The Day the World Discovered the Sun

by Mark Anderson

  And had one royal decision not been made, the council might well have handed Boscovich the assignment—transforming his obscurity into the kind of immortal renown that other Venus transit voyagers like Mason and Dixon would soon enjoy. However, tensions within the Catholic world conspired otherwise.

  Keeping pace with courts in France and Portugal, in March 1767 the Spanish king Charles III expelled from his country all Society of Jesus members—more than 10,000 people. In exiling his nation’s increasingly radical Jesuits, Charles said he only regretted being “too lenient” before.13

  The Royal Society’s surefire plan had just backfired. In May, Douglas wrote to Spain’s ambassador assuring him the society knew the suddenly outré Jesuit father would be an “impracticable” choice to lead an English mission through Mexico. Instead, he suggested, “two of our astronomers, delegated by the Royal Society, and each accompanied by an English or foreign servant, [might] go to California to make this important and, in a way, unique observation.” In July, the Royal Society heard back from the Spanish Council of the Indies, which was insulted by the society’s presumptuousness. The society could no longer rely on Spanish cooperation.

  Just twenty-three months remained before an English expedition had to be assembled, outfitted, and shipped to the other side of the planet. The Royal Society still had no firm plans. And so—on this momentous November evening—the society summoned Maskelyne, Bevis, Short, and Ferguson to offer up their best alternatives.

  For starters, the Astronomer Royal told the Council of the Royal Society that the French had already picked up the society’s dropped lead. Jérôme Lalande, Maskelyne said, had recently made inroads with Spain to send a joint French and Spanish mission to California. So between the Swedes and Danes taking one key transit observation and the French now handling the other, England—home to the very astronomers who first championed Venus transits—might have no substantial role to play in the celebrated measurement.

  But, Maskelyne said, some Spanish- and Dutch-discovered islands in the South Seas—the Mendozas (today’s Marquesas), Rotterdam (Nomuka, Tonga), or Amsterdam (Tongatapu, Tonga)—could instead serve as a transit mission’s Pacific destination. “There is a good harbour in the Mendozas, which is rather to be preferred,” Maskelyne meekly added.14

  Ferguson sputtered on for pages without saying much. (“My opinion is . . . the sun’s parallax can be best computed by observations made at those places where the whole transit will be visible.”) Bevis and Short made Maskelyne’s wild guess of a proposal look concrete by comparison.

  “I think it advisable to cross the Tropic [of Capricorn] at about 120° or 130° west of London and then, sailing Westward, to make choice of the first island that offers, provided there be a good harbour and anchorage, fresh water and tractable inhabitants,” said Bevis—a seventy-four-year-old doctor whose opinions carried great authority due to his longtime friendship with Edmund Halley.

  Short added to Bevis’s nebulous counsel that somewhere west of South America and within 25 degrees south of the equator, “a great number of islands are set down in the maps, and any of them will do very well for this purpose.”15

  The Royal Society, in so many words, barely had a clue what to do for its primary Venus transit voyage. And worse, it still needed money.

  In a formal petition to King George III in February, members of the society’s governing council—including Astronomer Royal Maskelyne, chemistry pioneer Henry Cavendish, and American polymath Benjamin Franklin—projected a 1769 South Seas transit expedition would cost a hefty £4,000 plus the buying and customizing of the ship that would carry the expedition. The council admitted neglect in securing satisfactory results from the 1761 transit expeditions and confessed to a maddeningly uncertain destination.

  On the other hand, the council said, English prestige was on the line. Britain was the world leader in astronomy, they said, and “it would cast dishonour upon [the nation] should they neglect to have correct observations made of this important phenomenon.” Moreover, “several of the great Powers in Europe, particularly the French, Spaniards, Danes and Swedes are making the proper dispositions for the [transit] observations.”

  And as the ultimate insurance policy against a case of the royal ho-hums, the council explained that an accurate set of Venus transit observations would “contribute greatly to the improvement of astronomy, on which Navigation so much depends.”16

  By March, the king had granted the Royal Society its £4,000 plus the Royal Navy’s open purse to buy and retrofit a commercial ship for a mission to a yet to be determined island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

  THE KING’S (SHIP)YARD, DEPTFORD, ENGLAND

  March–May 1768

  As a top naval architect, Thomas Slade was the mastermind behind some of the most powerful gunboats on the oceans. A student of superior French warship design, Slade stole the Gallic crafts’ sleek curves as part of a radical overhaul of the British Navy’s battle lines. His seventy-four-gun “third rates” struck a delicate balance between hull-blasting cannon power and steady maneuverability in uncertain seas. A good commander at the helm of one of Slade’s ships could play both offense and defense like no others in the world.

