The Day the World Discovered the Sun

by Mark Anderson

  The ship’s captain, no doubt in a gesture intended to placate the founder of the recently expelled Jesuits, set up a shrine on La Concepcíon to St. Francis Xavier. The captain, Chappe wrote, “laid [an offering] upon the binacle, beseeching him to send us a fair wind. The devout pilot’s remedy did not presently take effect, for the following days we had a succession of calms and contrary winds.”

  The boat continued to sail farther north, beyond the latitude of its destination, hoping to find a more generous current to cross the gulf. “From this time, it was my fixed resolution to land at the first place we could reach in California,” Chappe recorded. “I little cared whether it was inhabited or desert, so [long] as I could but make my observation.”

  By nightfall on May 18, some “favorable gales,” in Chappe’s words, had brought La Concepcíon—almost miraculously—to within twenty miles of Baja peninsular land. The captain surmised they were approaching San José del Cabo, a small town near the peninsula’s southern tip. The Spanish officers knew, however, that San José del Cabo would be a difficult landing. Heading toward this patch of Baja, they argued, risked wrecking the whole ship. “I was strenuous for landing at the nearest place,” Chappe recalled. “But as I was singular in my opinion the whole day was spent in altercations. . . . I was confident that his Catholic Majesty had rather lose a poor pitiful vessel than the fruits of so important an expedition as ours.”

  Doz, Medina, and the captain argued for traveling a little farther down the coast, to more accommodating ports in the bay of San Barnabé. Chappe would have none of it. Time was running out, and no options looked better than the coastline that now lay before them. The ship’s master, familiar with San José del Cabo, said that although the landing might be rough, he also knew a Franciscan mission nearby that could serve the expedition’s purpose well.

  So on Friday, May 19—with just over a fortnight before the Venus transit—La Concepcíon dropped anchor less than two miles from the river that led inland toward their ultimate destination. As if on cue, the wind whipped up a new microstorm, one that set tempers blazing again. But it died down just as quickly, before any heated verbal exchanges could be logged.

  Pauly and the expedition’s young artist, Alexandre-Jean Noël, climbed aboard a longboat and hauled most of the equipment ashore. The sight of such a pathetic craft ferrying such essential gear must have raised the nerves to the kind of heights that a man like Chappe, under other circumstances, might have wanted to study. Chappe could only watch helplessly as the longboat capsized again and again in the rough surf.

  Pauly returned to La Concepcíon alone, informing his boss that through some brave twist of luck, “They came off with no other harm than their fright and being very wet, as were all the chests.” On Chappe’s boat ride toward land, he wrapped up his clock and kept it close. “I . . . sat down upon it myself, to keep it dry in case the waves should chance to wash us,” Chappe wrote.

  The ocean had already soaked the longboat’s passengers on approach to shore. And as breakers pushed the craft toward its uneasy meeting with white sand, the saltwater spray ensured no clothes or unpacked provisions came ashore without a briny overscent coloring the sweat and stench of a long passage. The boom of a vivacious gulf now safely behind him was all the roaring crowd Chappe needed.

  “Then it was that casting my eyes upon my instruments that lay all around me, and not one of them damaged in the least,” Chappe reflected, “revolving in my mind the vast extent of land and sea that I had so happily compassed, and chiefly reflecting that I had still enough time before me, fully to prepare my intended observation, I felt such a torrent of joy and satisfaction, it is impossible to express, so as to convey an adequate idea of my sensation.”

  The sun hung low over the scrubby San Felipe foothills to the northwest. Nightfall was too close at hand to venture to San José del Cabo’s active mission seven miles inland. Instead, the abandoned former mission at the edge of the beach was their nearest shelter for the night. Freshwater from the nearby lagoon quenched the party, while fresh pitahaya fruit must have tasted like multicolored manna to stale mouths deadened by salt meats and hardtack.

  One part of the abandoned beachside property, however, was active. The nearby cemetery kept an informal history of the region told in tombstones—grave markers for local missionaries and converted indigenes of the peninsula, dating back to the mission’s founding in 1730.26

  And judging from the number of fresh graves, in fact, history was still being made. Word had been spreading across the region that for nearly a year a brutal fever had been carrying off both Spanish and native populations like nothing since the spotted fever epidemics of the 1740s.27 Some called this new plague measles, others a different kind of grande enfermedad. All who knew enough to say knew enough to advise the travelers to stay far away from anyone infected.

