JUST OUTSIDE RIGA, RUSSIA (PRESENT-DAY LATVIA)
February 7, 1761
The screech of metal sliding over rock announced that the sleigh was stuck. No one was going anywhere. Cacophonous chatter among the Russian sleigh drivers broke the final seal on this otherwise quiet early evening. Stepping onto sled runners that had nothing to glide on, Chappe saw little else but dark. With no moon in the sky, two sources of dim light cast pale shadows on the patchy snow. To the west, the brilliant Milky Way formed a horizon-to-horizon hoop framing Chappe’s entire world. And off to the southwest beamed Venus, that tiny beacon. It was setting.
For these travelers, though, the night was just beginning. Chappe’s Russian translator, hired sixteen days before in Warsaw, was drunk beyond saving. “We could neither make him listen to reason nor hold his tongue,” Chappe later wrote of his Siberian journey.9 So the scientist was left to deal with the belligerent drivers himself. They quarreled and fumed, although over what Chappe had no idea. The frigid night lent a sense of urgency to an otherwise rather comical situation. Suffering frostbite—or worse—was a real possibility if they did not get help. Chappe fortunately did have a multilingual communicator with him: a single Russian ruble (equivalent to about $75 today). Showing it to his drivers, Chappe conveyed through gestures and whatever words the group had in common that he’d pay one of the drivers to go back to Riga and get help. Everyone volunteered. Each volunteer took a horse and shot off toward town, leaving Chappe and his babbling translator behind with the abandoned sleighs.
By midnight, torches and townsfolk—plus a false start involving more bribes and torn rope—had finally set the party moving again, back on carriage wheels.
As his carriage bumped along, Chappe caught a little sleep through a turbulent night. The snow grew heavier, though, and before long they wished they were back on sledges again. A morning snow squall left the carriages barely moving forward as the horses stopped every minute. To make matters worse, the baggage carriage overturned into a ditch with a tremendous crash. Earlier in the journey, when traveling by coach from Paris to Strasbourg, his group’s baggage cart suffered a similar calamity. In his wreck outside Strasbourg, Chappe had jumped out of his carriage to check on the delicate scientific instruments in the cart. At the moment, though, the road-weary traveler had no impulse to dive into the snowy wreckage. Over an unpleasant din of whinnies, blows, and snorts, horses were settled down and reharnessed, and the carriage was righted. The road widened as the sun sank.
Just outside of Wolmar (today Valmiera, Latvia), the wind, in concert with a hedgerow of trees, had swept out a long line of snow banks. The coachmen carefully drove the horses through the gauntlet. The road beneath remained rocky as before, although the banks’ smooth-blown surfaces fleetingly suggested fewer potholes in the road than there actually were. Then everything sank. As suddenly as a musket shot, the startled horses and lead carriage fell into a snowed-over sinkhole. Once Chappe and his companions recovered from the shock, they looked around to see the entire stagecoach had been buried. Only an opening in the vehicle’s roof allowed the battered passengers to exit. The horses struggled to keep their heads above the snow, their eyes wide with panic.
The driver of the baggage carriage—which remained outside the sinkhole—jumped down and unhitched his team. The once quiet Russian roadside now echoed with a brace of shouts, heaves, and misunderstood commands. All hands now worked to rescue the animals and the buried coach from their icy interment using the only horsepower they had available. No bribes (at least none Chappe considered worth recording) passed hands this time as one of the drivers rode to town to get shovels. The group spent the better part of the day excavating the horses, vehicle, and equipment from the snowdrift.
Their cold, wet clothes, icy gear, and shell-shocked steeds made the drivers swear off carriage wheels for good. At the next town, the drivers installed runners on the convertible carriage. And at the next major posting station—the university town of Derpt (present-day Tartu, Estonia)—the travelers traded the converted vehicles for horse-drawn sleighs.
This time the weather cooperated, and no snowless patches conspired to hinder the group’s progress. Sobering windchills kept normally exposed cheeks and necklines hidden beneath scarves and collars. But other than the trouble of additional layers, the party’s final fortnight toward St. Petersburg was smooth as the ride itself.
As the travelers approached the colossal Russian palace that was their destination on February 13, familiar sounds that Chappe and his servants hadn’t heard since Vienna pricked up their ears—conversations in courtly French. Russian empress Elizabeth, although largely uneducated, took pride in importing erudite western European culture into her realm. To her, this meant all things French: language, music, dance, art, and cuisine.10 Elizabeth’s Winter Palace—stunning and magnificent like Versailles—offered up French gastronomical delights for the starving travelers. And its halls resounded with French courtly music like the harpsichord variations of Jacques Duphly or clavichord compositions of Johann Schobert.
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.
WOODS OUTSIDE TROITSKOYE, RUSSIA
March 26, 1761
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
TOBOLSK, SIBERIA
April 1761
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 im
perial 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 Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 2