  His legacy lived long, too. Not only did the Navy continue Slade’s designs well past his death—eight of the thirteen ships of the line in Nelson’s 1798 victory at the Nile originated from Slade’s drafting table—he was also a talented teacher. 17 His students, not least at the Deptford shipyard where Slade learned his craft, became one of the British Navy’s secret weapons, working the craft that helped to build the island nation’s global empire by century’s end.

  As the Surveyor of the Navy, Slade pursued a prosaic life. He scrutinized ships’ hulls, masts, and yards for maintenance and repair, and—according to the Admiralty’s orders handed down on March 23—he sized up a special order for a special mission. The proposed captain of the Royal Society’s newly funded South Seas Venus transit voyage, Alexander Dalrymple, joined Slade at the King’s Yard in Deptford. The yard, just west of Greenwich, was a hub of Royal Naval activity that had seen history unfold on its very wharfs—from Queen Elizabeth I knighting Sir Francis Drake on his Deptford-docked boat to the Russian czar Peter the Great spending three months there studying shipbuilding.

  Dalrymple later wrote in his memoirs that “Alexander Dalrymple [sic] accompanied the Surveyor of the Navy to examine two vessels that were thought fit for the purpose. The one he approved was accordingly purchased.”18

  Dalrymple was a surveyor who’d come to the Royal Society’s notice with a recent book he’d written, An Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacifick Ocean Previous to 1764. In it, he wrote of his admiration for Magellan and Columbus and how “the fond object of his [sic] attention . . . was the discovery of a Southern Continent.” The mythical Terra Australis—a hypothesized landmass in the South Seas that might counterweight the vastness of Europe, Asia, and North America—had taunted mapmakers and explorers for more than a century. And Dalrymple was a man possessed, calling the search for the mysterious continent “the great Passion of his life.”19

  A former East India Company clerk who had already ventured through some of the Pacific archipelagos under consideration, Dalrymple had been the Astronomer Royal’s favorite pick to lead the transit voyage. There was just one catch. Dalrymple would only participate in the voyage, he informed the society, as its commander.20

  History does not record how the taciturn, sixty-four-year-old career Navy man received Dalrymple, half Slade’s age. But in the pair’s review of the two merchant ships—the Valentine and the Earl of Pembroke— Slade no doubt cast his critical eye as much on the prideful young hotspur as he did on the two barks they were sizing up.

  On March 29, Slade and associates reported back to the Admiralty that they’d purchased the Earl of Pembroke—“a ‘cat-built’ bark in burthen 368 tons, 3 years, 9 months old”—for £2,307. Built to haul coal, Pembroke was every inch the fatted cow to
the majestic warhorses the King’s Yard usually sent bounding out to sea. Although she’d ultimately be outfitted with guns, the ship’s unwarlike looks would later cause great grief in South American waters. (The term “cat-built” has uncertain origins. One etymology has the first word as an acronym for “coal and timber.” Ships of this calling were known for their round bluff bows, their deep waists, and tapered sterns.)

  Now Slade and his Deptford apprentices would be transforming a sturdy but dumpy collier into a globetrotting explorer’s vessel, ready for anything that might be hiding in the vast South Pacific and beyond.

  The three-year-old Pembroke was at her prime, having already settled into her joints—but not yet wearing into them or otherwise loosening at the seams. Her bottom and sides, however, had known only cold and choppy North Sea waters. On the other hand, ships anchoring in stiller and warmer tropical ports such as Kingston, Jamaica, had famously fallen prey to marine shipworms, a wood-burrowing insect that, as one traveler said, “cut[s] with great facility through the planks and burrow[s] a considerable way in the substance of them, incrustating the sides of all their holes with a smooth testaceous substance.”21

  Preparing the ship to ward off such infestations was only the first order of duty when on April 7 the Royal Navy’s Survey Office recorded, “Ship purchased to be sheathed, filled and fitted for a voyage to the southward. To be called The Endeavour Bark.”22