  The thundering surf feeding in from the bay sounded a steady and soothing drone to the travelers who at last lay down for the night, casting their thoughts northward to their final inland destination just a couple of leagues away.

  A welcome sleep washed over the voyagers. Even as fits of chills and shivers gripped stricken locals in the epidemic’s deadly embrace, a warm offshore breeze kissed the nearby jacaranda trees, cradling their purple blossoms softly to the ground.

  Chapter 7

  GREAT EXPEDITION

  PRAGUE AND CENTRAL BOHEMIA

  May 1–6, 1768

  The window to an unfurnished room slammed shut. From behind it, sharp words muttered in a vaguely Scandinavian-sounding language filtered out into the spring night. The linguist and astronomer Joannes Sajnovics and his boss Father Maximilian Hell—two Jesuit scientists on their way to observe the 1769 Venus transit from a northern Norwegian island—had taken lodgings for the evening in the Bohemian town of Kolín. And Sajnovics was not pleased.

  “They barely gave us anything for dinner,” Sajnovics (pronounced SHINE-oh-vitch) groused in his travel diary. “We spent the night sleeping on a tiny bit of straw. We could hear the most vacuous music from the neighboring tavern, as much as the impossible sound lacking any refinement of two whistles can be considered music. Good thing they stopped it around ten.”1

  Hell and Sajnovics were Hungarians who had accepted an invitation from the teenage king of Denmark to gather Venus transit data from a desirable location in his kingdom: an island garrison that’s practically as close as the European continent gets to the North Pole. Hell, who had met Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche on the Frenchman’s way through Vienna in 1760, was a Jesuit man of science. Hell enjoyed a place of prestige as chief astronomer to Holy Roman empress Maria Theresa and had edited a lunar calendar and ephemeris that had predated Nevil Maskelyne’s Nautical Almanac—and was intended more for fellow astronomers’ use than for facilitating navigation at sea. Hell had also earned some clout demolishing the claims, some coming from Danish astronomers, that Venus had its own moon. (Hell was right to criticize. The planet Venus, as we know today, does not have any moons.)2 However, Hell, who’d turned forty-eight in January, was no youngster. And the 1761 transit had left the most important number in astronomy frustratingly indeterminate. The solar distance, also called the astronomical unit (AU), still demanded its celebrated discoverers. The only remaining opportunity the century provided to unveil it still yielded the greatest calling any man of the stars might have hoped for.

  Hell had turned down two other propositions to observe the transit from other locations. But the Danish king’s offer placed him in an ideal position. The best astronomers in the world, French and British, were observing the transit at tropical locations in the South Seas and at the distant edge of New Spain. But their results would be practically meaningless in the quest for the AU unless they could compare their data with similar observations performed at higher, preferably arctic, latitudes. That a Protestant monarch would invite a Jesuit scholar into his kingdom to gather this needed arctic data could only, as Hell saw it, have been the intervention o
f divine providence.3

  Accepting King Christian VII’s invitation, Hell picked Sajnovics as his junior scientist, a thirty-five-year-old former assistant from the Vienna observatory who was a fellow Hungarian and Jesuit. Brooding and saturnine, Hell had found a travel mate whose animated and tetchy travel diary entries showcase a pair of men almost comically misfit for one another. Their entourage included a servant, Sebastian Kohl, and Hell’s dog, Apropos.

  As Sajnovics recorded it, the duo’s audience with the empress in Vienna had left the assistant a little starstruck. “Her Highness asked for my name,” Sajnovics wrote in a letter at the time. “She asked me where I was from and who my relatives were. Moving on to my astronomical studies, she asked about them so affably, in such a friendly and gracious manner, that her confidential and relaxed conversation completely beguiled me. Finally she made me promise that I would bring back her Hell safe and sound.”4

  Hell and Sajnovics were now making their way north from Vienna to the German port city of Lübeck—where their scientific instruments had already been shipped—whence they would sail to Copenhagen and ultimately embark for their northernmost Scandinavian destination. The voyage carried the familiar clocks, telescopes, and quadrants necessary for precision measurements of Venus crossing the sun’s disk on June 3, 1769. But Hell and Sajnovics also brought with them magnetic compasses to satisfy their own scientific curiosity about the subtle variations in the earth’s magnetic pull.

