reconnaissance mission to the house, Chappe peeked in the door to discover four familiar people sleeping on
the shack's floor. Next to them lay some girls, also asleep. “They seemed all to be in great want of rest,” he recalled. Creeping across the farmhouse floor to his servant, Chappe awoke the one Frenchman in his party without rousing the others. The boss was of course angry at his employees' reckless insubordination. But he left the house with his servant “as quick as I could, for I was unwilling they should discover how rejoiced I was at finding them again.”
¹³

The next morning, the reunited crew set out on the road again—all sleds and all occupants present and accounted for. In broad daylight, the roads and paths revealed themselves to be slender traffic lanes that were becoming too narrow for the travelers' tastes. Two-way traffic often couldn't fit on the road side by side. Ideally, this fact shouldn't have mattered. With its lead horse sounding the royal post bell, Chappe's sleigh commanded right-of-way, with oncoming traffic moving to one side. But they weren't anywhere near St. Petersburg, and in the wilderness the royal post law was just another irrelevant nicety of court.

As the roads to Siberia narrowed, Chappe began to tense up whenever he'd see a sledge approach. Some drivers would give the eastward bound party as much room as the road allowed. Others not as much. One incident crossed the line. The oncoming driver barely bothered to move his sledge out of the way, and Chappe's driver was evidently growing tired of Russian scofflaws. For a teeth-clenching moment, the two vehicles looked as if they might collide. But the horses on each side clearly had no interest in ramming each other head-on. A physics experiment was avoided, however narrowly. But before the offending driver could get close enough to meet with Chappe's scowling expression, a protruding arm of the other sledge's shaft rammed into Chappe's cab. Chappe's cab lost the joust. The sleigh's covering, Chappe wrote, “was carried away with so much force that I should certainly have been killed if the stroke had lighted upon me. This last shock completed the destruction of my [sleigh]. I now remained without any covering, exposed to the severity of the cold air.”
¹⁴

The three other sleds in the team also needed repairs, although none as direly as Chappe's. Consulting a regional map with his interpreter and sergeant, Chappe learned that a day's journey would bring them to the country seat of Pavel Grigoryevich Demidov, a scion of one of the richest families in Russia—and a friend of the transit expedition. A scientific amateur with a passion for botany, Demidov had given Chappe a letter in St. Petersburg commending the Frenchman to his family estates, should he need assistance during the journey into Siberia.

Demidov's Solikamsk riverside estate in the northern Ural Mountains provided comfortable refuge for a stranded traveler. Hosting a dozen greenhouses containing more than four hundred different species, Solikamsk turned out to be more than just a shack where a man could fix his sleds. “These were full of orange and lemon trees—and contained likewise all the other fruits of France and Italy, with a variety of plants and shrubs of different countries,” Chappe wrote.
¹⁵
The chief mistress of the household said that the letter Chappe carried put her under orders to treat the distinguished visitor's every request as if it came from Demidov himself.

The estate's mechanic told Chappe that he'd need at least three days to fix the broken sleds, freeing the travelers to enjoy comforts unknown since Vienna. Chappe went to the greenhouse. With 10 degrees Fahrenheit outdoor breezes buffeting the window panes, the humid, temperate climate—tinged with the welcoming scent of citrus—was all the oasis Chappe could have asked for. Moreover, the greenhouse gardener was something of a philosophe himself. Demidov had, Chappe learned, encouraged the gardener's omnibus talent by creating a small science, mathematics, and philosophy library for him. The French visitor explained his Venus transit voyage to the eager audience—as comforting as any warm breeze of greenhouse air. Excited at finding a kindred spirit, Chappe gave the gardener one of the two barometers he'd made to replace the device that the weeks of travel over craggy roads had destroyed.

On the morning of March 31, Chappe wrapped himself in a fur nightgown and, with his servant in tow, took a carriage to the estate's sweat lodge. Upon opening the lodge's creaky door, Chappe walked into a cloud that he thought was smoke from a bathhouse on fire. He fumbled for the exit and made his way back into the frigid winter air. Chappe heaved a cloudy breath, doubled over, as another of the estate's staff excused himself and opened the door through which Chappe had hastily departed. Chappe conversed with his servant, who explained that the “smoke” he'd taken such hasty exception to was mostly steam. Chappe ran to his carriage, grabbing a thermometer he'd brought along for just this purpose. Always a man of science, he now reentered the lodge to investigate the environment. His servant also walked in, disrobed, and sat down. His boss's giddiness, he said, would abate if he just gave himself a few moments to relax and acclimate himself to the new surroundings.