  Sheathing and filling the outer hull meant slopping on a tar-pitch-sulfur mixture and then fastening fir planks atop the goop. The “fitting,” though, was the real challenge. The newly christened Endeavour—still little more than a floating box—may have looked ugly. However, the oversize holds designed to maximize coal tonnage could now yield precious living and cargo space that a prettier vessel couldn’t accommodate. A collier of Endeavour’s size might normally carry a crew of sixteen. Slade’s men built a whole extra deck, increasing her capacity sixfold to ninety-four men. Still, despite the tight quarters, the spacious officers’ area—complete with skylight-illuminated lobby—afforded the kind of elbow room Endeavour’s botanical and zoological mission required, too. She also sailed with eighteen months’ worth of stores: 10,000 kilograms of bread (a dried biscuit called hardtack), 10,000 pieces of salted beef and pork, as well as 5,400 liters each of beer and spirits and 30 tons of fresh water. Despite all the tonnage of equipment and provisions, she nevertheless kept a shallow draft—a standard feature of colliers that allowed them to be beached to unload coal. Such comparatively low displacement would ultimately translate to safe passage through otherwise impassable waters.23

  Slade’s protégés spent the ensuing seventy-two days, minus time lost during a waterfront strike in early May, overhauling the modest bark into a ship that would be enshrined in British naval legend. Incorporation of spare crucial components like anchors and launch boats would prove essential to the mission in due course. One longboat’s ultimate destruction at the teeth of tropical marine worms only underscored the importance of Endeavour’s proper sheathing and filling. Moreover, even tiny details like backup “gammoning rings” (holding in place the forward-thrusting spar—bowsprit—that in turn helps steady the front mast) and tight covering of the companionway (the quarterdeck’s only below-deck access point) might have seemed inconsequential on the Deptford docks. But attention to such details ensured that when the main gammoning did indeed break (off the Brazilian coast) and when gale-force winds submerged the entire quarterdeck (near Cape Horn), the ship’s “fittings” proved anything but trivial.24

  According to one discerning lieutenant who would be circumnavigating the planet on Endeavour, the Royal Naval refit of the humble Pembroke made the forthcoming voyage “as well provided for . . . as possible, and a better ship for such a service I never could wish for.”25

  The officer was one James Cook. A forty-year-old naval veteran of the Seven Years’ War, Cook had first plied the North Seas working in colliers like the Endeavour. Now, after having made his wartime reputation as a supremely careful surveyor willing to brave dangerous assignments, Cook had earned the admiration of some of the military’s chief officers, such as Navy secretary Sir Philip Stephens. With Stephens and Admiral Hugh Palliser lobbying for him behind the scenes, Cook soon emerged as the Navy’s first choice for the mission.26 But the Royal Society’s proposed captain, Dalrymple, would still not relinquish his commanding role.

  So Admiral Edward Hawke took a more personal tack. At a Royal Society meeting in early April, Hawke publicly told Dalrymple that “such appointment would be entirely repugnant to the regulations of the Navy.” The Navy provided its own helmsmen, Hawke made clear. And those rare occasions when it didn’t—such as the near mutiny Edmund Halley had inspired when he captained a 1698 overseas scientific mission—only reinforced the Admiralty’s prejudice against civilians commanding military vessels. If Dalrymple was preparing for a standoff, the Navy only saw it as a stand-down. Cook, newly raised to the rank of lieutenant, would captain the Endeavour. And that was that. But Dalrymple, the society’s records note, “persisted in declining the employment of observer.”27 Lacking a vessel to captain, he would not sail at all.

  On May 5, James Campbell—a naval officer and member of the Royal Society Council—suggested his friend Lieutenant Cook could fill dual roles, arguing that Cook was “a proper person to be one of the observers in the observation of the transit of Venus.”28 The society was already well aware of Cook’s astronomical qualifications; his careful observations of a solar eclipse in Newfoundland two years before had been the basis for Cook’s carefully detailed map of the island. Still, for the upcoming mission, Captain Cook would be second in command astronomically to the new primary observer of the Venus transit mission: Charles Green.