  Since geomagnetism was a new science, one that some contemporaries were exploring as possibly another means of determining longitude at sea, Hell saw his arctic voyage as an opportunity to explore the frontiers of human knowledge, whatever form it may take.

  As Hell would later write in a letter, “Along with these astronomical tasks I shall not neglect work related to the realm of the physical, such as magnetic [measurements], observations with barometers and thermometers, northern lights, and the tides. That means everything I find useful for astronomy, navigation, geography, physics and understanding of nature; all of this will contribute to my work.”5

  Reaching Prague on May 2, Hell and Sajnovics paid their homage to the astronomers at the local university the next day. Having enjoyed a quiet breakfast after morning mass, the travelers ascended the tower housing the college’s observatory. (“It is very tiresome getting up to it on the wooden steps,” Sajnovics recorded.) The visitors introduced themselves and admired the observatory’s instruments. Sajnovics was impressed with the local handiwork behind the astronomical quadrants. “These two instruments were made here in Prague,” Sajnovics wrote (but presumably did not utter to his hosts). “So carefully, exquisitely and splendidly that one might consider it an English job.”6

  Despite a day that threatened rain and thunderstorms, Hell and Sajnovics rode in the college rector’s four-horse carriage across the Vltava River to visit St. Vitus’s Cathedral. “The vicar thought we were Italian abbots,” Sajnovics recalled. “We were wearing completely black dresses with a collar—like abbots do—with two hanging white stoles and a small pallium made out of black silk.” The pair took mass at the cathedral and kissed the relics of “many famous saints,” including that of the medieval martyr who is also the national saint of the Czech people, St. John of Nepomuk. They took mass again the next day, Thursday, May 5, and continued their northward trek toward the land of the midnight sun. Sajnovics, a gourmand at heart, relished his pheasant dinner and trout lunch the next day. The expedition followed the river out of Prague, even as the Vltava becomes the Elbe approaching Germany. “We set out on a wicked road, on the left of which the river Elba was flowing, constantly fearing that rocks would fall off the steep cliffs,” Sajnovics recalled. “We spent the night in a lonely house. From here we could see a white chapel on the top of a mountain so high that from afar it seemed to be the biggest mountain of Bohemia, almost impossible to climb by man. That’s it for today.”7

  TRAVENTHAL HOUSE AND SURROUNDING DUCHY OF SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN (TODAY NORTHERN GERMANY)

  May 30–June 1, 1768

  By the end of May, the party was approaching its first seaport, Lübeck. Its original intent was to sail from Lübeck to Copenhagen and meet the Danish king who had so graciously enabled the voyage. However, along the way, the travelers learned that the nineteen-year-old recently crowned monarch, Christian VII, had just embarked for a grand tour of England and the Continent. Kings of Denmark at the time also carried the title Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, the region where the visitors now stood. The dukedom’s seat lay eighteen miles west of Lübeck. Traventhal House—although the word “house” does meek justice to the pleasure palace it describes—was a beehive of activity as Sajnovics and Hell’s carriages pulled into town.

  “We arrived in the village of Traventhal in the evening,” Sajnovics recorded in his diary for May 30. “Everything was crammed with people. We had to make do with any old room in the inn. After a bit of soup and some beer, we spent the night on hay, as the other beds were taken by the owner and his staff. It was a miserable night. We found out that the king had arrived a few hours before at the palace.”8

  Just the day before, the king had placed a capstone on a sly diplomatic victory for Denmark—a victory that also represented one of the greatest strategic blunders in the career of Russian empress Catherine the Great. Catherine’s husband, Peter III, had six years earlier been advocating an ancestral claim to the very same Schleswig-Holstein dukedom where Hell and Sajnovics had arrived. The dukedom, crucially, would have given Russia the temperate seaports it needed to become a maritime power to rival at least the Dutch if not also the French and British. However, Catherine viewed her husband as a thwart to her own ambitions, so once Peter had been shuffled off to the great toy land beyond, Catherine papered over possible points of contention with any of her Teutonic countrymen. Emperor Peter’s saber-rattling plans for the future of Russian sea power became, under Danish suasion and Catherine’s envoys, a humbler request to endow less strategic German lands upon members of her extended family.9