Chappe tried. But, for starters, the stone floor and seats were uncomfortably hot. Chappe looked at his thermometer, which read 60 degrees Celsius (140° F). He got up from the hot seat too quickly, and the next thing he remembered was coming to on the sweat lodge floor surrounded by the shards of his broken thermometer. At first he didn't move. Then, from his prone position in the coolest part of the room, Chappe ordered one of the servants to throw water on him. But the dousing didn't calm the visitor's nerves. It just made him wet.

He knew he had to leave. But how to get up and go without getting up? “Attempting therefore to put on my clothes with my body bent, while I was wet, and in too great a hurry, I found them too little for me,” Chappe later wrote. “And the more eager I was, the less able I was to get into them.”

So he grabbed his fur nightgown, trailing bits of clothing behind him, and ran to his waiting carriage. At Chappe's command, the driver hurried back to the estate as quickly as possible. The now embarrassed
guest ran to his bed. The house's headmistress was, of course, startled to see her esteemed guest in such a frenzied state. She ran up to Chappe's room and offered him some tea. He demurred.

“She gave me to understand by the Russian sergeant who began to know a little of French that I had not stayed long enough at the baths to have been sufficiently sweated,” Chappe recalled. “And that it was necessary I should drink the tea to promote perspiration.”
¹⁶

The journey's final leg bogged down as March snows melted into April slush. On April 10, the sleds crossed a final river on ice that was already underwater. The trip from Paris had consumed nineteen weeks and almost twice as many carts, carriages, sledges, and sleighs.

Approached from the west, Tobolsk looked like two cities. One sat perched on a prominent hilltop near the confluence of two rivers—the Irtysh and Tobol—that wind through the town. The other was everywhere else, in the fields and floodplains below. The entourage, driving through the western outskirts with the lead sled's post bell clanging out its imperial mission, drew locals out of their cottages. Tobolsk residents may have been accustomed to traders and trappers from the east, but actual westerners—bearing the empress's imprimatur, no less—were a rarity.

It is scarce possible to walk along the streets in this city on account of the quality of dirt there is even in the upper town. There have been foot-ways made by planks in some streets, which is the general custom in Russia. But they are kept in such bad repair at Tobolsk that you can hardly venture out except in carriages.
¹⁷

Chappe's caravan climbed the hill to the Siberian mansions of Tobolsk's leaders. Ascending the town's central prominence provided an overview of the harsh spring thaw. The Irtysh River, which surrounds the eastern part of Tobolsk in a U shape, breached its banks in places and threatened to engulf the poorer, lower-lying regions of the city.

The crumble of icy gravel beneath the sleds' runners came to a final stop at the governor's residence. The foursome, whose wobbly legs reacquainted themselves with steady ground beneath their feet, climbed down.

The governor's eldest daughter approached Chappe and kissed his hand. Unsure how to respond, Chappe learned by the time the third daughter took his hand that he was expected to mirror her gestures and make the same kissing motions simultaneously. The governor told Chappe, through the interpreter, that he'd begun to worry that the team would not make it before the spring thaw, when travel slowed or ceased entirely.

But worries could now rest, Chappe explained. The best observers—and instruments—this region had seen had now arrived. And all that remained was to find a suitable location for an observatory. Then, with an enlisted crew of local laborers at hand, the Frenchman only needed to build.

Chappe located a hilltop three-quarters of a mile from Tobolsk and, with just twenty-six days till the transit, set out to create the site where he hoped to make history. No one suffered for daylight in this northern latitude. In early May, the sun rose at 5:30
AM
and set at 9:30
PM
. By transit day, June 6, daylight would trim the night by another hour on either end. Chappe unpacked and tested his equipment: the quadrant for measuring angles on the sky, his telescopes and the elaborate mechanical mounting that kept them trained on the same star or planet even as the earth's rotation made it “move” through the sky throughout the night.