  After Maskelyne had risen to Astronomer Royal in 1765, Green—the previous Astronomer Royal’s assistant—found work somewhere else. Green had instead pointed his mathematical talents toward a public works venture to divert freshwater from the Coln River west of London toward the city’s outer suburbs. No partisan to the counterfactual, Green had told his new employers that surveys of the terrain suggested the scheme wouldn’t work. The venture collapsed.29

  Meantime, in March, Green had married Elizabeth Long in London. And on the strength of his Barbados experience, Green earned an appointment to the post of purser for the Royal Navy’s frigate Aurora. Despite their falling-out after the Barbados trip, the Astronomer Royal in the end favored talent over grudges. Maskelyne’s lobbying assured Green the Royal Society’s job of lead astronomer on Captain Cook’s Venus transit voyage.30

  Now with a ship and capable men to captain and lead its primary scientific missions, all the Endeavour lacked was a destination. Maskelyne’s nebulous best guess was still its best hope.

  On May 23, 1768, newspapers began headlining an incredible story. Letters from the newly landed explorer’s ship HMS Dolphin posted dispatches from a new Pacific paradise. “We have discovered a large, fertile and extremely populous island in the South Seas,” the letter read. “From the behaviour of the inhabitants, we had reason to believe [ours] was the first and only ship they had ever seen. . . . ‘Tis impossible to describe the beautiful prospects we beheld in this charming spot; the verdure is as fine as that of England; there is great plenty of live stock, and it abounds with all the choicest productions of the Earth.”31

  Rumors had been spreading that the Dolphin crew had brought back Patagonian giants. (The rumors proved to be false.) Stories of first encounters with the natives of the new island—Tahiti—did, however, withstand verification. “The first day they came along side [the Dolphin] with a number of canoes, in order to take possession of her. There were two divisions, one filled with men, and the other with women—these last endeavoured to engage the attention of our sailors by exposing their beauties to their view,” a correspondent wrote in the London Magazine. After describing an initial failed attempt at attacking the Dolphin, one that left the ship’s captain Samuel Wallis no recours
e but to open fire with her big guns, the peoples of this island “immediately showed the greatest desire of being at peace with us.”

  “The natives,” the correspondent continued, “are in general taller and stouter made than our people and are mostly of a copper colour with black hair. . . . It does not appear that they know the use of any one metal whatever. When the grapeshot came among them, they dived after it and brought up the pieces of lead.”32

  PLYMOUTH

  May–August 1768

  On May 27 the Endeavour’s masthead first carried a white and red Royal Naval pendant, signifying an officer of His Majesty’s fleet now commanded the ship. Lieutenant—the Royal Society more loosely termed him “Captain”—James Cook now was at the helm. Since taking charge of the ship, Cook had supervised Endeavour’s final renovations, had received ordnance downstream on the Thames (along a stretch of river called Gallions Reach), and had sailed to Plymouth for her final loading and staffing before setting out to sea.

  The onboard scientific kit that Cook and Green were preparing constituted some of the finest portable astronomical instruments in the world. Royal Society member James Short—who’d essentially shrugged his shoulders when asked where to send the transit voyage—made the most sought-after telescopes in England. He furnished two for Endeavour. The Navy also provided Cook with a simpler scope with which he’d already become familiar on previous missions, while a British Museum scientist on the voyage would be bringing his own thirty-six-inch telescope to rival the two-footers Short had built. For measuring angles between objects in the sky, the society outfitted Endeavour with the best designs of dimensions both compact—brass sextant by Jesse Ramsden—and large—one-foot astronomical quadrant by John Bird.33 The Astronomer Royal’s staff had been working overtime to supply Endeavour with Nautical Almanacs for both 1768 and 1769—enabling the quadrants and sextants to serve as precision longitude finders for at least the next year and a half. And for tracking the ship’s heading, the Navy installed magnetic compasses from the shop of Gowin Knight, the nation’s most celebrated geomagnetist.34 Similarly top-rated and redundant clocks, thermometers, micrometers, and stands rounded out a gear manifest that carried the pride of an increasingly technologically sophisticated nation. The Royal Society was also sending the Nautical Almanac computer William Wales and assistant Joseph Dymond to Hudson’s Bay to observe the Venus transit. (This despite the fact that Wales had informed the society that he “prefer[red] a voyage to a warm climate.”) No less impressive than Endeavour’s scientific instruments were Wales’s James Short–designed telescopes as well as a pair of quadrants, three clocks, a barometer, and a thermometer.35