  On May 29, King Christian VII granted earldoms to key players in the Russian negotiations. One such entitled gentleman was Denmark’s brilliant minister of foreign affairs, Johan Hartvig Ernst von Bernstorff. Upon arriving at Traventhal on May 31, where the Hungarian visitors would be meeting their sponsoring king, Sajnovics met Count Bernstorff. Not only was the foreign minister well-known in Denmark, but courts across Europe also recognized Bernstorff’s preeminence. Prussia’s Frederick the Great—who called him “the oracle of Denmark”—reputedly quipped, “Denmark has her fleet and her Bernstorff.”10

  Sajnovics was clearly impressed. “This prestigious minister is nearly 45 years old, of medium height, with a friendly disposition, a soothing voice, very gentle, an exceptionally intelligent and extremely cultured man,” Sajnovics wrote. “I could never praise highly enough the friendliness, kindness, respect and admiration with which he received Father Hell. He said he was happy to see such a meritorious man visit his entire country and that he would try to make his stay in Copenhagen and Vardø [the transit expedition’s ultimate destination] as pleasant as it deserved on account of his extraordinary merits.”11

  Taking a quiet lunch at a nearby inn, Sajnovics and Hell were surprised to see one of the king’s counselors approach their table. His Majesty, the envoy said, requests your presence at lunch at the palace. The king, they learned, took lunch at four o’clock.

  “The lunch was sumptuous,” Sajnovics wrote. After the afternoon repast, during which they had no opportunity actually to meet the king, Sajnovics and Hell took a walk among the famous sculpted greenery surrounding Traventhal House. “Walking about in the wonderful garden created by man and God, we had the marvelous idea to have a look at the maze at the end of the garden,” the visitor recorded.

  A river flowed through the lush baroque landscaping, and Sajnovics began to wonder at a small boat that first approached them and then, once the travelers had passed, turned around as if to track them. “Wer s
ind Sie?” (“Who are they/you?”) asked the boat’s sole occupant, wearing a hood over his face. “Since we did not know who was asking, we just ignored the question,” Sajnovics wrote, “but he repeated the question louder still. Wer sind Sie? At the same time, he grabbed the paddle to push the boat that had been stuck on the shore back in the water. The silver cross on his chest, the collars of the Order of the Elephant and all of his appearance indicated that he was the king!”

  Hell genuflected and immediately apologized for not recognizing His Majesty. But the king would have no such formalities once he’d learned who the two gentlemen were. “Pater Hell?” King Christian VII replied in German—the lingua franca of the Danish court. “Kommen Sie zu mir!” As commanded, Father Hell approached the king and a brief exchange of greetings passed their lips. However, without Bernstorff or other advisers at hand, the king could not accept an official visit. Instead, he requested his guests also attend dinner—which Sajnovics later learned began at 10:00 PM or later. In no mean feat of cheek, Hell and Sajnovics declined the invitation and showed up at the palace the next morning instead.

  Sajnovics and Hell arrived at Traventhal at 11:00 AM. (Both days they’d left Apropos behind with the innkeeper, “growling and protesting,” Sajnovics said.)12 Talking both courtly and scientific matters with the royal advisers, the pair learned the nineteen-year-old monarch would greet them in person at 4:30 PM.

  The appointed hour came, as did the next hour, and the hour after that—without a hint of a royal audience. “Around seven o’clock the king left the meeting room,” Sajnovics recorded. “His purple dress was embellished with silver . . . a wide dark blue royal belt on his waist, a sword on his side, and his hat held under his arm. He is of medium height, proportionately built; he has an open and gentle look, only 22 years old [sic]; his royal dignity is doubled by his handsomeness, so anyone who gazes upon him cannot help but love him. We greeted him . . . and he expressed his gratitude in German that P. Hell had safely arrived and said that he was very happy to have received such a great astronomer to carry out the astronomical observations in his country.”